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ArenaNet® Licenses Umbra Software´s Visibility Optimization Solutions

Bellevue, Washington. - October 27, 2008 – Umbra Software Ltd., developers of highly-acclaimed Umbra occlusion culling technology, announced today that ArenaNet, Inc. licensed Umbra´s visibility optimization technology to be used in ArenaNet’s award winning Guild Wars® franchise.

“Rather than spend resources developing a new occlusion system to meet the demands of our next game we decided to license technology from the experts,” said Jim Scott, ArenaNet’s lead graphics programmer. “This allowed us to get up and running with sophisticated culling quickly.”

Umbra is a highly robust, GPU based, visibility optimization solution that allows game developers to create highly dynamic game worlds without preprocessing. With Umbra game developers can increase their polygon budgets significantly and create highly complex game worlds which were previously impossible.

“ArenaNet has proven their talent and leadership in building a lasting franchise with over 5 million copies of Guild Wars sold around the globe,” said Farhad Taherazer, VP of marketing for Umbra Software. “With Umbra’s occlusion culling technology, we will give ArenaNet’s talented developers and designers the toolset they will need to create more innovative and large complex 3D worlds with less development time and effort.”

I like the idea -- I'm sure this is definitely going to speed up the development process of GW2 significantly.

I hope so - GW2 needs to be released /blum.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\':P\' />

I'm excited to see the graphics for it. You can definitely tell ArenaNet has some true talent when it comes to making beautiful graphics. Each campaign brought up the graphics realism to a whole new level. GWEN was just truly amazing. Unfortunately to see all the neat graphics you have to have a pretty good system /cry.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\':(\' /> That's the only downfall.