Originally Posted by 10-12-2011
At a press conference in Japan last weekend, Square Enix showed off tech demos of its next-generation Luminous Engine, which it first announced in August, and announced features of its Luminous Studio development framework.
Designed with native DirectX 11 support, the engine includes cloth and fluid simulation, realtime reflections and highly efficient tessellation techniques that lower the level of detail of 3D models with minimal memory usage cost.
Square Enix chief technical officer Yoshihisa Hashimoto claimed that despite its startlingly realistic visual fidelity and new features, Luminous Studio can reduce game development costs by up to 30 per cent, and expects it to enable faster development cycles.
Square Enix's team has also created a demo of realtime scenes, including an underground parking garage, designed to show off the Luminous Engine's ability to mirror digital photographs of the real thing. The effect is mainly achieved through diffuse reflection, which models light as it behaves in the real world, with coloured surfaces bleeding their hue on to nearby surfaces.