With a vision to expand the knowledge base of the gaming industry, Activision is excited to share the release of an open-source data set featuring the map Caldera from Call of Duty®: Warzone™ for non-commercial use.

This talk, presented in a postmortem format, focuses on the unique technical and design challenges when creating boss AI in Call of Duty Zombies, such as pathfinding, maximizing limited animations, and the general mentality of tackling complex issues with cost-effective solutions.

Originally presented at the Render Engine Architecture Conference 2024, this presentation explores the optimization strategies of user interface systems..

This talk, originally presented at GDC 2024, analyzes the workflow for integrating and resolving code and data between Perforce branches with the help of our in-house merging tool

This tech report discusses optimal encoding methods for AHD and IrradZ lightmaps, introduces two new IrradZ-compatible and runtime-blendable hemispherical lighting models, and shows how to efficiently apply hemispherical or cone occlusion to volumetric spherical harmonic lighting at runtime to improve the appearance of AO and prevent light leaking.

This presentation introduces the ZH3 lighting model, which sits in between linear and quadratic SH in quality but requires only one extra coefficient over linear SH. It describes how to solve for the ZH3 coefficient, how using a luminance axis can mitigate color shifting, and how RGB ZH3 can be encoded in only 16 bytes. Additionally, it shows how ZH3 coefficients can be hallucinated from the ratio of the bands in linear SH, improving on linear SH in quality with no extra storage.

The design of Call of Duty matchmaking is driven by our goal to create the best experiences for our player community.

In a collaboration between Caltech and ABK, we identified six challenges related to handling disruptive behaviors in competitive action games through analysis of Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® II data and stakeholder feedback. We discovered challenges omitted by prior work, such as handling high-volume imbalanced data and ensuring the comfort of human moderators. We also offered a discussion of possible technical, design, and policy approaches to mitigating these challenges.

Originally presented at the Rendering Engine Architecture Conference 2023, this presentation explores the render graph technology we use at Activision.

Journey into the malware analysis and reverse engineering process of a multi-staged remote administration payload.

Originally presented at KubeCon 2023 Amsterdam, this talk explores how Demonware adopted Vitess/Kubernetes to run MySQL databases at a significant scale. The talk describes MySQL operational and scalability difficulties we had and how Vitess helped to solve them.

Anti-cheat and cheat developers are locked in a cat-and-mouse cycle of detection and generation. Anti-cheat developers struggle to detect cheating players' behavior. Cheat developers easily evade the detections by generating different behavior. This paper examines how anti-cheat developers may reverse the cycle with configurable hallucinations.

Originally presented in GDC’s Advanced Graphics Summit, this presentation explains the system Treyarch developed for Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War to automatically scale shadow quality.

A MySQL Performance Case Study

This talk covers the general architecture of our render pipeline with focus on certain novel approaches and provides comparative performance analysis dependent on specific render scenarios ranging from closed indoor spaces and open world outdoor spaces to more specific heavy triangle and alpha test overdraw scenes. Current work in progress and future extensions are discussed.

The Rust programming language has been quietly taking the tech world by storm, but adoption has been slower among game studios. Treyarch has been gradually integrating Rust into our tools and pipeline since 2018. This session leverages that experience to explore both the opportunities and challenges that Rust can give to the game tools programmer and examine the ways in which Rust can be a powerful addition to the tools arsenal.

Learn the “how” and the “why” of Activision’s rendering submission process. A walk through of how we prepare and submit work, with special attention paid to the underlying philosophical basis for our decision-making. We examine decoupled simulation and rendering, memory orthogonality, parallelism in worker command systems, latency minimization, and hierarchy of work amortization.

A presentation describing the key techniques behind the large-scale global illumination system in Call of Duty. Explained is a new precomputed lighting compression technique that enables high-performance and seamless reconstruction directly from the compressed lighting data. Visibility-based sampling of precomputed volumetric lighting, and a practical method for computing constrained spherical harmonics representations, are also discussed.

We study the problem of efficient representation of potentially high-dimensional, spatially coherent signals in the context of precomputed light transport. This paper won the EGSR 2021 Best Paper Award.

