Sword and Fairy 7 is a role-playing game developed by Softstar Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd.
This work balanced the experience of drama and gameplay. The attractive story happens between three races of Humans, Demons and Beasts. Compared with the previous series, combat system has undergone major changes. To ensure the fast pace and fluent controls in the battlefield, this game adopts a real-time combat from a third-person perspective, players may enter and exit the battlefield seamlessly.
In 2019, NVIDIA and Softstar jointly announced that Sword and Fairy 7 will have ray tracing technology in the game, and announced an in-game recorded trailer using ray tracing. After two years of painstaking development, NVIDIA joined hands with Sword and Fairy 7 to bring more RT scenes from the game, showing more types of RT features applicable to different types of maps.
The crystal clear pond not only reflects the whirling reflections of the trees and buildings on the shore, but also shows the sparkling water caustics effect, making the player's ideal fairy world more real. The pool water uses NVIDIA Hybrid Translucency technology, which enhances RT reflection over the water, and makes the reflection effect more realistic than traditional SSR. The caustics effect is calculated in real time using NVIDIA Ray-Guided Water Caustics (RGWC) based on ray tracing, which can make the caustics effect of the water body and the characters interact realistically. The combination of the two technologies produces the now-seeing Sword and Fairy art style gorgeous effect of the pool water, which is difficult to achieve with traditional rendering.
Direct sunlight enters deep seabed caves, RGWC water caustics technology is also used here to reflect the caustic ripples on the reef, making the experience of snorkeling on the seabed more immersive.
The light emitted by the scarlet crystal in the cave reflected red on the surrounding cave walls and paths. If you look closely, you will find that the light from the crystal forms a brighter caustic spot on the ground. Unlike water caustics, NVIDIA Adaptive Anisotropic Photon Scattering (AAPS) ray tracing technology is used here. This technology can calculate accurate real-time caustics effects on translucent objects, highlighting the mysterious atmosphere of the cave.
Sunshine goes through the stained glass and reflects on the dim hall, NVIDIA AAPS technology generates mottled color patches on the ground in real time. As the sun moves, not only the entire hall is illuminated, RT global illumination also makes the places in the hall gradually brighter even if there is no direct sunlight. Different from the traditional global illumination, NVIDIA ReSTIR GI technology based on ray tracing is used here. This technology can implement indirect lighting from various light sources and emissive surfaces using a very low sampling rate, therefore producing complex light and shadow effects almost consistent with the real physical world, while maintaining extremely high rendering performance. This is a precise balance of effects and efficiency which is difficult to achieve with traditional rendering.
Ray tracing technology is fully applied in the development of Sword and Fairy 7, improves the overall light atmosphere in the game. Softstar is expecting to bring an upgraded new generation of Sword and Fairy artwork.