Software company Autodesk is launching its own game engine

TheVerge: If you play video games, you've probably seen the effects of Autodesk's work. Autodesk owns the Maya and 3ds Max modeling software, the Scaleform rendering engine, and a variety of animation and texture-making tools. But the meat of the game will (usually) be made in an engine like Unity or Unreal, both of which have spent years courting developers with low prices and approachable tools. On August 19th, though, they'll see a new competitor: Autodesk's own engine, called Stingray.

Stingray was first announced in March, but it's technically existed for several years as an engine called Bitsquid, which Autodesk acquired in 2014. Bitsquid is behind, among a handful of other games, chaotic cooperative shooter Helldivers. The core of Bitsquid, says Autodesk's head of games Frank Delise, isn't changing much. But among other things, it's using a different interface and is more tightly integrated with the rest of Autodesk's design tools. "We really liked that the engine was separated from the user interface, so we can make very user-specific versions of the technology," says Delise. It's hard to tell exactly how good Stingray games will look — the major test for any engine — but the screenshots don't look too bad.