vicious-cycle-software posts

Yet another instance of publisher consolidation is about to occur. In February, Namco Bandai Games announced their intention to acquire D3Publisher and today Namco Bandai has announced it has already gotten control of 95 percent of D3Publisher's stock.

Gamesindustry.biz reports that Namco Bandai does plan to get control of the remaining 5 percent of D3Publisher, making their acquisition plans complete. The deal will include buying D3Publisher's US operations and their in-house game developer Vicious Cycle Software. That company also develops the Vicious Engine middleware product for game developers. Namco Bandai stated, ""D3Publisher operations will remain unchanged at this time. Development of our current and unannounced titles is ongoing and will move forward as planned."

We have remarked in the past that there are quite a few third party graphics engines that can be used for game development, from the Unreal Engine to CryEngine to the Source Engine and so on. A lesser known entry in this space is the Vicious Engine and this past week its developer Vicious Cycle Software announced their plans for the second generation version of their game development tech.

VentureBeat reports that the engine will be made available to other developers around the time of the Game Developers Conference later this month. Reportedly the second version will allow developers to make games for the PC as well as the Xbox 360 and PS3 at the same time for less money than other game engines.

Among all of the game engines that are available to be used by game developers (Unreal, Source, Gamebryo, etc) one that hasn't gotten as much attention is the Vicious Engine, created by North Carolina-based Vicious Cycle Software. Today the game developer announced that it has launched the second major version of its Vicious Engine technology.

Vicious Engine 2 will first be used in the upcoming console title Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard (due out in 2009) but Vicious Cycle Software is shopping the engine around to early adoptors with the final version available for game developers later in 2008. The new version includes "overhauled lighting and shader technology, advanced audio and AI, and enhanced physics and path finding."