Square Enix’s new gaming engine offers photo-realism

By Ryan Fleming October 12, 2011

The day when the line between reality and digital recreation is too thin to see just got a bit closer. At a press conference in Japan last week, Square Enix unveiled its Luminous Engine for next-gen consoles, and it may be a game-changer.

Forget the new id Tech 5 engine. Smile and point at the Frostbite 2.0 engine. The Luminous Engine is nothing short of incredible.

To be fair, the Luminous Engine is still just in the early testing phases, and while it can make a wall look very pretty, it has yet to show that it could be realistically blown apart with a virtual rocket launcher, or adequately render the snarling faces of mutants that are rushing at you. But the promise is hard to deny.

Designed for the next generation of gaming, the engine was originally announced as being in the works back in August, but the first results have been released. According to the magazine Edge, the engine was designed using native DirectX 11 support, includes cloth and fluid simulation, realtime reflections and highly efficient tessellation techniques that can help with 3D imaging.

If those tech terms don’t mean much to you, then check out the video below, or look at the pictures posted by Develop.

Despite the wild graphics produced by the Luminous Engine, Square Enix’s CTO, Yoshida Hashimoto claims that Luminous Studio can reduce game development costs by up to 30-percent. He also claims that it will lead to faster development cycles.

The engine also uses “procedural animation techniques,” which uses a database of motion captured animations, then adapts as necessary. If a rendered person is walking, then that person has a helmet or additional weight added to them, the animation will reflect the change in weight and react accordingly.

The engine is still a long way from reaching the public, but when it does, it will be used in everything from casual games to triple AA titles.

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Ryan Fleming is the Gaming and Cinema Editor for Digital Trends. He joined the DT staff in 2009 after spending time covering…

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https://twitter.com/tombraider/status/1511368712279904258
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