LucasArts Indiana Jones game to feature Euphoria behavioral-simulation engine

“Imagine a swaying rope bridge… characters visibly attempt to balance themselves, their feet stumbling, their arms flailing, and their hands reaching for security as the unpredictable movements of the bridge threaten to send them plummeting to their doom. Perhaps they all survive. Perhaps they all fall… the action isn’t scripted ” it’s simulated ” so you’ll never be able to predict exactly what will happen, no matter how many times you’ve experienced a certain scenario.”

The above passage from LucasArts is your introduction to euphoria, the new behavioral-simulation engine from NaturalMotion Ltd., creators of the award-winning Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS) technology. With this new engine, LucasArts is ridding next year’s “Indiana Jones” video game of mindless in-game AI characters and replacing them with rational throught that dictates their actions – not scripted events. The result will be a different gameplay experience every time – in theory. This type of behavioral technology is something gamers have been clamoring for since the dawn of modern gaming and for us, it can’t come soon enough.


“With euphoria, A.I. drives character behaviors so that there’s a different payoff every time. The depth of this character interaction gives us true next-gen gameplay that you simply couldn’t do with earlier generations of hardware,” said Peter Hirschmann, vice president of product development at LucasArts. “We’ve been working with NaturalMotion since 2004 to help bring their groundbreaking technology to games, and there’s no better character to demonstrate it than Indiana Jones.”

“We have big plans for euphoria, and we are absolutely thrilled to be able to show it off in the first next-generation release from LucasArts,” said Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion. “LucasArts is an excellent partner with a real passion to raise the bar for next-gen games, and we look forward to working with them to apply euphoria technology to its games for years to come.”

LucasArts will be demonstrating euphoria with “Indiana Jones” on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 at E3 in less than 2 weeks. We’ll bring you our first impressions of hapless warriors bobbing around on a rope bridge for balance direct from the show.

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