Crystal Engine – originally named as the White Engine, was an engine developed by Square-Enix since 2006 as a video-game programming tool that can be used cross-platform, enhancing work-flow as well as one common 3D format.

Crystal Tool Character/3D Editor

For those that played with DATs in the previous MMO of Square Enix – FFXI, you would probably know that most DATs are probably developed using metasequoia or something similar, and you can see it closely resemble the same tool within Crystal Engine on the right.

The Crystal Engine was also used to develop FFXIII (FF13), and this is an example of FFXIII and Behemoth.

One of the new engine incorporated into the Crystal Engine is the physics effects calculations. Up till FFXII (or FFXI, the latest MMO by Square-Enix), the death of a character is a pre-rendered animation of a model, and the same animation is being played even when you are on a ramp or cliff, which looks pretty odd. However, when you KO this time on a ramp, you will probably keep rolling until you hit the bottom of the hill =) It will sure bring a new humor into the game. (Now just imagine the whole alliance wiped, and everybody just roll down the hill *giggles*).

On the development side, they’ve enhanced their work-flow speed by incorporating their video editing, sound editing as well as multi-server rendering into one piece of software (their in-house Adobe suite). Communication between these sophisticated software are handled by their “GRAPE2″ server (like the Mental Ray server in Autodesk).

Like in previous FF series (FFXI), players used plugins in Autodesk 3ds max to read 3d models from FFXI. It seems like Square-Enix are going to continue with that trend of using plugins to provide compatibility between other 3rd party software and their in-house platform.

One thing worth to note, which is the compatibility of Crystal Engine. According to Joystiq, contents developed using the Crystal Engine are made compatible with Windows PC Platform, PS3 and Xbox 360. Now, on the FFXIV official website, they are only supporting Windows PC and PS3. Technically, the data and engine is already compatible with Xbox360, but I’m just guessing that they don’t want to run into the “PS2 limitations” again, which happened in FFXI where players could not even increase their inventory space due to technical issues.