In a pretty revealing interview with Gamebase’s executives Bryan Tarlowski and Yoonjae Hwang, it seems that the engine is undergoing a major transformation. So what exactly they have been working on? Read on to find out.

Rashid Sayed: The Gamebryo engine has been a massive success, powering some of the biggest hits of the last two generations so far. Why have you guys kept a low profile for these last few years?

The last few years have been a transitory phase for Gamebase, between last generation and next generation. The team has been preparing for a major overhaul of Gamebryo, involving architecture-level changes to support future technologies. In the progress of this development, the importance of mobile game has continued to increase. In order to achieve these 2 different goals, high-quality graphics and scalability, our team has spent the last few years focusing on large development.

Rashid Sayed: Recently, Epic and Unity have all announced cheap access and subscription models to their engines. Gamebryo is apparently still only available as a purchase (either in the form of binaries, or the full source code). In light of changing market conditions, are you looking at changing your market model as well?

The change to subscription models is a very interesting development. It’s similar to what we have seen Adobe do with the Creative Cloud plan. The Adobe Creative Cloud plan is a great way to stretch the dollar for part time graphic designers, with the ability to turn off the service during slow months and turn it back on when projects come around. Our usual customer for Gamebryo have been large development teams, these customers are not interested in a royalty fee back end which comes with the monthly plan. These customers need a solution for hundreds of developers; the subscription model doesn’t meet their needs. However, small teams have been making amazing and interesting games. We would like to have these developers use Gamebryo,so we are investigating new pricing structures to go with our new technology.

"Rapid Iteration and real-time hot updates will increase production efficiency by unblocking artists, designers and programmers working on different platforms. Developers can iterate with gameplay mechanics, look-and-feel, and art assets in more detail with less time, to get your game looking and playing the way you want on any platform."

Rashid Sayed: What are the technical changes you have made to the engine and its source code to ensure that it will be competitive and up to players’ expectations from the PS4 and Xbox One?

One of the key trends in the latest rendering APIs is command buffer based rendering, which enables multi-core CPU utilization for sending graphics commands to GPU, Gamebryo is making progress in increasing this functionality. Also, rather than forcing developers to use a specific lighting/shading scheme like physically based rendering, we are working to offer more flexible material system that allows artists to express their imagination intuitively. To that end, our artists tools, including DCC tool plugins will be deeply integrated to Max/Maya in order to aid artists in producing more detailed in-game graphics.

Rashid Sayed: Given the engine’s modular and highly saleable nature, how easy has the latest iteration of engine made it easier for multiplatform development across PC, PS4, Xbox One?

Gamebryo is built on a one common architecture, but is specifically targeted and optimized for each platform. This will also apply to PS4 and Xbox Oneand Gamebryo will provide developers with the best multi-platform development experience. Rapid Iteration and real-time hot updates will increase production efficiency by unblocking artists, designers and programmers working on different platforms. Developers can iterate with gameplay mechanics, look-and-feel, and art assets in more detail with less time, to get your game looking and playing the way you want on any platform.

Rashid Sayed: Both the new consoles have extremely similar architecture but yet they are slightly different from each other. The PS4 has unified memory architecture and the Xbox One has an extremely fast memory in eSRAM. How is GameBryo taking advantage of these two similar yet distinct architectures?

Gamebryo implementations on each platform are written in a way to maximally utilize underlying hardware. But developers won’t need to take different code path because Gamebryo API encapsulates the different hardware capabilities. For example, on PS4, Gamebryo will try to reduce deep copies between CPU and GPU whenever possible, and on Xbox One, Gamebryo will put some of frequently accessed GPU resources on eSRAM according to their access pattern.

"Indirect lighting can be a key technology for next-gen graphics. Even though our focus for now is to improve direct lighting, Gamebryo’s render system is flexible enough to integrate those global illumination solutions effortlessly."

Rashid Sayed: PC as a platform has grown ridiculously in the last 2 years. We already have dual GPU cards in R295X2 which are light years ahead of the new consoles already. This is a major achievement in my opinion as the new consoles are not even six months old. How will GameBryo cater to the needs of high end PC games development?

Supporting high-end machines is as vitally important as supporting mobile devices for us. We are researching as to how we can move some of CPU-intensive operations to GPU so that we can get dramatic performance increase by utilizing thousands of compute units of high-spec video cards. Other than that, explicit multi-GPU programming using CUDA or Mantle is one of our research areas, which can be potentially more efficient than traditional alternate frame rendering.

Rashid Sayed: Tell us about LightSpeed. How has the product evolved in the last few years?

