GAME Watch has gone up with a new article on Square Enix‘s next-generation game engine Luminous Studio, and the Agni’s Philosophy tech demo, both which were shown off at E3 last week.
The site interviewed several key developers at work on the project, including lead engineer Hiroshi Iwasaki, lead artist Ryo Iwata, senior R&D engineer Remi Driancourt, Square Enix CTO Yoshihisa Hashimoto, and Visual Works chief creative director and senior manager Takeshi Nozue.
Before Agni’s Philosophy was created, the Visual Works team created a pre-rendered CG movie to be converted into real-time. The goal was to make a real-time demo look pre-rendered.
According to Hiwasaki, the demo shown last week is running on a Windows 7 64-bit high-spec PC. Luminous Studio is designed to support 64-bit, he said. The PC was built from parts you could find in your local PC shop, Hashimoto added. It is of the same specifications that other developers use to show off their tech demos.
Agni’s Philosophy ran at 30 to 60 frames per second in 1080p, at 16-bit floating point. HDR rendering, according to Hashimoto. Polygons per frame are between 5 and 10 million, including invisible polygons used in post-processing.
The article includes a set of shots comparing the Visual Works clip to the real-time Agni’s Philosophy demo, as well as more shots of the engine at work (toying with lighting, eyeball shaders, etc.). View the images at the gallery. A set of clips, showcasing the engine’s live edit function in action, can be seen below.
