Yes, Agni’s Philosophy’s mirrors are probably some of the most detailed, reflective surfaces. However any developer that has built a tech demo will tell you that they are much of a muchness. Part of this seems to be thanks to a clever, if undisclosed, way the engine is running live with Autodesk’s Maya to allow for live editing of assets in the game renderer – although Square doesn’t go into details.Īll in all, it is very slick, instantly catapulting Square Enix into a select league of studios that have dared to show super-HD games for PC and next-gen consoles before the latter are even announced.Īt E3, Square Enix contemporaries LucasArts, Epic Games and Ubisoft Montreal were the only others happy to breakaway from Sony and Microsoft’s sealed-lips policy to show equally marvelous videos for Star Wars 1313, Unreal Engine 4 and Watch Dogs. But this kind of design can be achieved with the powerful GPUs on the market now, and we can make it look realistic.” He adds: “If an artist came up with the elaborate design for a game on PS3 or 360, we would really scold them. Now, within seconds, they can edit characters and change appearances.” He explains: “This has been a very big deal for our cinematic team, who would wait hours to see the rendering result of a single frame. Later, during a close-up of a bearded hobo, his facial scruff dynamically generated in real-time using tessellation, Hashimoto jokes, “More beard!” and “Santa Claus!”, lengthening strands of hair and recolouring the assets on-the-fly to comical but impressively swift effect. One scene in his tech demo includes the following: seven hugely detailed character models including Agni herself, whose outfit is built from hundreds of feather assets, an evocative temple environment, plus a giant contorting beast that is evolving from over a hundred thousand smaller insects, themselves made up of thousands of polygon meshes layered with detailed particle effects.Īt one point Hashimoto pauses the action and spins the camera around to reveal the warts and all textures hidden off camera, to prove the content is real and not a trick. Hashimoto was director of the Sonic games for ten years, before moving to Square Enix to head up its next-gen technology efforts. When he sits down with Develop to talk us through replay after replay of the real-time CG effects, Square Enix’s Japanese CTO Yoshihisa Hashimoto pours off the details, his labour of love broken down into impressive stats and humble demonstrations of technical genius. It revels in every detail, introducing a detailed, dusty town built into a mountain-top populated with characters both strikingly beautiful and realistic, but also ugly, with hairs and odd-looking facial nuances. It tells a brief but classic Final Fantasy story about priests, magic and transforming demons. The first demo for Luminous, called Agni’s Philosophy, is very slick. Oh, and it will also rescue its ailing Final Fantasy series by living up to the dream offered by the franchises luscious cut-scenes. And it reckons it can do that by either keeping team sizes the same, or at least empowering its artists and coders in the face of spiraling asset demands. Square Enix thinks it can use this to form a cross-studio internal technology base. At E3 it unveiled its long-in-gestation Luminous Studio engine, a new proprietary technology built in-house.Įverything about Luminous seems to run contrary to the direction triple-A games are going.
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