Q platform to launch at GDC

A new set of development tools from two of the key figures behind Direct3D and Reality Lab is set to be officially unveiled at GDC in San Francisco next week.

Q is the brainchild of Servan Keondjian and Doug Rabson and has been designed with the primary aim of offering developers as much freedom in design as possible, specifically to contrast with the kinds of restrictions that existing game engines can apply.

"It's very different from other middleware solutions," Keondjian, Qube Software's CEO, told GamesIndustry.biz. "Other solutions are more monolithic - they're basically game engines from a game, that have been repurposed. Nearly always that's what you get.

"What we've done is looked at it from the ground up and thought about what a studio really needs - what is a solution that can be used across a studio for multiple titles, multiple genres, and how do developers really want to work?

"If there's one thing they hate it's being constrained and closed in, to have to use somebody else's solutions - so we wanted to fix all of those issues, and we're only talking about it now that we believe we have fixed them."

In contrast to existing game engines, Q has been likened to a set of Lego bricks, with which it's possible to build almost anything and tailor it to specific needs.

"There is a framework there, but what's taken our time is designing a framework that's pluggable on all the levels that you need it to be pluggable.

"So there's very high stuff in the framework, so you can plug things at the level of game objects, but you can go all the way down to the lowest level graphics rendering and write specific rendering for your PlayStation 3 if you like.

"That's still a plug-in framework - you don't need to get a source code license, learn somebody else's source code, start hacking about with it and needing a new dev team to do it."

But one of the problems with taking this path is in educating developers as to what's possible.

"They don't sometimes know what all the Lego bricks we have actually are, so when people start we definitely want them talking to us, because just that pointing in the right direction is a lot of help for people," added Rabson, the company's CTO.

"But developers still need to have a clear vision of exactly the title they want to build, and they still have to have the talented people to build that, on the art, the game design and the technical sides.

"We can't take any of those problems away, but what we can do is make sure we don't block them in doing that.

"We've spent a long time building this, and we've been designing it so that it could become a standard for game development - and that's really the exciting thing for us."

Qube Software will be in the Strategy Room of the W Hotel, adjacent to the GDC venue on February 20 and 22, and on the ATI stand throughout the show.