German AI toolmaker Xaitment has announced Sydney, Australia-based Epiphany Games will use the company's suite of middleware tools in its upcoming RTS, tentatively titled
Frozen Hearth.
Epiphany plans to use Xaitment's XaitMap and XaitMove tools to generate navigation meshes for AI pathfinding and control movement and crowd simulations, XaitControl to model character behaviors, and XaitKnow and XaitThink to control NPC behavior, the company says.
Xaitment's tools support platforms including Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, and the middleware has recently been licensed by developers in
Europe and
India.
Frozen Hearth is the first title from Epiphany Games, and is the first in a series of three announced projects from the studio. The following two titles,
Aki and Plizkin: Codex of Ancients, and
Amorra: Teigh Suil, are planned as an action RPG and an MMO, respectively.
"Our project is an RTS game and we estimated that for us to build the AI ourselves, it would take quite a long time -- time that we do not have," said Morgan Lean, CEO of Epiphany.
"By using Xaitment's AI tools, we can quickly and easily implement the AI elements we need into our game so we can concentrate on the story design. Using middleware will save us up to one year on development."
