Quick, think of the burliest video game engines that you’ve seen lately. Frostbite 3. Unreal Engine 4. That Luminous Studio demo Square Enix showed off at E3 2012. Project Cars. Pretty soon, you’re going to have to add Snowdrop to that list.
Ubisoft first showed the tech behind its upcoming Tom Clancy game at E3 last year , with a surprise reveal that no one saw coming. With the Game Developers Conference happening right now, the French company’s offering another peek under the hood of Snowdrop.
Right now, it appears that Snowdrop is only being used for The Division but when companies invest in building tech like this, you better believe they’re going to us for as many games as they can.
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14 responses to “Let The Next-Gen Engine For The Division Blow Your Mind Even More”
Wow! That is all I can say.
It’s a good time to be into games.
Gah, I need more games made with the SnowDrop engine already! (even though the first one isn’t out yet)
So could this mean that smaller studios can produce bigger games than previously?
Yeah id say its better than spark lol 😛
Good to see some engine comptetition this gen. Unreal made everything look the same. What else was there? Source? CryEngine? That’s about it, except for rarely used engines by smaller companies.
I’m still waiting on X-Ray 2.0
Unity….
I would argue Unity has been the biggest game changer the last few years, especially for indy/smaller devs. One of the main reasons, portability.
You know that if you make a game for Unity, you more or less can ship the same game easily to Linux, Mac, Windows, PS3, 360, iOS, Android.
And when a new architecture is released, you just have to wait for a newer version of Unity to support it and you can recompile and release. Yes some changes may have to be made, but it won’t be much.
I think Unreal 4 may be stepping things up due to them releasing the full source code, combined with EXTREMELY low barrier for entry [$15 per month, plus 5% of sales made of end product].
While this engine looks fantastic, it is developed in-house for the express purpose of powering in-house games. It may be licensed out for other titles, but ubisoft generally don’t do that with their engines. UE4/Unity have been made with the sole purpose of being used by third parties, which means the ease-of-use and flexibility of the engine will be much higher. But that’s fine. Ubisoft has made some great titles with their engines. Shawn White Snowboarding was SPECTACULAR with the Anvil engine [assassins creed].
Personally, I’m super excited to see REDengine3 in action, with The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077
True enough. Unity has come in leaps and bounds in the last little while and it continues to impress. idTech4 seemed to die off pretty quickly. It had some cool lighting and texture tech, but everything looked like it was dipped in plastic.
I’m assuming this is an updated version of or a replacement to Anvil. With this, Frostbite, CryEngine, Unity, Unreal, and Source 2 all available, I’m hoping to see some real innovation in the next few years. I haven’t seen much of REDengine3 other than Witcher 3 screens, but it’s looking good. More choice, more competition, more efficient tech… I’m really hoping to see some cool stuff in the next few years.
And X-Ray 2.0… Somebody, please! X-Ray 1.6 had some amazing tech for the time.
Has there been any news from the ex GSC devs recently?
From what I knew, some devs left GSC to form 4A games [Metro series] to make the 4A engine, as X-Ray, while very impressive for the time, was severely limited in it’s ability to be scaled for modern, multi-cored hardware.
Some went to 4A, some went to Vostock Games. They are working on what was originally a Stalker MMO. It’s called Survarium now. It’s in Beta and there’s round based multiplayer that works like capture the flag. They are putting all the pieces in place and the MMO portion of it should be live by Q4 this year.
Ubi Art Framework. Now there’s an engine.
Hopefully it won’t suffer a degredation in quality the closer we are to release date, like some other upcoming games
Certainly the most impressive demo of an engine i’ve seen this generation. Unreal 4 demo to me was very underwhelming when it was showcasing “next-gen” visuals.
So hype for Division.