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1. Creating successful Wii games easier and with less risk

"The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii."

Will Wright

"The Wii is a great platform, both for consumers and for game developers", said Folker Schamel, CEO of Spinor.

"The console and the games designed for it have made games far more accessible to audiences of all ages and interests. Shark 3D and its well-proven toolset for Wii enable game developers to tap into the console’s phenomenal success easier and with far less risk."

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2. Famous game brand powered by Shark 3D

Shark 3D was used to develop "Moorhuhn Tales" for Wii, the latest game based on "Moorhuhn" (also known as "Crazy Chicken" and "Chicken Hunter"), one of the best known game brands in Europe.

Moorhuhn ist eine registrierte Marke der phenomedia publishing gmbh
(c) phenomedia publishing gmbh 2008

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3. Be fast. Be free. Be agile.

Shark 3D provides you a complete all-purpose solution with an extensive set of features. You can immediately start implementing your content and your unique gameplay.

This power means in no way a restricting for you. Shark 3D is breaking new ground for flexibility and easiness of customization.

This not only makes it easier to create innovative, unique and high quality games of any genre; it also helps teams more efficiently and predictably to meet production milestones and budgets.

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4. Empower your game designer: Live editing

One of Shark 3D’s core features is the tool pipeline, which supports live editing from the bottom up.

• Edit your game items and NPCs in the Shark 3D Wii game editor,
• edit your game scripts,
• edit your textures in Photoshop,
• edit your animations and geometry in Max or Maya,
• edit your rendering effects in the Shark 3D Wii shader editor, ...

... and see and test all your changes live not only on your PC, but also on your Wii development kit!

Furthermore, supported by Shark 3D's live-live™ editing, developers can easily modify and customize the tool pipeline for their particular needs. This makes game production for Wii more efficient and predictable, significantly reducing production times and risks.

See Live editing the running console and PC game for more information.

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5. Empower your artists: Lighting, shadowing, reflections on Wii - easier than ever!

The node based shader editor empowers your designers to create their own Wii shader graphs.

Your designers can easily create, combine and customize lighting, shadowing, reflections, shader animations, color operations, and many other effects.

Internally, the shader editor automatically compiles the Wii shader graphs into assemblings of Shark 3D renderer modules and pipeline stages, powered by the Re-entrant Modular Shader System™.

Of course, the designers can edit the shaders interactively both on the Wii and on PC. This is especially useful when fine tuning the look on the Wii.

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6. Empower your game scripters and programmers: New game play in record time

Shark 3D scripting does not only provide scripting interfaces to run-time features and tools. Shark 3D also provides a well-designed set of building blocks which can be combined in a flexible way.

The Shark 3D C++ APIs are open and well-designed. Shark 3D has a clean layer architecture.

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7. Extensive documentation, tutorials and samples

The Shark 3D software includes many samples showing the various features of Shark 3D.

The software includes an extensive documentation, containing

• introduction articles,
• tutorials,
• videos,
• expert articles, and
• references.

Various sections handle Wii specific aspects.

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8. Many useful run-time features included

Run-time features of Shark 3D for Wii include the following:

Rendering

• Efficient rendering: Off-line generation and Wii specific optimization of Wii display lists and Wii vertex data.
• Efficient skinning: Off-line assembling of skinned meshes specifically for the Wii. At run-time, the CPU does not touch any vertex, index or polygon data anymore.
• Wii specific off-line conversion of textures for optimal performance and minimal memory usage.
• A multi-layer animation system.
• A character walking animation system.
• Efficient culling of static and movable objects for rendering.
• A shader system providing access to Wii specific render state settings.
• A particle system.
• Dynamic local lights.
• Lighting management respecting Wii specific aspects.
• GUI rendering.
• TrueType Unicode text rendering.
• Smart management of object state dependencies using delayed evaluation.
• Smart attachment point management.
• Multiple viewports with separate culling for multiplayer games.
• And many other features.

Sound

• Optimized Wii specific sound formats.
• Run-time support for compressed Ogg Vorbis files.
• Efficient culling of static and movable sound sources placed in the level.
• Streaming sound (e.g. background music) from disk.
• Wii specific off-line optimization and conversion of sounds for optimal performance and minimal memory usage.
• Various other sound features.

Physics

• Collision detection.
• Physics.
• Automatically generated sound for physics collisions and friction.
• Automatic merging of nearby contact sounds.
• Various constraints.
• Generic path-based motors.
• Various other physics features.

Logic

• Triggers and sensors.
• Scripting.
• Level management.
• Many other logic features.

Streaming

• Background loading of levels without halting the rendering loop.
• Background loading of levels parts and asset groups without halting the rendering loop.

Resource and memory management

• Pack files.
• Optimized low-level memory management.
• Optimized for avoiding implicit memory allocations while a level is running. This avoids unexpected out-of-memory errors while a level is running.
• Many other features.

See also

See the technology section for more detailed information.