Artemis is a complete development framework for DirectX 10-equipped PLAYSTATION®3, providing the vast array of core technologies, content creation tools, and support infrastructure required by top game studios, advanced visualization and simulation developers and creators of 3D animated content for linear productions.

Every aspect of the Artemis Engine has been designed with ease of content creation and programming in mind, with the goal of putting as much power as possible in the hands of artists and designers to develop assets in a visual environment with minimal programmer assistance, as well as giving programmers a highly modular, scalable and extensible framework for building, testing, and shipping games in a wide range of genres.

Artemis is integrated with numerous leading middleware technologies through Sony Development's Integrated Partners Program. Continual optimizations are made to the Artemis Engine’s highly mature tool pipeline, massive world support and multi-processor performance. Artemis advanced toolset is designed specifically to accelerate developers' productivity for ultra-complex, next-generation content.

* Powered by NVIDIA PhysX.

* Rigid body physics system supporting player interaction with physical game objects, ragdoll character animation, complex vehicles, and dismemberable objects.

* Cloth simulation.

* Soft body simulation.

* 'Physical Material' system that allows per-object or per-surface properties such as friction, sounds and effects.

* Physics-driven sound.

* Fully integrated support for physics-based vehicles, including player control, AI, and networking.

* Gameplay-driven physical animation – capable of driving physics based on animation, and blending the results in many ways.

* Artemis PhAT, the visual physics modeling tool built into UnrealEd that supports creation of optimized collision primitives for models and skeletal animated meshes; constraint editing; and interactive physics simulation and tweaking in-editor.

* Fracture tool in UnrealEd allows you to take a mesh and break it into pieces.

Multi-threaded rendering system – Gemini.

Dynamic visibility determination, requiring no pre-processing or specially placed portals.

64-bit color high dynamic range (HDR) rendering pipeline. The gamma-correct, linear color space renderer provides for immaculate color precision while supporting a wide range of post-processing effects such as motion blur, depth of field, bloom, ambient occlusion and artist-defined materials.

Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapped, parameterized Phong lighting; custom artist-controlled per material lighting models including anisotropic effects; virtual displacement mapping; light attenuation functions; pre-computed shadow masks; directional light maps; and pre-computed bump-granularity self-shadowing using spherical harmonic maps.

Platform-abstracting rendering layer - the Render Hardware Interface (RHI):
• Allows an extremely low level of abstraction, minimizing redundant code pathways.
• Supports static and dynamic binding.

Detailed character lighting, using spherical harmonics to composite the light environment and support large numbers of affecting lights at near constant rendering cost.

Advanced shadowing, providing full support for four shadowing techniques:
• Dynamic stencil shadow volumes supporting fully dynamic, moving light sources casting accurate shadows on all objects in the scene.
• Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft shadows on the scene using projected shadow buffers. Multiple shadow filtering methods are supported including uniform PCF, jittered PCF and VSM. Filtering methods support varying quality settings and are optimized to take advantage of platform-specific features.
• Ultra high quality and high performance pre-computed shadow masks allow offline processing of static light interactions, while retaining fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections.
• Directional light mapping enables the static shadowing and diffuse normal-mapped lighting of an unlimited number of lights to be pre-computed and stored into a single set of texture maps,
permitting very large light counts in high performance scenes.

All supported shadow techniques are visually compatible and may be mixed freely at the artist's discretion. Techniques also may be combined with colored attenuation functions to generate properly shadowed directional, spotlight and projector lighting effects.

Volumetric environmental effects that integrate seamlessly with arbitrary environments. Camera, volume and opaque object interactions are handled correctly per-pixel. Volumetric effects on translucency are approximated for maximum efficiency. They include:
• Multi-layered, global height fog.
• Fog volumes bounded by arbitrary, user-defined, animated or static meshes. Multiple density functions are supported, allowing for complex yet efficient fog effects. Fog volumes can replace hundreds of soft particles in effects to achieve the same visual impact without the overdraw.

Full support for seamlessly interconnected indoor and outdoor environments with dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadowing supported everywhere.

High performance texture streaming system, which seamlessly handles both static and dynamic objects while maintaining constant memory usage.

Threaded fluid surface simulation on both the CPU and the GPU, allowing for height and normal simulation – or just normal simulation at extremely high detail.

Split-screen rendering.

High-resolution screenshot support.

Debug view modes to accelerate level optimization, such as:
• Shader complexity that provides a visualization for the shading cost of each pixel.
• Light complexity showing light-object interactions.
• Texture density that enables a quick and detailed overview of a level's texture detail distribution.

Scalability settings to support a wide range of end users on PC.

Optimized skinned mesh rendering.

Render-To-Texture tools, allowing real-time dynamic reflections and static scene captures.

Versatile decals supported on every type of mesh with optimized pathways for each. Decals support artist-defined materials and can be lit and shadowed to integrate with the environment.

An easily extensible post-process system with built-in effects including:
• Motion blur.
• Depth of field (DOF).
• Dynamic ambient occlusion.
• Tone mapping.
• Artist-defined materials.

Due to the Artemis Engine being in beta, we have not yet published the API. Please return later.

If you have any questions or concerns, or would like to be on our beta release list, please email us at community@sonydevelopment.com.