GAMEBRYO : SNAPSHOT

TM

Deciding to build an engine or buy an off the shelf solution is an ongoing battle throughout the game industry.
This decision impacts various aspects of a project and can significantly change the risk level. Emergent is
dedicated to helping the video game industry continually raise the creative bar and allow our developers to
focus on making great games while we focus on the core technology. We firmly believe developers need time
and money to concentrate on innovative game play, mechanics, design and art and let us mitigate risk by
delivering world class solutions like Gamebryo, creating a cost and time effective relationship.

Gamebryo is a complete platform for creating next-generation games, visual simulations and other
3D experiences. Every aspect of Emergent’s state-of-the-art engine helps game studios reduce
development time and costs, while empowering artists and engineers to create more spectacular
visual effects and more immersive game environments. Proven in over 200 games across 15 genres,
and with 100 additional titles in development, the infinitely modifiable Gamebryo is simply the
most powerful and battle-tested commercial solution for any game project.

ARTISTS are able to craft their visuals by

assembling detailed scenes with Scene
Designer and by sequencing within the
Animation Tool. What’s more, feature-rich Max,
Maya, and XSI Exporters allow artists to use the
workflows they know and love in their favorite
digital content creation tools, and to
experience their visions coming to life in
Gamebryo runtime.
TEAMS are amazed at how easily large
numbers of developers can work with
Gamebryo, and how well their work translates
across all platforms, whether it’s for the PC,
Sony’s PlayStation3, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, or
Wii. Moreover, Gamebryo fits seamlessly into
studio pipelines; so instead of building the
infrastructure to support their game, teams
can focus their time and energy on designing
unique and more immersive gameplay.
ENGINEERS will appreciate the world-class quality
of Gamebryo’s cross-platform code base. Targeting a
new platform is often as simple as recompiling; while
seamless support for single-core, multi-core, and even
many-core environments, is built right in. The C++
code for the engine, the supplementary libraries and
the samples are all clean and legible, making it easy to
understand and modify. Moreover, Gamebryo’s modu-
larity allows engineers to easily integrate their own
internal applications, or to extend the engine’s func-
tionality with best-of-breed middleware from any one
of Emergent’s technology partners.
STUDIOS can rest easy, assured that our superior
support team is available to answer even the most
difficult questions, and to help them achieve new
and exciting directions for their games. Emergent’s
world-class support is unique, and is designed with
our customers’ needs in mind.
FLEXIBLE RENDERING Gamebryo’s cross-platform renderers, known for
their flexibility and their modular design, have
been used to create stunning visual effects in
hundreds of games that span all game genres
and multiple generations of gaming hardware.

< A demo built in 1 month by a small evaluation

team of 8 from Coldwood, on a binary version of
Gamebryo. Shadowing, high dynamic range lighting,
depth of field, heat shimmer, and soft particle
effects are all dynamic and repurposed from
Gamebryo samples shipped with the product.
Custom code was used for screen-space ambient
occlusion, rim lighting, reflection, inverse kinematics,
and audio integration.

FLEXIBILITY – A developer’s control starts with

data-driven assets and extends to C++ modification. Assets
from DCC tools as well as shaders expose rich out-of-the-box
graphics; while developers can enhance the uniqueness of
their AAA titles by writing their own C++ APIs to highlight
unique, platform-specific game features.
Your concept
was born, SHADER SYSTEMS – Gamebryo
supports data-driven shaders, such as HLSL, FX, CG and
now let’s CGFX, allowing developers to choose the shader authoring
environment that best fits their needs. Gamebryo also offers
breathe a NSF as a cross platform data-driven shader format, simplifying
technique setup on all platforms with one file. Additionally, a
little life well-designed C++ API between renderers and shaders allows
developers to implement more advanced & high-performance
into it... rendering techniques by coupling shader authoring tightly
with the renderers.
FLEXIBLE RENDERING
STANDARD MATERIAL – Gamebryo provides a Standard Material
that artists can configure using a simple GUI:
S S
HADOWING YSTEM – A flexible
Shadowing System is adaptable to many shadow map-based
techniques. Depth maps, percentage closer filtering (PCF), and
variance shadow maps are all supported out-of-the-box.

