Game Boy Advance gets pushed to the limits; “DeltaAdvance Engine” leads the way for new FPS

by Louis Bedigian

Exclusive Screens and Exciting New Info!

Now that N-Gage has brought true 3D gaming to the small screen, it’s only a matter of time before everyone replaces sprites with polygons.  Sony, Tapwave and Tiger Electronics are just a few of the companies working on new technology for a new mobile game platform.  Intel thinks that they can put the power of the Xbox in a cell phone by 2006, and Sony has said that their PSP (PlayStation Portable) game console will do for multimedia what the Walkman did for music. 

Most Game Boy Advance games look like they were developed for the SNES.  How can it compete with the next generation of mobile game consoles?  We’ve all heard about the Nintendo DS unit, but that’s not a part of the Game Boy family.  Game Boy Advance is still the GB leader, and Nintendo has no intention of replacing it anytime soon.

There is one way to compete, and it goes by the name of innovation.  You remember innovation, don’t you?  The stuff that used to push gaming long before the technology was there to help things along.

At this point, Game Boy Advance has yet to see a first-person shooter that truly played like a first-person shooter.  Talos Interactive hopes to change that with their DeltaAdvance Engine:

These exclusive shots give us a glimpse of what Talos is capable of.  What you see is merely a demonstration of the engine’s power, developed without any game property attached.  What would happen if they put their engine to the test by developing a full-fledged game?  Talos Interactive’s Dr. Robert Templeman (Lead Programmer) and Max Meltzer (Producer) provide answers in this exciting interview.  They talk about the engine’s development, its capabilities, and even comment on the PSP…

When did the DeltaAdvance Engine project begin?

Dr. Robert Templeman: That’s a hard one to answer, the name was created pretty recently, but the underlying software has its roots back on the old Acorn Archimedes!  In fact there is actually some source code in the engine that was converted from BASIC years ago!  So to answer: it has evolved over the last 6 years, from Acorn to PC to GBA.

Is the DeltaAdvance Engine 100% complete, or is this an on-going development process?

RT: The Engine is completely ready for games development.  We’ve ported an old FPS of ours called Destiny to GBA and it is fully functional.  Any underlying technology a first person shooter needs is already in DeltaAdvance.

Tell us about the test results you've had with the engine thus far.  What makes this one the best? 

RT: Well as I’ve mentioned, by using DeltaAdvance we’ve ported an FPS from a far more powerful platform to GBA and produced essentially exactly the same game.  The game in question was a shooter that I co-wrote on the Acorn platform, called Destiny.  It typically ran on a 200Mhz machine with 32Megs of RAM.

We reckon our engine is the best primarily because of its flexibility, it allows for fully perspective correct 3D environments and for rich game content to be combined with ease.

Was it hard to achieve graphical realism (and more importantly, three-dimensional gameplay) on such a tiny screen?

RT: [That’s] a good question!  When you’re sitting close to a high-res big screen it’s easy to get immersed in the 3D experience but the smaller GBA screen is pretty different, what’s needed are fairly high contrast visuals (essential on the original GBA) and more importantly to remove any messy graphics in the distance.  DeltaAdvance’s features mip-mapped texturing and polygon simplification in the distance, this allows for much clearer distant graphics to be realized.  What this means is that you can actually see what’s in the distance much more clearly than most GBA 3D games

Is your engine capable of porting PC games to the GBA?

RT: In essence yes, the game we’ve ported so far was basically a PC game.  It depends a lot on how featured the PC game was originally, a complex PC game would need more taking out or simplifying to work on GBA.

How far can this engine go?  What are its limitations?

RT: A long way!  Its limitations are primarily due to the memory footprint of the GBA, all the graphics, sound & music must be crammed into the GBAs cartridge.  With the efficient data structures used in DeltaAdvance a surprisingly large amount of game data can fit on the cartridge.

DeltaAdvance could be easily extended to other game genres.

In all, how many polygons can the DeltaAdvance Engine produce?

RT: It depends [on] what you want, currently a typical scene could consist of a thousand or more rooms, all of which can have varying numbers of polygons. The scenery structure of DeltaAdvance is composed primarily of compound objects which are rendered polygonally during game play, it’s not really valid to convert this to a number of polygons or triangles as many of the scenery elements are rendered as a whole, a PC with hardware acceleration might use 10 or 20 triangles to render an object that DeltaAdvance renders as one.

One level of the Destiny game that we’ve ported has over 1400 rooms, each room has around 20 polygons, these consist of polygons of up to 20 sides, so quite a few for a GBA!

 
What kind of special effects (smoke, fire, explosions, etc.) can the DeltaAdvance Engine demonstrate?

RT: The effects depend entirely on how a game is implemented, at the moment we’ve got smoke and particle explosions.  However, the particle system code can be tailored to produce a huge number of effects depending on what is required.  Also particles can have physical properties to make them collide and interact physically with the scenery.

Have any game publishers expressed interest in your exciting new technology?

Max Meltzer: An honest question deserves an honest answer. We’ve had a good deal of publisher interest but you have to look at how tough the GBA market really is. The costs of manufacturing, size of profit margins and retail space makes any game on the GBA a hard sell, even to publishers. For example, look at your local Toys ’R’ Us or Wal-Mart or any other big chain. Look at the games section. There’s what? About forty spaces for GBA titles and how many GBA titles are there altogether? About eight hundred. That’s not a lot of space for the amount of titles, so publishers have to be sure they’re putting out the right title. I think publishers realize that our FPS engine is something special and we’re getting good feedback from them. We hope we’ll be able to set a deal soon and finish a title worthy of a purchase of many a Game Boy Advance owner.   

What is your #1 goal for the DeltaAdvance Engine?  What do you hope to create or achieve?

MM: Our number one goal is to deliver one of the most sophisticated and graphically beautiful game engines on a handheld platform. We believe we’ve already achieved that objective with DeltaAdvance on the Game Boy Advance, now as another as important target; we want to turn our tech into a good game. We also look forward to the future and believe we can achieve similar goals on future handhelds.  

Now that 3D gaming is becoming more and more common on the GBA, where do you think its future lies?  Will the system continue to receive this much attention and innovation once the PSP is released?

MM: Nintendo know how to support a system with original titles, so I’m sure this will continue. You have to feel after this, little more innovation can come for the GBA. As mentioned, the GBA market is already a risk and it’s unlikely especially when the higher specification PSP is about that companies are going to want to invest in major GBA innovation. I believe we will see more 3D games on the GBA but innovation may be restricted as developers also turn their heads toward the so-called ‘Nintendo DS.’

Speaking of the PSP, can you tell us anything about what you're creating or intend to create for that console?

MM: As Rob was saying, a great thing about our technology is its versatility. We haven’t decided on anything, therefore we’d be interested in exploring several routes and genre’s on the PSP, potentially. It may be neat to do a racer, or an RPG, or an FPS again. Our decision on what to create may come as a result of what the PSP market wants. However, whatever is decided upon, we will attempt to bring forth our technology onto the graphically better PSP platform and deliver on the same objectives again of providing a graphically stunning and good gameplay experience.

Thank you for your time.