Ace Combat 8’s Developers Are on a Mission To Create the Perfect Clouds

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve’s team prioritized scientific accuracy, leading to meticulous cloud development. Brand director Kazutoki Kono emphasized the sky’s lack of traditional level design, requiring clouds to function as interactive elements. The team’s dedication to realism became evident during hands-on demonstrations of the game’s first and fourth missions.

Bandai Namco established a dedicated development unit, Bandai Namco Aces, in 2022 to centralize expertise for the franchise. This allowed long-term knowledge retention and innovation, including the creation of Cloudly, a proprietary middleware engine layered atop the game engine to render realistic clouds.

Cloudly replaced the previous tool, Truesky, used in Ace Combat 7, offering greater customization and control over cloud rendering. The engine enabled nuanced details like shadow casting and sunlight reflections, which enhance gameplay by providing altitude and enemy-position cues to players.

The cloud technology’s development involved academic research and engineering precision to meet performance constraints. Producer Manabu Shimomoto noted that initial cloud volume calculations exceeded processing limits, requiring optimization to maintain 60 frames per second in a 100 square kilometer space.