Vicious Cycle

Chapel Hill-based Vicious Cycle launched its Vicious Engine in 2005 as the first technology to offer dedicated support for PSP. In part this arose from its own work on the PSP title, Dead Head Fred, but since then, the first version of the engine has been extended for other platforms such as PC and Wii and is one of the newcomers to the middleware arena.

The forthcoming Vicious Engine 2 will further expand support to include Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. In order to handle these, new features have been added such as a dynamic lighting system, including the ability to bake lightmaps, an animation blending system, a shader-based material editor, occlusion culling, and better pathfinding and AI functionality.

More generally, one of the main features of the Vicious Engine is its data-driven point-and-click scripting, which the company claims makes it much easier for non-programmers to work with -- something that is particularly important in terms of the fast turnaround projects for which it's typically used.

Working in conjunction with this is a script editor, which enables you to debug gameplay using breakpoints and analyzing object variables and agent AI states. A built-in user interface development tool and an intelligent memory management system are also included.

Vicious Engine (Ver. 2 due "soon")

Features: Dynamic lighting system; animation system; material editor; AI engine, scripting system and debugger

Platforms: PC, PlayStation 3, PSP, Xbox 360, Wii

Integration with Other Technologies: 3ds Max, Maya

Cost: A combination of license fee and support fee on a per-platform basis. Price available on request

Released Games Include: Elements of Destruction (Frozen Codebase), 300: March to Glory (Collision), Alien Syndrome (Totally Games), Dead Head Fred (Vicious Cycle)

Games in Development Include:

www.viciousengine.com

Totally Games' Alien Syndrome