From wyeth@cs.arizona.edu Sat Oct 22 02:13:39 1994 Return-Path: Received: from mx5.u.washington.edu by stein2.u.washington.edu (5.65+UW94.4/UW-NDC Revision: 2.30 ) id AA10561; Sat, 22 Oct 94 02:13:39 -0700 Received: from hitl-new.hitl.washington.edu by mx5.u.washington.edu (5.65+UW94.9/UW-NDC Revision: 2.30 ) id AA21677; Sat, 22 Oct 94 02:13:36 -0700 Received: by hitl.hitl.washington.edu; id AA15400; Sat, 22 Oct 1994 02:10:53 -0700 Received: from relay1.UU.NET by rodan.UU.NET with SMTP id QQxmrs00970; Sat, 22 Oct 1994 05:13:25 -0400 Received: from optima.CS.Arizona.EDU by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP id QQxmrs13711; Sat, 22 Oct 1994 05:13:22 -0400 Received: from caslon.CS.Arizona.EDU by optima.CS.Arizona.EDU (5.65c/15) via SMTP id AA11621; Sat, 22 Oct 1994 02:13:20 MST Received: (wyeth@localhost) by caslon.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.6.7/8.6.4) id CAA26809; Sat, 22 Oct 1994 02:13:17 -0700 To: sci-virtual-worlds@uunet.uu.net Path: not-for-mail From: wyeth@cs.arizona.edu (Wyeth) Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: RW Developer Response Date: 22 Oct 1994 02:13:10 -0700 Organization: University of Arizona CS Department, Tucson AZ Lines: 63 Message-Id: <38al36$q5i@caslon.CS.Arizona.EDU> Status: OR This is primarily a response to a post for more info from renderware developers, but it also should answer some general questions I have seen earlier on this group. I have been working with RW (renderware) since its 1.2 release (about 8 months ago). The main effort of my work has been a VR game called CyberKnights, which will be out around the end of this month. It is a LBE (site-based) entertainment module, which includes 3d spacialized sound from an alphatron board, a liquid image HMD with tracker, a proffesionally compsed audio CD for music, and a sleek, relaxing sit-down unit that looks alot like a sports-car. The unit will begin sales early next month and soon will be updated with multiple experiences. I wrote CK (cyber- knights) on a pentium-90 (which the software runs on) using watcom C 10.0 and RW. Now that you know what I've been up to, I'll share with you some of the knowledge I have gained. First, let me get rid of some misconceptions: RW is not a VR world building toolkit. World toolkit is, CDK is, Virtus is. RW is not. RW is a 'rendering solution', which in short means it is a small subset of a world building environment. However, it does happen to have the fastest rendering I have ever seen without hardware acceleration under windows, which makes it ripe for evolving into a VR world builder. If you want to be able to make VR worlds, however, I would have to warn you that you will have to code quite a bit of functionality into it that other options allready provide. CDK release 2 (coming soon) will support RW as a rendering engine, and still provide a 'world building' environment. This may be a much better choice for people looking into the area. Also, I saw a previous post saying that RW speed was independant of screen space or screen complexity, I can't remember, but either way thats not the case. While RW may at times seem to act this way, in truth its just a fast renderer. Lets look into the company for a moment... Since I first emailed the people a Criterion (a division of Canon in the UK) many months ago, to when I got RW and started using it, to this very moment, I have been nothing but pleased with the company. They have always responded to my tech questions promptly and accurately, and they are always willing to give me a hand when I need it. I have watched RW evolve substantially, and I would like to believe my feedback has helped guide its progress somewhat. Although developing a true VR environment has been difficult, I do not think I would have been able to do it at all without their help. To people starting with it now, a good deal of functionality has been added to it that makes it much easier to use, and the road ahead looks like more of the same additions. My next project will be to incorperate what I have developed for CK over the past 8 months into a toolkit for VR world creation. Being a Computer Sci student, it kills me to think people might have to code everything I did from scratch. I have also written code to support the 3-d sound spacialization provided by CRE's Alphatron, VFX1 support, and many other VR-related devices. All of these will be incorperated into the toolkit hopefully making the idea of virtual world creation less ominous. Please post any questions you may have, and Ill answer them asap. -Wyeth Ridgway wyeth@Caslon.CS.Arizona.EDU Computer Science ** CyberKnights work done for CyberTechnologies, a division of Ferris Productions. *** All Renderware, Criterion, and Canon rights reserved.. blah blah blah.. -- /___________________________________________________________________________\ \ Wyeth Ridgway | "To boldly code what no one has coded before" / / Computer Sci Sophmore | \ \___________________________________________________________________________/