Geomerics

Geomerics Ltd.
Company typeLimited partnership
IndustryVideo games
Founded2005
FounderChris J. L. Doran
HeadquartersCambridge, Cambridgeshire, England
Key people
Chris J. L. Doran (COO)
Gary Lewis (CEO)
ProductsEnlighten
Number of employees
25 (2010)[1]
WebsiteGeomerics.com

Geomerics was a software company based in Cambridge, UK, that specialised in creating lighting technology for the video game industry.

The company's main product was Enlighten, software code that calculates indirect lighting ("radiosity") in real-time for live action games running on systems such as the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and personal computers. The company licensed this code to game companies for incorporation into their proprietary rendering engines.[2][3][4][5] The software was ported to Nvidia's CUDA platform in 2011.[6]

The first system to incorporate the middleware was the Frostbite 2 engine,[7] created by the EA DICE studio, used in Battlefield 3 (2011)[8] and Need for Speed: The Run (2011).[9] Enlighten has also been licensed for a variety of other titles,[10] including Eve Online,[11] has an integration for Unreal Engine 3 & 4,[12][13] and was built into Unity from version 5 to 2020 LTS.[14][15]

Advanced real-time global illumination system Enlighten has since become property of and is further developed by Silicon Studio.[16][17][18]

  1. ^ Bio for Jules Davis Archived 4 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine (previously CTO), Tenshi Ventures. (Retrieved 7 July 2011).
  2. ^ Codeshop: Step Into The Light, EDGE, 18 February 2008
  3. ^ Game Developer, 16 (11), December 2009, Page 35
  4. ^ Keith Stuart, Becoming Enlightened, Guardian Online, 5 February 2008.
  5. ^ Sam Martin (Geomerics), Per Einarsson (DICE) "A real-time radiosity architecture for video games 2", in Advances in Real-Time Rendering, SIGGRAPH 2010
  6. ^ Real-Time Live!, SIGGRAPH 2011
  7. ^ Kenny Magnusson (DICE),"Lighting you up in Battlefield 3", GDC 2011
  8. ^ EDGE, May 2011, p. 28-29
  9. ^ "Enlighten: Case Studies". Geomerics. Archived from the original on 2 December 2013. Retrieved 6 September 2019.
  10. ^ Press release: Geomerics Sales Progress, Angle PLC, 14 April 2011. "Geomerics [has secured]... sales for seven new titles with three major publishers in the first quarter. All the new titles are with large publishers and include some of the industry’s most iconic and best selling computer games. In keeping with the games industry’s standard working practices, details of the individual titles and publishers will not be made public until those titles are released. At this time, the only information Geomerics is able to disclose is that three of these titles are scheduled to be released in calendar 2011, all of them well-known and highly regarded game franchises."
  11. ^ "Eve online and world of darkness to use Enlighten". Geomerics. Archived from the original on 26 March 2012. Retrieved 6 September 2019.
  12. ^ "Geomerics Announces New Enlighten Integration with Unreal Engine 3". Unreal Engine. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
  13. ^ "Enlighten: Real-Time Global Illumination in Unreal Engine 4". Unreal Engine. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
  14. ^ "Unity Technologies Debuts Unity 5 at GDC". Animation World Network.
  15. ^ "Enlighten will be replaced with a robust solution for Baked and Real-time GIobal Illumination". Unity Blog. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
  16. ^ "RiME from Grey Box, Six Foot and Tequila Works first game on Nintendo Switch™ to feature "Enlighten" Global Illumination". www.siliconstudio.co.jp. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
  17. ^ "Silicon Studio's post-effect middleware "YEBIS" and global illumination system "Enlighten" adopted by "GOD EATER 3" from BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment". www.siliconstudio.co.jp. Retrieved 18 November 2019.
  18. ^ "Enlighten global illumination releases version 3.10". www.siliconstudio.co.jp. Retrieved 18 November 2019.