The Madness Engine is Slightly Mad Studios’ critically acclaimed next-gen, cross-platform game engine and development framework used to create Need For Speed SHIFT.  SHIFT’s stunning graphics, highly evolved physics, and intense gameplay was made possible by the advanced technologies, tools, and support infrastructure of The Madness Engine.

With The Madness Engine, the future is an open book and an open world!

What critics are saying:

IGN (9/10) – “…stellar visuals”

Team Xbox (9.0) – “flawless in execution”

Official Playstation Magazine (U.S.) (4.5/5) – “some of the best visuals in the genre”

This Engine Moves a Lot More Than Cars

• Cross platform engine currently supporting XBox 360, PS3 and PC
• Built specifically for multi-core and multi-processor architectures
• Optimised to maximise the capabilities of each target platform
• Automated tool chains built for distributed development
• Advanced AI with decision making, finite state machines and custom behaviours
• Advanced physics system for world physics, characters and objects with PhysX support
• One of the most advanced vehicle physics/driving dynamics systems on the planet.

Please Do Not Look Directly at The Madness Engine

• Fully featured, state of the art rendering system
• Realistic depth of field and motion blur
• HDR lighting and displacement maps, per-vertex, per-pixel and volumetric lighting
• Radiosity, lightmapping, gloss maps, and cutting edge anisotropic lighting

Current gaming hardware is the first generation to be built around multi-core and multi-processor architectures, with Quad Core processors on PC, three Dual Core processors on Xbox 360 and the SPU architecture of the PS3. This trend will only continue, extending the multi-core/processor hardware even further.  In order to ensure each platform’s performance is maximized, gaming engines need to be developed specifically to suit these structures.

The Madness Engine has been written from day one with the multi-core/processor architecture in mind, the low level support layers are designed for multi-threaded use for performance and stability. Sub-modules are designed to execute asynchronously across multiple cores with bridges to keep everything in sync.

Heavy duty processing sections of the engine are built as small modular packets which are perfect for parallel processing on Threads or SPU units.

The Madness Engine is therefore perfectly suited to support next gen platform architectures.  Platform specific sub modules are written for new hardware as required, but remain part of the existing hierarchy thanks to the modular structure.  There is now no more need for large scale upgrades or rewrites of the entire engine in order to support future hardware.  Just plug in a new sub module and it’s ready to go.

With a constant push for improvement, The Madness Engine features the most important advances in game technology.  The graphic components offer advanced lighting techniques including HDR lighting and displacement maps, per-vertex, per-pixel, and volumetric lighting, radiosity, lightmapping, gloss maps, and cutting edge anisotropic lighting.

The Madness Engine also contains multiple shader engines featuring vertex, pixel, and high level shaders, as well as never-before-seen real-time verlet and light driven shaders. Its highly advanced cross platform shader system is based on industry standard DirectX .fx shaders, which allows game-quality visualisation in 3D modeling packages.

The Madness Engine also includes realistic depth of field and motion blur, advanced AI with decision making, finite state machines, and other custom behaviors, and, of course, an incredibly advanced physics system for world physics, characters, and objects with PhysX support, and one of the most advanced vehicle physics/driving dynamics systems on the planet.

Slightly Mad Studios’ tech team continues to refine the engine every day, maximizing performance and visual fidelity for each platform, allowing the team to create ever better gaming experiences and evolving the technology to support all game genres with no limits and no barriers.

Awards & Accolades