The Trinigy Engine is one of the first game architectures that utilize DirectX 11 features as PCGH reported earlier in November 2009. One of the most important games using Trinigy engine is the upcoming RGP Arcania: A Gothic Tale (also called Gothic 4). PCGH talked to the developers about the usage of the Trinigy engine. Our interview partner was Andreas Speer, CEO from Spellbound.

PCGH: You have already announced that you utilize Trinigy's Vision Engine. What makes this technology so suitable for your game?

Andreas Speer, Spellbound: The Trinigy Vision Engine provides a high performance cross platform rendering engine with all of the flexibility that we required to integrate our own technologies such as our open world streaming management and varied display modules. The Trinigy team provide excellent support for us and have readily developed new features to allow us to build ArcaniA the way we wanted to.

PCGH: Did you modify the Engine? Do you furthermore replace parts of Trinigy's technology with you own engine code? If yes, why where alterations or new developments necessary?

Andreas Speer, Spellbound: We have been working with Trinigy for a long time now and are on our third generation of game built on their Vision Engine. We know the technology well and have built our own systems on top of it to create a certain number of new unique features that we wanted for ArcaniA.

We have not modified the Vision Engine though we have added our own systems to manage many details of rendering to suit the particular needs of our product. Examples include our own face-rendering technology, tree management for the open world, a specific height field implementation of our own and many more.

PCGH: We were informed by AMD and Trinigy that Vision Engine 7 will be enhanced with a support for the new Windows 7 API Direct X 11. Will you take part in this development step and integrate DX11 support in the Renderer of ArcaniA: A Gothic Tale too?

Andreas Speer, Spellbound: We will not integrate DX11 support into ArcaniA for a number of reasons.
Firstly, and most importantly, our product will release too early. the number of players who have DX11 systems today is too small. Releasing ArcaniA as a DX11 game would prevent too many players from playing.

Secondly, our rendering technology has been designed to perform well on DX9 systems. The gains that we would get from re-implementing this technology using DX11 features would be insignificant.

For the future DX11 will allow us to develop new rendering technologies that would not be so well adapted to DX9 so we will be happy to embrace it when that time comes.

We would like to thank Spellbound for answering our questions.