Sundog Software, developer of computer graphics middleware for rendering the sky and 3D clouds, has integrated its technology with Trinigy’s Vision Game Engine. The integration between Sundog’s SilverLining SDK and the Vision Game Engine is available today, and brings physically realistic skies, clouds, lighting, and precipitation effects to licensed users of Trinigy’s game engine on the PC platform.

Trinigy’s Vision Game Engine is used on over 200 commercial game productions across a wide variety of platforms and services, as well as most game genres, including racing, role-playing, and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. These genres all feature expansive outdoor scenes, which will benefit from SilverLining’s physically realistic skies.

SilverLining allows game and visual simulation developers to specify any time, location, and weather conditions they wish, and produces matching skies, clouds, and weather effects within their application automatically. SilverLining also generates realistic natural lighting for outdoor scenes by simulating the scattering of sunlight and moonlight through the atmosphere. SilverLining’s expansive toolset will now be accessible directly within the Vision Game Engine’s scene editor, vForge, for developers of PC games and simulations.

“By integrating SilverLining with Trinigy’s scene editor, completing realistic outdoor scenes in a game is now just a matter of a few clicks,” said Frank Kane, owner of Sundog Software. “For games and training systems with outdoor environments, the sky and everything in it is a big part of the scene. We’re proud to offer our physically-based rendering to the long list of customers producing groundbreaking content with Trinigy.”
SilverLining is used by developers across the world for rendering skies and volumetric clouds in games, military flight simulators, architectural visualization, and television weather broadcasts. Its accurate positioning of the sun, moon, stars, and planets give it the fidelity required by serious training applications as well.

”The SilverLining integration provides another great option and a valuable shortcut to PC developers seeking to include realistic time-of-day effects and volumetric clouds in their Vision-powered games and simulations,” said Felix Roeken, general manager of Trinigy. “From extensive programmatic control to easy access of SilverLining’s features via vForge, developers will appreciate the freedom and speed with which they can create realistic skies for any given time and location.”

Trinigy, a 3D game engine provider with offices in Germany, Austin, TX and Seoul, Korea, announced today that upcoming versions of the Vision Game Engine will fully support the next generation portable entertainment system (codename; NGP) from Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCE). The new version, which includes a host offeatures designed to accelerate the development of graphically rich, high-performance game titles for NGP, will be unveiled at the 2011 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA (Mar 2-4) at booth 1810.
Trinigy’s modular Vision Game Engine is available on and optimized for the development of highly immersive games and serious games running on most major platforms. Trinigy is now expanding the capabilities of its Vision Game Engine to enable game developers to more rapidly create high-performance, high-quality games for NGP.Key new features for NGP include an optimized character skinning system, full support for input features such as multi-touch, improved multi-threading, and an optimized renderer that takes full advantage of NGP’s GPU cores.
“SCE is known for producing powerful computer entertainment systems and handheld entertainment systems capable of delivering rich gaming experiences and eye-popping graphics,” said Dag Frommhold, managing director at Trinigy. “With support for NGP, the Vision Game Engine gives developers a flexible, full-featured solution for speeding the creation of graphically superior, high-performance casual and hard-core gamesfor portable entertainment systems.”
Key features designed to speed NGPdevelopment and enhance game and graphic quality include:

• Optimized character skinning system for NGP– allows for efficient rendering of detailed characters with very high polygon and bone counts.
• Full support for cross-platform and platform-specific texture formats– offers a straight forward workflow and easy porting of existing content, while providing high-loading performance and platform-specific content optimizations, where required.
• Multithreading system– takes full advantage of NGP’s CPU cores for animations, mesh deformation, particle simulation, physics, visibility determination, and more.
• Highly efficient rendering– Efficient rendering system minimizes CPU load.
• Optimized shader/shader constant handling– includes full cross-platform compatibility.
• Comprehensive support for NGP’s user interface–includes multi-touch as well as support for dual analog sticks.
• Fully featured graphics technology– includes normal/parallax maps, specular maps, dynamic lighting, post-processing effects and more.
The Vision Game Engine for NGP will be available for customers after GDC, and will be shown at GDC 2011 behind closed doors.