MONTREAL - March 22. 2006 - Engenuity Technologies Inc. ["Engenuity" or the "Company"] [TSX: EGY]. a global leader in providing visualization and simulation software solutions. today announced the release of AI.implant™ 4.0. its next-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and middleware solution. The updated product will reduce the cost and time of video game development. while meeting the evolving gameplay demands for increased complexity and realism.
"Rendering and physics engines dominated the last generation of game development. but. with next-generation platform development. artificial intelligence has moved to center stage." said Dr. Paul Kruszewski. chief technology officer. Engenuity. "With version 4.0. developers will be able to build more robust. immersive and atmospheric games. populated by sentient and environmentally aware characters driven by AI.implant."
Over the past two years. developers have faced the ongoing challenge of providing intelligent navigation in physics-driven virtual worlds. AI.implant 4.0 addresses this challenge by enhancing the overall game experience with dynamic obstacle avoidance and pathfinding in large. dense urban environments and wide open spaces. Moreover. AI.implant 4.0 works with the powerful physics processing of the AGEIA PhysX processor to create even more realistic and unpredictable dynamic in-game experiences.
"AI.implant has consistently provided game developers and designers with AI technology that heightens the quality of gameplay." states Greg Stoner. vice president business development. at AGEIA. "This latest version is no exception. and its integration with AGEIA's PhysX processor certainly provides for dramatically increased detail and immersive reality for next-generation games."
AI.implant's production-proven and intuitive authoring environment allows developers to create variable and complex Artificial Intelligence behaviors across all major next-generation game platforms. including "PLAYSTATION®3" and Microsoft® Xbox® 360. Using the unique GUI interface. game designers can rapidly create realistic. real-time character and crowd behaviors. such as milling. panicking and rioting. Users also have the power to instantly and interactively control the size and layout of crowds via the paint tools in both Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Maya®. a component that is only available through AI.implant.
In version 4.0. users can both author and preview AI directly into the level editor or on the target platform using the AI Development Environment (AI.DE). the powerful visual development environment in AI.implant. The seamless integration with 3D content creation tools. including 3ds Max and Maya. as well as with such key game engines as Emergent Game Technologies' Gamebryo. will save companies time and money by enabling their developers and designers to work with familiar platforms and tools.
"We standardized on AI.implant in our production pipelines so that our programmers could be relieved of the burden of having to manually 'wire up' AI behaviors and our designers could focus on tweaking and tuning performances." said Paul LeFevre. chief technical officer. Midway Games. "Our next-gen development for "PLAYSTATION®3" and Xbox 360 was planned around a core technology based on the Unreal 3 game engine from Epic and powerful middleware tools such as AI.implant. This combined approach will allow Midway to deliver the immersive and complex games for which the next-gen platforms were developed."
Engenuity will be showcasing AI.implant 4.0 at the 2006 Game Developers Conference from March 22-24 in San Jose. California. For more information. please visit www.ai-implant.com.