The GUI supports:

- Skinned and unskinned
transformations
- Vertex colors
- Base maps
- Normal maps
- Specular mask maps
- Emissive maps
- Decal maps (up to 3)
- Cubic and spherical
environment maps
- Per-vertex fog
- Parallax maps
- Light maps
- Detail maps F R
RAME ENDERING YSTEM – S
- Bump environment maps Gamebryo’s Frame Rendering System eases the construction of
- Projected light maps, clipped
rendering operations for performing complex rendering effects
or unclipped (up to 3)
- Projected shadow maps, clipped within a frame. Frame rendering reduces common rendering code,
or unclipped (up to 3) allows for more portable effects between applications, and
- Animated texture transforms simplifies the enabling and disabling of effects.
per map
- Point/Spot/Directional/Ambient
lights contributing to the diffuse,
specular, and ambient color, up to
8 total lights, per-pixel or per-vertex

The Standard Material is implemented via a fragment material

library that is available to game makers.

Fragment Materials combine small portions of shaders that are

bundled together by the asset type and the runtime effect
applied to objects. To give their game an even more unique
look, many customers modify the standard material with
additional features.
FLEXIBLE RENDERING
MESH MODIFIER SYSTEM - The latest version
of Gamebryo also introduces the Mesh Modifier System as a general
purpose API for dynamically updating geometry.
The Mesh Modifier System:
Supports skinning, morphing, particle system simulation and
quad generation, instance culling, and water simulation
Enables developers to generate custom modifiers for creating
unique effects in their game, such as terrain, hair, fur, stencil shadow
volumes, and much more.
All modifiers that ship with Gamebryo take full advantage of
Floodgate™, so work performed by the modifier is executed in
parallel on multiple cores
FLEXIBLE GEOMETRY SYSTEM
The latest version of Gamebryo features a completely overhauled
Geometry System that gives games complete control over data types,
interleaving, and sharing between objects. The new Geometry System:
Removes runtime data conversions, accelerating data loading
Allows flexible and compressed data representations that reduce
bus bandwidth to the GPU
Eliminates buffer-to-buffer copies and any memory fragmentation
that may have occurred due to these copies for common
geometry usage
Supports optimization of data access patterns using multiple
geometry streams
Provides a generic interface for geometry data access using
semantic names to distinguish data meaning. This helps support
multiple NBT sets, fur length, 3D texture coordinates and so on.
Supports 2^32 vertices within a single object, effectively
removing the per-object vertex ceiling
Supports large objects with 32-bit indices, while still supporting
16-bit indices for space savings on smaller objects
Enables GPU hardware instancing
Enables more flexible geometry data sharing, such as sharing index,
position, and UV coordinates while using unique vertex colors per
object
Applies any material or shader to any compatible NiMesh object,
including particle systems
FLEXIBLE RENDERING
SCENE GRAPH - Most Gamebryo games utilize several hierarchical
Scene Graphs. These graphs can be organized for hierarchical transformation, culling,
state management, attachments, and so on – all based on the unique needs of the game.

PARTICLES SYSTEMS – The latest version of Gamebryo adds

support for shaders on particles. If the target platform supports it, simulation and quad
generation can also take advantage of multiple cores.
Creative freedom IMMEDIATE MODE RENDERING – Gamebryo features a
without compromise. simple API to directly submit rendering geometry. This is primarily used in tools and
for debugging visualization.

CULLING AND PORTALS – Simple culling and portals are

provided, with clean APIs to enable the custom genre-specific solutions that
customers want to implement.

BACKGROUND LOADING THREAD SAFETY

Renderers support background loading of files and thread-safe creation of GPU
resources (PC resource creation is deferred and done later in the main thread).

EFFECT SAMPLES – Gamebryo ships with dozens of samples and

demos, many of which demonstrate state-of-the-art effects, including High Dynamic
Range lighting, bloom, depth of field, heat shimmer, soft particles, multiple render
targets, motion blur, picking, dynamic textures, rendered cube maps, reflections,
dynamic CPU vertex modification, and programmatically controlled particle systems.
 SCENE DESIGNER Scene Designer amplifies the power of the Gamebryo
engine and tools, allowing studios to assemble new
worlds from discrete assets more rapidly than
ever before.

