Glacier (game engine)

The Glacier engine is a series of game engines created by the Danish game studio IO Interactive (IOI) and is used for their games, the Hitman series, Freedom Fighters, the Kane & Lynch series and Mini Ninjas.[1]

Glacier Engine
Developer(s)IO Interactive
Initial release2000 (Glacier 1)
2010 (Glacier 2)
Stable release
Glacier 2
PlatformMicrosoft Windows
Xbox
Xbox 360
Xbox One
PlayStation 2
PlayStation 3
PlayStation 4
PlayStation 5
Xbox Series
GameCube
Wii
LicenseProprietary

The first iteration of the Glacier engine was first used in the game Hitman: Codename 47 from 2000 and up until Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days from 2010. Glacier 2 was first seen with Hitman: Absolution and has since been an evolving engine used in all new games from IOI, with Hitman 3 from 2021 being the latest. As the engine is evolving with game releases and even in patches for current games, it was at some point decided by IOI internally to drop the version number from the engine name and simply call the engine Glacier or G2.

Square Enix has licensed the Glacier 2 engine and branched off to create the Dawn engine.[2]

Glacier 1

The first iteration of the engine was notable for having working mirrors and advanced ragdoll physics. Not much information is known about Glacier 1 as it's a proprietary engine and not much has been discussed in public.

Glacier 2

The second generation of the Glacier engine was a clean cut from the first iteration. One of the major reason for developing an in-house engine is the AI system. The AI system in Glacier 2 can handle an enormous amount of NPCs which enabled the creation of the sprawling levels seen in the World of Assassination trilogy.

Glacier 2 will be one of the first engines to support DLSS,[3] XeSS[4] and FSR[5] simultaneously. The engine will support ray tracing with an update to Hitman 3.[6]

Technical aspects of Glacier 2

Glacier 2 was developed with three main pillars in mind, WYSIWYG, hot reloading/live editing of levels and an automatic asset pipeline.[1]

References
  1. "Assets and Entities in the Glacier 2 Engine / Maurizio de Pascale, Technical Director IO Interactive". YouTube.
  2. "How the Dawn Engine is powering the next wave of Deus Ex games". MCV. 11 February 2015.
  3. "CES 2022: NVIDIA RTX Coming to 10 More Games, Including the Day Before, Rainbow Six Extraction, & Escape from Tarkov".
  4. "Intel Arc - Xe Super Sampling".
  5. https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-software-fidelityfx-super-resolution
  6. "CES 2022: NVIDIA RTX Coming to 10 More Games, Including the Day Before, Rainbow Six Extraction, & Escape from Tarkov".
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