| Q&A |
 Airplay
Ideaworks3D,
Tim Closs,
August 2009 |
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“
Airplay certainly accelerates that convergence from
the development perspective, as we provide a vanilla
C++ development environment that is very familiar to
PC apps developers or console game developers. Airplay
users do not need to know anything about specific platform
SDKs such as Symbian, iPhone, etc. ”
<
Developed with AirPlay |
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| Q1 |
Could
you please give a brief description of Ideaworks3D? |
| A1 |
Ideaworks3D
is a privately held technology and game development company
headquartered in London. Founded in 1998 with a strong Oxford
and Cambridge computer science and electronic engineering pedigree,
the company has an unparalleled track record of creative innovation
and technical leadership in the field of high performance mobile
gaming. Ideaworks3D‘s Airplay™ platform is the result
of over 8 years of research and development into high-performance
native multimedia applications on mobile devices, and has powered
ground-breaking and award-winning titles such as Konami’s
“Metal Gear Solid Mobile”, which won “Best
Game” and “Operators’ Choice” accolades
at IMGA 2008. Ideaworks3D's Studio is also the recipient of
multiple industry accolades including Best Mobile Studio at
the Develop Excellence Awards 2008, and two BAFTA Games Awards
for best handheld and mobile games. |
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| Q2 |
There
are many different embedded platforms. How can Airplay produce
optimized performances on each device? |
| A2 |
Through
a combination of clever runtime decisions, and clever offline
tools, as follows:
- Runtime decisions: the app queries the device for the presence
and type of any hardware graphics acceleration. If GLES2 is
available, all drawing is pushed through the GLES2 drivers;
otherwise if GLES1 is available, all drawing is pushed through
the GLES1 drivers. If no GLS driver is available, drawing falls
back to (extremely fast) software rendering (we claim to have
the fastest mobile 3D software renderer in the world). Also,
when using GLES drivers, the driver string is queried for vendor
and revision, and some "load balancing" is performed
depending on the type (e.g. deciding whether to do transform/lighting
on the application side, or the GLES driver side).
- Offline tools; Airplay by default generates a default asset
set that will run well anywhere. However, if the developer has
time/budget to create separate asset sets optimised for different
classes of device, that can do that very easily. For example,
one line in a resource script will trigger the generation of
a new asset set optimised for PowerVR, formatting streams as
required and using PVR texture compression where possible. |
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| Q3 |
iPhone
is more and more popular: have you any tool for creating games
on it? |
| A3 |
Using
Airplay, developers can create iPhone applications in pure C++,
on either PC or Mac. A single Mac is required to be connected
to the developer's LAN, to run the Apple code-signing tools.
Otherwise, a developer could choose to develop purely on PCs
in Visual C++, testing their ARM binary on the desktop, and
deploying to iPhone using iTunes on PC. Of course, Airplay's
support for GLES1 and PowerVR optimisations are also very useful.
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| Q4 |
What
are the main features of Airplay in the field of 3D graphics?
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| A4 |
 Airplay
supports flexible material management, model management and
rendering, skinned animation, shaders, and a "scaleable
graphics pipeline". What is meant by the latter is; developers
can construct materials that use shaders and multiple texture
stages; these can be utilised on GLES2 devices, but if a device
only has GLES1, the shader is not used and texture stages
1+2 are used instead. If there is no GLES driver, only texture
stage 1 is used.
Large models can be automatically segmented using octrees
or BSP trees.
Multiple textures can be automatically "atlassed"
into a single large texture, to improve GLES performance.
Skinned animation supports up to 32 bones, 4 weights per vertex,
blending of multiple full-hierarchy and sub-hierarchy animations.
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| Q5 |
Ideaworks3D
try to use standard technologies from Khronos group. What are
the benefits of using those technologies for embedded devices?
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| A5 |
Obviously
GLES is generally the only way of accessing hardware graphics
acceleration on devices, so must be supported.
The main other Khronos API we support is OpenKODE, an emerging
standard for OS abstraction on embedded devices.
Ideaworks3D was instrumental in designing the OpenKODE specification,
and we are the only solution provider to claim OpenKODE compatibility
across all open OSs. |
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| Q6 |
Ideaworks3D
can produce interactive 3d contents for Zii. There are more
and more devices ready to display 3D graphics : do you manage
to support all specificities of this new handheld device? Is
Airplay bundled with Zii SDK? |
| A6 |
An
Airplay demo will likely be bundled with the ZiiLABS Plazsma
SDK, and customers will be directed to us for licensing discussions.
Airplay can support all of the great features of the Zii EGG
platform including 3D graphics, sound, cameras, touchscreen,
accelerometer, GPS, and video. |
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| Q7 |
Could
you please describe the 3D pipeline for creating 3D assets?
(ex: wich DCC tool can be used, what can be supported : skeleton
animation, shaders...?) |
| A7 |
 We
provide exporter plug-ins for all recent versions of 3DS Max
and Maya. Additionally, we support any tool that can export
in COLLADA format.
Materials, models and animations can be previewed in the Airplay
Viewer from within the DCC tools.
Materials and shaders can be edited from within the plug-ins.
All data is exported from the DCC tools in very readable text
files; these files are used when running the Windows version
of Airplay, and are optimised and compressed into binary versions
suitable for loading on embedded devices. |
| Q8 |
Creating
3D games for embedded devices is more and more popular: do you
think that there will be less and less differences between programming
for PC and programming for smartphones? |
| A8 |
The
two are converging, but more slowly than many people had expected.
Airplay certainly accelerates that convergence from the development
perspective, as we provide a vanilla C++ development environment
that is very familiar to PC apps developers or console game
developers. Airplay users do not need to know anything about
specific platform SDKs such as Symbian, iPhone, etc. |
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