The biggest difference between Gamebryo LightSpeed and its previous iterations is game framework. Since the first release of LightSpeed, we have improved it with background entity loading, replication, flow water, terrain decoration and so on. Also we added new rendering features like light pre-pass renderer, and post-processing effect framework to our rendering stack.

Rashid Sayed: Lighting is now a major element in game engine these days. Geomerics seems to be doing a great job in that department. Then we also have the likes of Confetti who are pushing the visual boundaries with Global Illumination Technique. Tell us how you are using LightSpeed across the PS4, Xbox One and PC?

Indirect lighting can be a key technology for next-gen graphics. Even though our focus for now is to improve direct lighting, Gamebryo’s render system is flexible enough to integrate those global illumination solutions effortlessly. Gamebryo’s lack of indirect lighting can be compensated by that kind of middlewares and we think integrating them to Gamebryo can be the best of the both worlds.

Rashid Sayed: I have always maintained that terrain enhancement is one area where substantial enhancement has not been achieved. Are you guys working on this?

We’ve got many feedbacks on our terrain system and well aware of some of its weaknesses like limit of available resources per terrain sector. We are currently working on new improvements to the terrain, we agree!

Rashid Sayed: Given the rise of many major publishers’ insistence on using their own engines- EA, for example, uses Frostbite, or its EA Sports engines, for its games. Konami has Fox, and Ubisoft, Square Enix, Valve, all use their own internally developed engines. Do you see the market for middleware being adversely affected by these developments?

I could see middleware that is not adaptable being affected by the rising popularity of in house solutions. What interests some companies in Gamebryo is the ability to use their in house framework with our rendering solutions, or vice versa.

"Mantle enables us to share many rendering code for Xbox One and PS4 and brings many benefits even on PC like explicit Multi-GPU management. Also Mantle exposes more low-level features than DX12 as extensions."

Rashid Sayed: Let us shift our talk towards DirectX12. What kind of development benefits will this bring to PC/Xbox One games development when used with GameBryo?

Although it’s true that DirectX12 offers opportunities for better performance by allowing developers a lot of low-level control of graphics device, it also means that application needs to do explicitly a lot of book keeping and validation that video drivers used to do for us. Using Gamebryo can eliminate this kind of tedious work from developers while still obtaining all the benefits of DX12. Also Gamebryo abstracts away architectural differences between DX11 and DX12 like the removal of immediate context, so Gamebryo can help developers move to DX12 in the least intrusive way.

Rashid Sayed: Are you planning to include Mantle integration with GameBryo? Or does DX12 do enough of a job for giving low level access as it is?

Our engineers have been testing Mantle. Mantle enables us to share many rendering code for Xbox One and PS4 and brings many benefits even on PC like explicit Multi-GPU management. Also Mantle exposes more low-level features than DX12 as extensions. Although we are going to inevitably support DX12 as well, Mantle is definitely the key technology that we’d like to adopt for consoles and high-end PCs .

Rashid Sayed: GameBryo has essentially been used for developing vast open worlds. Fortunately the new generation is being slated an open world generation. This personally excites me since I loved what you guys did with Oblivion. Can you tell us the potential of GameBryo when used with PS4/Xbox One in order to create to massive game world?

One of the goals of next major update of Gamebryo is support of more massive world. Even though Gamebryo is a genre-agnostric game engine, many MMORPG games have been powered with Gamebryo and this area is definitely the part we’d like to improve. With more memory and processing power available on recent hardware, we are experimenting with various techniques to render massively large world.

Rashid Sayed: The new consoles have a ton of memory now. If you go 5 years back, I am sure you must have heard several developers complaining about limited memory on PS3 and Xbox 360. And now we have high end games which already require 8GB of memory. Are we going to see a repeat of what happened last gen and how will GameBryo tackle this memory issue?

In next release, Gamebryo will support 64-bit platforms, and 4GB RAM (or 3GB effectively) limit will be removed. Actually this is a requirement from the latest consoles and DCC tools. On top of it, recent graphics APIs and platforms support GPU virtual memory. Combining both of them will largely reduce the limited memory issue.

Gamebase’s Gamebryo may be the most under-rated engine of all time, having found use in games like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Rift, Defense Grid: The Awakening and much more. GamingBolt had a chance to speak marketing director Bryan Tarlowski and Gamebryo lead engineer Yoonjae Hwang about the future of the engine.

We asked if AMD Mantle integration is on its way to Gamebryo or whether DX12 would be capable enough to provide low level access. “Our engineers have been testing Mantle. Mantle enables us to share many rendering code for Xbox One and PS4 and brings many benefits even on PC like explicit Multi-GPU management. Also Mantle exposes more low-level features than DX12 as extensions. Although we are going to inevitably support DX12 as well, Mantle is definitely the key technology that we’d like to adopt for consoles and high-end PCs.”

