Square: CG and gameplay will share assets in next-gen
Luminous Studio, the Square team behind E3's incredible Agni's Philosophy demo, has told RPGSite that CG assets will be pulled down into gameplay in the next generation.
The notion of swapping assets backwards and forwards between CG and gameplay is now a reality to the creators of the E3 animation.
"Yeah, that's what we're expecting to do," said Yoshihisa Hashimoto, Square Enix CTO, when asked if the process was possible in the new Square tech.
"For the backgrounds used in this - the mountains, the houses - we are using exactly the same assets as are used in the Visual Works CG version."
Hashimoto cautioned, however, that there's still work to be done on asset-sharing systems in this regard.
"Of course, it's too massive of a data to use in a game as-is, but I think the look and feel will probably remain," he said. "If we had time, we could've compressed the data even smaller. We didn't have time to do that, so we just used the same master data - but it can definitely be reduced."
He added that it could be a "challenge" to fit next-gen games on a single Blu-ray because of the sheer size of graphical assets involved.
"We have to really consider the mechanism of compressing the data carefully," he said.
Both PlayStation 4 and the next Xbox are expected to release at the end of 2013.
The Agni's Philosophy demo, which you can watch below, is in real-time. A CG version was shown behind closed doors at E3, but has yet to be released by Square.
The engine has been developed to be able to straddle various genres, but has been more specifically designed to create RPGs and action-RPGs.
Epic released its first look at Unreal Engine 4 at E3, which showed similar levels of graphical detail to Agni's Philosophy. Watch it down below.
