Wookash Podcast Why Assassin's Creeds share monorepo | Nicolas Lopez
Dec 6, 2025
Nicolas Lopez, engine architect at Ubisoft, delves into the intricacies of the Anvil engine and its role in the Assassin's Creed series. He discusses the benefits of a monorepo approach, which enhances collaboration and streamlines code management. Topics like balancing shared and specific resources, optimizing for GPU vs. CPU, and implementing ray tracing are explored. Nicolas also shares insights into Ubisoft's telemetry systems that help test dynamically changing game environments and the management of vast codebases, all while ensuring performance remains high.
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Engine Designed For Massive Open Worlds
- Anvil was built from day one for systemic, scalable open-world games with massive instancing and GPU-driven pipelines.
- Its strengths are instance count, performant GPU culling and lighting features like volumetrics, GI and ray tracing.
Pick VCS For Your Non-Programmers
- Prefer Perforce for non-programmer workflows because shelves let technical artists easily share and test unsubmitted changes.
- If you use Git, invest in tooling to hide branching and merging complexity for non-developers.
Choose Monorepo To Force Shared Quality
- Use a mono-repo when multiple productions benefit from shared fixes because breakages force immediate company-wide fixes.
- Accept higher entry cost per change to gain enormous mutualization and many teams contributing improvements.