Firefly Licenses Morpheme System For Dungeon Hero

[GameBanshee News]

NaturalMotion issued a press release this morning announcing that Firefly Studios has licensed their morpheme animation system for Dungeon Hero.

Firefly Studios Licenses NaturalMotion's Morpheme Animation System For Dungeon Hero

London, UK – Oct. 9, 2007 – NaturalMotion Ltd., developers of the highly-acclaimed euphoria and endorphin 3D animation technologies, today announced that Firefly Studios has licensed the morpheme animation system for its upcoming PC and Xbox 360 title, Dungeon Hero. morpheme is a middleware solution that affords developers unprecedented control over the look of their in-game animations.

“In Dungeon Hero we’re creating an environment that needs to feel real and alive to the player,” said Simon Bradbury, Designer at Firefly Studios. “The game features a lot of fearsome monsters, and we wanted to ensure that their movements are natural. morpheme gives us that amazing degree of animation control, enabling us to produce very realistic-looking behavior.”

Morpheme is robust middleware designed to give developers and animators unprecedented creative control over the look of their final in-game animation by allowing them to author and preview blends, blend trees and transition graphs in real time.

“Dungeon Hero is poised to be one of the biggest action RPG hits of 2009,” said Andy Payne, NaturalMotion’s VP of Sales, Europe. “Demonstrating their usual commitment to excellence, Firefly is creating a dark, gritty and realistic experience and we’re thrilled that they’ve chosen morpheme to create their in-game animations.”

About morpheme
morpheme consists of two components: morpheme:runtime and morpheme:connect. Morpheme:runtime is a run-time engine optimized for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, and ships with full source code. morpheme:connect is a powerful 3D authoring application that allows animators to graphically author blend trees and transition logic (based on Hierarchical Finite State Machines), modify and edit parameters through sliders and view the results in realtime. morpheme is designed as a flexible and open system and does not require the licensing of any other product. Unlike euphoria, morpheme is not based on Dynamic Motion Synthesis. Instead, morpheme complements euphoria’s advanced real-time behaviors.

About Firefly Studios
Firefly Studios is a computer and video games development company, formed in 1999. The company has produced a number of high profile and commercially successful strategy games including the Stronghold series. It is currently working on a number of PC and next Gen console titles. Firefly Studios has offices in the United Kingdom and United States. For more information, please visit our website at www.fireflyworlds.com

About NaturalMotion
NaturalMotion Ltd. Is the first company to create 3D character animation software based on Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS), a technology that utilizes Adaptive Behaviours and artificial intelligence to simulate the human-nervous system. Based on Oxford University research on the control of body movements, NaturalMotion’s euphoria synthesizes 3D character animation in real time on Playstation® 3, Xbox 360® and PC, thus creating unique game moments and previously unachievable interactivity. NaturalMotion’s other DMS product endorphin creates off-line animation an order of magnitude faster than traditional techniques, and is widely used in the film and games industries, with customers such as Sony, Giant Killer Robots, The Mill, Capcom, Namco and Konami. NaturalMotion’s third product, morpheme, is the industry’s first graphically authorable animation engine designed to give animators full control over the look of their animations in-game.