007 First Light Engine Session Reveals Glacier Platform Work at gamescom
The session shows how a proprietary engine built for HITMAN was retooled around Bond's character-driven animation and visual style, and how the team prepared for the Nintendo Switch 2 version.
Reporting from 1 source: 4Gamer.net.
IO Interactive detailed how its Glacier engine was modified for 007 First Light during a gamescom dev session. Executive Producer Cris Vega and Principal Core Programmer Kristofer Hammarsköld explained the engine's independent runtime, editor, and resource system, plus the Virtual Platforms feature for hardware-specific tuning. The session covered three technology pillars: Cinematic, Fluid Experience, and New Tech, including new facial animation and global illumination systems.
IO Interactive has spent over 25 years on Glacier, with the first code written in 1997 and a major architecture revamp in 2006. The engine keeps the runtime, the editor, and the resource system separate, so a crash in one does not wipe out work in another. The team demonstrated this live, intentionally crashing the runtime on a complex lighting scene while the editor stayed up, then reconnecting and restoring the scene in about a minute.
The Virtual Platforms feature lets artists and programmers set LOD and rendering content per hardware while checking the actual appearance. For 007 First Light, the team organized the work into three pillars: Cinematic, Fluid Experience, and New Tech. Under Cinematic, they strengthened facial and full-body animation to capture Bond's persona, and built a new global illumination system aimed at the look of the films, which make real landscapes more attractive than reality.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.