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The Fox engine is a cross-platform development that will be used in upcoming games like Pro Evolution Soccer 2014, The Phantom Pain and the next Metal Gear title, but beyond that, we don't know much about it. Fortunately, Hideo Kojima has spoken out on Twitter to give us some ideas.
The original tweet is posted below, but you'll struggle to make much from them if your only language is English. Fortunately, Kotaku has a translation for us:
“The concept of the ‘Fox Engine' is photo-realism.” Kojima said. “The age of fixating on pictures and sound in games is over. Now the questions are: How free is it? Does it connect to the internet and is the gameplay smooth? Even so, a certain level of realistic atmosphere is required. ”
“At Kojima Productions we're aiming for a line where even simple CG models look photo-realistic when you zoom out of the game screen.”
That seems like a nice idea and we're certainly getting to a stage where photo-realism is sort-of possible with in-game graphics, but we're not there yet, not with the highest of the high end PCs could you achieve that. It's also worth noting, that a lot of in-game elements look fantastic if you're zoomed right out – or if you shake your head around to blur everything. It's not the same thing as actual photo-realism though.
We've seen a bit of the Fox Engine before, with the “A or B?” choice from a pre-rendered conference room. It does indeed look pretty good, but I'll be interested to see what it looks like while someone is moving through it in 1080p instead of a small web-friendly pic.
KitGuru Says: The goal of almost every engine development for the past couple of decades has been increased realism. Bigger, better, prettier. While we're obviously moving in a photo realistic direction, I'll need to see some hard evidence before I believe Kojima's team has cracked that nut just yet.
「FOXエンジン」のコンセプトはフォトリアル。ゲームなので絵や音に拘る時代は終わった。いかに自由度が高く、ネットで繋がり、ゲームプレイが快適か？が大切。それでも最低限のリアルな臨場感は必要。KJPでは簡易なモデルでも、ゲーム画面を縮小して観た時、実写に見えるラインを目指している。
— 小島秀夫 (@Kojima_Hideo) March 20, 2013
B’s are the fakes I believe (unless they’ve played a deceiving trick). I think it’s really cool that they managed to do it so well though. In short it gave it away because:
-The images on the left have a higher dynamic range, darker shades yet washed out colours on the posters, unlike the game engines version which has over saturated some of the assets.
– The models. The models on the right are more basic and while the lighting is almost spot on, the materials on the chairs are not, there’s no visible texture, if I were to reach out and touch A’s image it would feel like fabric, B’s looks like it would feel like plastic.
Finally the lighting itself, the engine has created a mathematical idea of what the light cone would be, in B’s final image it’s very clear compared to A, where all the light cones are the same shape, in A’s image the real life wall doesn’t have such a bright cone of light on it and the light is softer.
Despite my previous paragraphs (showing off), I’m not at all disappointed, after seeing Metal Gear Solid Ground Zero’s announcement a few months back, to see this image is just heartwarming. Strangely I wonder why the “Uncanny Valley” theory doesn’t fit in with computer graphics, the idea is the same, it’s not human but it has a human-like presence, yet people aren’t as freaked out as they are about robotics.