Unmitigated fucking nerd question
More broadly this is part of the "what did FromSoft do before 1994" question, which in the anglosphere is a question nobody knows the answer to. What business software, motherfucker???
But the delightful and low-poly models and environments in 1994's King's Field made me extremely curious. The game has that janky photo-cd texture look, but I couldn't really find out what FromSoft's development pipeline looked like at the time. The PlayStation is the first 3D capable console that truly mattered, and its japanese launch games interest me because a lot of studios struggled to move to 3D games. It was a big time, famously Square Soft spun up basically their own entire 3D rendering division based on a bunch of expensive SGI Onyx systems and shit to make Final Fantasy VII.
Is it possible that FromSoft just used 486 PCs or Amigas running Lightwave or Cinema 4D or whatever? Very much so, but for a company that had spent a bunch of time doing random business software, (maybe they were into CAD stuff?) and specifically cited the lacking ability of PCs to do polygons well when talking about moving to the PlayStation, it seems like the modelling tools and stuff they used to make basically Ultima Underworld But More would be of interest. Despite that, I can't find anything about it. Did they make their own whole 3D rendering program like Capcom? I thought From was pretty small back then...
Oh, and don't say Sword of Moonlight. Cool program but From was not using a DirectX-accelerated Windows program before Windows 95 came out. It is true that Armoured Core and presumably Shadow Tower were built on the same core "engine" as King's Field, at least, akin to the internal company "engines" of devs like the british Climax.
EDIT: thanks to @h0ll0w5p4c3 digging up an obscure magazine page, it has been discovered that FromSoft (founded in 1984, mostly doing "OA software" or Office Automation, primarily automated livestock sorting for a Japanese farm consortium!!!) was prototyping a fully-polygonal dungeon-crawling mecha game called ZAMS-K3 for the PC-98, which is nuts. Most commercial 3D games for PC-98 run poorly, so the move to PS1 makes sense albeit porting the code probably made less sense :) but the tech underlying ZAMS-K3 served as the basis for King's Field (initially cited in english magazines as "Crystal Dragon") and eventually Armoured Core. While this does not reveal every inch of From's dev environment, it sheds a lotta light which I like. ZAMS-K3 itself reminds me of the PS1 game Crime Crackers (lol) which was also a launch window game.
Sources, found by searching "ZAMS-K3" after seeing the translation of magazine pages h0ll0w5p4c3 linked:
https://www.lost-town.com/dossier-d80-p1-kings-field
https://www.stayforever.de/podcast/king-s-field-ssf-94 (god I wish I could listen to this)
Choice quotes from lost-town:
This gave him so much enthusiasm that it was decided that the box would make this prototype [ZAMS-K3] a commercial product! We are then in 1993 and unfortunately for From Software the popular consoles of the time such as the Super Nintendo do not tolerate 3D very well, ask to be programmed in a special assembly language and also require very high costs to be authorized to be released by Nintendo! In real life... Even a PC-98 release is a bit hot because the game is incredibly ahead of its time with a dozen mecha that rotates 360 degrees, the ability to fight against another player, a palette of 256 colors and the ability to fire lots of missiles at high speed in complex dungeons with even a system to block hits! In short, the game only ran on PC-98s modified to have even more internal memory and the game seemed to be extremely difficult to complete... [...]
In addition, Sony was asking for much less money to develop on their machine and the devkit wouldn't even be that expensive! Only 2 million yen, which seems laughable compared to the famous Silicon Graphics stations that could cost up to 30 million yen! In short, a golden opportunity to convert ZAMS-K3 to a home console although... In fact, the machine was not powerful enough to run the game properly, this project was really TOO ambitious with its realistic mechs that required too many polygons.... As a result; it was decided to take the dungeon assets of ZAMS-K3 to do something else.
Doesn't seem like their 3D workflow was that advanced...
In fact, From Software was a very serious company but their total inexperience in video games meant that they discovered everything day by day. Even something as simple as a polygon counter, an essential trick at the time to not impose too much on the machine had not been developed and they counted everything by hand!
Moreover:
Already the Playstation did not have a few devkits with particularly finalized development libraries and the team did not have access to Sony's memory card which forced them to test everything since the start of the game every time!
This possibly means they were using the MW.3 standalone devkit described here instead of the ISA card setup Sony later used.
It's mostly an educated guess, and I have since discovered an interesting fact that complicates things a bit.