Despite the hype though, AMD Mantle has seen a fairly slow adoption rate. DirectX 12 will be out next year (it will reportedly ship with Windows 10) so there’s still plenty of time to speculate its impact on the industy. Thoughts on the power of Mantle? Let us know below.

DirectX 12 is going to improve a lot of technical processes when it launches late next year. Gaming PCs that have a multiple GPU set up will see benefits as the new iteration of the API will make sure there are no bottlenecks due to the CPU. However this does not mean that simply using DX 12 will resolve all the problems in one go. The developers will still need to code accordingly.

In our interview with Bryan Tarlowski, Marketing Director at Gamebase and Yoonjae Hwang who is one of the lead engineers on Gamebryo, it was revealed that DX12 will require applications do a lot of validation and book keeping. Book keeping means that developers need to use the same section of the code at different places, with little to no changes.

“Although it’s true that DirectX12 offers opportunities for better performance by allowing developers a lot of low-level control of graphics device, it also means that application needs to do explicitly a lot of book keeping and validation that video drivers used to do for us,” the duo said to GamingBolt.

However they will be using the next iteration of Gamebryo to resolve this issue. “Using Gamebryo can eliminate this kind of tedious work from developers while still obtaining all the benefits of DX12. Also Gamebryo abstracts away architectural differences between DX11 and DX12 like the removal of immediate context, so Gamebryo can help developers move to DX12 in the least intrusive way.”

In the end, nothing happens magically. DirectX 12 will no doubt change the game development scene for PC gaming and Xbox One. But developers will still need to find ways to properly optimize and program according to the new API.

We will have more coverage on Gamebase and Gamebryo. Stay tuned.

Gamebryo is one of the popular gaming engines around that have been used in AAA games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Bully: Scholarship Edition, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and many others. With the advent of the new console, Gamebase, the company behind Gamebryo are working on upgrading the engine further. GamingBolt got in touch with Bryan Tarlowski, Marketing Director at Gamebase and Yoonjae Hwang, one of the lead engineers on Gamebryo to know how they are utilizing the new hardware.

Both the new consoles, PS4 and Xbox One, have extremely similar architecture but yet they are slightly different from each other. The PS4 has unified memory architecture and the Xbox One has an extremely fast memory in eSRAM. GameBryo will be taking advantage of these two similar yet distinct architectures

“Gamebryo implementations on each platform are written in a way to maximally utilize underlying hardware. But developers won’t need to take different code path because Gamebryo API encapsulates the different hardware capabilities. For example, on PS4, Gamebryo will try to reduce deep copies between CPU and GPU whenever possible, and on Xbox One, Gamebryo will put some of frequently accessed GPU resources on eSRAM according to their access pattern,” the duo said to GamingBolt.

Till date, the eSRAM remains a topic of much controversy and debate. Several developers have found it easier to work with and at the same time, many have claimed it to be major hindrance. At least, the folks at Gamebase will be utilizing to its full potential.

What is Reach3dfx, you ask? It is a brand new fully featured, highly advanced 3D game engine that was revealed at the game Developers Conference earlier this year, that works across iOS, Android, Flash, and HTML5 platforms. It is based on the OpenFL framework and Haxe, and allows for an extremely high end 3D game experience to be delivered on these platforms that have traditionally been viewed as low end.

Gamebase, the guys who are working on this engine, have announced a close beta test for the upcoming engine, which will will showcase the HTML5 version and all features of the engine. For those invited, the closed beta test will run until August 18^th. 

If you are a game developer for the smaller, lower end platforms, this may be a good chance for you to get the jump on what appears to be a fairly full featured engine; for mobile game developers, it has never been a better time, as currently, they have access to a full range of great engines, including Unreal Engine 4, Unity, and now Reach3dx.

Reach3dx not only aims to bring a fully featured engine to mobile platforms but to allow for decreased development times in the process. GamingBolt spoke to Marketing & PR Manager Bryan Tarlowski along with Senior Lead Engineer on Reach3dx Paul Welch about the engine and the potential it holds.

Rashid Sayed: Can you please tell us a bit about yourself and the humble beginnings of GameBase?

Hello, my name is Bryan Tarlowski and I am the Marketing and PR manager for Gamebase. Paul Welch, who is beside me, is the Technical Director on Reach3dx. He will be answering most of the technical questions.

Rashid Sayed: GameBase has primarily focused on making engines for console games. I understand that the emergence of mobile gaming might be one of the reasons but other than that what were the reasons behind the development of Reach3dx?

