In a press release today, the team responsible for the development of Cursed Mountain has announced some of the details behind the graphics engine being used. The new engine is titled "Athena" and it is a proprietary graphics engine being developed by the Sproing team.

The team best sums up the features:

The engine highlights of "Athena" include amongst others, HDR-Rendering, shader simulations developed especially for Wii in order to display ice, heat and water (realistic reflections and refractions), an ultra-fast particle system for amazing snow storms, soft particles for realistic fog and smoke, depth of field, motion blur, dynamic soft shadows, spherical harmonics lighting, as well as a high performance level-of-detail and streaming system in order to provide long viewing distance of the entire surrounding.

In order to create an exciting atmosphere when battling the ghosts, the game employs a number of custom-created special effects such as the shader simulations as well as a newly developed post-processing framework.

According to the Technical Director of Sproing, Gerhard Seiler, the engine "really takes the Wii hardware to its limits and Wii gamers can really look forward to a heart-stopping, and breath-taking world that comes alive with this title."

Considering some of the trailers coming from High-Voltage's Conduit, it would not surprise me if Sproing is also able to set a higher than usual bar in the Wii visuals department.

Cursed Mountain will be released worldwide for Wii in 2009. More information is available at: http://cursedmountain.deepsilver.com More PlayStation 3 News...