Dragon Age The Veilguard: one of the feats of BioWare's new RPG comes… from EA Sports FC, and it has nothing to do with football

Game news Dragon Age The Veilguard: one of the feats of BioWare's new RPG comes… from EA Sports FC, and it has nothing to do with football

Because they are worth it

If you have seen videos of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, or more simply if you have played it yourself, one detail has surely jumped out at you: the BioWare software displays magnificent hair. The hair actually moves naturally, sways in the wind and reacts impressively in relation to the body of the wearer. In a recent article broadcast on the official Electronic Arts website, the group looks back on the technology that made it possible to develop these breathtaking cuts.

Called Stand Hair, it manages up to 50,000 strands of hair on each of the main characters in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The article highlights how BioWare had to work around various issues related to transparency and rendering when different special effects are enabled. If you like technical details, James Power, Senior Rendering Engineer at BioWare, has it in spades in print. “We first make the part of the hair strand opaque, then we make the objects transparent”, he summarizes.

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From a round ball to long hair

The unusual information that comes out of the document is that Stand Hair technology is used in the Frostbite engine developed by Electronic Arts, and that it was originally developed for… EA Sports FC. Yes, the football game! The Frostbite team had to increase the maximum hair length and implement a new system for more complex hair structures. The engine has also been significantly improved to handle characters with horns or braids. “It's the first EA game to feature such detailed, physics-driven long hairstyles” writes the editor in the article.

Of course, such rendering requires good performance on the memory side. The team had to manage the management of the latter efficiently, while knowing thatthere would never be a team of 22 on-screen heroes with Strand Hair, unlike what we have in EA Sports FC. The studio was able to find the solution for those with an inefficient configuration by giving the possibility of activating hairstyles “standard” via the title options.