In a recent preview video, Skill Up spoke to the development team about the engine and whether it was Luminous or Unreal Engine. “I asked if this was running in the Luminous Engine, and Square said ‘no,’ I asked if it was Unreal and they said ‘no.’ I asked what it was, and they refused to say.”

Many have speculated that it’s the same engine used in Final Fantasy 14, which is similar in structure to Luminous. The latter is known for its use in Final Fantasy 15 and the recent Forspoken, while Unreal Engine has been used for Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion.

Final Fantasy 16 launches on June 22nd worldwide for PS5. Unless a catastrophe strikes Square Enix, like a “meteor hitting our headquarters in Japan” as per producer Naoki Yoshida, there shouldn’t be any delays.

Final Fantasy 15 is still going strong with new content coming this year, a PC version out in early 2018 and Final Fantasy 15: Pocket Edition for mobile devices. While director Hajime Tabata said there’s a chance of the mobile version coming to Nintendo Switch, he revealed to DualShockers that experiments with Final Fantasy 15’s Luminous Engine on the platform didn’t go well.

Tabata said that the Luminous Engine on Switch was unable to “bring out the most of the engine”, though he clarified that no optimizations were made keeping the console’s power in mind. So there’s still some hope that it could happen but more tests will be required, which Tabata’s team hasn’t done yet.

In the meantime, you can look forward to Final Fantasy 15’s Episode Ignis releasing in December. The Comrades DLC, which adds co-op multiplayer along with customizable avatars and new side quests, hasn’t been dated yet but should receive some new information when the Tokyo Game Show rolls around.

Square Enix showcased another demo from Agni’s Philosophy at Gamescom, this one running on DirectX 12 and featuring the company’s Luminous Engine. Despite Square Enix’s focus on the engine in recent years – with Final Fantasy 15 using it – it will not be powering the upcoming Final Fantasy 7 remake.

FF15 director Hajime Tabata confirmed as much to Nova Crystallis. “Final Fantasy 7 (Remake) is not planned to be made with that.”

It’s pretty early at this point to really be learning about what engine powers the remake seeing as how Final Fantasy 15 is still to release next year and Final Fantasy 7 remake director Tetsuya Nomura is still working on Kingdom Hearts 3 (which runs on Unreal Engine 4). Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see the actual in-game look of the FF7 remake when it’s eventually showcased.

What are your thoughts on Luminous not currently being used for making the Final Fantasy 7 remake? Let us know in the comments below.

Square Enix, the huge globe trotting developer and publisher that’s currently working on Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts III, has filed a European trademark for something called the DAWN ENGINE. No one is entirely sure what the DAWN ENGINE is, leading some to speculate that this isn’t actually a video game engine, whereas others believe that this may be the engine to replace the Luminous Engine.

It does clearly state that this is something to be used in conjunction with “computer game software” and “DVDs and CD-ROMs pre-recorded with computer game software, video game software…”, so the DAWN ENGINE being a replacement for the Luminous Engine isn’t exactly outside the realm of possibility.

Let’s not forget that the Technical Director for the Luminous Engine Yoshihisa Hashimoto left Square Enix earlier this year. Are the two related? There’s no official line yet, so all we can really do is wait and see what happens.

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It looks like Square Enix is looking to expand its team. The Japanese publisher and developer is looking to hire people to work on its new, next-gen and completely proprietary game engine, Luminous, along with “tomorrow’s gaming systems.”

“Join our ongoing next-gen game engine development effort at Square Enix!” reads Square’s job ad on Gamasutra. “Our Tokyo studio is actively seeking talented Animation Researchers interested in contributing to a multi-platform game engine aimed at delivering cutting-edge content to tomorrow’s gaming systems.”

Square is looking for everything from soft body animations to facial animations. Obviously, the Luminous Engine will be pretty detailed and complex in its layers, from a development perspective.

They’re also looking for a Graphics Researcher.

“Put your abilities to test, push the boundaries of game development technology, and support future-titles in our our rich lineup of world-renowned franchises such as Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts and more,” says the job ad.

This certainly sounds interesting. Stay tuned, and we will keep bringing the updates on this matter.

[Source]

Square Enix won’t allow others to work with the Luminous engine as they have mentioned that it will be an in-house tool.

This isn’t surprising, however, since many Japanese studios including Capcom don’t really give developers working on their own franchises like Ninja Theory access to their first-party engine called MT Framework.

