The Mac version has been updated to beta 1.34 bringing it in sync to the Windows version.

The day after I posted the latest beta, Epic released Unreal 4.22.0. I want to support Ray Tracing so work began right away to bring this feature to Abducted. Preliminarily speaking, I don't think this is going to be difficult to do. More on this in a future post, but I think there are enough fine tuning options available to make this run well on 1080 hardware.

Right now Abducted gets 60fps+ on a 1080 graphics card, epic settings, 1600x900. I think in many cases it does much better than that, ranging from 70-90fps. So a careful implementation of Ray Tracing should get at least 30fps on that same hardware, maybe better. As I mentioned in an earlier post, RT will be a toggle in the video prefs most likely. The game will still look great with current gen rasterized graphics of course. Ray Tracing will take it up a notch and be a quality option for people who care more about beautiful graphics than maximum framerate.

One other technical note: Distance culling may go away as a graphics option. As of Ue4.22, Epic reconfigured how the engine draws lots of objects. In the old days, developers would do culling of objects early and often in order to keep framerate up. Now with the latest engine, there may no longer be any real benefit to doing this. This needs to be evaluated, and some things may still benefit from not being drawn at long range. So we'll see, but I can imagine that it may not matter anymore to cull distant objects. Ray Tracing is very rapidly changing not just the graphics themselves, but how we as developers should consider them.

And keep in mind, Abducted is a game that needs to support large outdoor spaces like this at a very high framerate. It's not just a corridor game, Abducted contains large nonlinear vistas: