Gamebryo Element

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Note: Gamebryo Element is a very high end game engine used by many of the larger studios. There are no licensing/purchase prices available on the public sections of the engine's web site.

For years, Gamebryo Element has set the standard for technical flexibility among game runtime engines - it's the best choice for developers looking for a rich set of tools to expand their production pipeline.

Because of this flexibility, our customers' games have been routinely greeted as some of the most beautiful, graphically rich games being created today.

Gamebryo 2.3 takes development to a new level with full-featured support for Nintendo's Wii™ console and a Scene Designer that allows developers to assemble new scenes, levels and worlds more quickly than ever. It's all part of a pluggable tools framework that lets developers focus on custom features, content and gameplay to make truly unique titles.

The power and extensibility of Gamebryo Element has made it the game runtime engine of choice for countless developers across the globe, including Firaxis Games' Sid Meier's Civilization IV and Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Gamebryo: Art Tools

Developers using Gamebryo have a wealth of useful tools at their disposal. Using our tools, artists can quickly create prototypes—and they can easily integrate their work into the game throughout the development process. From animation tools and exporters to 3ds max & Maya plug-ins and run-time performance tools, Gamebryo technology is created for flexibility and ease of use.

With instant access to updated art assets, your entire development team can avoid pipeline pileups.
3ds max & Maya

Known for being extremely flexible and robust, Gamebryo’s 3ds max and Maya plug-ins make for a seamless transition between art assets created in those programs and the actual game. Plus, once your artwork is in the game, we make it easy to adjust it to create more realistic effects. Our 3ds max and Maya plug-ins let artists

* create game-specific content,
* edit and tweak content for performance and visual quality
* export content with platform-specific optimizations

You can add custom features specific to your needs, as the plug-ins support the Gamebryo component framework. Gamebryo is designed to fit into the developer’s content pipeline – not the other way around.
Gamebryo’s 3ds max & Maya plug-ins offer the flexibility to:

* Add unique features using our pluggable architecture.
* Preview interactive content, including animation, lighting and effects in the actual game environment.
* Preview content on consoles from within the modeling tool.
* Export virtually any geometry, textures, texture effects, animations, particles and skin/bones information that your modeling package can create.
* Optimize content on export for the target platform—as well as customize the export for the requirements of the specific title and developer.
* Create, modify, compress and tune animation using animation tools.
* Apply pixel and vertex shaders as easily as regular textures or materials.

Animation tools

Gamebryo’s animation tools offer a clear view into how animations will look in the game. Using these tools, you can:

* Set up, tune and tweak transitions between different animation sequences.
* Apply sequences to different character models.
* Preview groups of animation layers
* Preview Bone LODs, which assist in the creation of high-performance, many-character scenes.
* Export animation data and a ready-to-use state machine that make the programmer’s job easy.

Run-time performance analysis tools

Using technology found in Emergent’s Metrics Element, Gamebryo can now easily show how your game will perform on your target platform, using all the art assets, functionality and features you’ve created. Gamebryo can gather performance profiling and memory tracking stats for updating and rendering an entire scene graph in real time, allowing developers to measure:

* Time to render each object
* Number of polygons rendered for each object
* Culling vs. rendering statistics per object
* Profile of memory usage
* Track size, duration and location of allocations
* Export memory reports for detailed analysis

Gamebryo also features a new visual statistics tracker that takes performance monitoring to new levels.

Gamebryo’s profiling framework can be easily extended to report application-specific statistics.

Gamebryo: The Engine

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion from Bethesda SoftworksThe Gamebryo engine is both powerful and flexible enough to suit the needs of any type of game – just look at the range of major games that use it: Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Civilization IV, Dark Age of Camelot, andThe Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion to name a few.

Gamebryo runs on every major platform and is already in use for Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3 titles. It boasts outstanding, reliable performance, and includes all the rendering, animation, and special effects features needed to create any game.

The Gamebryo run-time engine is a well-architected C++ API that includes multiple culling and sorting techniques reduce CPU usage by drawing only visible objects.

Rendering
Gamebryo’s robust rendering tools ensure that when developers pull together game assets, the result is totally polished. Here are a few of the features that make it happen:

* Completely customizable rendering pipeline features the ability to specify techniques and data on a per-object basis.
* Customizable pipeline is directly integrated with art tools – allowing artists to view results immediately.
* Pixel and vertex shaders are fully supported. Shaders can be written in assembly, Cg, or HLSL.
* Default rendering path that supports a wide range of texture effects such as
o dark maps
o decals
o projected lights and shadows
o bump maps
o spherical and cubic environment maps
* Animated textures for effects such as fog, fire, smoke and explosions
* Rendered textures that can be used for advanced effects such as television screens, dynamic shadows and mirrors.
* Support for multiple geometric primitives including lines, particles, triangles, triangle strips and a variety of screen-space primitives.
* Full range of simple rendering effects including transparency and fogging.
* Pixel & vertex shader examples to demonstrate effects like normal mapping, hardware vertex tweening, shader maps, toon shading and parallax mapping.
* High Dynamic Range (HDR) texture and buffer formats, along with other advanced texture formats.
* Full-screen pixel shader effects that are easily applied—blurring, light “blooming,” night vision, and edge detection.