As for the reason for making Luminous an in-house engine, here’s what Mike Fischer, president and CEO of Square Enix, told Shacknews.

“Every Final Fantasy game is original. We create a new world with every new number. We need to keep pushing the envelope so that every Final Fantasy game creates a new standard,”he said.

“Having a custom toolset like this is really helpful, because it makes that process a lot more efficient.”

Square Enix also has proprietary engines from their western studios, and he said that it does not make it redundant.

“This is obviously developed by a team that creates these Final Fantasy worlds, that are this amazing blend of technology and magic. It’s never a one-size-fits-all solution, and I don’t think it ever should be,” he said.

“You need to have the right engine for the right game. Glacier–one of the key features for that is that it optimizes for these incredible crowd scenes. The Crystal Engine has its own thing going for it.”

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

“Every Final Fantasy game is original,” Fischer told Shacknews while discussing Luminous and the company’s plans for the future with the new engine. “We create a new world with every new number. We need to keep pushing the envelope so that every Final Fantasy game creates a new standard. Having a custom toolset like this is really helpful, because it makes that process a lot more efficient.”

He also said that having three in-house game engines- Glacier at IO Interactive, Crystal Engine at Crystal Dynamics and the Luminous engine- is not in any way redundant. HE also said that Square is not creating this engine to be used massively, like CyrEngine or Unreal Engine 3. “This is an in-house tool. We’re not building this around a licensing model,” Fischer said. He does, however, hope that developers will want to get into publishing deals with Square, since then they’d be allowed to work with Luminous. “It’s my hope that this makes teams and creative people around the world excited to work for us because they’ll get their hands on some of the best technology in the industry.”

“Our focus right now is on games. Can it do more? It can definitely do more. But our focus is on games,” he continued. “There’s no Final Fantasy movie in the works that I’m aware of, but the key thing is we’re very much a creator-driven company. We want to have the technology to help these creators turn their vision into a reality. And that’s why we made this investment.”

The Luminous tech demo was a sight to behold. You can watch it above.

Stay tuned for more updates.

They have released a new video which shows on-the-fly tweaking, something which they showed earlier too during a presentation. In this video you can see how they can change the lighting and the beard color of the person without doing anything different to the source code.

The engine isn’t quite finished yet according to the publisher, but it’s something really important for the company’s fortunes. You can check out the earlier demo here as well.

Check out the video below.

Square Enix’s Luminious Engine is something that is supposed to provide them with easy to use development tools and the ability to release games fast.

They’ve spent a lot of time developing Crystal Tools which didn’t work as they expected, and the Luminious Engine is something that they hope won’t happen again. They showed some screenshots earlier and also a demo called Agni’s Philosophy which was awesome to look at and showed that the new engine had a lot of potential.

They have released a new demo which shows some new things, but it’s the same one as before with a new camera angles and what not. Check out the video below, it’s something that is quite stunning to look at and will confuse you a bit.

Final Fantasy: Versus XIII is supposed to use the lighting engine of Luminous Engine.

Let us know what you think.

Square Enix’s worldwide technology director Julien Merceron has revealed that animation will play a huge role next-gen, and neglecting that would be a “huge mistake”. He mentioned something about an uncanny valley where there is a mismatch between good graphics and poor animation resulting in awkward graphics as a whole.

“Focusing on graphics only would be a huge mistake. You start to have super great graphics, characters look really good and you end up in the uncanny valley, but you don’t have animation at the same quality level,” he told GamesIndustry.

“Same thing with behavior and AI; it animates well and looks good, but it is making stupid decisions. It simply won’t be immersive,” he added.

He also gave some examples he thought was a good showcase for animation in the industry. He mentioned the importance of physics, rendering and animations and said developers should also attempt to upgrade these things and not solely concentrate on a single thing – graphics.

“Killzone 3 had great facial animations back in the day. There are great teams that, for this generation of consoles, have done good quality that could be considered good enough. The problem I am talking about is, as soon as we ramp up the quality on graphics, this level of quality on facial animations won’t be good enough,” he said.

“Some games succeed to be at the limit of the uncanny valley, but … the problem is that as rendering quality will go up, new problems will surface. The quality of the facial and body animations and the acting won’t be good enough. So that is why as you evolve, you have to upgrade your physics, rendering and animations.”

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.