IMG brought you the news of Synaptic Soup's cross-platform open architecture game engine Cipher in October of last year; now it appears that this next-generation game engine is complete, and about as buzzword-compliant as you would expect. Developers can now license this engine to make their own game (an increasingly common practice, as it becomes increasingly expensive to "roll your own" engine) and the fact that this engine already runs on the Mac OS means we may get games made with it "for free."

One of the best advantages of this new engine is that, unlike any of the current licensable game engines (with the possible exception of the revamped UT engine) it is built to take full advantage of the feature set of the GeForce 3 card and any other next-generation hardware that does "per-pixel everything." As there will likely be an eight month to yearlong "lag" between the introduction of the GeForce 3 and games that actually use its full feature set, this engine may help to speed along the process. Here is an excerpt from the press release:

UK based games and technology developer Synaptic Soup announced today that its one-stop development solution Cipher is now available to license.

Cipher offers a complete technology solution for developers working on the current and next wave of gaming hardware. Designed specifically to address spiralling development times and costs, Cipher delivers an integrated development environment that provides all of the core systems required to deliver a cutting edge game in the quickest possible time and at a minimum of cost.

Features include: -

• Latest high performance graphics engine, ready to exploit next gen. consoles and latest PC hardware.
  
• Art driven approach for rapid prototyping and development.
  
• Particle systems for realistic fire, smoke and explosions.
  
• Animation system.
  
• Collision detection.
  
• Multiplayer.
  
• 3D Audio.
  
• Powerful tools.
  
• Built to be highly portable.
  
• Suitable for many different game genres.
  
• Quality Technical Support.
  
• Limited number of licenses to ensure a highly personalised service.
  

Cipher has already attracted some of the industries biggest names with NVidia recently choosing the Cipher powered game Crazy Car Championship as a showcase product for the launch of their GeForce3 GPU. Kevin Strange, Developer Relations Account Manager for NVIDIA commented, "We were very impressed by how well positioned Synaptic Soup were to take advantage of our leading edge technologies and how fast they were able to turn our discussions into demonstrable software with their Cipher engine."

News: Platform-Independent Cipher Unveiled

Synaptic Soup

Synaptic Soup Announces Cipher Engine Complete

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