POST-PROCESSING // YEBIS 2 | BUILD MORE THAN MIDDLEWARE
YEBIS IS JUST one feather in Silicon Studio’s cap – albeit the largest and most colourful. The company offers a range of other services for Japanese games developers and is keen to provide similar support to Western firms. “We’re probably one of the only middleware companies to survive in Japan,” executive director Fumiko Kato tells Develop. “Our strength is our one-stop service for developers. We offer support in the form of tools and middleware, as well as full game development, we provide people, and we provide consulting and networking services. So we have a lot to offer the games industry.”
“The only input Yebis needs is the colour information, the depth information and maybe the motion vector information if you want motion blur.
“Basically, at the end of the pipeline for your rendering engine, when you have your near final picture before post-processing, you just pass this information to Yebis and take a look at the output. We have seen people integrating Yebis in less than a day.” Square Enix – a shareholder in Silicon Studio, along with Bandai Namco – has already integrated the technology into its new-gen engine. Meanwhile, a recent partnership with French middleware firm Allegorithmic has seen Yebis added to the company’s range of Substance texturing toolsets. While Yebis 2 might shine brightest on
Xbox One and PS4, Silicon Studio has also gone to great lengths to get it across multiple platforms – 18 of them, in fact. That encompasses not only traditional consoles and handhelds, but also a variety of smartphones and tablets. In fact, Google used the company’s Yebis 2 demo to show off the power of the Nexus 7 tablet. “Each customer comes with different needs, so we have ported Yebis 2 onto 18 different platforms as of today,” explains Magne. “That was a big challenge, but it has also strengthened Yebis. Each time, we added specific optimisations and algorithms that we could take advantage of on each platform afterwards. It makes it very efficient and very scalable. “Of course you will achieve the best quality with the high-end consoles. Yebis is already available and optimised for PS4 and Xbox One. But recently, we have brought Yebis to a number of mobile platforms, in which we also have an interest. We released an OpenGL ES3
demo of Yebis’ features on Google Play – there are some interesting effects we can do thanks to the new OpenGL ES3 so we’re looking into what we can do with this and we’ll expand from there.”
LIGHTING THE WAY AHEAD
Yebis 2 may be beloved by games developers and film-makers alike, but Silicon Studio isn’t about to sit back and relax. On the contrary: the Japanese middleware firm has world domination in its sights. The Allegorithmic partnership goes some way to supporting these efforts, as does the use of Yebis in MotoGP 14, the new-gen racer being developed by Italian studio Milestone. But the biggest boost should come from the imminent launch of Yebis 2’s successor.
There are more than ten years of
research behind Yebis 2 – and our customers recognise that. Steven Tsang, Silicon Studio
“We’re planning to launch Yebis 3 this summer,” Kato reveals. “We are going to promote in Japan first, and then prepare to release overseas. We’ll be promoting as well.” And Magne adds that Yebis 2’s features have been so well-received that the team has been free to explore new possibilities for the toolset, rather than refining what has already come before. “People are extremely happy with what we deliver right now, so there is nothing we need to improve on,” he says. “It’s more a case of
adding new features. Rather than learning from Yebis 2, we’re continuing from it.” The new features of Yebis 3 have largely been based on the most popular requests from established Yebis users. Headline features of the next version include SSAO (screen space ambient occlusion), higher quality depth of field effects and even lens dirt – again underlining Silicon Studio’s commitment to recreate realistic camera effects in games. That’s not to say Yebis 2 will be completely replaced by its follow-up. Silicon Studio will still continue to support the middleware as it reaches out to more Western developers and even film studios to get its post-processing tools into the hands of the most gifted creators while it eagerly waits to see what these teams can do with the power of Yebis.
www.siliconstudio.co.jp/en/
Key to this expanded selection of services is Silicon Studio’s own games development team. The in-house studio has produced a variety of titles over the last few years – most notably, Square Enix’s 3DS RPG Bravely Default (below) and PS3 exclusive 3D Dot Game Heroes (above). In fact, the latter served as another great showcase for the effects Yebis can produce. “They’re creating really great games, and they have a really high reputation,” Kato says of the studio. “When we started to sell middleware, we didn’t have a games studio, but it’s hard for us to sell middleware without us creating games for ourselves. With our own studio, we can test and run and use our middleware to create great games.
“A lot of publishers already come to us to make a game in our studio. And because we’re not a publisher, we can concentrate our own original titles.”
Tech demos such as Agni’s Philosophy by Square Enix (above left, top) and Silicon’s own RigidGems (above left) show off some of the effects Yebis 2 is capable of creating
JULY 2014 | 39
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