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As part of Rainbow Six Siege’s Operation Health, Ubisoft have announced some of the Rainbow Six Siege team has been reworking their maps to make them perform better and look prettier than their launch counterparts.
The team’s assault on each map is two-fold. Firstly, they’ve gone through the map optimising art and textures to reduce the workload for PCs, which should have the side effect of making things run a little smoother when you make like Chris Jericho and break the walls down.
Secondly, they’ve reworked the lighting to reduce the bloom effect, putting into effect one the single most requested change from the community. Rainbow Six Siege’s lighting was much hated, seeing as it has the effect of making it nearly impossible to shoot into or out of a building in the game without being blinded by the glare from outside or finding it impossible to see inside because of the darkness.
Siege’s whole conceit involves blowing through walls to assault enemies, and as a result it was made so that defenders couldn’t shoot out and attackers couldn’t fire in due to difficulty seeing. This difficulty was created by the bloom, and now this has been disabled it could be a whole new era for Rainbow Six Siege.
Finally, Ubisoft are working on their BDRF shading model, known as the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function, which calculates reflections. That’s all a bit technical for me, but the update should mean that you see better reflections, which is good if you want to try and use a mirror to see round a corner for something or… honestly, I’m not technical enough to understand that part.
Anyway, there’s more details and comparison pictures available on Ubisoft’s blog.
