Fox Engine

The Fox Engine is a cross-platform game engine built from the ground up by Kojima Productions for use in future titles developed by the team. The development of the engine began after the completion of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots with the goal of making the "best engine in the world." Fox Engine was announced in mid-2011 and made its public debut at PAX Prime 2012. The engine will make it possible for Kojima Productions to develop multiplatform games with a significantly shortened development time and has been described as the first step for the developer to move away from development for a single platform. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (then known as Metal Gear Solid: Rising) was originally set to use Fox Engine, but it was cancelled. Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes is the first game running on the current-gen Fox Engine and Metal Gear Solid 5 will be running on an enhanced Fox Engine. This engine is named after FOX. Fox Engine logo sports Philanthropy's written-in-Japanese motto which means "To let the world be."

Development
A demo of the engine was shown at the Konami pre-E3 press conference on June 3, 2011. Taking place in a jungle environment, the demo showed off the engine's visual capabilities and featured a young man running around, a horse and a dog. The tech-demo was not a game that will be released but instead a test area for the development of the engine. It was said that Kojima Productions will use the engine for all future titles.

On August 17, 2011, Kojima released a series of images on Twitter. The images were of facial tests created by the Fox Engine. The tweets stated that the character was a "killed character." It also stated that the character shown was not Colonel Volgin.

In mid-October 2011, during a lecture at the University of Southern California held by Kojima, a demo was shown to various students in a demonstration of the Fox Engine's capabilities.

On October 25, 2011, Kojima revealed another image from the Fox Engine, this time demonstrating what Peace Walker and Chrysalis from Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker would look like if they were put into the Fox Engine and remarked that the mecha were bigger than expected.

On December 16, 2011, Kojima released more images over Twitter, including one image showcasing "One of the key features about "Fox Engine", here's the transparent technique. See-thru underwear."

On February 21, 2012, a site named Development Without Borders owned by Kojima Productions was uploaded promoting the next MGS for recruiting staff at the Game Developers Conference pavillion between March 6th and March 9th including "Project engineers for the latest Metal Gear Solid targeted for high-end consoles and PC", "Engineers to help develop next-gen engine technology for use with the FOX Engine" and "Kojima Productions Brand Manager".

On March 2, 2012, the Development Without Borders website uploaded a "classified" CD labelled "Fox Engine Lighting Sample" that contained a question as to which of the two pictures was a simulation of Kojima Productions' conference room created by Fox Engine and explains how it does it. The second slide also depicts some hoops and levitating balls of varying colors in the "seats" of the table, as well as a horse entering through the room. As the company explains, the engine doesn't use pre-calculated lightmaps to determine how static objects will reflect the light around them, but instead uses a physics-based lighting process that allows for moving objects that can be "lit so they naturally blend in with the environment."

On June 8, 2012, in an interview with CVG, Kojima talked about Fox Engine: "One thing that we want to make clear is that Fox Engine is not just a graphics engine, it includes the entire toolset that we use to create games. It's a very powerful toolset and allows us to create games in more efficient ways. We can look at objects and gameplay in real time as we are developing, and it saves us spending lots of time making items that we may then decide not to use once they are ready to put in the game. Another area where Fox Engine excels is that it can be used to develop the same game on multiple platforms at once. It [Fox Engine Lighting Sample] was actually running on current hardware - it's running on PS3, 360 and current PCs. It's not something out of reach. One thing we paid a lot of attention to is lighting effects, the way light shines through and reflects off different materials, and this is something that couldn't be done in past generations but can be done with current generation platforms. The sample that you saw is based on a meeting room that we use every day. We recreated that room in Fox Engine as a test, and put the two side by side. When we first looked at it you could tell that things were different but a lot of it was just lighting effects, so our approach was to keep on refining those effects and implementing updates until it became really hard to tell the difference between the real thing and the Fox Engine version. Of course, the resolution will depend on the screen you are running it on, but we're using tricks to make it look really high. For example, because we're limited by polygons, we're using some programming tricks to resolve that issue by smoothing the image out to give the impression of a higher polygon count."

