The Scimitar Engine was newly developed by Ubisoft specifically for the unique gameplay and mechanics of Assassin's Creed. Claude Langlais gave some information about the aspects of the engine. He stated that much of the engine and the tools used were built from the ground up, and that is was built to be reusable. Further, they focused on the tools early on, so that they could create things as efficiently as possible. Next, they moved onto getting animation fluid and precise. For the crowd mechanics, they used middleware for the physics and collision detection paired with their AI and animation, where Langlais stated that it controls about 150 people at a time. Any architechture protruding two inches or more can be utilized for free running, things such as scaffolding can be collapsed, and the crowd serves as an obstacle during the chases. All of these were modified so that it could create a better experience for the player, where unimportant things may have been left aside in order to make the main elements better. Another task that the developers had to tackle when devoloping the engine was the problem of draw distance and the sandbox style of the game. The cities where the game takes place are quite large, and so optimization of the resources was key to making the city look impressive, while keeping an acceptable frame rate. The open-endedness of the sandbox made it so almost any part of the game had to be able to be ready to load and render anything the player might do at any given time. Combining all these aspects together should prove to create a rich and exciting gameplay experience.
