Qube announces Wii compatibility for toolset
Qube's middleware building block kit expands its range to include Nintendo platform
Qube Software, the company set up by the people behind Direct3D, has announced that its Q middleware toolkit is now available for Wii game development.
The software, which is designed to allow developers maximum flexibility as well as easy portability across platforms, has been in development for several years, and was officially unveiled at GDC in San Francisco this year.
"We designed Q so that it's lean enough to perform well on last generation consoles and is even better on the current generation of machines," said Servan Keondjian, Qube's CEO. "Q is an incredibly powerful tool. It really brings out the best in the Wii.
"Q fully supports special hardware features including custom shaders through platform specific APIs," he went on. "Meanwhile all of Q's core features are available on Wii.
"These include background data streaming, a renderer that supports arbitrary scene rendering algorithms, a texture manager capable of handling scenes with many gigabytes of texture visible on screen, a cross-platform data format, n-dimensional animation blending, a background work queue and a 3D editor which allows both core and custom plug-ins to run live inside the editing environment."
The software is intended to contrast with other middleware platforms which, says Qube, can be more restrictive, forcing developers to build games in certain ways.
"Other solutions are more monolithic - they're basically game engines from a game that have been repurposed," Keondjian told GamesIndustry.biz previously. "Nearly always that's what you get."