Motion
Gamebryo features full support for almost all animation methods and parameters produced from 3ds max and Maya, including

* hierarchical, spline-based interpolations
* translation and rotation keyframes using linear, Bezier and TCB interpolations
* quaternion-based rotations
* cycle control for clamping, looping and reversing sequences.

Gamebryo exporters support the spline-based animation compression system used by the Gamebryo animation system. Artists can control the level of animation compression for entire characters or on a per-bone basis to balance run-time memory usage and visual fidelity.
Other motion features include:

* A powerful animation sequence manager that makes it possible to share animation data among different characters in the game, use multiple independent animation sequences on a single character, and transition and layer the animations on the fly.
* Particle systems . Virtually any particle effect in 3ds max and Maya is supported, including animated emitters and deflectors, forces like gravity and drag, and mesh- or volume-based emitters.
* Skinned characters , in either hardware or software.
* Support for vertex morphing, light and material color animation, texture coordinate animation, and just about any other animatable value.

Run-time performance optimizations and features

* Batching of primitives. Expensive set-up time for primitives can be minimized by grouping together primitives that share the same rendering attributes (such as texture, lighting, etc.).
* Selective update. Non-moving scene elements don't require updating as frequently as those scene elements that move, lowering per-frame update time and increasing frame rate.
* Portal-based visibility. Portal systems trivially reject certain “rooms” from rendering from a particular vantage point.
* Level of detail, including LODs for skinned characters to reduce bone and vertex count.
* Aggressive memory management. Includes an override-able small object allocator to reduce fragmentation and memory usage.
* Animation compression.
* Multithread architecture. Includes task managers to support CPU-intensive tasks running in the background.
* Fast load times. Support for background loading allows smooth loading of files during gameplay with no apparent load times.

Platform-specific optimizations
Gamebryo has been carefully optimized for each platform and incorporates special features designed specifically to enhance the target platform development experience.

Nintendo Wii

* Extensive rendering capabilities and integrations with key graphics tools, such as Max and Maya
* Scene Designer layout tool that allows drag and drop placement of objects, lights, and cameras
* An animation tool for mixing and matching animations and transitions
* Built-in libraries (collision detection, portal system and application framework)

Xbox 360

* VMX128 optimized matrix math routines.
* Multithreaded operations
* Memory management optimization
* Task manager framework for easily harnessing the power of the multiple processors on Xbox 360.
* Automatic generation of vertex and pixel shaders consistent with the Gamebryo multitexture pipeline.

PLAYSTATION 3

* Memory management optimization
* Cross-platform parallel task creation & issuing framework
* Automatic generation of vertex and pixel shaders
* In-console asset previews

PlayStation 2

* Geometry compression with fast VU1 decompression.
* VU1 hardware skinning.
* Support for 4-bit palettized textures to maximize VRAM usage.

Xbox

* Geometry compression.
* SSE optimized math routines.
* Pluggable memory framework for textures and vertex buffers.

Gamebryo: New Features
Wii™ Support: Gamebryo power for Nintendo developers

Wii™ developers can now experience the flexibility and extensive toolset of Emergent's game runtime engine, Gamebryo Element. Loaded with rendering and animation tools, a Wii-specific viewer, extensive libraries and APIs to simplify pipeline integration, Gamebryo Element gives Wii™ teams everything they need to optimize and deliver visually stunning games on time and on budget.
Floodgate: a potent Gamebryo feature for next-gen development

Gamebryo Element 2.3 includes Floodgate, a new stream processing engine that helps next-generation developers squeeze the most processing power out of every core on their target development platforms.

With Floodgate, applications quickly and easily take advantage of the processor and memory configuration on each platform. As a result, studios can develop multiple skus faster and release those skus in closer succession. Visit the Floodgate page for more details.
Scene Designer: a highly customizable layout editor

Gamebryo's Scene Designer amplifies the power of the Gamebryo engine and tools, delivering the ability to assemble new worlds from discrete assets more rapidly than ever before.
Now developers can easily place objects and lights in a scene, assigning a range of attributes and features to objects.

Other features of the Scene Designer include:

* Full-featured object placement and scene navigation tools
* Interactive display of the scene running in Gamebryo or using Gamebryo rendering technology
* Ability to save scenes/levels for direct import into Gamebryo applications
* Tools for creating, positioning and orienting lights and cameras
* Easily extensible plug-in architecture allowing nearly any aspect of the tool to be customized for the specific demands of any game.