Remember Brigade Engine? No? Well shame on you because OTOY has announced that game developers worldwide will be able to leverage Brigade – its path tracing and rendering technology for photorealistic next-generation games – through Amazon EC2 in the second half of the year.
According to the press release, OTOY is concurrently launching a seamless physically-based art pipeline for Brigade, shared with OTOY’s OctaneRender software and supported across all major 3D modeling packages.
Here is what OTOY aims to achieve:
-
Expanding the Brigade developer program – Through Brigade, OTOY is now helping leading game developers explore the potential of cloud computing for the delivery of next-generation games. Brigade is a powerful graphics API that can easily replace Microsoft DirectX or OpenGL graphics within popular game engines such as Epic Games’ Unreal Engine or Unity, serving as a backend for superior graphics without disrupting the game logic. Harnessing the power of the cloud, Brigade’s sophisticated technology enables real-time ray tracing and path tracing of game environments, simulating light as it appears in the real world to deliver in-game interactive graphics that are on par with the best movie effects of today. Frames that traditionally have taken minutes or longer to render now do so in fractions of a second, allowing for a fluid game experience streamed to consumers’ homes without the need for expensive hardware.
- Next generation final render art pipeline for Brigade, powered by OctaneRender, supported across all major 3D modeling tools – OctaneRender, OTOY’s acclaimed rendering software, and Brigade now share the same code base, allowing extraordinarily complex 3D scenes, materials, lighting and objects rendered in OctaneRender to be effortlessly loaded into Brigade for gaming and other interactive applications. Similarly, Brigade is now compatible with 15 of the top modeling programs through OctaneRender plugins. The end result is a pain-free art pipeline that lets developers easily transition detailed game assets from the program of their choosing to Brigade.
-
Developing via Brigade on Amazon EC2 – Delivering physically accurate photorealistic games demands a compute-intensive environment that’s affordable, scalable, and up to the task. In the second half of 2014, OTOY will make Brigade Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) available via Amazon EC2 to facilitate testing and development of next-generation games.
Jules Urbach, Founder and CEO at OTOY, said:
“We’re quickly approaching a time where rasterization-based gaming APIs won’t be able to keep pace with the realism gamers demand. As media and entertainment companies look to leverage existing assets across movie, television, and game mediums, and as we face an ever more connected future, the top game studios know that the cloud is the logical solution. We have the distinct pleasure of working with several premiere developers using Brigade to explore jaw-dropping next-generation games, and with today’s announcement we look forward to getting Brigade into even more developers’ hands in the near future.”
Enjoy!
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.”
Contact: Email
Begun the API wars have, yet again.
If it’s the only way to make some progress, then let there be war! 😛
Oh boy, good times when we used to launch games and went to menu to choose different renders. Keyword Choose.
I am really loving this new round of “Graphics API wars”
Oh I remember the Brigade Engine, how could you not after seeing it in action, just wow.
3DFX surely wasnt successful.. i dont think this API would be either
Right, so this mostly takes advantge of cloud computing. So meaning an always on connection will likely be in order even for singleplayer games. And it’ll eat up your bandwidth and upload/download caps. Not to mention it can be used in tandem with always online DRM.
No thanks.
Not to mention to connect to servers thousands of miles away even with a great connection takes 1 to 3 seconds and then for the server to render the thing and send it back to whatever your gaming on takes another 1 to 3 seconds minimum. So with a great internet connection there would be 2 to 6 second delays on things in the game.
This could work for latency insensitive things. Rendering the sky in an open world game for example. But until internet is stable enough to have 0 latency this “cloud” computing won’t be very useful.
Microsoft touted this whole cloud computing and it hasn’t helped there games out visually at all. Drivatar and keeping track of what players do is all its been used for.
actually nvidia did show it’s grid technology during tegra k1 press release the guy was playing batman arkham origins, game was being streamed from a GRID server 6,000 miles away in Sophia, France and it was overall smooth without any delay or lag at all . now in reality you would connect to a much closer server. furthermore fiber internet is gonna replace cable so have little faith, console’s outdated hardware holding us for quite some time so maybe cloud gaming is really the answer
I have a demo from Brigade (one of the first prototypes they released) and it is quite amazing, the level of detail they can achieve is fantastic. Lighting and reflections/refractions are quite realistic compared to everything thanks to the Ray Tracing.
I would love to see this and Atomontage Engine using “Atoms” (little voxels) in where you also have destruction/deformation of the environment and stuff like that.
At least these people makes things happen not like Euclideon Engine with their “unlimited detail”…Though this also exists.
Any ways…I like how everyone claim “Ray Tracing is the future”, “Voxels/atoms are the future”, “Unlimited detail is the future”…..I say: DO IT GOD DAMN IT, JUST DO IT!! (not sponsored by Nike or anything just in case…lol)
There is a couple things about that. 1) Companies have extremely good internet connections. 100 download and 100 upload at least.
2) All the servers are only going to 1 place while doing that demonstration. When millions of people are connecting to it at once all that power has to get split up. In other words it’s going to slow it down a ton.
Also the servers were only 6,000 miles away. They aren’t gonna be able to provide servers for everybody that close. They can only afford so many servers and so many buildings to have the servers in. Millions of gamers will have to connect more like 50,000 miles away and that could be really short.
This is the biggest issue about it. You will have to say you need x upload, x download. Then you need to be x miles away from the servers. To make these AAA games they spend ridiculous amounts of money but they are limited how many gamers can play there game.
Game devs are still companies trying to make money. From a business standpoint it makes no sense to spend more money to ultilize this “cloud” technology for just a limited amount of people to be able to play it. It would literally be asking for bankruptcy
wtf am i back in the 90s that devs had to optimize for a crapazillion of things?
Eh. Not feeling it.
Man , saw this long time ago , will they ever do something ? Release a game or some tech demo?