[144] in comp.os.os2.announce archive
REPORT: OS/2 Game Developer's Seminar
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (msavio@vnet.IBM.COM)
Wed Sep 6 15:47:57 1995
To: os2ann.DISCUSS@bloom-picayune.MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 1995 10:09:46 GMT
From: msavio@vnet.IBM.COM
Reply-To: msavio@vnet.IBM.COM
Submitted by: M. Savio (msavio@vnet.ibm.com)
Source: Dave Briccetti (daveb@netcom.com)
Date received: 1995 August 28
Date posted: 1995 September 5
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One Developer's Report of the OS/2 Warp Game Developer's Seminar
by Dave Briccetti
August 19th, 1995
I. Introduction
On August 16th, 1995, I attended the OS/2 Warp Game Developer's
Seminar, presented by the IBM Personal Software Products
Solution Developer Organization in San Mateo, near San Francisco.
This is a brief report about my experiences at that event.
Please forgive any errors in product and company names and the like,
and send me corrections. I haven't double-checked facts and figures.
I have no association with any of the products or companies
mentioned herein, except that I'm a member of several IBM vendor
support programs.
II. About Me
For those of you who don't know me, I'll tell you a little about
myself. I have been developing applications for OS/2 since
1987, as an independent developer and consultant. I am a cofounder
and the president of the OS/2 Bay Area User Group, a large,
independent organization of OS/2 users and developers. Most of the
development work I have done has been with C and C++ and PM, in
the areas of business and scientific programming.
Recently I have felt compelled to do something flashy and fun;
either games or edutainment software development for OS/2. I
bought several great books on graphics and game programming, and
now IBM has released Beta 1 of its OS/2 Warp Entertainment Toolkit.
I'm ready!
III. Presentations
After a continental breakfast I took a seat with about 80
other developers in the classroom at the Solution Partnership Center.
Like the airlines, IBM had overbooked the event, but they weren't
offering free future classes to people who would go away. (Their
classes are free anyway.)
1. Welcome & Introduction
E. Lloyd Webber, Worldwide Games Brand Manager from Boca Raton,
Florida, started the presentations. Lloyd announced the OS/2 Warp
Entertainment Toolkit Beta 1, which is part of the now shipping
Developers Connection 8. He made it very clear that IBM wants to
help game developers, and told us that they want to hear from us about
how they can help us.
2. Video Performance
Next up was one of the Entertainment Toolkit developers, Luis
Rodriguez, on video performance with Direct Interface Video Extensions
(DIVE). Luis showed an animated jet fighter in a window (some of
you have seen this before), and it was running so fast it was just
a blur. It was running at around 135 frames per second. In
full screen it was about 36 frames/second.
Luis took us through the steps involved in using DIVE from a program.
I won't go into the details since they are documented so well
elsewhere. Take a look at the IBM OS/2 Games Home Page for more
information. See the last section of this report for the URL.
One interesting feature of the toolkit allows a PM game developer
to switch to full-screen modes such as 320 x 200, which is
typical for games, and get the same performance as DOS games while
still using the PM architecture.
3. 3D Graphics (BRender)
After a break we had a fascinating and awesome demonstration of
BRender, a 3D real-time, high performance rendering program, an
evaluation copy of which is included with the toolkit. BRender stands
for "Blazing Render," and it truly blazes. Rich Seidner of
Argonaut Technologies (formerly with IBM and then Kaleida) showed
the product, along with several games such as FX Fighter which use
BRender.
Here the topic drifted far from OS/2 as people asked esoteric
questions about other platforms, and most of the stuff Rich showed
was under DOS. Nonetheless, the technology is fascinating, and running
under OS/2.
Rich announced a special offer: For a limited time, developers
may license BRender for unlimited, royalty-free use under OS/2 for a
onetime fee of $2,000. For multi-platform use, the fee is $10,000.
IV. Lunch and Technology Demos
IBM fed us sandwiches and cookies and we wandered around to various
rooms where we could meet the toolkit developers and other IBMers from
Boca and Austin. One of those developers was Mike Brown, the author
of PMMPEG, a program to display MPEG movies. Several months ago
Mike added DIVE support to PMMPEG, and he showed me the difference.
The color and speed improvements are quite impressive.
I also saw programs with the new network games APIs demonstrated.
There were some glitches but the concept is pretty cool: OS/2 APIs
to connect players up to a game over the internet.
V. Presentations, Continued
1. Audio
Next up was Larry Kyrala who talked about Direct Audio and realtime
MIDI. These features allow more precise control over audio in the
dynamic game environment. One buzzword I heard was "score
richening." I think this means that when you're getting your ass shot
off in a game the music gets louder and busier.
2. Input Devices
Herman Rodriguez was the next speaker. Herman leads the
toolkit development team. He struck me as being very knowledgeable
and capable. In this segment he talked about device driver support
for generic input devices, and joysticks specifically. He has
developed an API which not only supports current analog joysticks,
but which will support new digital joysticks being developed.
He said his goal was to generalize the interface to support devices
such as data gloves.
3. Multi-player Network
The toolkit includes warpnet.dll, which provides an API to
support multi-player games over a network. The API currently
supports TCP/IP. There are functions such as WarpNetInitialize, Open,
Broadcast, PackSend, PackRecv, and Close. Herman Rodriguez made this
presentation.
VI. Technology Demos
After the presentations we were invited to wander around and meet
the developers and look at their demonstrations. I saw an early
version of Avarice, from Stardock Systems. It has stunning graphics,
but the guy running it (an attendee like myself) didn't know how to
run it and we just didn't get it. It was very soothing and mellow, but
I'm a Dark Forces kind of guy, I guess. Psygnosis' Lemmings for OS/2
was cute. SimTown was there but I didn't see it. I think I saw Star
Emperor, which I believe is the follow-on to the highly
successful Galactive Civilizations. It looked good.
VII. Conclusion
I very much enjoyed taking a day and immersing myself in this
new entertainment development technology. I remain convinced that
IBM is committed to supporting OS/2 developers. IBM's developers
of this new technology appear quite knowledgeable, and they
obviously enjoy what they're doing. Now let's see if I can satisfy
my own creative needs and develop something fun!
VIII. More Information
I can be reached at daveb@netcom.com, and 74475,1072 on CompuServe,
or by phone at 510 945-7565, Ext. 210.
The IBM OS/2 Games Home Page is
http://www.austin.ibm.com/os2games.
Herman Rodrigues, Toolkit Manager: hermanr@vnet.ibm.com.
Rich Seidner, Argonaut: rich@argonaut.com.
Bradley Wardell, Stardock Systems: wardell@ibm.net
IBM Solution Partnership Center, OS/2 Program Manager, Keith Lew,
kflew@nvet.ibm.com.