With the industry shift to mobile gaming, we needed to create a new solution. We developed solutions for taking existing Gamebryo games and porting them over to an Android device, which is a great feature for current Gamebryo users. Meanwhile, there was a small team at Gamebase focusing on a brand new engine written from the ground up. It would eventually be Reach3dx. Gamebryo presented a robust development environment, but it was simply too large and full featured for mobile and web game development. As a result we started working on Reach3dx. There are two main goals of Reach3dx: the first is to provide cross-platform rendering that is flexible and high quality, and the second is to decrease development times so users can get to the market faster.

"The combination of OpenFL and Haxe was something that just made complete sense to do from a performance and user experience perspective. OpenFLand Haxe present a familiar game development environment where cross-platform games can be run in native code."

Rashid Sayed: What kind of advantages and challenges have OpenFL framework and Haxe bought into the development of Reach3dx?

The combination of OpenFL and Haxe was something that just made complete sense to do from a performance and user experience perspective. OpenFLand Haxe present a familiar game development environment where cross-platform games can be run in native code. It’s also an extremely easy development framework to use. Developers can prototype and build their game up very fast.

Rashid Sayed: How are you planning to position Reach3dx differently compared to Unity?

We would like small developers to be able to work with engines from Source. No indie developers really buy Unity from Source because it’s very expensive for small developers. So, our runtime is only around 30,000 lines of code, and we want the small teams to be able to work with engines.

Rashid Sayed: What kind of tools will Reach3dx provide so that cross rendering is not only time saving but is of the highest quality?

We have a full feature editor that allows the developer to setup your game scene. One of the great features of Reach3dx is that all the features will work cross-platform, so your game will look the same no matter what platform you run it on. We will utilize the latest versions of Open Gland Web Gl, as browsers and mobile devices also support them.

Rashid Sayed: Reach3dx is based off the popular GameBryoengine which was primarily used for PS3 and Xbox 360 games. What kind of programming challenges did the development team faced while pulling out parts from the GameBryo engine over to Reach3dx?

Actually, Reach3dx is written completely from the ground up! No lines of code were taken over from the Gamebryo engine and placed into Reach3dx. This is a fun statistic; The Reach3dx code size is about ¼ of just the Terrain system in Gamebryo.

"Certainly! With the work ARM and Nvidia is doing, it’s going to be very soon where we see last generation console quality on Mobile platforms."

Rashid Sayed: Furthermore, does this also indicate that mobile games are now at console level quality? [Since you are now using portions of the GameBryo engine]

Certainly! With the work ARM and Nvidia is doing, it’s going to be very soon where we see last generation console quality on mobile platforms.

Rashid Sayed: Unity is already doing an awesome with their set of tools and middleware technologies. They recently announced Unity 5 which is a level above compared to its previous iterations. Do you think Reach3dx will have its task cut out since there is no denying that Unity is now considered as a de facto solution for mobile gaming?

We absolutely have our task cut out for us! There are many companies offering development solutions. I think we have cut out a comfortable space for ourselves and offer enough differences to attract developers over to Reach3dx.

Rashid Sayed: When do you think you will start licensing Reach3dx?

Reach3dx will be available later this year.

Rashid Sayed: Furthermore Epic Games have announced their aggressive strategy to give developers full access to Unreal Engine 4 for $19.99. How does this affect your business model for Reach3dx?

Their decision to offer a monthly contract at GDC was interesting, and it was even more interesting watching companies like Crytek react! It doesn’t affect our business model for Reach3dx much, and we are pricing on a small per-platform price with no royalty fee.

Rashid Sayed: Is there anything else you want to tell about Reach3dx?

We are conducting an open Beta currently with Reach3dx. We are essentially sending out the engine in its current status and asking people to check it out and make a game with it! You can sign up for the beta by contacting GameBase.

Gamebase will be introducing a new game engine at the Game Developers Conference 2014 in San Francisco, they announced today.

It’s called Reach3dx, and it is a new, full-featured 3D game engine which provides cross-platform support for iOS, Android, HTML5, and Flash. It is based on the OpenFL framework and Haxe, and it facilitates a creative environment that should be highly familiar to the existing development community.

“There are two main goals of Reach3dx. The first is to provide cross-platform rendering that is flexible and high quality. The second is to decrease development times so users can get to the market faster on the ever changing mobile platforms.” said Paul Welch, Senior Lead Engineer on Reach3dx. “With Reach3dx, developers have a simplistic and efficient game creation environment.  I’m very excited to see what people will create with it in the near future.”

Gamebase is known for its award winning engines, the most popular of which is Gamebryo, which powered high profile games such as Epic Mickey 2. It will be interesting to see how well this new one catches on.