The BeOSJournal spent some time with Stephane Denis, founder of Realtech VR, creator of the V3X rendering engine, and long-time programmer involved with developing on the BeOS with his own creations.

If you remember Space Girl and liked it, you have him to thank for it. ;)

** Please note that english is not Stephane's native language, so bear with him as he tries his best to provide answers in english.

Hi Stephane, and welcome officially to the BeOS Community. It's a pleasure being able to spend some time with you, as we discuss the things that Realtech VR is working on these days with BeOS.

Hello, yes, with pleasure.

Can you explain to the readership who or what V3X is?

Yes, well V3X is a 3d engine, which is developed since 1995, was a MS DOS engine, and was ported for BeOS around 1996 for the Bebox and PowerPC.
.. so today it is now ported for Windows, MacOS and Windows CE.

All of this work was done by Realtech VR, correct?

No, really, we were demomakers initially. We used to be known as 'realtech'. We have released a couple of demos during 1994-1995, like DX Project which was the first SVGA demo on PC.

We have released a game 'Space Girl' for BeOS but only a demo was available (but we are planning to release the full version one day). We have released some couple of tools like Nasm for BeOS port, W32RC2Be (a tool that converts Windows RC files (Visual Studio Resources) into BeOS API. The latest production release for BeOS is 'SkyORB vr', an astronomy program which use V3X (this was released in december 2002).

Why was BeOS chosen to port the V3X engine to? Does BeOS represent something special to RealTech VR?

Back in 1996, I met someone who knew Be Europe and at this time I was working on a product named 'No Gravity' (which become 'Space Girl'). I was introduced to Be Europe and was very interested by the Bebox. So I ordered the Bebox (dual 66 mhz, which I still have) and started the port of the game to BeOS (It was release 3 at this time if I remember).

Later, the project 'Space Girl', which was planned to be commercial was cancelled by our publisher and I decided to continue the 3d engine for BeOS.

In fact I was very interested by the 'multitasking ' features of the OS. The engine still has the multiprocessor optimisations.

What is your role at RealTech VR, and how did you begin working there?

Well I'm the lead programmer and founder of realtech. As I said, realtech was born around 1993-1994 already as a demomaker group, and became Realtech VR in 1998.

Besides the multi-processing aspect of BeOS, were there any other features that interested you greatly?

Yes, the API of course, the way it is written, the stability, things I didn't have at this time on PC, the debugger, in fact, BeOS helped a lot for debugging code. This helped a lot the engine to be very stable due to the fact it was ported on different platform at the same time.

Only things I really missed is the OpenGL support. They were so many attempt from Be to have an API: There were the 3D Kit (which was never document), the OpenGL Kit (known a BGLView), then later, the DirectGLView and later again, the famous hardware accelerated OpenGL kit, which was a never released.

(correction: the famous BDirectGLWindow, which was never released and was supposed to have hardware acceleration.)

But apart from these problems, the others features like media kit, the 2d framebuffering, in fact BeOS has everything for a gaming platform, and was a dream for me.

Did you work closely with anyone at Be Inc, during the course of development?

Yes, i knew a lot of people at Be Europe, and had some contact a Be USA. Be Europe has really nice people like Georges Edouard Berenger, Christophe Droulers for example. They helped me a lot and let me have access to a lot of material.

There were also the famous 'Geek Tea' each month, the friday evening when everybody came to Be Europe and showing demo. I've even met Jean Louis Gassee once !

What are you working on these days that takes up your time?

Well realtech is not my primary source of living ! it's more a spare time job. I'm working for games companies where I am game developer.

How long have you been a programmer?

For 10 years professionally, I've worked for many major game publishers in fact. I've really started programming around 1983, on PC, I was 10 year old.

What is the one aspect of the current BeOS R5 platform that is stopping V3X from working to it's fullest potential?

Well 3d acceleration of course. But I've developed a software renderer, so powerful that it was rendering better and has more features than the one offered by BeOS. (There some demos on Bebits) written in MMX assembler, supporting 32bit shading and shadow rendering.

But of course, a real 3d acceleration would be nice. There were 3dfx glide support (the game we've made worked with glide, under PC and Mac.)

I think that Zeta got hardware acceleration, but what I remember, it required a change in the code, all previous OpenGL application wouldn't support it. I think this is because they were issue with the multithreading + opengl. The newest kit would fix that problem, but it was quite unstable.

By 'newest kit', what do you mean?

It's the BDirectGLWindow API. In fact there is actually three OpenGL implementation in BeOS !
So yes, the BDirectGLWindow API, which was know as 'OpenGL Beta Kit' would solve the issues of multithreading and hardware acceleration.

Only if it worked properly, that is... ?

Yes, if it worked properly. It worked fine but was easily' crashable'. Not going into the details, but if you forgot the 'lock' a context before accessing any opengl function, the application would crash. Also there were issues like resizing window etc.. but again, it was beta,

Will the BeOS Community be seeing more updates to your software renderer?

Yes, about the software renderer. A new version is currently developed with SSE support. In fact SSE is already supported but the new version go far beyond because all the code is now written using SSE intrisincs. So it is even faster.

Only drawback is only Pentium III and greater would be supported. The problem is many BeOS users had still older machines than this. As soon as Zeta will be publicly available. It will uses GCC 3.2, so will be zeta only I guess. Also, a 64bit version of the engine is currently in progress.

Stephane had to cut this short unexpectedly, so we both decided to continue the interview the next day. We're posting part one now to allow the community to read and respond with any questions they may have to be included in part two, if interesting. ;)

Stay tuned for part 2 of this interview, within a few days...

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Stephane Denis is the creator of V3X, a gaming engine designed wtih portability in mind from the start, as well as lead developer of DXGL Wrapper, a directX wrapper for BeOS. Information on both projects can be found at the official home of Realtech VR.