Sean Paul Taylor here from the RIM® Gaming Team. We have all been busy working towards bringing the latest and greatest game titles to the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ platform and getting them ready for the BlackBerry 10 launch. My team has been working on a very deep down, technical level with game studios and have been putting the new BlackBerry 10 devices to their guns with exciting new content. We have also been doing heavy battle testing of various, new upcoming external game engine technologies and some of our own internal to share as well!

Today we are announcing the latest version of gameplay3d v1.5.

For those unfamiliar, gameplay is an open-source and cross-platform C++ game framework that we have contributed out along with the community on github. Lately it has really been picking up steam in the 3D indie communities. Our focus in creating the gameplay3d framework was to deliver a high-quality, minimalistic 3D game framework that helps game studios understand our platform better. People have been looking into the source code of the framework (library, tools and samples) and it has been helping people understand the details on how to easily go cross-platform and how to easily include BlackBerry with very little efforts.

New features

• Linux support (tested on Ubuntu 12.04 LTE 64-bit)
• Linux development environment (via CMake or CodeBlock 10 IDE)
• Vehicle physics support (via new PhysicsVehicle and PhysicsVehicleWheel classes)
• Gamepad support for Xbox360, PS3 and Bluetooth® HID controllers on desktops systems.
• Touch gesture support for tap, swipe and pinch.
• Configurable multi-sampling anti-aliasing support.
• New gameplay-tests app for easily learning basic engine features.
• New public community forums directly off the website at www.gameplay3d.org/forums
• File formats documentation for game.config .scene, .material, .animation, .physics, .particle
• Visual Studio Plug-in (beta) support for BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0 and BlackBerry 10.

The ‘next’ branch features for v1.6, v1.7

• AI path finding with navigation meshes
• Terrain and Water
• Asset Pipeline improvements