Here's a Look at the 'Snowdrop' Engine Being Used in Tom Clancy's The Division

Surprised they're not dropping the Tom Clancy part of the name. Well. Not really I guess. Marketing and all.

It's a weird, awkward situation to me.

He really doesn't like that cop car

@rawtext: Ubisoft has owned the Tom Clancy name (seriously, they bought the rights to the name) for years, so I'm not surprised. And it does, based on what I've seen, feel like it's in the same spirit as the stuff Tom Clancy did, so I think it fits.

Also, gosh darn, but man, this game looks pretty realistic.

This has potential.

Oh man this game looks snow good!

this game looks fucking killer! Frostbite 2 engine, WATCH THE FUCK OUT SON!!!

GOD RAYS FOR DAYS

Ahhhhh, not that impressed.

As annoyed as I am by yet another "the day America died" setting for a video game, this looks totally sweet.

...

Did you SEE that illuminated smoke??

Next Gen SLUSH

What is a snowdrop?

VIDEO GAMES GUYS

@thebunnyhunter: A rain flake.

Just drop it already.

Its set within the "Tom Clancy" universe, Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon etc, are all set in the same universe, so why would they drop a name, just because he died? It's part of the Clancyverse, you are just being awkward.

Dem particles, yo

NEXT GEN DOGS CONFIRMED, DAWGS.

I'm impressed by all that environment detail that people had to create as much as the engine itself. Tho Ubisoft is a monster when it comes to this (massive amounts of asset creation), so not that surprising that they can pull it off.

Then again I still remember very very impressive looking bullshots (well videos) of stuff like Fallout 3 and Crysys 2. That had areas setup and shown in exactly the right way to make it look several orders of magnitude more detailed and pretty then 99% of the rest of those games.

@tennmuerti:

I was just about to write about how this reminded me of the Crysis 2 tech demo, and how the final product was such a huge disappointment. I really think this is something that could be done right now on high end PC by experienced devs such as cd project red, but I really don't think that the final build on a new console will be any where near as good.

the slush and tire tracks looks amazing. the setting might be a bit boring but I'm still excited at how good the engine looks.

this is the game i cant wait for

I work in film production, I have literally no idea what they mean by "light probe system". That's just fucking gibberish. Do they mean raytracing?

@sweep: Words also buzz, not only bullets...

This looks amazing! I haven't been impressed with any of the new U4 tech. It all looks like minor tweaks to me. If objects, and materials really do react like they claim in this, I will be extremely impressed. I just hope this wasn't a "tech demo".

"I must play the Division!"

The new SnowDrop shader tech allows the world to react to the constantly changing weather, including:

Ice AND Snow

Game looks great, but this graphical egotism is goofy to me. Especially at such an early stage of the consoles lifespan.

Clearly you are a fake!

Who the fuck knows, you know how stupid marketing people can be. "LIGHT PROBE SYSTEM SOUNDS AWESOME AND EXPENSIVE, RIGHT?"

P.S. I really wanna play this.

I hate to be that guy but they still haven't said this will be on PC have they?

Was it just me, or was there some frame stuttering in that video?

@andrewboza: no there was a little stuttering, but the game still looks amazing! cant wait for this one

@sweep: Or its a proprietary system they created and named the "light probe system."

This game looks really interesting. I just hope you can play and enjoy a lot of it on your own. I really don't like the constantly online/people coming into your world thing that seems to be becoming a fad this gen.

This game looks fuggin' TITTIES. That is all.

Ummm yeah. Video games. I love thee.

Looks great, but come on, "Deep and Vast Universe?" Nothing Tom Clancy wrote was ever deep or vast, even if it was entertaining. Rugged, American Conservative, Religious Heroes against Russians/Chinese/Arabs or, the worst enemy of all..... LIBERALS! Even worse, Non-Religious Liberals! That was 99% of everything he wrote. You could have taken out every page of his books, replaced them with a "Vote Republican" Bumper Sticker, and you'd get roughly the same message across.

EDIT: Actually I'm being unfair to this game. He didn't write the storyline for this, and some games and books from the Tom Clancy Franchise are not so black-and-white as the stuff Clancy wrote himself (especially the stuff he wrote in his later years - yeesh).

@sweep: Light probes use ray tracing, but not in real time. Basically the scene is rendered offline using ray-tracing then mapped onto a sphere so that the ray-traced global illumination calculations for irradiance and other stuff that would be too computationally expensive to calculate real time are saved to a texture. Dozens of these spheres are then built from numerous viewpoints in the level. Then in real time as objects move through the scene, they sample a handful of the nearest light probes and interpolate the values based on the object's position. Given the time of day stuff, at each spatial position they probably build multiple probes for different times of day and interpolate those as well. Films wouldn't use light probes as they're rendered offline with ray tracing in the first place. The marketers probably made the claim cause some of the lighting calculations are now kind of approximates of what it would look like ray-traced.

@hayt: At the end of the video there's a logo for PC DVD-ROM, so that's confirmed. That's also confirmed what platform I will be playing it on.

I hope the Snowdrop engine doesn't melt and crash when it get's to warm out.

This doesn't look that far off from the E3 trailer thingie.

Pleasantly surprised. Hope they announce a PC version soon.

@sweep: Okay, glad someone else thought that line was kind of a stretch, too - light probes are a rendering trick used to approximate radiosity/global illumination on dynamic objects (so the side of a character that's next to a well-lit red wall will appear slightly red, etc). I assume their connection to filmmaking is using the white reflector boards instead of direct (harsher) lighting.

At least a third of my playtime in this game will be spent looking at illuminated fog.

@klager: They already announced that quite a while ago.

this looks great

Still looks really pretty, but it's that same street and that same police station from the E3 demo. I'd like to see some new stuff.