British publisher and developer Codemasters have just recently announced that they are working on creating their own 'Neon Engine', in collaboration with Sony, for the company's next-gen PS3.

Codemasters producer Gavin Cheshire talked to the PSINext guys and said that they've run down and evaluated the middleware solutions (including Renderwares and the Unreal engines) that they could use but there were none that fulfilled their specific PS3 requirements. Cheshire says, "...we just wanted to find the technology we could have ready for the next-gen so we weren't left catching up in ten years' time."

Because of the results of this research (or lack thereof), Codemasters decided to talk to Sony about creating a spanking new next-gen engine which Codemasters will build from scratch. The developer company has reportedly been working on this engine over the last 18 months and has decided to call it the "Neon Engine".

Cheshire also shares the info that Sony knew early on that it'll be hard to get the best out of the PS3 so they had their Japan office to assemble a team in Europe to start developing new tools and technology. Cheshire adds, “What we were able to do is exploit something that Sony was developing internally, which we were the first to see – and since then we’ve worked very closely with Sony. It’s a two-way street.”

The Neon Engine will NOT be exclusive to Sony though, and is even intended to be cross platform. And Cheshire says that this is totally fine by Sony because "Sony realises that the only way to make next-gen viable for everyone was to allow everyone to exploit technology”. Well, that IS true, and it's a good thing Sony realizes this. As for the games that will be using Codemasters' Neon Engine, Cheshire says that Lucky#1 will be the rally game Colin McRae: DIRT, which will also be available on the Xbox360.