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Edge_Maverick · Dec 23, 2015

Former Square Enix Worldwide Technology Director Julien Merceron explained why Square Enix shifted from using Luminous Engine on several games to only Final Fantasy XV.

Merceron explained that its difficult to share an engine without first creating a game on it. Some companies do that, but he wouldnt. When he creates an engine, a game also has to be developed with that engine. After the engine proves itself in said game, then the technology can be shared, as the developers can finally say that it works.

If the engine hasnt proved its worth, theres a constant risk of problems. In fact, with the Fox Engine, the team did not start working on Pro Evolution Soccer before finishing Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. The decision to use Fox Engine in PES was taken after Ground Zeroes was completed, and the team was sure that the engine could deliver.

The same goes for Luminous. Merceron recommended to Square Enix to release Final Fantasy XV and then see what happened with it, before using Luminous Engine with other games.

From DShockers

Doctor_Thomas · Dec 23, 2015

It's never going to be used again, is it?

James Scott · Dec 23, 2015

But SE already released a Ground Zeroes-esque version of XV after charging for it

danthefan · Dec 23, 2015

He was Squenix engine director? I thought he used to work for Konami?

Ishida · Dec 23, 2015

Doctor_Thomas said:
It's never going to be used again, is it?

Why not? It looks fantastic.

I hope the game is a success and this engine gets more love.

benzy · Dec 23, 2015

Doctor_Thomas said:
It's never going to be used again, is it?

That's not what Merceron said.

ookami · Dec 23, 2015

danthefan said:
He was Squenix engine director? I thought he used to work for Konami?

Before working for Konami he was also technical director for SE. I think he's the one behind the Luminous engine.

KainXVIII · Dec 23, 2015

Doctor_Thomas said:
It's never going to be used again, is it?

Maybe only for FFXV-2

th4tguy · Dec 23, 2015

In the time it takes them to release one Lum game, they will have produced and released several UE4 games....

Pooya · Dec 23, 2015

Well, it's going to work, FF15 will come out eventually but they are also seeing that UE4 works better, it won't matter in the end..

burgerdog · Dec 23, 2015

Ishida said:
Why not? It looks fantastic.

I hope the game is a success and this engine gets more love.

It really doesn't look all that great in the current state of the demo. I really hope they improve the IQ and add some AF to the final product.

DangerMouse · Dec 23, 2015

James Scott said:
But SE already released a Ground Zeroes-esque version of XV after charging for it

Given Duscae is still relatively recent, maybe something they haven't revealed yet has begun development or planning on it, but such a thing would of course be super early.

Considering that so far in the time that the game has really had full resources, mainly since the move to PS4, it seems to have made somewhat more constant progress, maybe it will live on in more games.

entremet · Dec 23, 2015

Where's the link?

Peff · Dec 23, 2015

The decision to use Fox Engine in PES was taken after Ground Zeroes was completed, and the team was sure that the engine could deliver.

That can't be right, considering PES 2014 came out quite a bit before Ground Zeroes.

epmode · Dec 23, 2015

Ishida said:
Why not? It looks fantastic.

I'm simplifying this a bit but the look of a game is a poor reason to choose a particular engine.

Alienous · Dec 23, 2015

Namco, just stick to UE4.

BadWolf · Dec 23, 2015

Peff said:
That can't be right, considering PES 2014 came out quite a bit before Ground Zeroes.

The decision to cut GZ from the main game and sell it separately probably came long after it was actually completed.

Triggerhappytel · Dec 23, 2015

Ishida said:
Why not? It looks fantastic.

I hope the game is a success and this engine gets more love.

Considering S-E have gone with Unreal Engine 4 for most of their other big-scale projects, one would assume that Luminous has been to blame in some fashion for the troubles FFXV has been through.

Honestly, at this point there seems to be less and less purpose to having an in-house engine unless they're going to nail it and use it across multiple projects, like Frostbite. Middleware like UE4 and Unity seem to be so ubiquitous that building a proprietary engine seems unnecessary.

callmeavis · Dec 23, 2015

miladesn said:
Well, it's going to work, FF15 will come out eventually but they are also seeing that UE4 works better, it won't matter in the end..

