BETA | GAME ENGINES // LUMINOUS STUDIO
If you’re keen to make games that look like this remember: Square Enix is keeping its tools to itself
running side-by-side. The comparison of the two inevitably shows the tech demo outshining the original and comparatively rough source material. It’s a production draft, after all.
But the marvel here is the fact it has taken
high-end assets and swiftly translated that into game engine material. When it comes to things like lighting, the look and feel of this art-driven source material has been perfectly replicated into the demo. “The same people who worked on the CG
then worked on the lighting and design of the actual demo,” adds Hashimoto, extolling the inherent values of mixing the game and CG video workforces. “If you want to fine-tune pre-rendered CG,
rigging the lighting and changing the expressions takes time – but in our real-time technology it’s just a few minutes of tweaking. We’ve been able to easily change and address many of the subtleties quickly. “Ultimately, what we have done is create a
movie as a visual work, and it was ported into real-time. And we felt we became more flexible editing that using Luminous Studio compared to just creating it as a pre-rendering.”
CHASING THE DRAGON In terms of gameplay, much of the motivation here has been on what Square Enix has always championed: characterisation. “Square Enix highly values in-game
characters – so the hair, skin, face and details. That’s what we focus on,” says Hashimoto. You don’t have to look hard for varying
22 | JULY 2012
examples of Square’s eternal search to get this right. The expensive foray into CG movies with Final Fantasy: Spirits Within or the emphasis on faces in the publisher’s 2011 Deus Ex sequel are just two. This new footage of Agni’s dragon pursuit seems to be, finally, the dream realised. Yet the actual humans the company
employs to make its games might in fact be the ones escaping from the nightmare trappings of development. Team sizes could actually fall in this new era of high-end technology, says Hashimoto – if not, the
We are hoping that Luminous means we
will not have to reduce any of the capabilities shown by the on-screen characters.
Yoshihisa Hashimoto, Square
emphasis will at least allow more creative artistic freedoms. “If you are making games like those we’ve seen on PS3 or 360, I can say you will be able to reduce your staff numbers with technology like this,” he says. “However, this level of quality game [in
Agni’s Philosophy] will require a lot of additional material, so you’ll probably end up employing more artists and designers. So that would offset reducing any staff.
“But things that previously used to require a lot of manual input, such as smoothing out errors or flaws, will switch to procedural or automated computer function.” The emphasis in the next generation, he
says, will shift to aesthetics, not programming. He doesn’t mention it, but it’s no secret that Square Enix for one has struggled with the demands of the current generation. A project like Final Fantasy XIII needed hundreds of programmers and artists, and even then was beset by delays. Hashimoto won’t go on the record as
saying his technology can kill off the cut-scene, though. For a start, things like “tiny changes to costumes” on the fly could cause headaches for designers and load for GPUs and CPUs – so whenever Agni shows up in a real Final Fantasy, it’s likely her adventure will still be punctuated by static video clips bookending gameplay segments. “But these days you want seamless
movement between cut-scenes and gameplay – that’s why we highly value having such high quality gameplay that looks like CG,” he says. “We are hoping that, as a game engine,
Luminous means we will not have to reduce any of the capabilities shown by the on-screen characters.” It is progression, at the very least. The
difference between cut-scene and gameplay, even those that are often produced in-engine but still rendered into movies, has been a concession developers have always had to make, often only with minimal satisfaction. Gamers might not notice it
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