QSDK 1.1 Documentation

Overview

Contents

• Introduction
• Streaming
• Visual Quality
• Productivity
• Business Model
• Is the QSDK Right for your Project?

Introduction

Welcome to the QSDK, comprising the Q engine, tools and documentation, a  development solution for games and other high performance 3D interactive applications on Sony PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox, Linux and Microsoft Windows.

The QSDK's design strengths include:

• Integrated background loading and content streaming
• High visual quality on all platforms
• Productivity enhancing development tools and samples

Alongside the rich feature set and tool chain comes a highly flexible business model that enables application developers to get started and even ship on PC at no cost.

Qube's core team has a strong track record in developing cutting edge middleware. Qube and third party companies have shipped products using the QSDK. So you can trust the capabilities of our engine, and our commitment to perfecting it.

Streaming

The integrated background loading of the QSDK makes it easy to load objects while maintaining framerate in just a few lines of code.

But the QSDK goes much further: the API and tools have been designed to facilitate the creation of streaming content. Worlds can be partially loaded, with only the essential information held in memory. Loading screens are a thing of the past, allowing arbitrarily large worlds with rich content.

With the QSDK, the gating factor on world size becomes one of authoring facility rather than memory constraints.

QStudio, the QSDK's WYSIWYG authoring tool, complements the runtime capabilities with a set of content validation and mastering tools that enable a level to be tuned for streaming performance and then mastered to produce a file optimized for streaming.

Visual Quality

The QSDK supports full Phong lighting with specular mapping on all platforms. Phong lighting on its own can give an overly plastic feel to scenes, but when accompanied with specular mapping the range of achievable material effects is vastly broadened. We have particularly concentrated on achieving this high quality lighting at competitive performance on PS2.

The resulting lighting quality is generally higher than that seen in any but the most graphically polished products.

The real-time Phong lighting is combined with full screen anti-aliasing on all consoles to give a feel of reality to the graphics more convincing than that of solely pre-lit scenes. Pre-lit vertex colors can be used in conjunction with the real-time lighting to allow total flexibility and control of the scene illumination.

QStudio provides real-time WYSIWYG editing tools for lighting and shader properties, to maximize a scene's visual quality.

Productivity

The QSDK provides a number of aids to productivity:

• A Complete API
  The QSDK API provides access to all functionality, both editing and runtime. All the tools, including the exporters and QStudio, are built on top of the public, documented API. Even parts of the Q engine itself, such as Puppets and scripting, are built entirely on top of the public QServer API. There are no cryptic file formats to master, no hidden API functions. Anything that can be done at authoring time can be done at runtime.
  
• A Portable Data Format
  The core data formats of the QSDK are portable, so a single data file can work on all platforms, simplifying asset management during development. Platform specific data files can be deployed for enhanced performance in the finished product.
  
• QStudio
  QStudio is the QSDK's primary authoring tool, complementing the geometry and animation building capabilities of MAX and Maya. Triggers, game objects, sounds, lighting, shaders and animation state machines may all be edited on the fly. The ability to view and modify data also makes it an effective tool for debugging scenes.
  QStudio is a true WYSIWYG editor, using the same PC QSDK renderer as other products built on the QSDK.
  
• Sample Code
  A wide variety of samples are provided to help coders get to grips with the QSDK, including:
  • Complete source code for QDemo 2, a commercial quality streaming game demo. A complete production guide is supplied, describing the demo, its art assets and their workflow. The QDemo 2 code can be easily adapted for other products, potentially saving months of development time.
  • Complete source code for the MAX and Maya exporters.

Business Model

The QSDK comes with a highly competitive business model. Users may develop and ship products on Windows and Linux PCs free of charge. Commercial level support is available for the PC version. The console versions of the QSDK are only available with a support contract. See the QDN website for further details.

Is the QSDK Right for your Project?

The QSDK has many strong points in streaming, visual quality and productivity, but it is not suitable for all projects. In particular, there is currently no public low level graphics API; this will be added in a future release of the QSDK. For many projects, it should not be a problem, as the graphical standards achievable with the current API exceed those seen in most current titles; but it is not currently possible to add further cutting edge graphical effects which require low level graphics access.

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