I'm not sure we are in any position to make that sort of statement from a long-term perspective. UE3/4 Dev at this point should certainly be faster as they've, presumably, used it to create several games thus understand the particular quirks and difficulties of that engine.

It is certainly possible that once FFXV is 'complete' SE will be in a position to figure out where the new tech fits in to other projects. Whilst I'm sure one-and-done engine development happens that's a huge investment for relatively little return.

The upside with a single game being done on the new engine rather than multiple parallel development efforts is you only have one "team" making the majority of the production mistakes due to not understanding the new tech. Once they finally get through that they'll be in a better position to either assist the next team or start on their next project (or both) thus reducing the cost of the next effort.

That's not to suggest you do one project and immediately workflows are perfect and the dev environment is completely understood for all cases; you should simply be in a better position to predict what type of issues you'll run into and start thinking about how to either mitigate or take a different direction to avoid them all together.

Shin-Ra · Dec 23, 2015

burgerdog said:
It really doesn't look all that great in the current state of the demo. I really hope they improve the IQ and add some AF to the final product.

This was improved in Duscae 2.0 apparently.

benzy said:

Ingueferroque · Dec 23, 2015

I was kind of sad to read the FFVII remake wouldn't use Luminous.

mrpeabody · Dec 23, 2015

Because they figured out what everybody else has known for years: that making your own bespoke engine in this generation is the height of idiocy.

Nirolak · Dec 23, 2015

He's not wrong. This is why it was kind of dumb to make it with Agni's Philosophy instead of a game from the start.

When shipping a game, you find all the problems an engine has.

That said I still don't expect this to be used for much more than Final Fantasy XV if for no other reason than the amount of staff experience they're already investing into other engines. Nomura was just going on about how the Kingdom Hearts team is able to help out on Final Fantasy VII and that kind of scenario is invaluable.

danthefan said:
He was Squenix engine director? I thought he used to work for Konami?

He was Square Enix's Worldwide Technology Director and moved to Konami to have a similar position, and is now at Namco Bandai as a CTO overseeing everything from digital toys to game technology.

R10Neymarfan · Dec 24, 2015

Ingueferroque said:
I was kind of sad to read the FFVII remake wouldn't use Luminous.

And graphically that's why it doesn't look that good. Let's be real UE4 is most acceptable quantity over the quality Luminous will most likely provided

And yes I know about the infallable word of the savior of Japan UE4

RoboPlato · Dec 24, 2015

R10Neymarfan said:
And graphically that's why it doesn't look that good. Let's be real UE4 is most acceptable quantity over the quality Luminous will most likely provided

And yes I know about the infallable word of the savior of Japan UE4

I genuinely like the look of FFVIIR more than FFXV. XV really needs to sort it's image quality out.

Durante · Dec 24, 2015

Shin-Ra said:
This was improved in Duscae 2.0 apparently.

The IQ in those shots still looks terrible though.

JordanN · Dec 24, 2015

R10Neymarfan said:
And graphically that's why it doesn't look that good. Let's be real UE4 is most acceptable quantity over the quality Luminous will most likely provided

And yes I know about the infallable word of the savior of Japan UE4

1 game has been in development for 10 years, the other just barely got started. Not really a fair comparison.

artsi · Dec 24, 2015

th4tguy said:
In the time it takes them to release one Lum game, they will have produced and released several UE4 games....

* In the time they develop a new engine and at the same time a game that uses it

Of course it will take time when Luminous itself has not been ready yet. If they happen to develop their next project with it there should not be that many engine level problems anymore they need to solve.

JordanN said:
1 game has been in development for 10 years, the other just barely got started. Not really a fair comparison.

Luminous started development in 2011.

John Kowalski · Dec 24, 2015

making a game and an engine at the same time is hard enough, imagine making a game, making an engine and supporting other teams using that engine

crunch isn't funny

JordanN · Dec 24, 2015

artsi said:
Luminous started development in 2011.

But they had a PS3 game/assets to work with before then. FF7R has to be built from complete scratch.

SoulUnison · Dec 24, 2015

Square's really had a hard couple of generations with proprietary engines, haven't they?
Was it only the XIII trilogy that ended up using Crystal Tools?

artsi · Dec 24, 2015

JordanN said:
But they had a PS3 game/assets to work with before then. FF7R has to be built from complete scratch.

