Enlightening your fantasy
How the new middleware that lightened up the world of Final Fantasy is going mobile, as Alice Pattillo discovers
It’s often assumed that the advanced lighting achieved in visually stunning games is too expensive to scale into platforms like mobile, who suffer with restricted budgets, unless they have specialised hardware. However, Geomerics, an ARM company, has come up with a game-changer in Enlighten, which makes bespoke hardware unnecessary for rendering these advanced lighting effects. Enlighten is a dynamic global illumination middleware available as an SDK for internal engines, through the Unreal Engine Integrated Partner Program and with Unity 5 as standard. Chris is vice president of gaming middleware at ARM, and has held many senior positions
at the tech giant. www.bit.ly/arm-chris
Real-time lighting is delivered by Geomeric’s award-winning Enlighten
in Final Fantasy Remake Chris Porthouse, VP of gaming middleware at ARM says, “Enlighten computes the effect of indirect lighting in real-time both in the game and in the editor. Instead of having to wait for lengthy bake cycles, art teams can see the effect of changes made to the lights and materials of a scene in milliseconds and iterate quickly to achieve their desired effect within a shorter time frame.”
In terms of gameplay, this opens up new levels of creativity, “dynamic runtime effects such as time of day and player-controlled lighting are possible,” Chris continues.
Square Enix used Enlighten on the highly anticipated Final Fantasy VII Remake, the new lighting technology that will add a fresh look and feel to the iconic game. But Enlighten also has the ability to scale from a PC title this size, down to a more budgeted platforms – specifically a mobile game. “Enlighten can scale across all of today’s gaming platforms, delivering high-quality output across PC, console, mobile and virtual reality devices.”
face the future
Facial performance
capture evolves The DI4D Pro System is able to obtain super high definition facial motion capture from an array of nine standard video cameras, without using markers, makeup or special illumination. “Quantum Break is a hugely ambitious project that combines action and narrative components in a unique way to bring the characters to life. The only way to achieve the high quality of performance was to create highly realistic digital doubles of talented actors,“says Sam Lake, creative director of Remedy.
In this market developers are increasingly turning to advanced effects, whether sound, gameplay or graphics, to stand out
Shortlisted for the ‘Most Anticipated Game’ at The Game Awards in LA on 3rd Dec 2015, the Xbox One exclusive will also feature a liveaction TV show.