Gamebryo Tools

Artist and Programmer Tools. The Gamebryo tools framework allows artists to quickly create a compelling game prototype. Gamebryo’s flexibility then allows the artist to add, improve, enhance, and optimize the look, feel, and playability of the game from prototype to gold master. 3ds max and Maya plug-ins allow the artist to create game specific content, preview the game on the target platform, edit and tweak content for performance and visual quality, and export that content with platform specific optimizations. The 3ds max and Maya plug-ins support the Gamebryo component framework, which allows developers to add custom features specific for their needs.

3Ds Max and Maya Plug-Ins
Gamebryo provides plug-ins that integrate seamlessly with Discreet 3ds max (including Character Studio) and with Alias-Wavefront Maya. Some plug-in features include:

Pluggable architecture that allows game developers to add features unique to their title
Interactive previews of content, including animation, lighting, effects, rendering modes, etc. , with the same real-time performance characteristics as the run-time game environment.
On-target Preview. From within the modeling tool, artists can preview their content on Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube development hardware. This feature also allows the ability to interactively adjust variables such as L&K mipmapping variables for the PlayStation 2.
Export whatever geometry, textures, texture effects, animations, particles, and skin/bones information that the specific modeling package can create.
Optimization of content on export for the particular target platform, including the ability to customize the export for the requirements of the particular title and developer.
Integration with Havok physics.
Animation tools that allow artists to create, modify, and tune animations .
Pixel and vertex shaders can be applied as easily as using a regular texture or material. The artist can tweak shader parameters to provide the precise effect they want.

Animation Tools
Gamebryo’s tools allow the artist to see immediately how various animations will look in-game. Capabilities Include:

Setup and tweak transitions between different animation sequences
Apply sequences to different character models
Preview groups of animations layers
Easily create Bone LODs, which assists in the creation of high-performance, many-character scenes
Export animation data and a ready-to-use state machine that makes the programmer’s job easy

Shader Tools
Pixel and vertex shaders have required the programmer every step of the way. With Gamebryo, programmers can write their own shaders, drop in or modify shaders from RenderMonkey, cgFX, or HLSL, or use “off-the-shelf” shaders provided with Gamebryo. These shaders are placed in a “shader palette” that is available to the artist and can be used without further programmer intervention. From there, the artists can tweak and preview these effects directly inside of Gamebryo.

Pluggable Tools Architecture
Gamebryo’s plug-ins for 3ds max and Maya are “componentized.” Gamebryo users can modify and expand the tool functionality as desired, without the need for a Gamebryo source or tools release and without having to write the tools from scratch. In this way, client applications can completely customize any step in the content pipeline, including initial export. A scripting system in the framework allows for scene graph import, processing and export to be fully customized.

Art Environment
Gamebryo supports: Discreet 3ds max 5.1, Alias-Wavefront Maya 4.5


Gamebryo Engine

A cross-platform 3D graphics engine for PC, Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube. The C++ API is highly optimized and customized for each platform and allows the programmer access to hardware capabilities of each individual platform. This proven engine has outstanding performance and all of the rendering, animation, and special effects features necessary to create any type of game.

Gamebryo Run Time Engine
A well-architected C++ API
A hierarchical scene graph with support for multiple geometric primitives including lines, particles, triangles, and triangle strips.
Multiple culling and sorting techniques that leave more CPU cycles for drawing visible objects. Different techniques can be used simultaneously in different parts of the scene graph.

Rendering
A fully general camera model.
Pixel and Vertex Shaders. Programmers can write their own pixel and vertex shaders, drop in or modify shaders from RenderMonkey, cgFX, or HLSL, or use “off-the-shelf” shaders provided with Gamebryo.
Dynamic RGB lighting. Any color and may be point, infinite, or spotlights. Specular highlights and pre-lit vertices are also supported.
A wide range of texture effects.
Multi-textures, such as light maps, dark maps, gloss maps, decals, etc.
Projected textures, including projected lights and shadows (for interesting lighting effects).
Animated textures, for effects such as fog, fire, smoke, and explosions.
Environment maps (spherical environment maps are supported on all platforms, with cubic environment maps supported on DX8 and Xbox).
Rendered textures, which may be used for television screens in the scene, dynamic shadows, mirrors, and other advanced effects.
Bump mapping.
Transparency, including alpha-blended translucency, which can be used to create cutout billboards, stained-glass windows and other effects.

Motion
Level of detail, including Bone LODs
Animation. Full support for almost all animation methods that are produced from 3ds max and Maya, including hierarchical, spline-based interpolations, translation and rotation keyframes using linear, Bezier, and TCB, rotations with quaternions, and cycle control for clamping, looping and reversing sequences.
Powerful Animation Keyframe Manager. Makes it possible to share animation data among different characters in the game, use multiple independent animation sequences on a single character, and blend and layer the animations on the fly.
Particle Systems. Virtually every type of particle system animation from 3ds max and Maya are supported; for example, snow, moving emitters, deflectors, particle bomb, particle array, and particle cloud.
Skinned characters.
Dynamic Collision Detection.

Special Effects
Fog is supported in three modes: range-based, Z-based, and (texture-based) volumetric.
Lens flare.
Dynamic shadows.
Pixel-accurate, high-performance 2D elements (for interface and text rendering).

Support for Other Middleware
Great games need more than great graphics, and we have relationships with several other middleware providers and customers using Gamebryo with their products:

Audio: Miles, Sensaura, FMOD
Video: Bink, Smacker
AI: AI.Implant
Networking: butterfly.net, Quazal
Physics: Havok, Meqon
Trees: Speedtree
Facial Animation: OC3 Impersonator

Run Time Performance Optimization Features
Batching of Primitives. Expensive set-up time for primitives can be minimized by grouping together primitives that share the same rendering attributes (such as texture, lighting, etc.).
Selective Update. Non-moving scene elements don’t require updating as frequently as those scene elements that move, lowering per-frame update time and increasing frame rate.
Tri-Stripping. Grouping adjacent triangles into “strips” that share vertices can represent a significant performance boost, due to optimizations in the rendering pipeline for shared vertices. Tri-strips are also faster than triangle sets on most console platforms.
Aggressive Culling. Many opportunities exist for trivial rejection of scene elements that the application “knows” do not needing to be rendered in a particular scene from a particular vantage point. Applications may flag entire subtrees in a scene graph to be ignored when updating and/or rendering a given frame.
Portal-Based Visibility. Portal systems represent a special case of aggressive culling. They trivially reject certain “rooms” from consideration for a particular vantage point.
Small Memory Footprint.
Fast Load Times. Support for background loading allows smooth loading of files during gameplay with no apparent load times.

Run-Time Performance Analysis Tools
Gamebryo can gather performance profiling and memory tracking statistics for updating and rendering an entire scene graph in real time. Statistics include such metrics as

Time to render each object
Number of polygons rendered for each object
Culling vs. rendering statistics per object
Profile of memory usage
The Gamebryo profiling framework can be easily extended to report application-specific statistics.