From R.Hollands@sheffield.ac.uk Mon Sep 26 13:58:35 1994 Date: Sun, 22 May 94 23:44:37 +0100 From: R Hollands To: scivw@hitl.washington.edu Subject: NEWS: New 3D Graphics Toolkit Company News clipping from VR NEWS (May 1994) - Reproduced with permission Borland founder backs 3D software toolkit company. Neils Jensen, co-founder of Borland International, is backing a small British software company which aims to take a share of the growing market for 3D graphical toolkits. The company, called Virtek International Ltd, will launch its '3D-Ware' product at VR '94 in San Jose. This will be a DOS only release, to be followed by a Windows version later in the year. Licencees of the first release will be offered a free upgrade. Target markets are games companies and virtual reality software developers. A US marketing company, Virtek Corporation, has also been formed, and will start operations during May from offices in Pompano Beach, Florida. A considerable flurry of entrepreneurial activity has been visible ever since the Canon subsidiary, Criterion Software, launched its Renderware toolkit in January. Criterion spoke at the launch of a billion dollar market for Renderware, capturing the attention of numerous graphical software specialists with ambitions to share that market. The emerging competitive offerings all claim faster performance that Renderware, and are priced competitively. Few of the originators have any experience of large-scale international marketing and distribution of systems software however, which is why the involvement of Jensen in Virtek may be of particular significance. Borland was founded in 1982 by Jensen and two Danish friends. They brought in Philip Kahn to head their US operation shortly afterwards, and achieved spectacular growth based on products such as MenuMaster, SideKick and Turbo Pascal. The company floated on the London stock exchange in the mid-1980s, and on NASDAQ in 1990. Jensen detached himself from the company, settled in the UK, and sold off his holdings some years ago. Virtek in the UK comprises a team of four development staff run by Philip Allsop, whose background is in the computer games industry. His successes include F-29 Retaliator and EPIC, both of which sold over 100,000 copies. In 1993 his PC game 'TFX' was released, and it is the high-performance low-level graphics routines developed for this game which form the nucleus of the 3D- Ware toolkit. The company is currently working flat out to get the product ready for launch, but an early and partial demonstration laid on for VR NEWS showed promise. Jensen takes the view that the market for VR and 3D graphics software is "immature, and nobody's property yet", and believes that, apart from performance and functionality, 3D-Ware's special attraction to developers will be its freedom from royalties. The DOS Professional version sells for $1495, and the Standard version (excludes texturing and Gourard shading) for $249. No royalties are payable on games or experiences developed using the toolkit, which has also been designed to be usable from any language compiler, including C, Basic and Pascal. Virtek International Ltd Salford, UK Tel: 061-237-9929 Fax: 061-237-5553