First videogame to use the Anvil Engine

Originally dubbed the Scimitar Engine, Ubisoft's Anvil Engine was designed specifically to help them create the innovative and densely populated environments of Jerusalem, Acre or Damascus, as featured in the first Assassin's Creed game. The engine has been developed and refined over time and has been subsequently used as the games engine for two Prince of Persia games as well as Shaun White Snowboarding and a number of Assassin's Creed sequels. A game engine is a software framework designed for the creation and development of videogames. Claude Langlais, the Technical Director Ubisoft Montreal in 2007 describes the focus and impetus behind creating the Anvil engine: "The first focus earlier on was on tools, i.e. streamlining the asset creation pipeline to make content creators as efficient as possible. Animation was also one of the main concerns, getting fluid & precise animation was one the key aspects early on. Good tools and a lot of animation also means a lot of data to process at runtime, which is where multi threading comes in, the engine takes full advantage of the multi processing architectures of the current hardware platforms. The engine then allows many more animated & simulated characters on screen. And the whole world is loaded dynamically, resulting in a rich & vast environment."