ENTITY PLACEMENT AND EDITING – Scene Designer allows

developers to easily place entities in a scene based on Gamebryo models and anima-
tions. Entity properties can also be added and edited, if necessary.

CUSTOM ENTITY TYPES – Custom entity types can also be created

and placed within the game world. Grab all the elements
LIGHTS AND CAMERA – Lights and cameras can be adjusted and and watch them
optimized with ease. come together...
MULTI-USER COLLABORATION – The newest version
of Scene Designer adds support for prefabs (compound entities) and multiple, lockable
layers so several artist can work on the same scenes and assets.

ADDED USABILITY – New tagging and search functionality saves

time and improves efficiency for levels and world design.

REAL - TIME PREVIEW – Scene Designer provides an accurate real-

time preview of how a scene will appear in an application, including lighting, shaders
and particle systems.

BUILT ON INDUSTRY - STANDARD TECHNOLOGY

Built on the industry-standard .NET framework, Scene Designer can easily be adopted
into any game pipeline. What’s more, extensive plug-ins create a highly customizable
workflow and user interface.
TERRAIN SYSTEM Gamebryo’s cross-platform Terrain System is in-
tegrated with the runtime. It includes complete
support from the tool chain and is complement-
ed by a WSIWYG Terrain Editor that is incorpo-
rated into Scene Designer.

INTUITIVE TOOLS – The Terrain Editor allows teams to sculpt

game terrains interactively or to import height fields generated by other ap-
plications. Terrain texturing, painting and decal tools enable teams to build
materials in layers in order to quickly generate extensive visual variations.

COLLISION DETECTION – The Terrain System is integrated

with Gamebryo’s collision detection system, so game objects can realistically
interact with (and even deform) the terrain.

TERRAIN META-DATA – Arbitrary meta-data can be associat-

ed with layers on the terrain and queried at runtime to drive game logic such
as path finding, audio changes, foliage types, or anything else a developer
dreams up.

DYNAMIC LOD – The terrain runtime adds detail when close-

up terrain patches are rendered, and removes detail when far-away terrain
patches are rendered.

IDV SPEED TREE® INTEGRATION – The optional

Gamebryo integration with IDV SpeedTree is fully compatible with the
Terrain System, so SpeedTree trees can be interactively placed on
the terrain.
 FLOODGATE SCALABLE TM

MULTI-CORE SOLUTION
Gamebryo is unmatched at harnessing the pro-
cessing and graphics power of modern, multi-core
PCs and consoles. By removing the complexity of
MULTI-CORE BUILDING BLOCKS - Gamebryo provides optimizing multi-core production environments,
robust, proven classes for wrapping low-level multithreading concepts like the Floodgate stream processing engine provides
atomic operations, synchronization primitives, and even threads themselves. When a high-performance interface for multithreaded
it comes time to consider targeting a new platform, there’s no overhead for learning computing. The engine provides a number of
a new API or testing handwritten classes. low-level building blocks for threading that allow
studios to jumpstart their own development.
FLOODGATE TM
- The Floodgate stream processing engine provides a
straightforward execution model for computational tasks that’s easily portable to
all platforms, including PlayStation3. Floodgate manages the decomposition,
dependency analysis, synchronization and data transfer for tasks, reducing the
time programmers need for producing high-performance code. Open the floodgates
MESH MODIFIERS - The Gamebryo Mesh Modifier System layers & jumpstart your
on top of Floodgate and the Gamebryo Geometry System to provide a flexible
dispatch system for per-frame tasks. Studios can reduce the complexity of the
game development
application logic required in a title by associating Floodgate kernels with mesh
modifiers and relying on Gamebryo to execute and retrieve results at the
appropriate time with each frame.

AUTOMATIC ACCELERATION - Whether or not a

studio chooses to write a multithreaded application, Gamebryo will automatically
manage the details. For example, directly from the DCC tools, mesh modifiers are
applied to accelerate particle simulation, deformable meshes, skinning, and more.
 EMBRACING MULTI-PLATFORM
Not only is Gamebryo built for PC, Xbox360, PS3 and Wii;
it’s built to leverage each platform’s unique features.

