Virtuos on making the Switch version of Starlink – “extremely technically challenging” meeting parity with other platforms
We’ve known that Virtuos worked on the Switch version of Starlink: Battle for Atlas. But as it turns out, the studio was extremely involved and handled a significant amount of development on Nintendo’s console. GamesIndustry spoke with senior technical director Jonathan Boldiga about what the process was like.
According to Boldiga, creating Starlink for Switch wasn’t easy. Ubisoft apparently “had very high standards in terms of what they wanted on the Switch platform” and the team had to do what it could to maintain visual parity across Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. In the end, Boldiga believes they were able to deliver “one of the best-looking Switch titles out there.”
Boldiga’s full words:
“It was extremely technically challenging. Ubisoft had very high standards in terms of what they wanted on the Switch platform. Basically the mandate for us was, ‘We need parity between all three consoles’.
Obviously, the Switch is a great machine but we had to do a lot of work to make sure we could keep visual parity between Switch, Xbox One and PS4. We did a lot of work on rendering optimisations, multi-threading, and trying to squeeze the most that we could out of the CPU. Lots and lots of data compression to fit into memory – you name every trick, we tried it.
Some of those post-processing passes for Xbox One and PS4 aren’t really necessary on Switch when you’re in handheld mode because the fidelity isn’t going to come through. There are tricks you can do there to avoid certain things. Plus, on a smaller screen you don’t have to worry about anti-aliasing as much because it’s not as noticeable, but when you’re on a big, high-def, 1080p screen, obviously it’s a lot more noticeable. So you can sort of use different anti-aliasing techniques to speed things up as opposed to some of the more expensive routines.
It was definitely a challenge. There was a lot of late nights and hair pulling, but at the end I think what we were able to deliver is probably one of the best-looking Switch titles out there.”
