Capcom has said during a company conference that it may start integrating AI into its development workflows. Or more specifically, using the tech in further developing its own proprietary RE Engine. Part of said conference was a presentation by programmer Satoshi Ishida titled, according to machine translation, “The Outlook and Future of the ‘REX’ Project, Further Evolving the RE Engine for the Next Generation”.

According to the report by Japanese outlet gamebiz.jp, REX represents “RE neXt Engine”, in which the company’s RE Engine is not rebuilt from scratch every time it gets updated. Instead, when new tech gets added to the engine, the new component is identified with the name RE:X, where the X stands for the name of the new tech in question.

That said, from the examples given during the presentation – such as RE:Dox, RE:UI, RE:Log, and RE:Flows, among others – all of these describe tools available for developers when working with the RE Engine, rather than features that players can expect to see in newer games. And indeed, the descriptions of these additional dev features include better streamlining of the development process.

AI is not explicitly mentioned in each of these, but at the very beginning of the presentation, the report mentions that Ishida said, “successfully integrating AI technology into development workflows has become an essential condition for streamlining future development”. With that in mind, the REX project, and each component within, was launched to “improve performance, tools, development efficiency, QA and other aspects”.

To be clear though, this is very much a form of generative AI usage in game dev. Ishida even comments that these tech advancements will lead to the larger goal of evolving into a “game engine of the AI generation”. The general consensus against AI-generated content in games is centred around assets that players see, as is Capcom’s public stance so far. Using the same tech for backend stuff like programming does not currently have the same severity of backlash, so for better or worse, it’s understandable that devs are going ahead with that.

(Source: gamebiz.jp)

Updated 6:41 pm, Sun, 4 October 26