Zombie Studios Explains Benefits of Unreal Engine 4 When Used With PS4’s Unified Memory Architecture

Zombie Studios is currently busy with Daylight for the PC and PS4 and besides being one of the few psychological horror games for the next generation, it’s also the first commercial release to use Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4. How does it take advantage of the PS4? Also, given the studio’s experience with the PS4 with Blacklight Retribution, how have they been able to further push the hardware this time?

Studio director Jared Gerritzen stated, “Developing on the PlayStation 4 is great, and since Daylight is the first Unreal Engine 4 title to come out on the console, we’ve been really pleased with the entire process.

“We recently announced a Twitch Chat Stream integration that will allow viewers watching a live stream of Daylight to spook the player even further by typing out a word that corresponds to a sound in-game. We obviously had to time this to prevent spamming, but this interaction is yet another way Daylight creates a very cool (and creepy) experience.”

As for the benefits that Unreal Engine 4 brings when used alongside the PS4’s unified memory architecture and how it makes things that wouldn’t be possible on the PS3, Gerritzen said, “Very direct access to texture memory is a major advantage of having unified memory. This access allows us to work with render targets easily without being forced to write a bunch of specialized code designed to simply move data between buses.”

The team also opted for Unreal Engine 4 as opposed to, say, CryEngine 3 because, “Zombie has heavily invested in Unreal technology over the last few years. Throwing all the knowledge away to transition to a different engine represented a significant amount of cost without an obvious award.”

Daylight will be out on April 8th for the PC and PS4. Stay tuned for more updates on the game.