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MIDDLEWARE MAKES SENSE. CHOOSING an appropriate middleware solution will save development time and money. When it comes to rendering engines there are several offerings on the market. Gamebryo and RenderWare gravitate to the top of the list of professional engines. Both provide dedicated support and have a track record of commercially successful titles, although RenderWare is now owned by Electronic Arts. Regardless of how that can potentially affect you, both engines should be on your short list of products to evaluate.
Gamebryo provides a general purpose graphics rendering engine. Based on a scene graph architecture, Gamebryo's graphic engine is easy to use and produces commercial results without requiring you to develop and maintain your own engine. Shaderand fixed function rendering pipelines are well supported and work appropriately on each platform. Gamebryo provides an ample amount of tutorials and v demos for using the engine, including shadow maps, stencil shadows, matrix palette skinning, object picking, animation, background loading and other examples. It also provides tools and developer support.
SHADERS
Gamebryo's shader system is clearly one of its strong points. At the highest level, FX files can be used directly on the PC, giving you immediate access to all the shaders in the public domain provided by ATI and Nvidia, as well as the ability to rapidly prototype new effects using those tools. A custom shader format is also provided that has the added advantage of working directly on the Xbox, making simultaneous PC and Xbox development a snap. At the lowest level, Gamebryo provides an abstract C++ interface that allows you virtually limitless control of your shader. Shaders developed in C++ can be compiled into dynamic libraries so that they can be used by the rest of the Gamebryo tool-chain, including the scene viewer and the material editor.
TOOLS
Gamebryo provides both a platform scene...