Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Elements Hits Stores

Developed using the complete User Interface authoring tool Menus Master, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Elements hits the stores today.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Elements, created exclusively for the Xbox 360, allows gamers to experience brutal combats in a dark atmosphere, using the highly detailed interactive environment as a weapon to outsmart the most fiendish monsters.

Ubisoft Annecy’s Tool Programmer Yannick Gerber sees their decision to use Menus Master as a key to his team’s ability to make sure the user interface in the game would meet their expectations.

“One of the best things about licensing Menus Master is that it enabled our User Interface team to work serenely, knowing they could quickly prototype numerous user interfaces, pick the best, , upgrade it until obtaining a cutting edge user interface, and would still be able to make last minute changes” said Yannick Gerber.

Menus Master helps artists and programmers to dramatically reduce the time it takes to author any sophisticated game user interfaces: 2D and 3D front-ends, in-game UIs and heads-up displays (HUD).

“Another great feature of Menus Master is the flexible editor; it allowed us to prototype fully functional user interfaces and modify their visuals and animations at will, without having to change anything in the code... The artists didn’t need any programmer’s assistance, or any complicated conversion systems to test the user interface” said Yannick Gerber.

Menus Master has a fully open architecture, based on drivers. Any kind of custom technologies or 3rd-party middleware can be used with Menus Master.

“One of the greatest features of Menus Master is its open architecture, based on a driver system” explains Yannick Gerber, “this brilliant idea completely changed the way we create our user interface; it allowed us to start authoring the user interface without a running engine; we simply plugged our work into the game afterwards, when the engine was all set. And the integration of the User Interface into our engine was very easy; it took less than two days”.

Said Yannick Gerber, “this driver system also allowed us to control the rendering ourselves, and to share game and UI assets very easily, not only graphic resources, but also localization data, sounds etc, with the technologies we wanted to use, and, most important, all this was made with very good performances and small footprints”.

“Last but not least, it won’t be fair not to mention the quality of the support provided by Omegame’s team” said Yannick Gerber “they have been by our side during the entire project and very prompt answering our questions or to develop some features we needed”.

“Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is the first title on the shelves using Menus Master, and we are very proud the talented Ubisoft Annecy’s team shows so much enthusiasm for our technology” said Sébastien Kohn, Associate Managing Director for Omegame, “it shows Menus Master perfectly meets the needs of a very demanding video game developer’s team”.