Rockstar feeling euphoric at new deal
With Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 being all the rage at the moment, you might forgive developers for overlooking other options, since UE3 has proven its capabilities. Congratulate Rockstar then for doing something different. They have partnered up with NaturalMotion who developed the Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS) technology. The deal allows Rockstar to incorporate NaturalMotion’s new “euphoria” engine into upcoming games.
No-one expects you to understand what the hell DMS is, but thankfully research has been done and here are the results. The “euphoria” engine brings (DMS) onto the next generation of hardware.
With euphoria, animations are not canned but are generated on-the-fly by the CPU as the game is played. Every tackle is your tackle, every haymaker is your haymaker.
euphoria provides unprecedented interactivity and realism, and gives users a true next-generation gaming experience.
The euphoria engine simulates a human’s motor nervous system. This therefore means that even if the same scenario happens over and over, the AI will react differently every time. This adds to the realism of the game considerably.
It should be pointed out that the guys behind the euphoria engine do not class it as middleware, something Epic do with their UE3 engine. Instead NaturalMotion have close co-development relationships with publishers and development teams, allowing the engine to be integrated into the next-generation titles within a short space of time. Check out the twelve second demo of the technology here, it’s quite impressive.
What does this mean for games then? Well, Rockstar are yet to announce exactly what titles they will use the engine with, but if they don’t use it with the next Grand Theft Auto game I’d be very surprised. Given the amount of people you shoot, blow up, punch, kick and generally kill, the euphoria engine is crying out to be used. It would definitely show the capabilities, as every person you run over dies in a different way. Shooting someone with the sniper rifle in the head will never be the same again.
You could go through Rockstar’s catalogue of games that the engine could be used for, but the most obvious one is of course GTA. I’ll leave it to you in the comments section as to what other things Rockstar could do with this.
Thanks nofear360 and Sanchez for submitting, who have been linking up brilliantly together today!
The euphoria engine is very impressive.
An engine with a name like Eup]-[horia. I’m all for that.
Its the future of all games! Said it the first time I saw it in action last year.
Table Tennis 2 will be that much more realistic!
not until i tackle juergen
“The euphoria engine simulates a human’s motor nervous system. This therefore means that even if the same scenario happens over and over, the AI will react differently every time. This adds to the realism of the game considerably”
I’ve heard this a lot before, hopefully this will really be a big step forward.
The Euphoria eninge is the same that will be used for Star Wars Forces Unleashed and the new Indiana Jones game!
Over at gametrailers.com you can watch a few engine tech demoes of indi and star wars, but it should give a peak of what’s to come!
Gametrailers.com star wars page
oh shi* thats it euphoria! gta just because the #1 open ended game again, this thing is SPECTACULAR every time through a game the result will be different even if you try to play it exactly the sme.
wekko it is watch the tech footage, their is NOTHING prescreened its all AI based
whats funny is though with euphoria and precedural coding im starting tos ee why microsoft isnt worried about the 9gb limit hehe… just look at masseffect and crackdown on 1 disk hehe