Reactor | Jon Langford

Gears 5 - Reactor

21 August 2020

I was the Senior Technical Artist on Reactor for Gears 5. My role was to create the custom timing manager to drive the Hammer of Dawn strike on the map, as well as making sure the map ran at 60fps on Xbox One.

The timing manager was created to overcome technical limitations in our engine version as we didn't have Sequencer. The system was developed to have a minimal user set up, enabling our artists to push for more dynamic and reactive elements in the map, whilst still being powerful enough to drive multiple animation tracks and elements.

In terms of performance, the biggest challenge on this map was the amount of dynamic lighting needed to support the Hammer of Dawn strike. In one of our more static multiplayer maps, we only can afford one dynamic directional light. But for Reactor, we knew that we wanted more dynamically lit elements. To do this, we had to perfectly time it with the timing manager and manage cone angles to not overburden the GPU.