Press release: Hyperion Entertainment brings 3D graphics to PDAs
Date : 2001-11-19
Hyperion Entertainment is very pleased to announce that it has finalised an initial version of its Warp3D technology, a mature, small foot-print, feature-rich yet very fast 3D solution for Elate"/ Amiga DE" based devices.
Warp3D allows content-creators to effortlessly deploy 3D graphics on low-end devices such as PDAs, web-tablets and 3G phones and is the product of years of development in response to concrete performance challenges and 3D technology.
Hyperion intends to showcase the Warp3D technology by producing several PDA oriented games.
A lot of the PDA content we are seeing now is a throw-back to the earlier days of entertainment software and whilst this is not necessarily a bad thing, we do believe that users would like to enjoy sophisticated 3D content on these devices as well. Our contract-work for LithTech Inc. also means we were able to incorporate extensive research and expertise in the field of software rendering which resulted in one of the fastest software renderers in the industry - the only viable solution on a non 3D-accelerated PDA. Add to that a highly optimised subset of OpenGL which is nonetheless capable of running industry-standard 3D engines like Quake II" and LithTech" and you have a piece of very compelling technology indeed.
Warp3D was already successfully field-tested on the SH3 powered version of Sharps Zaurus PDA and is due for imminent release.
The technology will remain in continuous development and will be licensed to interested parties.
Features:
Flexible runtime-supported driver system allows for the support of 3D hardware (if present) or software-only emulation
Completely transparent handling of drivers - applications run on both software emulation and 3D hardware without changes
Generic API that was designed with years of experience in desktop 3D graphics
Support for most primitive types supported by current hardware: Triangles, Triangle Strips and Fans, Lines and Points
Support for different OpenGL shading modes, like MODULATE, REPLACE, DECAL and BLEND
Support for texture mapping with different RGB and index color texture formats
Extremely small memory footprint, under 60 KB. Tool-based (load only what\'s used).
Support for Z-Buffering and Stencil Buffering
Alpha-Blending
Fog
Fully OpenGL compliant
Support for Vertex Arrays for maximum vertex throughput
Automatic texture conversion by drivers to allow optimal hardware support
Automatic video memory management - no programmer interaction required
Completely written in VP assembler - local CPU optimisations possible
Continuous development
Software Renderer Features:
Affine subspan texture mapping giving the best blend of speed and quality
Supports Flat Shading, Gouraud Shading
Texture Mapping (including full colour shading)
Support for most common Alpha blending operations
ZBuffering support (Z_LEQUAL) for normal depth buffering
Planned Features:
VP-based MiniGL, a minimal OpenGL subset sufficiently complex for Quake2-Engine games
Complete OpenGL based on Mesa libraries for more powerful devices
Vertex- and Pixel-Shader support
Single-Pass multitexturing
Support for T&L-Units where Vertex Shaders are unavailable
