Upon its release late last month, Alan Wake 2 earned praise as possibly the best-looking game available to date. This week, Remedy published a lengthy blog post that went into the evolution of its in-house Northlight engine from Control to Alan Wake 2.

　　First of all, the developers switched to a new entity component system (ECS) model, making parallel execution efficient and thus allowing the engine to support a variable amount of hardware CPU cores. In turn, this enables 'bigger, more dynamic and fuller worlds', said Remedy. Indeed, Alan Wake 2 is considerably larger than the first game, and Senior Creative Director Sam Lake didn't deny the possibility of moving toward open world-like design in the future. As such, this seems like a savvy tech upgrade that could bear fruit.

　　The studio also built a new voxel-based character control that made character movement smoother and more natural, even in complex and dynamic environments. As a side bonus, the playable characters won't bump into objects when moving through cramped spaces. NPCs also had their locomotion reworked, allowing them to utilize animation-driven movement in combination with new distance-based Motion Matching.

　　Remedy wanted wind to be an important factor in Alan Wake 2, so they built tech based on Signed Distance Fields. So-called wind boxes function like building blocks that define the wind's strength in different areas of the game, with the goal of achieving realistic and varying wind patterns.

　　The most interesting new features are those related to the updated graphics rendering pipeline. Thanks to the integration of mesh shaders, the Northlight engine can perform occlusion culling down to a single-pixel precision, using everything in a scene as an occluder. Even meshlets are culled, not just meshes. As such, the engine only draws what is visible in Alan Wake 2, pushing greater geometric detail than ever before in a Remedy game.

　　Transparent rendering also received an overhaul so that transparent geometry and effects blend seamlessly with the fog (enhanced by per-pixel transparent lighting and fog-affected reflections). Last but not least, Alan Wake 2's full ray tracing is coupled with path traced indirect lighting and improved denoising, the latter thanks to NVIDIA's DLSS 3.5 (Ray Reconstruction). Ray tracing also enhances the game's animated foliage, which is based on a brand-new shader-based vegetation system.