Over the last couple projects Treyarch developed a new terrain system that's been seen in Black Ops 4, Warzone, and Black Ops Cold War.

This presentation is a technical deep dive into the process of optimizing the high-accuracy model collision in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.

This report examines a hacking tool being promoted for use against gamers by masquerading as a cheat for Call of Duty: Warzone.

Reasoning about controller to display latency can be non-intuitive in modern game engines where multiple independent timelines are running in parallel. In this presentation, we analyze the path that data flows through each of these timelines, from the input sample out to the video scan-out hardware. By identifying and measuring segments on this path, a dynamic throttle can be implemented to squeeze the input sample as close to the end of the frame as possible without dropping frames. Special attention is placed on how latency is introduced in the interaction between the GPU and display scan-out timelines when Vsync is enabled.

This presentation describes how ray tracing can be integrated into a modern, forward+ engine with minimal-to-no content changes. Also discussed: how to approach the ray tracing of multiple local area lights, and how to efficiently clean up any resulting noise.

This lecture covers a novel rendering pipeline used in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2020).

We describe the design and evolution of UberBake, a global illumination system we have used in multiple AAA games, which supports dynamic lighting changes in response to certain player interactions.

Call of Duty is well known for its 60fps frenetic gameplay. To achieve a high level of graphical fidelity at this frame rate across all target platforms, a suite of finely tuned content scaling techniques must be employed.

This talk covers extensions and improvements in the precomputed lighting pipeline used in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

Spherical Harmonics (SH) are a convenient basis for representing various signals in computer graphics, with lighting and visibility being the most common.

This technical report extends the content of [JZJ∗ 15], by adding some additional explanations and details, and including new tests with more complex multilayered materials.

In this work we introduce a set of techniques for real-time ambient occlusion targeted to very tight budgets. We propose GTAO, a new formulation of screen-space ambient occlusion that allows the composited occluded illumination to match the ground truth reference in half a millisecond on current console hardware.

This talk covers the temporal supersampling techniques created during the development of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.

We had fun making this animation over the holidays. Hope you enjoy it!

In this paper we present a ray guiding technique for improving the computation times in the context of production lightmap baking. Compared to state-of-the-art, our method has better scalability and lower variance.

Volumetric participating media can significantly impact the realism of virtual scenes, due to both the subtle interplay between surface and volume-transport effects and the presence of entities like smoke and clouds.

A number of improvements were made to our lit surface shaders in Call of Duty: WWII, a few of which are described in this presentation.

How huge games like 'Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare' monitor the progression of code and assets in terms of functionality and performance.

This talk covers a basic introduction to color science, color terminology, and display standards.

Our goal for the rendering in COD: AW was to take a small step towards photorealism.

In recent years the expected standard for facial animation and character performance in AAA video games has dramatically increased.

Indirect lighting is an important factor in creating a believable look of game worlds.

This lecture covers two novel rendering algorithms used in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. The first, z-binning, significantly improves the quality and performance of volumetric entity-vs-geometry culling as compared to classic tiled and clustered techniques.

This talk presents a practical approach to multilayer, physically based surface rendering, specifically optimized for Forward+ rendering pipelines.

This lecture presents a technical deep dive into COD:IW renderer and the architectural design process behind it.

We present a family of basis functions designed to accurately and efficiently represent illumination signals on the unit sphere.

Game and movie studios are switching to physically based rendering en masse, but physically accurate filter convolution is difficult to do quickly enough to update reflection probes in real-time.

From Siggraph 2016, our antialiasing technique for games.

Transparencies have always been a tricky problem for games, to render them correctly you have to draw them in front-to-back order from the view of the camera, traditionally this means to sort them when you do this you have to break apart material batches and sometimes even meshes, which affects performance.

We present a novel method for real-time rendering of subdivision surfaces whose goal is to make subdivision faces as easy to render as triangles, points, or lines.

We present a solution for indirect diffuse lighting as an alternative to traditional lightmaps.

Lighting large outdoor scenes continues to present a challenge for realtime rendering.

We present new systems for occlusion of indirect lighting.

Ambient occlusion is ubiquitous in games and other real-time applications to approximate global illumination effects.