og:image:, the phantom pain, FOX Engine

The new Metal Gear Solid V trailer wasn't the only amazing thing to come out of Kojima's talk yesterday. This was GDC after-all, where the technological innards of the games we love are discussed with intricate detail. Discussion of the new FOX Engine -Kojima Productions's new foundational engine- was especially deep in the weeds. So much so that layman writers like myself sat glassy-eyed through some of the more technical sections involving light transfusion and rendering processes. But even though those details might have been lost on some, there was one huge takeaway. Namely, not only did the FOX Engine look glorious, the processes involved in its execution also saved developer time and money.

We're starting to see this trend now. As development costs have been going through the roof -so much so that 3.6 million in sales is now described as disappointing by publishers like Square Enix- it's becoming imperative to bring the cost of development down. Epic Games has taken a huge swipe at this problem with the development of Unreal Engine 4 and now Kojima Productions has done much of the same.

The glory behind the FOX Engine is its ability to render-in highly detailed scanned models rather than have developers create them by hand, and combining those with linear-space lighting and correcting the shaders using real-life photographs as a reference point. We've seen a bare-bones version of this in LA Noire but that was mostly to capture facial animation, not the entirety of the world which lead to an uncomfortable disassociation between the faces and body models. Uncanny Valley Noire might have been a more fitting title.

Kojima Productions, on the other hand, are scanning nearly everything for their world. Faces, weapons, rocks and even seashells were shown off during the talk. They're currently striving to create a literal translation of the real world...Flaming Space Whales and all.

Textures are also rendered from real life photographs by PhotoScan (I guess Max Payne 2 was onto something) and then only manipulated by the artist, rather than having textures be created whole cloth. The result is photo-realistic. Pictures of a Kojima Productions conference room were almost indistinguishable from their rendered counterpart.

The video below is a quick mashup of some of the talk, with much of the 'Inside Baseball' technical jargon left out so you can get a good -if even general- idea of what the FOX Engine is capable of on both the user and developer side of things. Essentially, strives in development practices are integral to the long term survival of the video game industry. At least on the upper tier of AAA development. And I can't wait to see just how much development costs start receding as this new tech get's instituted. 


Comments

  • Dimensaur2 Avatar
    Dimensaur2
    11 years, 8 months ago

    Man this is just nuts

  • Avatar
    Sickbrain
    11 years, 8 months ago

    I don't get "scanning" part. Are they using 3D scanning (camera captures) and then import 3D model with scanned textures in to the game or they just scan something for textures only?

    Natural day/night cycles are not new anymore and haven't been for a while. Plenty of games do that already like Skyrim for example.

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  • theottomatic91 Avatar
    theottomatic91
    11 years, 8 months ago

    Honestly I hope Konami decides to outsource this engine to other developers, it'd be a waste if they made this exclusive to the company

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