On June 20, 2012, in an interview with IG Magazine, Kojima revealed that "There will be a MGS5 with the new Fox Engine, but what we showed was not the in-game play, or something like that. It was only a demo that we had developed internally and that we released because the lighting and all interactions with the environment had fooled everyone."

On July 23, 2012, speaking with the PlayStation Blog about Metal Gear 25th Anniversary, Kojima said: "The Fox Engine is nearly finished, but the only way to be sure it works is to create a game at the same time and improve the engine with our tools as we go along. Originally we were going to do this for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, but a lot happened along the way and instead it is being made with the engine they have at Platinum Games. Production studios in Japan are nearly extinct, a fact that we have recognized for nearly 10 years, and although the Fox Engine is not finished we are ready to show what it can do… on August 30th in Japan to be more specific."

On August 30, 2012, a demo of Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes was shown at Metal Gear 25th Anniversary in which the Fox Engine's abilities was demonstrated. Eventually a similar demo of the game was shown at PAX Prime 2012. The demo was running on a PC and played using an Xbox 360 controller. While the game and engine are designed with both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in mind, Kojima stated the engine will cater to next-gen consoles. He also stated "The thing is, this is not just a tech demo. This is an upcoming, new, open-world Metal Gear Solid game."

In September 2012, it was revealed that Kojima Productions attempted to make their game development more efficient, in terms of creating a cross platform game engine that also supports cloud-based technology.

On November 29, 2012, Kojima told EGM that "I’ve always said that I want to work on original properties, but Metal Gear offers plenty of benefits. The Fox Engine, for example, took a lot of time and money [to create]; we were only able to develop it because it was intended for the next Metal Gear."

On December 20, Kojima released Twitter pics that revealed that he put the bento meal into the Fox Engine tests. He tweeted: "3D captured "Ultimate Character Bento" put on normal map over FOX Engine. This is the "Ultimate Character Bento" digitalized over FOX Engine. Very amazed to learn this "Ultimate Character Bento" tweet got around 10000RT. Maybe I shall use this as one of the item in my game lol. You may say it is waste of technology but this quality can be done in 2 hours after 3D scanning the real bento over FOX Engine."

In a January 19, 2013 interview with IGN Kojima said "I can’t share much details about it yet, but the new engine is built towards not only having better visual quality, but also better functionality that will allow new kinds of gaming experiences, UI, playability, etc., and that is something we at Kojima Productions are working at, and some of which will be incorporated into 'Ground Zeroes.' In terms of technology, FOX Engine is very efficient and that’s one of our focus as well. We are continually trying to make it as efficient as possible, and with it, we can develop games in much shorter time period than ever possible before."

On March 12, 2013, Kojima stated “Fox Engine by itself can’t compete with engines that are being sold right now as a business,” He added “It makes our workflow as efficient as possible for our purposes. We’re focusing on things like lighting – like in the Ground Zeroes trailer, using lighting to cover for, say, a low polygon count, but still being able to achieve photorealism." “It’s possible to make many things more realistic, but that doesn’t mean you should, You have to prioritise, and that is what’s going to separate the teams that succeed and the teams that don’t.” explained Kojima.

Personnel

 * Junji Tago – Technical Director
 * Kunio Takabe, Akio Sakamoto – Graphic Programmers
 * Yusuke Nishida – Animation Programmer
 * Ryuichiro Okamoto – Physics Programmer
 * Takehiro Nomura – Cinematic Programmer
 * Kazuhide Hatsuyama – AI Programmer
 * Masayuki Kobayashi – Network System Programmer
 * Masao Tomosawa – UI Programmer
 * Kotaro Oki – Audio Programmer
 * Norihito Hatakeda – Editor Interface System Programmer
 * Fumito Miyauchi – Asset Management System Programmer