Crystal Tools
Crystal Tools is a game engine created and used internally by the Japanese company Square Enix. It combines standard libraries for elements such as graphics, sound and artificial intelligence while providing game developers with various authoring tools. The target systems of Crystal Tools are the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows and the Wii. This was decided with the intention of making cross-platform production more feasible. The idea for the engine sprang from Square Enix's desire to have a unified game development environment in order to effectively share the technology and know-how of the company's individual teams.
Crystal Tools entered development in August 2005 under the code name White Engine. It was intended for the PlayStation 3-exclusive role-playing game Final Fantasy XIII, while it was first showcased in the Final Fantasy VII technical demo for the PlayStation 3. The decision to expand Crystal Tools' compatibility to other game projects and systems marked the official project start for a company-wide engine. Development was carried out by the Research and Development Division headed by Taku Murata, which was specifically established for this purpose. As Square Enix's biggest project to date, the creation of Crystal Tools caused substantial problems in the simultaneous production of several flagship titles; various critics cited the engine as the primary cause of significant delays in the release of Final Fantasy XIII.
Features
Crystal Tools is a unified game engine by Japanese developer and publisher Square Enix that combines standard libraries for graphics rendering, physics processing, motion control, cinematics, visual effects, sound, artificial intelligence and networking. Its target systems are the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows and the Wii. On the development side, the engine takes the form of various authoring tools focused on large-scale game projects. It encompasses a character viewer for 3D models, an effects and a cutscene editor, a previsualization tool, and a sound maker. Usage of the third-party programs Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Softimage and Adobe Photoshop is supported via plug-ins. The individual authoring tools are connected over a communications server called GRAPE2 which reads all the different data formats, processes them and gives an instant preview of the final game. The engine is highly customizable and can be expanded with new functions and tools should the need for them arise. Although Crystal Tools allows for easier cross-platform development, the differences in the target systems' video memory and microarchitecture still necessitate fine-tuning adjustments in the games, for example concerning texture sizes.Development
Origins
As a video game company with different production teams, Square had wished for its employees to efficiently share their know-how and technology even before the merger with its competitor Enix. The desire for a common development infrastructure and engine dates back to the 1997 role-playing video game Final Fantasy Tactics, which was created in the transitional period from 2D to 3D game production. Back then, the artists working on the game asked programmer Taku Murata for a fast way to check how their work would look in the final game. As the development was carried out on personal computers, the graphics were displayed on computer monitors. This looked very different from the PlayStation console's actual graphics displayed on a television screen. Initially, a faithful preview of the game's visuals was too time-consuming because all data had to be transferred from PC to console first. To evade this step, Murata created an instant preview tool. With this, he soon witnessed a boost in the artists' productivity and in the quality of their work. For 2000's Vagrant Story, the developers opted to reuse this instant preview tool rather than programming a new one from scratch. Murata and his colleagues added new functions to create a unified preview and cutscene tool tailored to the game's fully polygonal 3D graphics. With 2001's PlayOnline service, the company then made its first foray into introducing a common software for all its divisions.After the Square Enix merger, however, the individual teams still continued to program and customize their own tools for each game, which would eventually go to waste as only their respective creators knew how to use them. With the amount of assets and tools required by the in-development Final Fantasy XII and the impending advent of the History of [video game consoles (seventh generation)|seventh console generation], a common data format for the company was proposed in 2004. It was to be developed in-house and replace general-purpose formats such as FBX and COLLADA. Realizing the goal of an engine with a common set of tools proved to be difficult, as many production teams wanted to further their own interests rather than those of the company as a whole. Select staff members from different company divisions teamed up to work on the project on a voluntary basis, but their loose organizational structure failed to yield results. Nevertheless, Murata considered this group effort a first step in the right direction. In 2005, he was appointed general manager of the newly formed Technology Division. Although this enabled Murata and his subordinates to talk about a company-wide engine more extensively, the lack of manpower again prevented any significant achievements.
Version 1.0
Following the public's positive reaction to the graphics of the Final Fantasy VII Technical Demo for PS3 presented at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2005, it was decided to release the role-playing video game Final Fantasy XIII on the PlayStation 3 rather than the PlayStation 2 as originally planned. That August, the Technology Division began working on the White Engine, a PlayStation 3 engine that was supposed to be exclusively used for XIII. Eight months later, however, it was decided to repurpose the engine to further make it compatible with other projects such as the action RPG Final Fantasy Versus XIII and the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Final Fantasy XIV. In order for the company to stay competitive in a multi-platform environment, support of the engine was extended from the PlayStation 3 to the Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows, both of which were successful in Western markets. This marked the official development start of a company-wide engine for whose purpose the Technology Division was expanded into the Research and Development Division in September 2006. Murata remained the division's general manager with a full-time staff at his disposal.During development of Crystal Tools, the Research and Development Division continually surveyed what types of tools were needed to create Square Enix's flagship titles. Among the most frequently requested features was an extensive use of character close-ups. This made the staff realize that the Final Fantasy series put great emphasis on the "anime-like coolness" of its characters. Consequently, the engine's developers focused on attractive visuals rather than on accurate physics. To achieve a stylized look, a post-processing filter for additional lighting, blur, and visual effects was implemented. Square Enix's large teams were typically composed of a mix of industry veterans and rookie game developers. To accommodate this, the graphical user interface of the engine became another main feature and was designed to be as intuitive as possible. The large investments into technology and human resources quickly made the White Engine the company's biggest project to date. After one year of work, version 1.0 of the engine was completed in September 2007.