Xbox 360
All of Emergent’s products
are built on a common
architecture, but are targeted
for optimization on each
specific platform. So even
if a studio “only” develops a
single PC, Xbox360, PS3 or P2-99-1 Guidelines for using PLAYSTATION®
Wii title, the studio can rest
assured that it’s choosing a
proven technology solution
optimized for that specific
platform. Whether you are
developing serially or
About using the logos On PLAYSTATION®3 Tools & Middleware packaging
concurrently, Gamebryo Licensee can use the PS family logo mark and the Too
maximizes your investment, Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI). However, the log
When using the logos in ways described above, follow
allowing cross platform from SCEI for the proposed usage.
games to cost less and
deliver faster! Correct usage of the Follow the guidelines below for correct usage of the lo
Tools & Middleware logotype and
accompanying logo marks
On light background

Lo
TMPS3_S1_CP

PLAYSTATION 3

TMPS3_S3_MP
GROWING PARTNER PROGRAM
With game pipelines becoming an ever-more-complex
combination of technologies, productivity throughout
the development process is relying more and more on
Emergent’s partner integrations ensure the degree to which solutions interconnect.
that studios have access to the highest
level of integrated technologies for their
development. Emergent partner solutions
Emergent’s Current Partners
give studios unrivaled flexibility with a
choice of great middleware products
that work together out-of-the-box.
Moreover, when middleware solutions
are “Emergent Certified”, studios can be
©
sure that the partner’s products meet
Emergent’s standards of excellence.
They can also be certain that Emergent G A M E T O O L S

has worked closely with its partners to

co-develop an integration that is
rigorously tested, supported, and
documented, and has samples
demonstrating the optimal method
for using them together.
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LiveMove Pro
WORLD-CLASS CODE
All code in Gamebryo is easy-to-read and cleanly archi-
tected. All runtime code is C++. Tools are written in C++
and C#. Accompanying the code is easily readable, fully
indexed, and hyperlinked documentation, as well as
dozens of samples for both programmers and artists.

The modular architecture of Gamebryo allows teams to easy modify, ex-

tend and re-factor the solution to meet the needs of their game’s genre,
complexity and unique creative vision. What’s more, a wide-range of
Gamebryo partner integrations enable studios to extend their pipelines,
and enhance their games, with ease.

Modify, extend & push the

limits of Gamebryo with our
cleanly scripted code.
 WORLD CLASS SUPPORT
Emergent’s experienced team of engineers is perfectly positioned to assist
teams with their technical needs so they can focus on developing great
games. Support is provided by Emergent’s A-team of high-level support
engineers - all of whom are uniquely qualified to quickly answer the
Focus on creating question at hand, and to get teams back on track as quickly as possible.
incredible games.
We’ll take care of the rest.
What does a studio get with support from Emergent?

- Free patch upgrades throughout the year

Emergent’s support engineers are all hand-picked. Each has experi-
ence in writing code, developing Gamebryo product features and - Free upgrades to minor version releases of Emergent products
designing games. And each has hands-on engineering experience
- Support via email or the Emergent customer portal (coming soon)
using Gamebryo. In addition, their knowledge extends beyond code
base and art to the entire process of building a game, giving them a - Responses in one business day or less. 70% of Emergent’s
360-degree view of a studio’s needs. requests are handled within 4 hours!

- Responses in one business day or less. 70% of Emergent’s

Emergent’s team is educated in, and experienced with, both game requests are handled within 4 hours!
development processes and technologies, including:
- Art and development team support. Emergent will even help
- Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Maya® studios optimize their art assets in Gamebryo!
- Softimage® | XSI®
- A dedicated Technical Account Manager
- Multiplatform development
- Multi-core development - Access to Emergent’s Support Forum
- Performance and shader optimizations
- Access to many additional samples and tutorials
- All of Emergent’s technology partners
- Over 20 years of experience in building core technologies

- New releases designed for seamless transitions

CONTACT US TODAY!

To learn more about Gamebryo visit

www.emergent.net

or to contact Emergent go to
www.emergent.net/contact-us

or download us at Sony’s Dev Net:

https://ps3.scedev.net/projects/gamebryo

300+
teams
can’t be
wrong...