Interview with Allegorithmic

One problem facing the gaming world is the on-going need for content creation tools, especially tools for creating and dealing with textures. Textures are expensive, both in time required to create them and in memory footprint within the game engine. One company that has appeared to address these issues is Allegorithmic.

Allegorithmic was formed to commercialize the procedural texture research by Sebastien Deguy. The company has already delivered two products--MapZone, a texture authoring tool; and ProFX, a middleware component that plugs into the game engine to produce procedural textures in real-time.

MapZone

MapZone allows you to build complex 2D textures in the same way you’d build 3D shaders using a hierarchical tree structure. This non-linear approach doesn’t require flattening like textures made in Photoshop would. By reusing sub-nodes that have already been created, MapZone enables textures to be created up to 2 times faster than current methods. MapZone also provides more variations and a chance to experiment with different looks and effects.

MapZone 2.5 is available for a free download from the web site and version 2.6 is currently in development. The company has noted 25,000 downloads of MapZone since March. A retail version of MapZone, called MapZone Pro is available and bundled with ProFX.

Sebastian commented that procedural textures shouldn’t replace hand-drawn textures for all game assets, but at least 70% of a common game’s textures can be replaced with procedural textures.

ProFX

ProFX is a middleware component that plugs into the game engine to deliver real-time procedural textures to the game. These procedural textures are between 500 to 1000 times smaller than standard textures. The current version supports Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, Gamebryo, Virtools, and Trinity. There is also an API available to tie ProFX into other engines. It is currently available for PC, XBOX 360 and PS3 support is coming later this year. The ProFX components can deliver textures to the game at a speed of 20 MB/sec.

Naked Sky’s Roboblitz, delivered on the Unreal Engine 3, was developed using PhysX and ProFX components to XBOX Live within a 50MB footprint. Another example is the Virtual Earth project, which specified an 8MB footprint. It is available as a download over the Web.

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