X-Forge 3D Engine Arrives

suhit writes "Infosync is reporting in this article that Fathammer has finally launched its X-Forge 3D Engine. The screenshots on Infosync are amazing, plus this means that researchers out there can finally port Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash style Metaverse to a handheld device."

Porting the Metaverse

[Chris Pimlott]

"Port," that's funny. It's great we all have our high definition 3D force feedback full body immersive metaverse access portals at home, but like you said, the only problem is we can't carry it around with us...

By amazing...

[Tom7]

By amazing, you mean, "worse than Doom?"

Re:By amazing...

[yasth]

More like software mode quake I really.

Re:By amazing...

[cpeterso]

yup, amazingly worse..

Worse than Doom? Hardly.

[yerricde]

By amazing, you mean, "worse than Doom?"

You can't expect Doom 3 on a handheld machine. The best you can do on a handheld with a 16.8 MHz ARM7TDMI processor [gbadev.org] is Doom 1 at 120x120 pixels and 15 to 20 Hz.

The screenshots of the X-Forge demos look vaguely like those of Sega's Virtua games: simple maps, ok character models, few textures. But it looks good for a handheld.

Re:Worse than Doom? Hardly.

[gl4ss]

yeah, and it's more than just a raycast engine like doom anyways, which is NICE imho.

Sweet!

[tswinzig]

It's like 1990 on your PDA.

Amazing?

[CounterZer0]

Maybe it was just REAALY bad compression, but those screenshots looked like crap compared to...just about any commercial 3d engine - they looked very 'unsmooth' and 1997'ish.

Re:Amazing?

[satanami69]

It cuz they're for a handheld not a real computer. But yeah, they still do look like crap.

Re:Amazing?

[Anonymous Coward]

put any commercial 3d engine on PDA :-) oh wait, this is the one you can do that with.. no unreal or doom3 for you

Should I be impressed?

[Guspaz]

People have ported DooM, Quake, and even Quake II to the Pocket PC. Last I heard DooM and Quake ran at very playable speeds. Now I hear news about some new commercial engine that doesn't even look as good as DooM, and I'm supposed to be impressed? Sorry, not buying it.

Re:Should I be impressed?

[Abnormal Coward]

looking at the screen shots of Fathammer it looks pretty good.

Also I would say most of the games are demos to show of the SDK, comparing to doom which is a complete polished game is not really fair :).

quite impresive considering the spec of the devices that they run on.

Re:Should I be impressed?

[lahna]

Doom and quake both look like crap and run like crap on Pocket PC (ok, doom runs some 10-15 fps, but it still isn't real 3d). Don't buy everything that's been told to you. And x-forge runs fast, at least it did when i tried their first technology demo.

Seems damn good to me!

[abdulla]

You all seem to forget that this is aimed at things less powerful than the Sharp Zaurus, I've never seen such wonderdul graphics on a Gameboy Advance or a mobile phone before, the pictures at the bottom of this [fathammer.com] page look pretty damn good to me!