Southpaw Engine

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Southpaw engine is a video game engine designed for the Game Boy Advance to produce first person shooters. It was developed by Australian developer Torus Games.

Game engine Software-development environment designed for building video games

A game engine is a software-development environment designed for people to build video games. Developers use game engines to construct games for consoles, mobile devices, and personal computers. The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes a rendering engine ("renderer") for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine or collision detection, sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, localization support, scene graph, and may include video support for cinematics. Implementers often economize on the process of game development by reusing/adapting, in large part, the same game engine to produce different games or to aid in porting games to multiple platforms.

Game Boy Advance handheld video game console

The Game Boy Advance (GBA) is a 32-bit handheld video game console developed, manufactured and marketed by Nintendo as the successor to the Game Boy Color. It was released in Japan on March 21, 2001, in North America on June 11, 2001, in Australia and Europe on June 22, 2001, and in mainland China on June 8, 2004 as iQue Game Boy Advance. Nintendo's competitors in the handheld market at the time were the Neo Geo Pocket Color, WonderSwan, GP32, Tapwave Zodiac, and the N-Gage. Despite the competitors' best efforts, Nintendo maintained a majority market share with the Game Boy Advance.

Torus Games

Torus Games is an Australian video game developer founded in 1994 by ex-Beam Software employees including Bill McIntosh.

Contents

The engine allows first person games to be reproduced with a maximum of 19 levels, 8 enemies and 5 save game slots, to fit within an 8MB Game Boy Advance cartridge.

The game engine is most likely retired with no future titles announced using the Southpaw engine.

Engine Features

In computer graphics, mipmaps or pyramids are pre-calculated, optimized sequences of images, each of which is a progressively lower resolution representation of the same image. The height and width of each image, or level, in the mipmap is a power of two smaller than the previous level. Mipmaps do not have to be square. They are intended to increase rendering speed and reduce aliasing artifacts. A high-resolution mipmap image is used for high-density samples, such as for objects close to the camera. Lower-resolution images are used as the object appears farther away. This is a more efficient way of downfiltering (minifying) a texture than sampling all texels in the original texture that would contribute to a screen pixel; it is faster to take a constant number of samples from the appropriately downfiltered textures. Mipmaps are widely used in 3D computer games, flight simulators, other 3D imaging systems for texture filtering and 2D as well as 3D GIS software. Their use is known as mipmapping. The letters "MIP" in the name are an acronym of the Latin phrase multum in parvo, meaning "much in little". Since mipmaps, by definition, are pre-allocated, additional storage space is required to take advantage of them. They are also related to wavelet compression. Mipmap textures are used in 3D scenes to decrease the time required to render a scene. They also improve image quality by reducing aliasing and Moiré patterns that occur at large viewing distances, at the cost of 1/3 more memory per texture.

Games using the Southpaw engine

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Gaming Target Duke Nukem Advance Interview at GamingTarget
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