Titanfall engine branch

Promotional screenshot of Apex Legends, which runs on a heavily modified version of the Source Engine called Titanfall branch, featuring DirectX (Direct3D) 11, detailed models and better graphics, plus increased engine limits, allowing maps to be larger.

The Titanfall branch (also known as ReSource internally) is a third-party Source branch developed by Respawn Entertainment using licensed Source Engine code from Valve. It is a heavily modified version of the Portal 2 engine branch^[1] that adds many huge modifications and improvements that bring Source close to modern standards, while keeping the game running on consoles at 60FPS with stable framerate. This engine branch is still in active development.

It is also the only Source branch to be released on modern consoles.

Features

Todo: List all of the features of this modified engine.

Renderer

Native DirectX 11 (dxlevel 110) and DirectX 12 (dxlevel 120) (only in ) renderer

First Source engine branch to support both DirectX 11 and 12 renderer.

DirectX 11 (Direct3D 11) is used by default, supported in all games. Previous versions (DirectX 9.0c) has been dropped.

DirectX 12 (Direct3D 12) is currently only supported in Apex Legends, and can be enabled with -anticheat_settings=SettingsDX12.json command line argument. Requires Windows 10 or later.

Deferred shading

Allow many lights to be rendered on scene with little performance impact.

New rendering system with Physically Based Rendering

Texture streaming (also in )

Reduce system RAM and graphics card VRAM by streaming textures.

Better HDR Rendering

Improves the HDR (bloom) lighting.^[Clarify]

Native HDR displays support (not to be confused with HDR Rendering)

Outputs the game image to HDR-capable display, which is capable of rendering image with higher contrast, brighter image and more intense colors. Exclusive to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S version of Apex Legends only. On PC, it can be workaround by using Windows 11's Auto HDR feature.

TAA anti-aliasing

TAA (aswell as TXAA, TSSAA/TSAA and other variant of TAA) is a new method of anti-aliasing which was common in later games since 2010s, as most games are transitioning from forward rendering to deferred rendering which allows many lights to be rendered with little performance impact. TAA is a spatial anti-aliasing technique that works by combines information from past frames and the current frame (while simultaneously jittering between both frames) to smooth the current frame. Through it's main drawbacks is that it can cause ghosting and blurriness (basically creating motion blur) to the image, especially on lower framerate (Example). Some of the TAA drawback can be workaround by applying sharpening filter on the image.

TAA was first introduced with Titanfall as "TXAA" which requires "MSAA" to function, but this result in sharper image quality compared to regular TAA/TSSAA, which later introduced in Titanfall 2, replacing TXAA. MSAA were later removed starting with Apex Legends.

Audio

Custom in-house Sound System

Audio system improvements

Speex audio codec

Titanfall uses Wwise sound system.

Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends uses updated version of Miles Sound System, which properly support 7.1 surround on modern version of Windows and better DSP effects.

Networking

New netcode and (only in ) Cross-play support

Cross-platform multiplayer is supported starting with Apex Legends, allowing users other platforms (such as consoles), to play with PC users.

Platform

64-bit support

Full support for 64-bit, which improves performance and allow the engine to access more than 4GB of RAM. 32-bit are not supported on this branch.

Modern and next-gen console support ( PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S)

Supports next-generation consoles.

Other

Customized version of BSP and VPK

Titanfall uses BSP version 29, with the BSP headers using rBSP (Respawn BSP) instead of VBSP as identifier.

Availability

See also:  Category:Titanfall engine branch games

• Titanfall (earlier version, delisted on Steam)
• Titanfall 2 (earlier version)
• Apex Legends

References

References
1. According to the sequel Titanfall 2's steam.inf or gameinfo.txt, the engine contains a leftover appid (620) for Portal 2 as of March 2024. Confirm:Does Apex Legends or Titanfall 1 have this?