Some of the designs for sure, but I doubt we will see any actual PS3 assets in XV, as they would be quite outdated in comparison to the new stuff.

Wagram · Dec 24, 2015

They really need to skip making their own engines.

ShockingAlberto · Dec 24, 2015

I don't even mean this as a joke, but even if he's not just trying not to say the engine is bad, then his reasoning says we probably wouldn't see another Luminous game until 2018 at earliest.

Foffy · Dec 24, 2015

Durante said:
The IQ in those shots still looks terrible though.

They really do.

Not trying to troll, but it has the IQ of a last gen game.

SoulUnison · Dec 24, 2015

Wagram said:
They really need to skip making their own engines.

Yeah, but then we end up with things like Kingdom Hearts III on Unreal, where, I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt that it's still early in development, but it... just doesn't looks like a Kingdom Hearts game at all.

It's got that cheap, glossy "Unreal tech demo reel" look to it.

I hope, after all those statements about the "KINGDOM Shader" and how every world was going to have its own faithful art style, they're not having a bunch of trouble making Unreal look like anything but Unreal.

Styles · Dec 24, 2015

SoulUnison said:
Yeah, but then we end up with things like Kingdom Hearts III on Unreal, where, I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt that it's still early in development, but it... just doesn't looks like a Kingdom Hearts game at all.

It's got that cheap, glossy "Unreal tech demo reel" look to it.

I hope, after all those statements about the "KINGDOM Shader" and how every world was going to have its own faithful art style, they're not having a bunch of trouble making Unreal look like anything but Unreal.

Kinda agree. KH3 looks the same as DQXI.

NHarmonic. · Dec 24, 2015

SoulUnison said:
Yeah, but then we end up with things like Kingdom Hearts III on Unreal, where, I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt that it's still early in development, but it... just doesn't looks like a Kingdom Hearts game at all.

It's got that cheap, glossy "Unreal tech demo reel" look to it.

I hope, after all those statements about the "KINGDOM Shader" and how every world was going to have its own faithful art style, they're not having a bunch of trouble making Unreal look like anything but Unreal.

Well i guess it's using UE4 or waiting just too much time for KH3 to release. It's clear that Luminous has made a hell out of FF15 development.

tuxfool · Dec 24, 2015

Luminous still has one of the better implementations of real time GI.

It is right there in the name.

Vital Tundra · Dec 24, 2015

I doubt we will see this engine in anything substantial again. KH and FF7 aren't using it, so what will if not these 2 big name titles?

artsi · Dec 24, 2015

Vital Tundra said:
I doubt we will see this engine in anything substantial again. KH and FF7 aren't using it, so what will if not these 2 big name titles?

We'll see when XV is completed, like Merceron says. There's just no way FF7R or KH3 could have used the engine in it's fullest potential when it's still evolving all the time and the development and support personnel have been absorbed (for now) by the XV team.

After XV is done the engine itself is more mature and they also might have more time to create a proper support infrastructure for the engine.

R10Neymarfan · Dec 24, 2015

SoulUnison said:
Yeah, but then we end up with things like Kingdom Hearts III on Unreal, where, I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt that it's still early in development, but it... just doesn't looks like a Kingdom Hearts game at all.

It's got that cheap, glossy "Unreal tech demo reel" look to it.

I hope, after all those statements about the "KINGDOM Shader" and how every world was going to have its own faithful art style, they're not having a bunch of trouble making Unreal look like anything but Unreal.

Yes KH3 looks significantly downgraded. The optimization a in UE4 probably aren't as good as say Liminous so they can't have those high fidelity visual assets like FFXV does. Instead we get plastic lookin models. They could improve but so far it isn't looking good, but at least you guys get it sooner I guess.

Kule · Dec 24, 2015

SoulUnison said:
Square's really had a hard couple of generations with proprietary engines, haven't they?
Was it only the XIII trilogy that ended up using Crystal Tools?

FFXIV 1.0 also used crystal tools and why the game had really low player count display. The director Tanaka was basically lumbered with it instead of having an engine designed for massively multiplayer in mind.

