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

Sean Paul Taylor here again with some great news about gameplay, our open-source and cross-platform C++ game framework. gameplay version 1.4 is now available!  Since my last introductory announcement of gameplay v1.2, we have made some good progress and have added new features:

New features

• Lua script bindings on all public interfaces of the framework.
• Script binding generator tool for creating user-defined Lua script bindings from Doxygen XML.
• AI state machine for AI programming/scripting on game objects.
• Virtual gamepad input support with custom theming using UI system.
• Optimizations using NEON math for mobile platforms.
• Compressed texture support for DXT, PVRTC, ATC and ETC1.
• Improved modular shaders with support for #include in shaders and new light map support.
• Optimizations and Improvements to the UI system such as inertial scrolling and scrollbars.
• Pre-built versions of the gameplay-encoder and gameplay-luagen tools.
• Optimizations in animation and physics.
• Fixes to support Maya 2012/2013 COLLADA DAE_FBX export.
• FBX 2013 format support.

The ‘next’ branch features for v1.5, v1.6, v1.7

• Linux support.
• Vehicle physics.
• AI path finding with navigation meshes.
• Physical Gamepad input for Xbox 360, Wii, and Bluetooth® HID controllers.
• Terrain.
• Scene editor tool.

We’re extremely committed to the open source community and invite you to contribute on our projects.

Happy gaming!

The goal of the NDK is to make you, the developer, more productive in creating Native Applications for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. To accomplish this, the NDK includes tools: a compiler, a linker, the Eclipse-based QNX’s Momentics IDE, and command line tools as well as samples, documentation, and libraries, and is paired with the Developers/Native micro-site. The micro-site is brand new (we also released Android and HTML 5 micro-sites) and provides information on most common actions, and… it also provides pointers to Open Source Components!

As is the case for BlackBerry® WebWorks™, Open Source is a key part of our native story. We use Open Source licenses, and transparent development, to deliver samples that developers can use to kick-start development, or to learn from in general. The NDK comes with a small (4) set of samples, available under an Open Source license. But the micro-site mentioned above links to a larger and growing set of samples all hosted at our GitHub Organization and ready for you to use, or fork and modify.

We are also porting popular Open Source libraries to complement those that are already included in the BlackBerry PlayBook OS. Libraries already available include physics engines like Bullet Physics and Box2DX, scripting languages like Lua, multimedia libraries like OpenAL and SDL, gaming frameworks like Cocos2DX and general-purpose libraries like Boost and Qt. We will continue growing the list and welcome your suggestions!

Also available under an Open Source license are a few new libraries like GamePlay, a new 3D native gaming framework, and TouchMapOverlap.

We are using GitHub to anchor this and other initiatives. All libraries have a homepage that provides additional information on how they apply to the BlackBerry PlayBook OS. In most cases there will also be a code repository that holds the specifics for the port. For example, the OpenAL home page is
blackberry.github.com/ndk/components.html#OpenAL and the repository is github.com/blackberry/OpenAL. Ideally the port specifics will be accepted into the upstream community; what we want is for the library to work on the BlackBerry PlayBook OS out of the box.

We will continue to expand our involvement in the Open Source community; it’s more efficient for us, better for the developers, and creates a much more open communication channel for everyone. For more details on RIM’s Open Source activities, visit http://blackberry.github.com.

P.S. Also check out George’s announcement at WebKit-Dev about our renewed public participation in WebKit!

Do you use GitHub to develop? Have you checked out the BlackBerry GitHub page? Share in the comments!