Naked Sky Ent. announced that it has licensed Allegorithmic's ProFX procedural texture authoring and rendering system for its upcoming title ROBOBLITZ, expected to be one of the first Unreal Engine 3 titles to ship on Xbox 360 Live Arcade and the PC.
ROBOBLITZ is a humorous, physics-based action game featuring interactive environments, maladjusted baddies and a host of bizarre weapons. If ROBOBLITZ used traditional texture maps, the install size would be hundreds of megabytes, possibly gigabytes. By using ProFX procedural textures, which look as good or better than their hand-drawn equivalents, Naked Sky is able to squeeze the entire game into only 50MB.
"ProFX is a huge part of RoboBlitz fitting under the 50MB Live Arcade limit," said Joshua Glazer, Naked Sky's cto. "Textures are the majority of the budget for most 3D games. As soon as we replaced our big library of textures with procedural equivalents, we cut our footprint to below 1/20 its original size. Procedural textures have been around for a while, but there was never a solution as powerful as ProFX. I think it's going to be a requirement for anyone who wants a top notch, immersive game in a small file size."
Xbox 360 Live Arcade games are required to fit entirely within 50MB. Next-generation game engines like Unreal Engine 3 use very large textures which make the 50MB requirement essentially impossible to meet with existing technologies. ProFX solves this problem by letting artists paint textures procedurally. Those textures remain procedural, even if the artist erases, moves, stretches, colors or otherwise edits any piece of the texture.
"I'm very pleased to see Naked Sky using ProFX for ROBOBLITZ. From what Ive seen, it will be a great game with a very rich environment. I can't wait to see the look on players' faces when they realize what they've downloaded in only 50MB," said Dr. Sébastien Deguy, president/founder of Allegorithmic.
Seamlessly integrated with Unreal Engine 3, Allegorithmic's ProFX enables the generation of textures of any resolution from source files averaging only 1KB per material. The ProFX middleware is based on patented technology for fully-editable, procedural texture maps and allows texture artists to design hi-quality, next-generation materials (diffuse maps, specular maps, normal maps, etc.) limited only by their imaginations.
To learn how to get a first public sneak peek of RoboBlitz and ProFX, visit www.cmpevents.com/GD06/a.asp?option=C&V=11&SessID=2729.
Allegorithmic is the company behind ProFX, the middleware dedicated to the authoring and rendering of procedural content for next-generation games, and is the owner of the patented FX Maps concept, allowing local artist edits over procedural textures and effects upon which ProFX is built. Allegorithmic's team is made of extremely talented programmers and graphic artists developing new technology, imagery and pipelines for the visual effects and games industries. Allegorithmic is based in France with a branch office in Los Angeles. For more information, visit www.allegorithmic.com.
Naked Sky Ent. is an independent, next-generation game developer based in Los Angeles. Composed of top MIT programmers and award-winning artists, Naked Sky specializes in developing games for next-generation console and PC hardware. For more information, visit www.nakedsky.com.
Rick DeMott
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