So if you were working with 3d graphics in the 90's, you were almost certainly using an SGI. That was their bread and butter. Likewise, any tools FromSoft were using most likely had to be made in-house, outside of a few 3d graphics tools for prerendering, there wasn't anything available for first person 3d engines.
Now here's the twist. To develop for the PS1, you actually needed a PC. The PS1 devkit was just a card that dropped into a regular PC. So they very possibly just used a PC with the ps1 devkit, especially since they were targeting PCs for release originally but if the PCs weren't handling it, as the source says, they were developing the prototypes on something. Probably an SGI.
Now here's a reverse twist: SGI had intel machines, but only starting in 1998. The SGI Visual Workstation 540 ran Windows NT/2000. So sword of moonlight could have been used and ported to these new SGI machines by the time it was released.
So, in short, it's harder to say than I originally thought. Especially since the original game was to have prerendered scenes, I would assume an SGI was part of the development, but not all of it. I see no reason to think Sword of Moonlight, or an early version of it, was not used for development.
Edit: Let's twist a 3rd time, because not only did SGI have a 3d graphics accelerator card for the PC, but the ps1 CPU had tech licenced by SGI I found a y-combinator comment that says the ps1 graphics api is based on SGI's IRIS GL. idk if it's true, but it may be possible.
So no matter how you slice it, SGI hardware was being used at some level.
From had been developing a game for the PC-98 which had mechs in a 3d dungeon ZAMS-K3. When they found out about the PlayStation they shifted development from PC-98 and used their inhouse developed tech on the 3D dungeons to create King's Field.
The half-built 3D software (which in the context of the time probably meant a game) on the computer is the one I'm going to introduce here [ZAMS-K3]. The main content was a dome shaped colosseum where robots fought each other constantly. It's a pity that we didn't finish it. The photos on the right shows some of the characters that should have appeared in the software. It's a pity that we can't show them to you, but there are many other humanoid mechas in this work. By the way, the title of this game is the result of the developer's initials. Z and A and M are each taken one at a time, and K is for 3 people together.(My gues was Z stands for Natoshi Zin, A stands for Hiroyuki Arai, K stands for Yasuyoshi Karasawa, M stands for Masashi Moriya? ) Although it's only a tentative title, it's pretty cool as an official name!Images from HERE
Damn though, I knew it couldn't have been DOS-V computers, that would be silly. Having said that, A) making a 3D engine run playably on a PC-98 must have been a battle, B) moving that 3D work to the Playstation must have been a bigger battle still.
I'm also not seeing a ton in the way of dedicated 3D modelling software for PC-98, dunno if DOS-V would run Imagine or Cinema 4D or anything back then, so that's an open question. Write your own PC-98 modeling/animation software?
For pre-rendered anything, Square Soft had their fleet of systems and even Rare had the machines they used for Donkey Kong Country, but King's Field doesn't use basically any pre-rendered assets, right? The intro fly-through and title reveal is in-engine. The manual even uses shots of the in-game models, which surely if you just had Indigos or whatever handy you'd do some key renders, right? From was mostly just doing 3D modelling in its early years as far as I know.
I did look into PS1 devkits and the ISA cards surprised me because the japanese-font-capable DOS-V had relatively poor adoption at the time, with NEC PC-98 holding onto like 50% of the marketshare until 1996. Given that From pitched King's Field to Sony directly, I wouldn't be surprised if they were lent or given an x86 PC for development purposes. It's also not impossible that From just had DOS computers hanging around their office from [whatever they were doing before] though, too. It's actually kind of a mystery to me what most japanese PS1 development flows looked like, though. Maybe it helped push x86 adoption?
A fact I discovered in the US Next Generation magazine's issue 12 is that 3DO classic D (1995) by Warp was rendered entirely using Amiga 4000 systems. I had forgotten, but apparently the Amiga had decent adoption in Japan and some studios used them for CG/pre-rendered stuff, so it also wouldn't surprise me if they were used for 3D modelling with Imagine or Cinema 4D or something. Amiga 4000s would also probably have been substantially cheaper than loading up on SGI machines that a business [doing whatever From was doing before] may not have had.
Also that wikipedia article is so bad, lol lmao. Cites a source that actively contradicts what it's saying... I doubt From actually prototyped anything on any sort of commodity hardware back then, albeit the timeline isn't that clear.
The wikipedia article is trash, From were founded in 1984