38 Studios picks Morpheme

38 Studios has chosen to use NaturalMotion’s morpheme animation engine.

The studio, which describes itself as a producer of video games and ‘a broad range of entertainment products’, is working with popular artist Todd McFarlane and author R. A. Salvatore on a cross-media property, of which a MMO will form a part.

It was formed by ‘legendary’ baseball player Curt Schilling, and has spoken before of its very middleware-focused approach to game development, having already licensed both Unreal Engine 3 and the BigWorld MMO engine.

"When selecting middleware we are very careful to find solutions that enable us to focus our attention on our game. Morpheme allows us to create very high-quality character animations quickly, cutting down on a lot of intensive animation design and implementation time," said Jon Laff, chief technology officer for 38 Studios.

Christian Staack, vice president of sales in North America, Japan and Australia for NaturalMotion added: "Morpheme’s time-saving qualities become even more beneficial as the scale of games increase – the bigger your game, the more time your animators and programmers save thanks to an intuitive user interface and seamless front- and back-end integration. This makes morpheme an invaluable tool for the development of MMOs, arguably today’s biggest and most ambitious games."