Inside Anvil: The Technology Powering Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Last year’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows was built on the power of the Anvil engine , one of Ubisoft’s proprietary technologies that enables developers to build rich, dynamic worlds at scale. Behind the scenes, teams across Ubisoft continuously evolve Anvil’s tools and systems to push the boundaries of what’s possible in real time.
For Assassin’s Creed Shadows, close collaboration between production teams and Anvil developers led to a number of innovations designed to bring the world of 16th-century Japan to life with unprecedented depth. From dynamic weather systems to advanced rendering techniques, each breakthrough is built with one goal in mind: turning cutting-edge technology into something players can see, feel, and experience.
Let’s take a look under the hood with the developers behind these innovations to see how Anvil created the immersive and dynamic world of Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Atmos is the name of a group of systems that manage simulating weather in the Anvil engine. These systems add up to an entire network of real-time environmental control and a breathtaking world that can flip from a bright and sunny spring day, to dark and stormy, to a snowy winter wonderland on a dime. The system can control rainfall, windspeed, and direction, and even precipitation and cloud cover, resulting in a finely tuned variety of different weather patterns. And each environmental element can interact with the other to produce stunning results – wind blowing rain that drips off the eaves of a building onto characters’ clothes and hair, bright rays of sun beaming through the canopy of a forest, drying up puddles and evaporating the water into clouds that are moved by the wind. It creates a realistic climate which gives every
