Gamebryo 2.5

Overview

The Gamebryo Engine is a cross-platform engine designed to run on the PC, GameCube, Wii, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox, and Xbox 360. Gamebryo 2.5 was released on June 4, 2008 and subsequently replaced with version 2.6 on November 12, 2008. The current version is included in Gamebryo Lightspeed, a developmental package which bundles a variety of middleware tools along with the engine, released April 2, 2009.

Gamebryo was first developed by Numerical Design Limited. Numerical Design later merged with Emergent Game Technologies in August of 2005. Emergent is not itself a game developer; as the Gamebryo Engine's developer, it licenses the engine code to development houses.

Use in Games

Gamebryo has very widespread use in the industry, especially for developing cross-platform titles. Prominent developers that frequently use or have used the engine include Rockstar (Bully), Bethesda (Oblivion, the Fallout 3 games), Firaxis (Civilization Revolution) and Mythic (Warhammer Online). The engine has also been licensed for use by Square Enix on an unannounced title. On top of that, the engine has been used every major genre of games: 3D action games (Splatterhouse), large-scale RPGs (Divinity II), tactical games (the Freedom Force franchise), platformers (Epic Mickey), racing games (Speed Racer), even adaptations of board games (Axis & Allies).

However, the Gamebryo Engine has often been criticized for being riddled with bugs. Of particular note in this regard are large-scale open world titles like Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 and Obsidian Entertainment's Fallout: New Vegas.

Technology

Gamebryo 2.5 runs in DirectX 9 and 10 (DirectX 11 support is slated for the next release) on the PC and on all the current major platforms. It consists of a suite of middleware, as well as providing built-in support for a range of other such tools, like Nvidia PhysX 2.8.1 and SpeedTree 5.2. Recent iterations of Gamebryo have concentrated on adding more functionality on top of the basic engine: Gamebryo Lightspeed, for instance, includes tools to help quicken development, like rapid prototyping, rapid iteration and the ability to display changes to the game world in real time. The engine can be licensed either as a set of binaries, or with its full source code.

Gamebryo is coded in C , with object-oriented design, plug-in architecture, and a save/load system. It is designed to make seamless use of 3dsmax or Recent additions include systems to make better use of multi-processor systems across different platforms (PC, Xbox 360 and PS3), and a suite of tools to allow terrain and other assets to be created independently of the engine code. The engine's developers aim to provide as flexible a development kit as possible, and to that end they have included a system whereby new functionality can be added to the engine without having to modify its source code.

Features

• High-end texturing and rendering effects
• Flexible rendering, sorting and culling methods
• Cross-platform support for 3D acceleration and multi-core architecture.
• Integration with major 3D modeling tools including 3ds Max, Maya and Softimage|XSI.
• Powerful art tool chain integration
• Hierarchical scene graph representation
• Efficient visible object culling
• Dynamic collision detection
• Particle systems and customizable shaders for vertex colors, material, alpha transparency, textures and more
• Support for 3D audio

Middleware Integrations

• Nvidia PhysX and APEX,
• Scaleform GFx,
• Wwise,
• Speedtree,
• Illuminate Labs,
• NaturalMotion,
• Lightsprint,
• Aristen,
• Umbra,
• xaitment,
• memoraze,
• Allegorithmic,
• RAD.