SE should talk with Lionhead Studios about licencing their "Mega Mesh" terrain tools

[Rhianu]

There was an article posted on Kotaku a couple days ago about some new terrain editing technology that was developed by Lionhead Studios in the UK for their (now canceled) Xbox 360 game, Milo & Kate.

Anyway, long story short, the technology looks like it can produce some pretty amazing results, allowing artists to create very large 3D environments that don't contain all the excessive repetition that we see in FFXIV's terrain.

You can read the full article here:

http://kotaku.com/#!5783474/the-gorgeous-tech-that-powered-milo--kate-makes-the-xbox-360-look-brand-new

Considering that repetitive terrain is one of the biggest problems with FFXIV currently (not to mention most of the other games SE has produced in the past five years), I think it would be highly beneficial for SE to consider either licensing Lionhead's technology, or developing something similar themselves for use in FFXIV and future games.

Here's some other links pertinent to the topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaTexture

http://miciwan.com/GDC2011/GDC2011_Mega_Meshes.pdf

[Cairdeas]

integrating a third party terrain tool would be too difficult at this juncture I think. especially considering the Crystal tools engine was coded by japanese coders and lionhead studio makes glitchy shit.

[Rhianu]

Yeah, it probably would be better for SE to develop their own tools that did essentially the same thing, just so they can ensure greater compatibility with their own software and have more control over what the tools can do. Perhaps the Crystal Tools engine could be updated to work with these new tools if SE chose to develop them on their own?

Though perhaps SE could still talk with Lionhead to get a better understanding of how exactly the "Mega Mesh" tools work, just so they know what's going on under the hood before they set off to develop their own equivalent software.

But honestly, I do think SE should seriously look into improving the way they go about creating terrain, as FFXIII and FFXIV both have horribly bland and unimaginative environments, which I suspect may possibly be the result of an inefficient development pipeline.

Perhaps with better tools, SE could create better environments.

[Ryodi]

Though perhaps SE could still talk with Lionhead to get a better understanding of how exactly the "Mega Mesh" tools work, just so they know what's going on under the hood before they set off to develop their own equivalent software.

Unless they were selling this they are very unlikely to tell another company how to duplicate something they have spent time and money creating.

[origamikitsune]

Unless they were selling this they are very unlikely to tell another company how to duplicate something they have spent time and money creating.

Indeed, Lionhead has not (yet) jumped on the bandwagon of licensing engines that I am aware.

[Malakhim]

Somewhat off topic, but it's interesting that this topic should come up right after I read an article on Gamasutra that states that PC developers think DirectX is holding gaming graphics back.

In the article, it's mentioned by several people in the PC industry that the DX API adds a lot of overhead and prevents designers from really getting the most out of the hardware. I think I read in the comments that usually the games released towards the end of a consoles lifespan are much better technically due to the fact that developers have managed to learn how to work strictly with the hardware limits as opposed to using DirectX for much. I wonder if Crystal Tools has the same issue.

I'm no game designer and I'm hardly in the know, but I thought I'd put it out there.

Article here.

[Cairdeas]

Mala, most people do agree that Open GL is a much more robust and less hardware intensive rendering api. But the problem is to get the most out of it you have to customiza the open source code to your software. The best way I can make this example would probably be Counter Strike 1.6 The Open GL version is much smoother and less jagged then the Directx 8 version.

[Malakhim]

Oh, I wasn't trying to put either on a platform as much as I was just thinking aloud that maybe the issues that SE ran into with Crystal Tools was with trying to keep everything standardized for every supported platform and and DX9 without really trying to get into the "meat" of each individual system.

[Abriael]

You don't really have any idea on how those tools would work in the extensive environment of a MMORPG, considering that Kate and Milo was to be an extremely limited game in spatial scope.

Any and every decent engine can create amazing environments when the scale is small, that's nowhere such an amazing achievement (and it's unsurprising that the article is from kotaku, since they overly drool over anything and everything that comes from microsoft's mouth). The crystal tools engine is no exception, suffice to give a look to the environments in Final Fantasy XIII, that easily give those shown in that limited movie a run for their money (and do so on 60 hz, instead of 30).

Again, when another engine will produce better results *in a MMO* than the crystal tools, we'll talk. As of now, none did, so I don't see any reason to think that SE should go the roundabout way of integrating third party engines in their own suite, which is not exactly something that easy and fast to do, by the way.

In any case Milo & kate (including their engine) ended up just being another of Molineux's failed promises. There has to be a reason for that.

[Malakhim]

You don't really have any idea on how those tools would work in the extensive environment of a MMORPG, considering that Kate and Milo was to be an extremely limited game in spatial scope.

Any and every decent engine can create amazing environments when the scale is small, that's nowhere such an amazing achievement (and it's unsurprising that the article is from kotaku, since they overly drool over anything and everything that comes from microsoft's mouth). The crystal tools engine is no exception, suffice to give a look to the environments in Final Fantasy XIII, that easily give those shown in that limited movie a run for their money (and do so on 60 hz, instead of 30).

Again, when another engine will produce better results *in a MMO* than the crystal tools, we'll talk. As of now, none did, so I don't see any reason to think that SE should go the roundabout way of integrating third party engines in their own suite, which is not exactly something that easy and fast to do, by the way.

In any case Milo & kate (including their engine) ended up just being another of Molineux's failed promises. There has to be a reason for that.

I highly doubt that Milo's cancellation had anything to do with it's engine though, although I agree that third-party integration might be a pain in the ass(also expensive for licensing and screw that).

I agree with the fuck Kotaku part though. Incidentally that was the first thing I read from Kotaku in about 2 weeks.