Graphics Engine: this is being developed entirely by Lionhead. It’s an impressive piece of work, featuring 15 million poppies at this stage alone, and is probably going to bring almost all the Xbox 360’s power to bear. It’s probably written in C++.

We are still using our own engine, built from scratch for F2. Havok is just used for the physics side of things.Gradius / Charlton Edwards

LUA (for Scripting): from their job requirements: “Lionhead use LUA for gameplay scripts”. It’s fairly common for games to use this as it’s lightweight, flexible and great for scripting.

Havok (for Physics & Animation): it was announced on December 12th ‘06 that Fable 2 would be using Havok. Havok Physics is a very common 3rd-party physics engine for games, while Havok Animation is heard of less. Lionhead have licensed both tools as part of Havok Complete. According to the title of the news page, interestingly, it seems to be solely for use on the X Box 360. As part of his obligatory mini-speech of praise for Havok, Molyneux said:

Fable 2. By using Havok, we bypass a lot of the heavy physics maths and concentrate our teams more on the creative and innovative elements of the game.

Kynapse (for pathfinding): this is another popular piece of middleware, licensed by Lionhead back in May 2006. It handles pathing for characters, so that they can decide where and when to go in response to outside stimuli. It works in 3 dimensions, and can handle a lot of action types, like attacking or fleeing. Tim Rance, Lionhead’s CTO (Chief Technology Officer, in charge of the production tools) said:

After a detailed evaluation of the technology, we found that Kynapse provided the necessary levels of performance, robustness and support that we require for a next generation title. The tools and functionalities provided within Kynapse allowed us to concentrate on key elements within the gameplay. In particular, the ability to support large numbers of characters and large environments reliably on next gen platforms was a major factor in our decision.

We now know that this has been licensed for Fable 2 (and perhaps also for the Secret Game), so the requirement for large areas and many NPCs could be an interesting hint!

SketchUp (for whiteboxing): SketchUp is software to enable quick 3D-model creation, such as buildings. It’s used in the initial drafting of areas, to be able to put buildings in before they’re finalised.

What I do is help build the world of Albion, aided by SketchUp King Mike Green and Level Design Lead, Iain Wright.Charlton Edwards

Motionbuilder (for Animation): from the same folks as 3ds Max and Maya, Motionbuilder is an animation tool to fit into “existing production pipelines”. There’s no official source on this, but on their jobs page the job of Motion Capture Technical Director requires Motionbuilder experience. That could be for use in the Secret Game, but even so, you would expect Lionhead to use just one toolset for all its games - saves it having to retrain people.

Anark Gameface (for UI): a 3rd-party interface creation tool. It consists of Anark Studio, to make the User Interface, and Anark Format SDK, to bring the UI into the game engine. It describes itself as being about putting the UI entirely under artist direction and freeing up programmers from this task, and there’s a review of it here. From an interview with Gamasutra:

Molyneux: We’re also using things like Anark for our user interface. Being able to be dynamic with these things is vital. You would think that moving a health bar from the left hand side of the screen to the right hand should be a 10-minute piece of work. And it normally takes about a week to do [laughs]. It helps to use a third-party tool that allows me as a designer to move things dynamically. We’ll use as much of this stuff as we possibly can.

Asset Management: according to Tim Rance, Lionhead use Alienbrain 8 by Softimage to handle the tracking of any assets, such as 3D models, visualisation files and art.

Content: they use Photoshop for 2D images and Max, Maya or (probably) Softimage XSI to do their work, based on knowledge of those tools being required for artists. They’re industry standards, so that’s none too surprising.