Middle-earth: Shadow of War
2 documents in the library are about Middle-earth: Shadow of War, from writers such as Game Developers Conference, the newest from 2021. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Go behind enemy lines to forge your army, conquer Fortresses and dominate Mordor from within. Experience how the award winning Nemesis System creates unique personal stories with every enemy and follower, and confront the full power of the Dark Lord Sauron and his Ringwraiths in this epic new story of Middle-earth.
- Released
- Oct 10, 2017
- Developer
- Monolith Productions
- Publisher
- WB Games
- Genres
- Role-playing (RPG), Adventure
- Platforms
- PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch 2, PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox One
- Links
- Official site, Wikipedia
Game data from IGDB.com
Documents about Middle-earth: Shadow of War
Middle-earth: Shadow of War: Creating Multi-Character Combat Animations
The development of Middle-earth: Shadow of War centered on the implementation of complex, multi-character combat animations to establish a visceral and brutal aesthetic.
- Monolith Productions managed a high-volume animation pipeline for Middle-earth: Shadow of War by producing 1,200 unique sync-action animations between the player and orcs within a three-year development window.
- To maintain production efficiency, the team utilized a motion capture-first workflow where in-house animators performed the stunts, allowing for rapid iteration and immediate feedback from designers on-site.
- The studio employed a 'destructive' animation workflow that prioritized baking keys and layering poses over traditional non-destructive rigging, enabling animators to quickly adjust timing and weight without getting precious about curve handles.
Performance and Memory Postmortem for Middle-earth: Shadow of War
Middle-earth: Shadow of War required extensive technical optimization to support a complex open-world environment featuring up to 200 unique AI actors.
- To manage 200 unique AI entities in Middle-earth: Shadow of War, the team moved away from individual system threading in favor of a 'monolithic' approach, where entire systems like effects were scheduled to run on a single core to minimize context switching and cache misses.
- The engine team replaced expensive kernel semaphores with lightweight multiple-reader/single-writer primitives, such as Microsoft’s Slim Reader/Writer (SRW) lock, to reduce CPU overhead during high-contention scenarios.
- To optimize GPU constant buffer uploads, the team implemented named constant buffers and heuristic-based data packing, which prioritized frequently used constants and zero-valued data to minimize memory footprint and avoid cache line flushing issues.