Tarique Naseem

It’s humbling to know that some of the games that I developed, many moons ago now, have entered VR folklore. In fact the word Virtuality, the name of the company that I worked for at the time, is now used as a noun!

I have been searching for screenshots and any footage of the games for some time now, just for posterity, without much luck. That is until I found this blog post from Arcade Heroes, where they pay homage to the old systems we developed. They include this video snippet from a TV show that aired in the US many years ago, which showcased our old systems, including footage of my old games!

Well, okay, by today’s standards they’re very basic looking, but you have to remember that these were developed prior to any mainstream 3D hardware becoming available, even predating the original 3DFX cards by some years (remember them!?).

Also note that back then the systems were well ahead of their time. For instance, we had developed our own graphics cards with onboard memory to store all the model data. The GPU would also run in parallel to the host system (PC or Amiga 3000). Later the cards were upgraded with on-board sound and hardware MPEG support. The graphics cards would run in parallel to the host computer, so the game code was actually a multi-threaded application (graphics and sound handling on the card, game code on the host). The boards were even capable of being run in an SLI-type configuration, with up to 8 cards in parallel!

If this all sounds familiar, then you’d be right… Most of these things have only just come to fruition within the last couple of years on the latest crop of graphics hardware, and yet we were developing these systems back in the early 90’s!

Anyway, it’s nice to see some footage of my old games finally. I’ll now have to dig around in my loft to see if I can find some more screenshots (or anything!) for the stuff we developed. Brings back fond memories… :)

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The Innovative Technologies Centre, the people behind the Wow Academy, approached me to develop a VR demonstrator that they could show off to their funding partners, which include Yorkshire Forward and the LSE. It was to be used as part of an overall demonstration to secure further funding for future projects.

After discussions with the client on the project specification, it was decided to base the demo on the Apollo 11 lunar landing, utilising immersive VR technology. This particular theme was chosen as it would be the first project to be fully developed should funding be secured.

The major challenge with the project was the tight time constraints imposed (3 weeks!). Within this time period I had to develop a basic game engine, create the 3D assets, and add in hardware support for various VR peripherals, amongst other tasks - A tall order for any developer!

Various open-source SDK’s were utilised in the development of the game engine, including the Ogre3D graphics SDK, the ODE physics library and the OpenAL audio API.

For the assets I decided to scour Turbosquid for suitable 3D models, and found a highly detailed pack designed by the excellent PerspectX. However, these high resolution models had to be converted for real-time use, as they were originally created for pre-rendered scenes. There was quite a bit of work with this alone, as it required polygon reduction and the re-working of the materials, utilising pixel and vertex shaders.

After 3 weeks of (very) hard work, the project was completed on time and budget. The client was delighted with the results, especially considering the short time scale. I celebrated by having a full nights sleep… and then some :)

You can view more screenshots of the project in the portfolio section.

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