The Fox Engine

Keeping  the theme of my previous post, I thought I'd post a small bit about another type of engine used in video game development.

The Fox Engine video game engine designed and developed at Konami's premier studio "Kojima Productions". One of the engine's primary goals was achieving photo realism.

In 2013, Digital Foundry of Eurogamer posted a very detailed article on how the Fox Engine set out to achieve its goals. It is quite a technical article, but its a very interesting read and contains a few interesting videos embedded too.

Read it Here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-tech-analysis-mgs5-fox-engine

MGSV implements the Fox Engine

Looking back at what Kojima Production's intended for the Fox Engine and where it ended up is quite sobering. One of the other aims of Fox Engine was to reduce the difficulty and shorten the development time of video game projects for multiple platforms.

Was the Fox Engine the right solution? Well Metal Gear Solid V was almost five years in development before it shipped, with a budget of about $80 million.
On the other hand, Kojima Productions shipped the game on five platforms - More than any other project from the studio before that. Metal Gear Solid 4, for example was only developed for Playstation 3.

I have no idea what will happen to the Fox Engine technology, with Kojima's apparent departure and Konami's gradual shift from Triple A video game development to mobile(as well as their slot machine business and health clubs). One does start to feel that we may never see the Fox Engine utilized to its full potential.