One of the big conferences of this year's CGDC show in Long Beach, Calif., concerned Shiny's controversial game, Messiah, and its engine of the same name.

　　In a packed auditorium room, Shiny's president Dave Perry and lead programmer Michael "Sax" Persson were the centerpieces for an event called Messiah: What You May or May Not Believe, which detailed what we gamers can expect in the area of new graphics technology.

　　Perry started off his speech by dispelling the rumor that he is patenting the Messiah technology. He said that while he said something about patenting at last year's E3, it was taken out of context and ended up as a persistent rumor that had a life of its own. He explained that he knows that many programmers consider patents a four letter word in the industry. He joked that programmers would say, "That Perry is going to patent farting, and then we won't be able to fart anymore."

　　Getting past the fart jokes, Perry began talking in earnest about the new engine. He said that many of the features included in the Messiah engine are attributed to focus groups where it was discovered that not everyone had the fastest and most powerful systems. Although 3D accelerators are popular, not everyone has one, and Perry said, "Until systems, including laptops, come with built-in 3D, we really shouldn't assume that everyone has one."

　　So the solution to the problem Shiny came up with was an engine that would scale itself down in real time to optimize itself for the host system - and would look as good in software rendering as it would with 3D hardware as well as run on a PlayStation (a Katana version is rumored to be in the mix as well).

　　The process that created the engine started with an examination of the way games use polygons to create body parts. Shiny began looking at multiple ways to make body parts look like real body parts. The solution, whether or not you're a programmer, looks absolutely amazing.

　　Rather than base everything around a polygon design, Shiny went deeper into a bone-based solution and figured out a way to do anatomical compression so that the data wouldn't overwhelm the system. So characters could run at about 500,000 polygons (from what we know about the engine, the characters were running from 8,000 to 1,200 polygons), and Shiny has developed an interesting process for taking polygons from areas you aren't going to notice and placing them in fast events like explosions. This makes the engine run faster and without the hiccups that you find in games when the action heats up. Perry said that graphic artists aren't going to have an easier job by running such detailed characters, but games are going to get better with this technology.

　　The best way that Shiny showed this off was with a prostitute taking a stroll. All the parts that should be moving moved fluidly as she walked. Close-ups of her backside moved up and down in a very lifelike manner. Everyone at the conference was very impressed (if you consider the sound of the applause as any indication).

　　Other features in Messiah included polymetric lighting that would light shines down to a polygon level, and this made for some great uses of shadowing. If the main character needed to stash a dead body, the engine would shadow in parts of the body as it was dragged into darkness. The other shadowing features in the engine actually have shapes of the characters reaching out over surfaces. This is far ahead of the blob on the ground that only looks vaguely like a character. And with the prostitute character, her shadow as she walked down some pathways in the game was definitively feminine.

　　Perry wouldn't specify how much of Messiah would be shown at E3, but it wouldn't be too shocking to see a playable version of Messiah somewhere on the E3 show floor.