Also something interesting is the XIV 2.0+ engine is a sister version of luminous designed to support online play.

benzy · Dec 24, 2015

Nirolak said:
That said I still don't expect this to be used for much more than Final Fantasy XV if for no other reason than the amount of staff experience they're already investing into other engines. Nomura was just going on about how the Kingdom Hearts team is able to help out on Final Fantasy VII and that kind of scenario is invaluable.

Couldn't the XV team can help out other devs on Luminous if they were given the chance though? And XV will be released before any of their big UE4 games, not to mention VII-R is being made by mostly external developers so I'm not so sure there will be more SE devs experienced in UE4 compared to Luminous. There's also the case with what will the Luminous devs be doing after XV, tech support for more games than just one?

Durante said:
The IQ in those shots still looks terrible though.

I don't think the jpg compression is doing it any favors. IQ is decent for a 900p demo that was more than a year off from release. Aliasing is mostly seen in objects with lots of speculars and thin lines (gas station area), otherwise it can be pretty clean. There's a DOF effect that slightly blurs out background detail which I'm hoping they get rid of in the final version. Here are some PNG shots which I find much better than the jpegs. Obviously, there could still be improvements, like hitting 1080p.

NoctisVsStar · Dec 24, 2015

benzy said:
Couldn't the XV team can help out other devs on Luminous if they were given the chance though? And XV will be released before any of their big UE4 games, not to mention VII-R is being made by mostly external developers so I'm not so sure there will be more SE devs experienced in UE4 compared to Luminous. There's also the case with what will the Luminous devs be doing after XV, tech support for more games than just one?

The issue is that the LE is still being worked on alongside XV which is why development has been a bit rocky, so providing help for KH3 and FF7r would've been impossible. Imagine all three projects (XV,FF7r and KH3) being constantly delayed due to tech support. However, the positive in all this if SE is able to have a salvage LE and proves to be good, future titles could very use it. But at the moment it looks like XV is the only game using it for the foreseeable future. It feels more of a pride thing for SE.

I'm a huge XV supporter I feel the game is going to make people eat a lot of crow. I'm positive despite the same ol troll jokes.

DangerMouse · Dec 24, 2015

R10Neymarfan said:
Yes KH3 looks significantly downgraded. The optimization a in UE4 probably aren't as good as say Liminous so they can't have those high fidelity visual assets like FFXV does. Instead we get plastic lookin models. They could improve but so far it isn't looking good, but at least you guys get it sooner I guess.

I think the environment look has transitioned over well for the couple we've seen so far but I agree they still seem to be pretty work-in-progress bringing over the "Kingdom Shader" (like he said) for the characters themselves so they don't entirely feel like Square-Enix style and lit character models sometimes yet.

Whereas, FF7R I think they've nailed their shading and lighting perfectly in replicating the art style.
And ofcourse with Luminous on XV since that's their own engine.

artsi said:
We'll see when XV is completed, like Merceron says. There's just no way FF7R or KH3 could have used the engine in it's fullest potential when it's still evolving all the time and the development and support personnel have been absorbed (for now) by the XV team.

After XV is done the engine itself is more mature and they also might have more time to create a proper support infrastructure for the engine.

Agreed. Plus people really need to stop and consider that none of that time prior to re-reveal was on Luminous (Versus was the old engine plus supposedly some Luminous lighting) so other than some rockiness there's really no sign that they've had any significant trouble building with it on the new FFXV.

benzy · Dec 24, 2015

NoctisVsStar said:
The issue is that the LE is still being worked on alongside XV which is why development has been a bit rocky, so providing help for KH3 and FF7r would've been impossible. Imagine all three projects (XV,FF7r and KH3) being constantly delayed due to tech support. However, the positive in all this if SE is able to have a salvage LE and proves to be good, future titles could very use it. But at the moment it looks like XV is the only game using it for the foreseeable future. It feels more of a pride thing for SE.

I'm a huge XV supporter I feel the game is going to make people eat a lot of crow. I'm positive despite the same ol troll jokes.

Yeah, I was referring to the XV team (Business Division 2) helping other studios in the future on Luminous after XV is completed, not suggesting that anything currently in full production should be using Luminous outside of XV.

AwakenedCloud · Dec 24, 2015

Shin-Ra said:
This was improved in Duscae 2.0 apparently.

Hopefully this is one of those cases where it's always better in motion...

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