EA’s standout game in the past quarter has been EA SPORTS College Football 25, with over 5 million players. The game’s popularity stems from being the comeback title in the College Football series after an 11-year hiatus (the last installment being NCAA Football 14 released in 2013), along with the rights to American football athletes and 134 authentic stadiums. This allows sports fans to play as their favorite teams without any bias towards a specific team.
EA revealed the development process behind College Football 25, focusing on creating all 134 stadiums complete within a short period by utilizing a new graphic system incorporating Global Illumination Based on Surfels (GIBS). Previously, creating stadium models required meticulous adjustments by artists, particularly in lighting placement and adjustments for shadow details, a time-consuming process impossible to replicate for all 134 stadiums.
Leveraging current-gen console hardware like the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, EA capitalized on ray tracing-enabled GPUs to implement global illumination for handling stadium lighting efficiently. The technology, Global Illumination Based on Surfels (GIBS), a brainchild of EA’s internal research team SEED, was showcased at SIGGRAPH 2021.
Surfel, an abbreviation for surface element, divides object surfaces into circular elements of varying sizes and directions. In GIBS, the game’s scene model places surfels at different points to calculate global illumination efficiently, accelerating the process with the GPU’s ray tracing capabilities.
The collaboration between SEED, Frostbite engine development team, and game development team introduced GIBS into College Football 25, accompanied by the creation of a Stadium Toolkit for artists to easily build stadiums without concerning themselves with lighting adjustments. This streamlined process allowed artists to craft all stadiums in a single production cycle while maintaining high-quality details.
Behind-the-scenes work involved reusing models from the Madden series (with minimal repeated stadiums), on-site visits to real stadiums, and requesting educational institutions owning the stadiums to provide around 1,000 photos per stadium for creation.
TLDR: EA’s College Football 25’s success is attributed to the innovative Global Illumination Based on Surfels technology, streamlining the creation of authentic stadiums in the game and enhancing the overall gaming experience.
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