Luminous Engine

**Luminous Engine** (ルミナス・エンジン, *Ruminasu Engine*?), originally called **Luminous Studio** (ルミナス・スタジオ, *Ruminasu Sutajio*?), is a multi-platform game engine developed and used internally by Square Enix and later on by Luminous Productions. The engine was developed for and targeted at eighth-generation hardware and DirectX 11-compatible platforms, such as Xbox One, the PlayStation 4, and versions of PC, and it is used in *Forspoken*.

## History

According to Julien Merceron, the Worldwide Technology Director for Square Enix in the early 2010s, the concept for the new engine was born in 2011 while he was in the final stages of working on *Final Fantasy XIII-2*. This was a difficult period for Square Enix: the project then known as *Final Fantasy Versus XIII* was hitting technical barriers as it transitioned to open-world environments its original Crystal Tools engine could not handle, and *Final Fantasy XIV* had met with a disastrous launch due to development and technical problems. Faced with these issues, Square Enix decided to bring in former developers from Sega to create new engines for their products, including Luminous Studio. Talking about sharing the engine, Merceron said that he advised the company to avoid sharing between companies or internally between games until the engine had been finalized with the released game: this resulted in Luminous Studio being restricted to what would become *Final Fantasy XV* during development, while other major next-generation titles would use other outsourced engines.

The construction of Luminous was similar in concept to Epic Games' Unreal Engine or the Unity engine from Unity Technologies in that it incorporated all the development tools needed from asset editing onward, as well as being "high quality, easy to use, flexible, high speed, compact, and supporting both manual and automatic [game development methods]." The development team drew inspiration for this concept and approach from Unreal Engine and Crytek's CryEngine. The name "Luminous" was chosen to reflect the crystal theme of the Final Fantasy series. There were many major factors that the team considered while building the engine, as they wanted to ensure the highest possible quality for high-end games. Some of the environmental factors included lighting, shading and modeling. A core feature of the gameplay was the artificial intelligence (AI), which had previously been liable to become unstable or poor under certain conditions or with poor programming due to the large number of individual codes needed. For Luminous, the team created a single unifying flexible framework to control the scale of the AI while also making it intuitive. It was intended to be used in-house rather than licensed out to other developers, but that western subsidiaries of the company would have access to it. In addition, they also built in the ability to blend graphical assets designed for CG scenery with highly advanced real-time animation, making the two graphically similar. Luminous Studio was publicly revealed in 2011.

The head of the project was Yoshihisa Hashimoto, Square Enix's Chief Technology Officer, who had moved over to the company from Sonic Team in 2009 and became involved with development in 2011. Other key Square Enix staff members working on Luminous Studio include Takeshi Nozue, Akira Iwata and Hiroshi Iwasaki. While ground work was being laid for Luminous, members of the team traveled to look at engine technology being developed by IO Interactive, Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montréal, western video game developers who became subsidiaries after the company bought out Eidos Interactive. Square Enix's western subsidiaries shared information about game engine development from their experience developing the CDC and Glacier 2 game engines and shared their source code with the Luminous Studio team. During 2012, one third of the final development team was from western subsidiaries of the company. Luminous was developed based on high-end Directx 11 technology. While designed for eighth-generation video games, it was said to also be compatible with any console and hardware that could handle shaders, such as PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Its compatibility with Nintendo's seventh-gen hardware such as the Wii and Nintendo 3DS was doubted, as those consoles did not support shaders. During this early stage, they were looking into the possibility of adjusting the engine for use on Wii U. The company were hoping to promote Luminous as a kind of brand, showing off the logo and tech demo when they were ready.

