View source for OS/2 Warp Game Developer's Seminar

Written by [[Dave Briccetti]]

=== Introduction ===

On August 16th, 1995, I attended the OS/2 Warp Game Developer's Seminar,
presented by the IBM Solution Partnership Center with speakers from the IBM
Personal Software Products Boca Raton lab.  The Seminar was held in San
Mateo, near San Francisco.  This is a brief report about my experiences at
that event.

I have no association with any of the products or companies mentioned
herein, except that I'm a member of several IBM vendor support programs.

=== Presentations ===

After a continental breakfast I took a seat with about 80 other developers
in the classroom at the Solution Partnership Center.	Like the airlines,
IBM had overbooked the event, but they weren't offering free future classes
to people who would go away.	(Their classes are free anyway.)

==== Welcome & Introduction ====

E.  Lloyd Webber, Worldwide Games Brand Manager from Boca Raton, Florida,
started the presentations.  Lloyd announced the OS/2 Warp Entertainment
Toolkit Beta 1, which is part of the now shipping Developers Connection 8.
He made it very clear that IBM wants to help game developers, and told us
that they want to hear from us about how they can help us.

==== Video Performance ====

Next up was one of the Entertainment Toolkit developers, Luis Rodriguez, on
video performance with Direct Interface Video Extensions (DIVE).	Luis
showed an animated jet fighter in a window (some of you have seen this
before), and it was running so fast it was just a blur.  It was running at
around 135 frames per second.  Maximized on the 640 x 480 desktop it was
about 36 frames per second.

Luis took us through the steps involved in using DIVE from a program.  I
won't go into the details since they are documented very well elsewhere.
Take a look at the IBM OS/2 Games Home Page for more information.  See the
last section of this report for the URL.


One interesting feature of the toolkit allows a PM game developer to switch
to full-screen modes such as 320 x 200, which is typical for games, and get
the same performance as DOS games while still using the PM architecture.

==== 3D Graphics (BRender) ====

After a break we had a fascinating and awesome demonstration of BRender, a
3D real-time, high performance rendering program, an evaluation copy of
which is included with the toolkit.  BRender stands for `Blazing Render,'
and it truly blazes.  Rich Seidner of Argonaut Technologies (formerly with
IBM and then Kaleida) showed the product, along with several games such as
FX Fighter which use BRender.

Here the topic drifted far from OS/2 as people asked esoteric questions
about other platforms, and most of the stuff Rich showed was under DOS.
Nonetheless, the technology is fascinating, and running under OS/2.

Rich announced a special offer:  For a limited time, developers may license
BRender for unlimited, royalty-free use under OS/2 for a onetime fee of
$2,000.  For multi- platform use, the fee is $10,000.

=== Lunch and Technology Demos ===

IBM fed us sandwiches and cookies and we wandered around to various rooms
where we could meet the toolkit developers and other IBMers from Boca and
Austin.  One of those developers was Mike Brown, the author of PMMPEG, a
program to display MPEG movies.  Several months ago Mike added DIVE support
to PMMPEG, and he showed me the difference.  The color and speed
improvements are quite impressive.

I also saw programs with the new network games APIs demonstrated.  There
were some glitches but the concept is pretty cool:  OS/2 APIs to connect
players up to a game over the internet.

=== Presentations, Continued ===

==== Audio ====

Next up was Larry Kyrala who talked about Direct Audio and real-time MIDI.
These features allow more precise control over audio in the dynamic game
environment.  One buzzword I heard was `score richening.'  I think this
means that when you're getting your butt kicked in a game the music gets
louder and busier.

==== Input Devices ====

Herman Rodriguez was the next speaker.  Herman leads the toolkit
development team.  He struck me as being very knowledgeable and capable.
In this segment he talked about device driver support for generic input
devices, and joysticks specifically.  He has developed an API which not
only supports current analog joysticks, but which will support new digital
joysticks being developed.  He said his goal was to generalize the
interface to support devices such as data gloves.

==== Multi-player Network ====

The toolkit includes warpnet.dll, which provides an API to support
multi-player games over a network.	The API currently supports TCP/IP.
There are functions such as WarpNetInitialize, Open, Broadcast, PackSend,
PackRecv, and Close.  Herman Rodriguez made this presentation.

==== Technology Demos ====

After the presentations we were invited to wander around and meet the
developers and look at their demonstrations.  I saw an early version of
Avarice, from Stardock Systems.  It has stunning graphics, but the guy
running it (an attendee like myself) didn't know how to run it and we just
didn't get it.  It was very soothing and mellow, but I'm a Dark Forces kind
of guy, I guess.	Psygnosis' Lemmings for OS/2 was cute.  SimTown was there
but I didn't see it.  I think I saw Star Emperor, which I believe is the
follow-on to the highly successful Galactive Civilizations.  It looked
good.  

=== Conclusion ===

I very much enjoyed taking a day and immersing myself in this new
entertainment development technology.  I remain convinced that IBM is
committed to supporting OS/2 developers.	IBM's developers of this new
technology appear quite knowledgeable, and they obviously enjoy what
they're doing.  Now let's see if I can satisfy my own creative needs and
develop something fun!

=== More Information ===

I can be reached at mailto:daveb@netcom.com, and 74475,1072 on  CompuServe, or by phone at 510 945-7565, Ext.  210.  My WWW home page is [http://www.best.com/~daveb].
 
The location of the HTML version of this document is [http://www.best.com/~daveb/Programming/gamedev.html].
 
The IBM OS/2 Games Home Page is [http://www.austin.ibm.com/os2games www.austin.ibm.com/os2games].
 
 Herman Rodrigues, Toolkit Manager:	mailto:hermanr@vnet.ibm.com.
 Rich Seidner, Argonaut:  mailto:rich@argonaut.com.
 Bradley Wardell, Stardock Systems:	mailto:wardell@ibm.net.
 
 IBM Solution Partnership Center -- West
 2929 Campus Drive, Suite 275
 San Mateo CA 94403
 
 1-800-678-4249 or 1-415-312-0240
 fax 1-415-312-0254
 
 IBM Solution Partnership Center, OS/2 Program Manager,
 Keith Lew, mailto:kflew@sfovmic1.vnet.ibm.com.