Eve Online maker Fenris Creations is adding a rendering technique to its open-source Carbon engine that promises more accurate shading and greater depth

Fenris Creations, the creator of the popular game Eve Online, has announced a new rendering technique called CORTAO. This technique, which stands for Circular Occluder Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion, is an improvement over existing state-of-the-art rendering methods. CORTAO aims to provide more accurate shading and greater depth while keeping rendering costs low.

CORTAO is a Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) technique, which calculates how shadows should appear based on environmental lighting. Unlike other methods that focus on horizontal angles and struggle with non-flat surfaces, CORTAO uses screen space ray tracing, shooting up to 32 rays per pixel. By determining which rays are occluded or unoccluded, it calculates the amount of light reaching a specific point, providing a more accurate result than previous techniques.

The primary advantage of CORTAO over other rendering methods is its performance and realism. According to its creator, Daniel Isheden, CORTAO achieves the same level of accuracy as existing techniques but with about a quarter of the square error. This means that either the quality of CORTAO can be reduced to match the accuracy of other methods, or the quality can be maintained, resulting in better performance. Additionally, CORTAO handles depth discontinuities and similar issues much better than other techniques.

Fenris Creations has released two versions of CORTAO, both open source. The first version is the official reference implementation, released under the MIT license, while the second version is tailored to Eve Online's requirements, accounting for the game's vast depth ranges and the diverse range of objects present in its scenes.