Retox engine

The Retox engine is a state-of-the-art proprietary engine capable of running in a browser.

The Retox engine is built by Reto-Moto and currently used to create Heroes & Generals.

As a group Reto-Moto have been creating games for nearly 20 years. When we started out making 3D games it was for the Sega Saturn console (and before that we did a few games on Amiga & Sega Genesis (Megadrive in th US) but that was more a 2D fare).

Back then (1993’ish) the standard 3D graphics tool on the PC was Autodesk 3D-Studio 4 (or was it 3? - Can’t remember), which we used to create games like ‘Scorcher’, where all the background graphics was rendered using 3DS4 (using a pretty crazy technique that included a code-generated scene-file, animating the camera to render every polygon in the scene to get the texture/light and then packing the whole thing to allow it to run on a 2meg console).

These first 3d games laid the foundation for our engine technology years to come. When you have created just a few games you start to re-use alot which leads to the creation of an entire game-creation-framework (game engine).

The next game we started working on required large worlds to be created and even though the recently released vastly updated 3dStudio Max was great it just couldn't handle the size so we decided that we needed an editor for assembly of the gameworld. Everybody else was creating their own editors at the time so it made perfect sense.

When we founded IO we scrapped the game (an ambitious online fantasy game much in line with World of Warcraft) in favor of the much less ambitious Hitman: Codename 47 (which turned out to become a very ambitious project in the end), but kept developing the engine (now called Glacier) to support the following Hitman games, Freedom Fighters and any recent games released by IO Interactive.

Retox is our latest engine, where we've tried to rethink the whole premise of how to make a modern high performing game engine, which at the same time is very fast to work with.

One of the key features (or actually lack hereof) is that this time we haven't made our own gameeditor - instead we use Softimage XSI as we thought it to be very silly to make a proprietary editor, when Autodesk already makes an excellent 3d editor.