MILLENNIUM FALCON COCKPIT VIDEO GAME SOFTWARE

SIGGRAPH: How did you achieve the goals of high fidelity, high resolution, and high frame rate for the experience?ĮS: The expertise of our visuals partners at Industrial Light & Magic was key to building high-quality environments that best fit the “Star Wars” universe. The overall process, from the original story ideas to the design through to production took about five years, and although there was a very large team around the construction, the ride system, show-control systems, animatronics, audio, etc., the team who focused on building the interactive experience was several dozen. Keeping everyone on the same wavelength was no small feat, and our production team was key to making this successful. We brought in a video game developer to help with the project, as well as our partners from Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic to perfect the experience and make it deeply “Star Wars”. Although we have built interactive experiences at Walt Disney Imagineering before, building such a game was extremely novel for the company.

MILLENNIUM FALCON COCKPIT VIDEO GAME SOFTWARE

Not only did we need to build this innovative and unique piece of software technology, we also needed to build a game - and a large one. SIGGRAPH: Tell us about the process of creating “Millennium Falcon”: Smugglers Run.ĮS: Building “Millennium Falcon”: Smugglers Run was an extensive process.

Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 was an obvious choice, since its goal has always been to push visual quality boundaries. As for the game engine of choice to start from, we looked at which one could be a strong base to deliver the immersive experience we wanted to build. Then we needed to adapt our game engine to utilize those GPUs as best we could. This is where, through our discussions with Nvidia, we got the idea to utilize a custom-built piece of hardware where we could multiply our horsepower by 4–6 times through the utilization of multiple GPUs in one single computer.

With those goals in mind, we knew we couldn’t use traditional rendering to get the performance necessary to accomplish our goals.

The second was to provide an interactive experience, which meant rendering the attraction in real time out of a game engine.

(It also meant offering the highest fidelity as possible to put our guests in the “Star Wars” universe and movies the best we could.)

The first was to provide an immersive experience, which meant that we didn’t want our guests to see a screen in front of them and instead see the environment all around them.

Give us some background on those innovations.Įric Smolikowski (ES): We had two major goals for the rendering of the attraction: SIGGRAPH: Your demo will showcase the technological innovations behind the “Millennium Falcon”: Smugglers Run, which is part of “Star Wars”: Galaxy’s Edge at both Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World Resort. We connected with Eric Smolikowski ( Walt Disney Imagineering) to learn more about the technological innovations used to create this theme park attraction and how riders’ rave reviews have touched him on a personal level. “The Technology Behind ‘ Millennium Falcon’: Smugglers Run” is 1 of the 9 real-time demos set for SIGGRAPH 2020’s Real-Time Live! event. Real-Time Live! is one of the SIGGRAPH conference’s most popular annual events, featuring demos of the latest applications of real-time technology. “ Millennium Falcon”: Smugglers Run © 2020 Walt Disney Imagineering

Millennium falcon cockpit video game