Game developers have a new player in the game engine market, and it's one most of them already know quite well: Autodesk. At GDC Europe, the software company behind some of the most popular 3D modeling tools in the industry – 3ds Max and Maya – has announced the Stingray game engine to compete with the likes of Unreal, Unity 3d, and others. Alongside Autodesk's other design tools, it offers a seamless solution for game developers and designers to rapidly prototype and build high performance, cross-platform games.

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Stingray is based on the Bitsquid game engine acquired by Autodesk last year. It supports testing and deployment to Android, iOS, Windows 7 and 8, Oculus Rift DevKit 2, PS4, and Xbox One. There is already a history of games built with Bitsquid, including Magicka: Wizard Wars, Helldivers, the 2014 reboot of Gauntlet, and many more. Autodesk elected to keep most of the underlying BitSquid technology in place, including the data-driven architecture and LUA scripting language for development.

Where Stingray goes above and beyond is its extensive support and integration with Autodesk's other major modeling tools. Maya, Maya LT, and 3ds Max can all be used alongside Stingray to create an end-to-end development environment where changes in one application are reflected in another, similar to Adobe's Dynamic Link technology. The live-update capability isn't restricted just to the IDE, but can even occur during debugging with connected devices.

Several other well known tools also come with Stingray, including: Beast, HumanIK, Navigation, Scaleform Studio, Wwise, and NVidia PhysX.

Stingray will be available on August 19th with a $30/month subscription. Later this summer, it will also be offered as part of an expanded version of the Maya LT subscription package. Unlike Unity 3d and some other game engines, Stingray doesn't offer a free license to developers on the basis that they will pay once their games become successful, but its extensive toolset and integration with some of the best modeling tools in the industry is meant to attract developers who can afford to spend a little money up front. For more details about Stingray, take a look at Autodesk's promo page.

PRESS RELEASE

Source: Autodesk