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Qube boosts the launch of its future generation middleware 'Q' with 20% discount

February 13th 2008

Qube software is offering incentives on 'Q', its ground-breaking 'future generation' middleware platform, to mark its launch at GDC next week.

Companies signing up before September 1st 2008 will enjoy savings of 20% across the board on both shipping and support fees for the duration of their projects.

CEO Servan Keondjian said: "Q is an evolutionary step beyond the other middleware on the market. It ships with all the essentials you'd expect, plus a host of cutting-edge features to boot."

"But Q rewrites the middleware rulebook because from the outset it's been designed to be adapted by studios so they can easily add their own custom plug-ins, license in third party ones, or customise those we supply as they wish."

"We think Q will fundamentally change the industry's expectations of middleware. So we're offering an incentive to those companies who are going to lead this change in mindset," said Keondjian.

Keondjian and Qube's Technical Director Doug Rabson made their names as the creators of Reality Lab and Direct3D. That experience convinced the pair that middleware users waste huge amounts of development time trying to adapt third party 'out of the box' solutions to their own projects.

"There's a reason we set out to build Q the way we did," said Rabson. "It's all about both giving developers control and saving them effort. Q provides 80% or more of the coding they'd have to do to finish their game. They can use the excellent tools we provide, customise them to meet their specific needs or simply plug in their own. Other middleware already on the market, like physics or AI engines, can also be easily plugged in to Q."

Q is aimed at both new and established studios. New studios will find Q's extensive selection of runtime features a powerful aid to getting their projects up and running. Likewise its exporters and other tools allow content creation to begin on day one. Established studios will benefit from being able to plug in the technologies they've already created for previous game projects and from the ease with which Q's can be configured to support existing workflows.

Q also has the huge advantage of working across all genres and platforms from last generation consoles to top of the range DX10 PCs.

Q's cutting edge features include:

A powerful renderer which:

o Supports arbitrary scene rendering algorithms.

o Allows arbitrary single or multi-pass programmable custom shaders.

o Comes with a selection of standard and high-end shaders.

Background data streaming.

A texture manager capable of handling scenes with gigabytes of visible texture.

A single data format for all platforms.

Identical core APIs on all platforms.

o Platform specific APIs to access special hardware features.

QStudio: a 3D editor which allows both core and custom plug-ins to run live in the editing environment.

Who's Who at Qube

http://www.qubesoft.com/index.php?main=who-is-who.html

The Qube team will be in the Strategy Room on the 3rd Floor of the W Hotel adjacent to the GDC venue on Feb 20 and 22.

For further details contact Qube's Director of Communications, Jonathan Kent, on +44 (0) 7981 803 144 (m) or email jonathan@qubesoft.com or Alison Beasley, Lincoln Beasley pr; +44 (0) 1608 645756, +44 (0) 7966 449130 (m).

For technical or sales enquiries please email info@qubesoft.com

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