Autodesk has announced that its new Stingray game engine will be available to game developers worldwide beginning August 19th. Later this summer, Autodesk will also offer Autodesk Maya LT Desktop Subscription customers access to Autodesk Stingray as part of their subscription.
Built on the powerful, data-driven architecture of the Bitsquid engine, which Autodesk acquired in 2014, Stingray is a comprehensive new platform for making 3D games. The engine supports a host of industry-standard game development workflows and includes powerful connectivity to Autodesk 3D animation software that simplifies game development across a wide range of platforms.
Autodesk senior vice president, Media & Entertainment, Chris Bradshaw, said:
“Between Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and the proliferation of mobile platforms, the games industry is undergoing a major transition, which poses new complexities for both AAA and indie game developers. Autodesk developed Stingray with these challenges in mind, and we’re excited to share its debut with the game developer community. Stingray makes it easy and intuitive for artists with varying skill sets and programming expertise to create the next generation of 3D blockbuster games, entertainment and even architecture.”
Stingray feature highlights include:
– Seamless Art-to-Engine Workflow: Import, create, iterate, test and review 3D assets and gameplay faster with a one-click workflow and live link between Stingray and Autodesk 3D animation software.
– Modern Data-Driven Architecture: A lightweight code base gives game developers the freedom to make significant changes to the engine and renderer without requiring source code access.
– Advanced Visuals and Rendering: Produce visually stunning games with a powerful rendering pipeline, physically-based shading, advanced particle effects, post processed visual effects, lightmap baking and a high-performance reflection system.
– Proven Creative Toolset: Stingray includes proven solutions like Beast, HumanIK, Navigation, Scaleform Studio (UI technology built on Scaleform), FBX, Audiokinetic Wwise and NVIDIA PhysX.
– Versatile Game Logic Creation: Stingray includes a wide range of development tools, making game creation more accessible for game makers with varying levels of experience – including visual node-based-scripting and Lua scripting. C++ source code will also be available as an additional purchase upon request.
– Multiplatform Deployment and Testing: Quickly make and apply changes to gameplay and visuals across supported platforms: Apple iOS, Google Android, Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 8, Oculus Rift DevKit 2, Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One.
Martin Wahlund, CEO of Fatshark, added:
“Stingray’s data-driven architecture and flexibility have helped us build a broad portfolio of games, and quick iteration times for both code and content creators has boosted our productivity significantly. The engine has been a key success factor for us because we’re able to produce high quality games in a shortened timeframe. We’re excited to see how Autodesk will continue to evolve the engine.”
Johan Pilestedt, CEO, Arrowhead Game Studios, concluded:
“We never know what kind of games we’re going to create, and the engine is good for that. It really allows us to just make anything. We can make an FPS or an RTS, or a top-down shooter, or a role-playing game, or whatever. It’s not tied to a specific genre.”
The Stingray engine can also be used in design environments and is an informative next step to further understand design data before anything is physically built. The engine’s real-time digital environment, on a powerful, data-driven architecture, is programmed to look and feel like the physical world. Through the high-end development tools and visual scripting system, customers can program objects, light effects, environmental elements, materials, and entourage elements to behave and react as they would in the physical world.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Always great to see more options for game developers other than Unity and Unreal Engine.
I have been using unreal4 for my projects so far, but i want to try this out
It’s great that there’s another engine on the horizon, but I have a few concerns about this one in particular.
From what was shown here, it looks very similar in terms of workflow and feature-set to the tools Epic has been building in-house for UE4. What is Stingray going to offer to differentiate itself from UE4?
Seeing as Autodesk’s current business model is to hook people into Max/Maya via rather costly subscriptions, are we going to see them restricting Stingray’s import pipeline to these programs? It’s a kind of precarious position to be in when a lot of people are switching over to work in Zbrush, Modo, or even Blender. Moreover, seeing as both Unity and UE4 are likely big drivers of Max/Maya subscriptions, it seems a bit of dick move for Autodesk to continue to muscle in on their territory. Seems like Autodesk are trying to bite the hand that feeds them. Will the other big engines move towards supporting Zbrush or Modo instead of a company that is aggressively positioning themselves as a rival?
Whatever happens, I see this being a pretty interesting time in development. Either that or Autodesk will pack the whole thing in after six months and pretend it never happened.
Imo Unity should focus on supporting (other) free programs. Using something like Max (legally) in combination with Unity is like Al Gore pretending to save the environment while travelling by plane on a weekly basis.
I think the only reason they haven’t is because Blender adoption has traditionally been pretty low. A lot of people don’t really jive with its interface, which I can totally sympathise with.
I think what I’d like is some low-cost (but still commercial) modelling solution aimed squarely at game development which sacrifices features like render solutions and other CGI-centric stuff. Actually, Zbrush is inching closer to being that program, but I digress.
Do digress! I’m trying to become a one-man dev studio in my free-time and I have yet to touch modelling. It’d be rad to know which program to use so I don’t have to try out all of them for months. What’s missing from Zbrush that blender has for instance? My plan was to try blender first but if Zbrush has some advantage UI-wise…
Zbrush still ain’t cheap. It’s $795 but that’s significantly less expensive than Max or Maya. They recently added a bunch of features in v4r7 which make it a lot better suited for low-poly work, and not just sculpting like it traditionally did.
Well if it’s another software going for an absurd price targeted at companies then I want nothing to do with it. 800$ for any piece of software is a joke, it’s like they’re daring people to pirate it. I can’t wait for companies like Adobe and Autodesk to succumb to pressure from freeware or cheaper competitors, they are pure evil.
The shader editor is literally Unreal’s with less shiny looking UI elements. And their main selling point seems to be graphics. Nothing wrong with that in principle and the locations shown did look good. But not better than Unreal. And when CryEngine gets an update that makes it properly current-gen (finally removing all the last-gen “optimizations”) things are going back to the way they used to be: Unreal for functionality, CryEngine for graphics. Where does that leave Stingray? What other selling points do they have?
Stingray is directly compatible with 3dmax scenes, models, animations and other autodesk products, with no need to export them to specific file format. In other words, great tool for existing Autodesk users