Capcom reveals plans to further develop its signature ReengineSince 2017, nearly all of the company’s major games have been created on the engine. The Japanese publisher will not completely replace the engine, but will gradually modernize it as part of a larger REX project, which will make RE ENGINE faster, more convenient for developers, and better suited for use with artificial intelligence. This is reported in a large article on gamebiz.jp.
RE ENGINE was created in 2014 and was first used for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Over the next few years, more than 27 Capcom games were released on it, but during its eight years of use, the demands on the technology grew significantly. Modern projects are becoming larger and larger, and as data volumes increase, delays in editing and checking changes have become a productivity issue. In addition, the engine is now used by more than 2,000 developers, including employees from different countries, so Capcom needs a more versatile and convenient development environment.
It is to solve these problems that the company launched REX. An important feature of the project is Capcom There is no throwing away the existing RE ENGINE and starting over. Instead, the engine gradually receives new components prefixed with “RE:”, each responsible for a different problem.
For example, the RE:Dox system unifies the handling of various types of data and should speed up their loading and editing. RE:UI redesigns the interface architecture of developer tools, reducing load and the number of unnecessary operations. RE: The runtime optimizes the engine’s performance through a large number of objects and roles, while simplifying the internal software architecture.
The most interesting part of Capcom’s strategy, however, involves artificial intelligence. The company not only views REX as a technological update, but also as the foundation of the “AI generation” RE ENGINE. To achieve this goal, they are trying to introduce unified rules and programming standards into the architecture of the new system. According to Capcom, this not only makes the code easier to understand for humans, but also makes it easier for artificial intelligence algorithms to understand.
In the future, this could allow artificial intelligence to analyze existing code, independently create individual software components, and help developers complete daily tasks. Another direction is automated game testing. Capcom wants AI to be able to independently navigate game scenes, find bugs, and identify problems without the need for constant human intervention. This is especially true for modern projects, where the number of mechanics, objects, and possible game situations is constantly increasing.
Capcom, meanwhile, is already taking steps to prepare for such an ecosystem. The company releases some REX components as open source. According to the developers, one of the goals of this approach is to provide artificial intelligence with more material to study and learn from.
Therefore, the future of RE ENGINE does not lie in switching to a completely new engine, but in gradually rebuilding existing technology. Capcom hopes to simultaneously speed up the production of major games, simplify the work of thousands of employees, and create an infrastructure that enables artificial intelligence to become a full-fledged development tool – from writing code to finding bugs and automating testing. Capcom has yet to specify when these features will begin to become widely available in the company’s real-life games.
