While some companies have been notorious for hoarding money and trying to make profits however they can by selling whatever they can touch, a few have always stood out as beacons in the gaming industry, providing superior products with less drama, and actually giving back. One of those companies, Insomniac Games, has one-upped themselves with the recently revealed Nocturnal Initiative.
As they stress on the wiki they made for the Initiative, Nocturnal is not a game engine. Instead, it’s an open source library which will (hopefully) help fellow designers and developers avoid having to rewrite some of the basic components of game design, as "Sometimes the same people end up writing the same solution at several companies throughout their career."
"The code we are releasing at launch is the culmination of several weeks of work by key members of our tools team to prepare our code for public consumption," said Insomniac’s Geoff Evans. "A big reason why we wanted to do this project was the desire to make our code the same high quality that we come to expect from the Open Source projects that we utilize (boost, expat, etc…). This included cleaning up old (but reliable!) code to our current coding standard as well as programming the build and publish automation for the actual code packages."
The first batch of code is already available on the Nocturnal Initiative wiki. Keep in mind that none of this is last-minute scraps Insomniac put together–this code has been used in current-gen Insomniac titles ranging from Ratchet & Clank to the upcoming Resistance 2. While this isn’t exactly huge news for those of us who play the games, I’m sure those who are behind the scenes are very much appreciative of Insomniac’s efforts.