## Features

* Animation system, including character bone animation, animation AI routines, full body IK (inverse kinematics), procedural animation, and muscle based facial animation.
* Anti-aliasing, including MSAA, FXAA, and Yebis 2 image-based anti-aliasing.
* Artificial intelligence, including reactive AI, animation AI, and GPGPU support.
* Deferred rendering, including deferred lighting (light pre-pass rendering).
* Depth buffering.
* Development tools, modules and software for level editing, animation, game editing and shader authoring.
* DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 support.
* Dynamic day-night cycle, including time of day cycling.
	+ Dynamic cloud system, including full cloud simulation.
* Environment mapping, including cube mapping.
* Eye shader, including specular reflection, highlighting, refraction, tears, and eyeball shader, including eye depth and transparency layer.
* Global illumination, including real-time global illumination, indirect illumination and real-time glossy indirect illumination.
	+ Fast global illumination baking via ray-bundle tracing, including radiance exchange via rasterisation, ray direction sampling, fast lightmap baking via tessellation, and ray-bundle tracing, with performance of 200 million rays per second on GTX 580.
	+ Adaptive ray-bundle tracing, using adaptive tiling technique with memory usage prediction, an acceleration technique to efficiently generate lightmaps for fast global illumination in large scenes.
	+ Path tracing, including real-time bidirectional path tracing via rasterisation, bidirectional sampling, and artifact suppression technique for glossy surfaces.
* Ray tracing solutions, including ray tracing approximation and fake ray tracing shader.
* GPGPU and multi-core support, including GPGPU acceleration and GPGPU support for AI and physical simulation.
* GPU computation, for particles, hair, cloth and visual effects.
* Hair simulation, for hair and beard, including hair simulation shader, GPU accelerated hair simulation, software to render hair using mannequin technique, hair shading, hair lighting, scattering, specular reflection, hair physics, tessellation, strand smoothing, spline interpolation, and real-time adjustment of color, frizz, volume, style length and physics.
	+ Geometry shader for hair volume
	+ NURBS based geometry for hair and beard, including NURB curves, B-splines and T-splines.
	+ 50 hair shaders.
* Lighting, including refraction, reflection, diffuse reflection, specular reflection, volumetric lighting, per-pixel lighting, and per-pixel order-independent transparency.
	+ Subsurface scattering, such as for skin and clothing.
* Levels of detail (LOD).
* Maya software support.
* Materials system, including glass rendering.
* Motion capture, including facial motion capture.
* Occlusion culling, including point cloud culling for imperfect shadow maps.
* Particle system, including GPU accelerated particle system, particle effects, independent particles, collision handling, alpha blending, particle buffering, parallel particle updating, and individual particle adjustment of position, velocity and other properties.
* Physically based rendering.
* Physics simulation, including cloth simulation with real-time adjustment, water effects such as ripples, adjustable wind simulation affecting environment (such as grass) and characters (such as clothes), and GPGPU support.
* Shadow generation, including shadow mapping and percentage closer filtering (PCF).
* Skin shader, including texture coordinate system, shadows, and skin lighting, including diffuse reflection, specular reflection and subsurface scattering.
* Tessellation, including isoline tessellation and B-spline smoothing tessellation.
* Water reflection, including screen-space reflection and cube mapping.
* Texture resolutions: 2048x2048, 4096x4096, 8K by 8K.
* Yebis 2 middleware for post-processing, including HDR based exposure simulation, color temperature adjustment, depth of field, bokeh, chromatic aberration, and motion blur.

## Games

 2023
 2023

## Videos

Luminous Engine World Editor“BackStage” Ray Tracing Tech DemoUsing NVIDIA Omniverse for remote development in Luminous EngineThe Technologies of FORSPOKEN
## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Julien Merceron revient sur sa carrière chez Square Enix (in French).
2. ↑ Former Luminous Engine Lead talks transition from Final Fantasy Versus XIII to Final Fantasy XV
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 西川善司の3Dゲームファンのための「Luminous Studio」講座 スクウェア・エニックスが開発中の次世代ゲームエンジンの秘密に迫る！.
4. ↑ Square Enix Luminous Studio Interview.
5. ↑ Square Enix's CTO and Final Fantasy 14 tech director has left the company.
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Agni's Philosophy Final Fantasy Realtime Tech Demo Impressions.