San Francisco, Calif. - Emergent Game Technologies, a provider of 3D game development solutions, has revealed the latest updates for its development engine Gamebryo LightSpeed at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The new features include the launch of LightSpeed’s “Kickstart” program, as well as whiteboxing capabilities, additive animation blending, and full support for D3D11.
Emergent also announced a new source distribution method for LightSpeed which gives developers access to three branches of engine code: Development, Beta and Release. Customers can download and use versions of LightSpeed’s code that is still in development.
Kickstart is a starting point for evaluation, rapid prototyping, and development using LightSpeed. It includes tutorials, documentation, videos, sample game code and game assets so developers can more easily see the workflow and technical details of our development kit. Kickstart is a constantly evolving set of content that has targeted threads for designers, artists and programmers, ultimately enabling users to jump right into creating any game they want without starting from scratch.
With the new whiteboxing tool in LightSpeed’s World Builder, game designers can now rapidly prototype simple, playable levels to easily test gameplay without support from either programmers or artists. The whiteboxed level can then be provided to artists to texture and light. LightSpeed’s data-driven support allows designers and artists to rapidly iterate and develop the level simultaneously, maximizing team productivity, enhancing creativity, and reducing development down time.
The LightSpeed D3D11 renderer, which was released as a developer preview in October, is now a fully integrated solution. The D3D11 renderer offers support for tessellation via Direct3D11’s new hull and domain shaders as well as support for compute shaders.
On Friday, March 12th, Emergent’s Dan Amerson will be giving a tech talk “Practical Triangle Tessellation” at Nvidia’s GDC booth (#1702) from 11:00-11:30 am.