Nvidia Ansel Support!

(Let's go ahead and preface this post with a little notice: Those are nowhere near representative of the quality of tree-like organic structures that will appear in the game. I acknowledge they look like garbage. I actually just had a fun time writing a script to randomly generate some trees since everyone has been having a giggle at the "Minecraft trees" shown in earlier development. After generating the core of the tree, I slapped some random materials that kind of look like they belong there. This is not at all representative of what will be in the final game. In fact, it took me around 5 minutes to make these where I've spent hours working on the dirt that you see covering the landscape.)

I recently came across a particular tool that Nvidia has released. By the time of this post, only 28 games, not including V:SotN, have implemented this tool. It's called Ansel, and it's pretty neat.

Players are able to press a hotkey combination (by default, ALT+F2) and activate the Ansel overlay. While in the Ansel overlay, players can use their mouse (while holding LMB) to look around and WASD keyboard controls to fly a freecam around the game world. Z and X will change the height of the camera, and you and hold SHIFT to accelerate any translational movements.

So what is the point of the freecam? Can't that be used for cheating? Yes, but that isn't what it is for. (And there is a limit as to how far away you can fly from your character.) Using Ansel, you are able to take screenshots of the game from interesting perspectives. While taking screenshots, you're also able to adjust different filters such as contrast, brightness, sketch filters, etc. All of these effects aren't applied in post processing but are actually applied to the game itself, making for better looking image adjustments.

You're also able to change the resolution of the screenshots and the type of screenshot you're taking. For example, we're able to do cool stuff like what you see below. This tool will be employed so development team members can get a better feel of the area that is shown to them so they can provide better feedback, and this will also be used to document different areas in the game. Click and drag the image to look around the 360-degree panorama. The square icon will enter fullscreen. You can also view this using an HMD.