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| AGB Games Interview |
By Christian 'Fraust'
Wilson |
 The Game Boy Advance is just beginning the second year of its lifespan. In the
first year, we have seen everything from SNES ports to original titles, all providing
some great visuals for a handheld gaming system. We have seen a variety of 3D
elements in the games as well. The pseudo 3D environments of shooters such as
Doom or Dark Arena, to the polygon skaters in the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series
are just a few examples. Aside from these basic techniques, 3D really was not
something that was expected from the Game Boy Advance, until now. Recently, AGB
Games has shown us that true 3D games are indeed possible to experience with Nintendo's
newest handheld. We had the opportunity to talk with AGB Games programmer Matthew
Hopwood about their new 3D engine, what kind of games are possible, and what kind
of tools they are using to create these environments.
Fraust (Mindless Games): First off, thank you for giving us the chance to talk
with you about your very impressive 3D engine. It's quite revolutionary for the
Game Boy Advance.
Mat (AGB Games): Not a problem, publicity is something we really need to get
publishers to notice what we are doing. It's a very strange business developing
for GBA, the publishers that publish the games do not seem to understand what
the technology means to them and what an impact the technology can have in making
their game(s) much more immersive.
 Where did you first get the idea to create this 3D engine for
handheld platforms?
I have been developing gaming technologies for years. I developed
a 3D gaming engine 4 years ago that was ahead of anything back then for PC; you
can see shots of a game we were developing using the technology called Zero Tolerance
at www.agbgames.com/previous.htm. The shots do not look cutting edge compared
to some PC games nowadays, but they were back then :). I then ported this technology
to Symbian EPOC, Pocket PC PDA's and GBA. The engine was however too cumbersome
and slow on GBA so I designed and implemented a completely new engine called GBARAD.
I then went further and ported this to PC and Pocket PC as well as creating OHE
and WFR 3D game engines. The end result is two 3D game engines that run across
GBA, PC and PDA.
How many people are working on this project right now?
There are 3 people including myself working on the technology.
We may have another 2 joining us soon though, this will all be dependent upon
the number of games we undertake.
 How long has the technology been in production, and when do
you think you'll have the code completed?
The technology has been in production for over a year. The
engines are in effect complete and ready to use in games now and we are only improving
upon them. In-fact the 3D sections of Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones
used a very early version of GBARAD. The technology has moved on a lot since then
to the point that we feel confident in knocking out Quake, Wipeout, GTA and many
other famous titles.
It has been said that the Game Boy Advance can't handle
3D very extensively. What did you have to work around on the GBA hardware to make
this work?
Slow CPU, limited RAM, slow memory access, no hardware divide,
no floating point co-processor are the main things. it is very difficult, but
the GBA can be pushed a lot harder than your average developer would think. We
also use speed optimisation techniques and algorithms that only come with years
of experience in 3D games and rendering techniques.
 The
list of features in your engine is very extensive and looks like it can accomplish
more than enough for the Game Boy Advance. Are there more features being worked
on? Any features you were not able to get working under the hardware's limitations?
We are working on a system by which characters can be represented
using a very small number of textured polygons. We would hope to use this to have
real-time characters walking around the environment. We have all seen the video
on Raylights site of the walking character, however people do not realise that
it is a walking character on a static background picture, which we can do easily
using a real-time rendered character and a Z-buffer, but a walking character that
can walk inside a dynamic environment with a dynamic camera, as in the style of
FPS game found on PC such as Half Life, Deus Ex and so on is not currently possible.
We aim to reproduce this on GBA and bring those types of games closer.
We are also considering dual texturing for cool effects such as water, layered
sky, light maps, environment mapping and so on.
While in development, did you find any features the Game
Boy Advance could do that took you by surprise?
One or two things have caused me to raise an eyebrow, but
it would be nice to find something amazing that I didn't know about such as a
stretched textured line blit or a hardware divide :)
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