User:Merko/Dawn Engine

Dawn Engine is a proprietary game engine developed by Eidos-Montréal.

The game engine was originally built to be employed in future Deus Ex video game projects, but was only used in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided due to the cancellation of its sequel. The engine was later used for 2021's Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy.

Eidos-Montréal subsequently abandoned work with the Dawn engine, adopting Unreal Engine 5 for their ongoing work.

History
Dawn Engine is based on a heavily modified version of IO Interactive's Glacier 2, which has its roots in Hitman: Absolution. The engine was created after developers at Eidos-Montréal "found that [their] creative vision was somehow limited" by relying on existing engines. The graphics engine has been "almost completely" rewritten. This was done to "fully leverage the power offered by the PC and [ eighth-gen] consoles". The creation of Dawn was challenging even for Eidos-Montréal's most experienced staff.

In 2017, Eidos-Montréal revealed that they were shifting focus to online gaming and this required them to add online features to the engine.

In 2022, it was announced that Eidos-Montréal had several projects in development, none of them being on Dawn Engine. This decision was made by studio management to "focus on content" rather than technical hurdles of developing a game and its engine simultaneously.

Technical details
Dawn features improved conversation system and cutscenes compared to Glacier 2. It is built on an "entity system", which allows designers to create new behaviours without the assistance of programmers. Hair technology is an improved version of AMD's TressFX, which has been developed by the in-house research and development team Labs. Dawn features systems for volumetric lighting and air density, as well as support for dense indoor and outdoor areas, and many dynamic objects. Not all objects are rendered at the same time, the engine makes use of Umbra occlusion culling. With Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, ray tracing and DLSS support was added, as well as working in-game mirrors.