Today, the largest Czech game studio, Bohemia Interactive, officially presented for the first time their new game engine, Enfusion. It will form the studio’s core technology for future games. In addition to enhancing their games with a modern audiovisual look, the Enfusion engine will enable multiplatform use, improved user-friendliness for players, and superior support for mod creators.
The new Enfusion engine has been under development at Bohemia Interactive’s offices in Prague, Brno, and Mníšek pod Brdy for 4 years, despite it being conceived back in 2014. Currently, there is a team of 30 developers involved in its development, for what is the company’s flagship project in terms of investment and human resources.
Marek Španěl, founder and CEO of Bohemia Interactive, comments “we founded Bohemia Interactive 22 years ago, we’ve always chosen to use our own in-house engine. No other engine available on the market allowed us to create the kind of games we wanted. For example, simulations with detailed physics operating in massive-scale open worlds that players and communities can easily customize. Nothing has changed about that. However, our aging Real Virtuality engine, used in Arma 3, for example, has increasingly run up against its technological limits. Enfusion, on the other hand, is ready to face the technological challenges of the future and will without exaggeration form the shape of our games into the next decade.”
The Enfusion engine is cross-platform, enabling simultaneous development of games for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation. PC and Xbox gamers will enjoy full DirectX 12 support. The core of the engine is the C++ programming language with a scripting language called Enforce (an OOP scripting language that gamers may have already encountered, for example in DayZ). Shaders written in HLSL are used for rendering.
The audio-visual design of games developed on the new engine will therefore be future-proof. Optimizing the resource utilization of modern processors and graphics cards enables smooth operation and stable rendering frequencies even in demanding simulations. The developers have also devoted their efforts to a substantial improvement of the network code, introducing lower latency, smoother player movement, better hit registration, promising an overall better multiplayer experience.
Enfusion Workbench – Complete developer stack
One of the main advantages of the Enfusion engine is its simple and user-friendly design. Thanks to the Enfusion Workbench toolkit, they will be able to easily modify the attributes of the game or mod under development. Enthusiastic community content creators will get their hands on the same professional tools used by developers at Bohemia Interactive.
Enfusion Workbench modules:
- World Editor: this is where our virtual worlds are created
- Particle Editor: for visual effects
- Animation Editor: for configuring character and object animation
- Script Editor: for writing and debugging scripts in the Enforce language
- Audio Editor: for audio effects and music
- Behavior Editor: for defining the behavior of game-controlled characters (AI)
- Procedural Animation Editor: for simpler, game-driven animations
- String Editor: for language localization
- Layout Editor: for creating game user interface
- and more
The workbench is also closely connected to the backend systems of Bohemia Interactive, including its own workshop. Thanks to this, it serves as a robust tool not only for development but also for the composition and distribution of mods for all games that run on the Enfusion engine.
