Lithtech Showcases Product Roadmap

Lithtech showcased today its range of licensable game engines for the PC and PS2 at GDC. In the Playstation front, the company is offering Cobalt, a game engine evolved from the PS2 version of No One Lives Forever. Lithtech hopes this industry-proven engine will allow developers to immediately jump into the design & implementation phase of the game, without having to worry about graphics, sound or logic programming. In the PC arena Lithtech is offering two different products to suit different developers' needs. In the medium range, the company presents the Talon engine, which includes graphics, collision detection, physics, and game objects. Talon is the engine behind Aliens vs. Predator 2, and it's geared towards developers with aggressive budget/schedule requirements. Finally, in the high-end arena, Lithtech is offering the Jupiter engine, to be used in the forthcoming No One Lives Forever 2 game. Jupiter allows the creation of denser, richer environments (demos reaching up to 90,000 visible triangles per frame are not uncommon). It features advanced particle systems, water with full reflections, a facial animation system, and hundreds of interactive game objects. As a side note, Lithtech also showcased the Triton system, an effects-intensive derivative of Jupiter, to be used for the creation of the Tron 2.0 videogame. It adds special effects like neon outlines, as well as vehicle physics. Licenses for Lithtech's engines are negotiated on a one-by-one basis. As a reference, licenses for Talon and Cobalt are usually around $75,000 per title with no royalty rate, while Jupiter is around $250,000.