Unreal Engine 3
RoboBlitz, for Xbox Live Arcade, is set to the first game on Xbox 360 to use the Unreal Engine 3.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 currently 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 I've 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 and 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.
