Press Release
Sophia Cradle Incorporated
R-FORCE Entertainment, Co., Ltd.
Sophia Cradle and R-FORCE Entertainment Cooperate in Development and Sales of a Game Engine for BREW Handsets
Develop game applications for BREW handsets like Java. Create elegant, dynamic and yet delicate characters. Also for game planners.
Abstract
KYOTO — April 15, 2004 — Sophia Cradle Incorporated (Headquarter: Kyoto; CEO: Kazunori Sugiyama), an innovative developer of mobile phone software, and R-FORCE Entertainment, Co., Ltd. (Headquarter: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, CEO: Hirokazu Yokoyama), a planner and a developer of entertainment and networking software, today announced an agreement to cooperate in development and sales of a game engine SophiaGameEngine for BREW [*1] -enabled handsets, which will be equipped with Sophia Cradle's SophiaFramework [*2] and SophiaCompress(BREW) [*3], and R-FORCE Entertainment's Animation Engine.
Full Story
Sophia Cradle and R-FORCE Entertainment today announced an agreement to cooperate in development and sales of a game engine for BREW-enabled handsets in order to maintain and promote the world's first and the standard mobile game platform. R-FORCE Entertainment's technologies such as Animation Engine will be implemented on Sophia Cradle's BREW application framework SophiaFramework. Combined with SophiaCompress(BREW), these advanced technolgies will be provided as a product called SophiaGameEngine.
The main feature of SophiaGameEngine is that SophiaGameEngine makes development of a game application as easy as development in Java programming language, while the quality and the runtime speed of the application is better than a Java application.
SophiaGameEngine is composed of (1) graphic and character engines, (2) character and animation editor for Windows, (3) useful library for game development and (4) a compression tool for BREW applications.
Content of SophiaGameEngine
Numbers 1 to 3 are provided by R-FORCE Entertainment and 4 and 5 by Sophia Cradle.
- Game graphics interface
Drawing functions including shadow and emboss effects for text and graphics, other special effects of interface and high-speed development of interface. - Sprite interface
Drawing, maintenance, translucent operation, rotation, size alteration and hit detection of a character. - Animation interface
A planner can easily edit motion of multi-joint characters [*4] using tools on Windows. This multi-joint character technology enables dynamic, elegant and delicate movement of a character. - Game library
Special library for game engineers that includes string, sort, inner and outer product, trigonometrical function, random number and text input interface. - Compression tool
For compression of a BREW application. The compression rate is 50% on average.
Screenshots of SophiaGameEngine
How a multi-joint character is made
An example of a multi-joint character
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Terms
[*1] BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless)
The standard of mobile phone software developed by QUALCOMM Incorporated, released in January 2001. BREW applications work fast no matter what the underlying system software in the handset is. A user can download a compiled BREW application from the Internet and use it with any BREW-enabled handset. The worldwide spread of BREW is remarkable, and there are many network operators that provide BREW services, including Japan's KDDI which started offering it in February 2003.
Middleware released by Sophia Cradle in August 2002. It runs on BREW and consists of three layers: graphical user interface (GUI), C++ utility library and C++ wrappers. SophiaFramework helps a developer create a high-quality BREW application in a short period of time. The technology of SophiaFramework is used in many top-selling BREW applications in Japan.
Concept of SophiaFramework:
More about SophiaFramework:
/english/products/sophiaframework/
A compression tool for BREW applications, released by Sophia Cradle Incorporated in November 2003. It supports BREW-enabled handsets of all carriers in Japan: NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and Vodafone. SophiaCompress(BREW) is adopted by major content providers and game makers for top-seller applications.
GUI of SophiaCompress(BREW):
More about SophiaCompress(BREW):
/english/products/sophiacompress_brew/index.html
A technology that enables the expression of a character in a two-dimentional data array by dividing a character into joints and then connecting these joints. A character's motion is represented as parts, such as hands, feet and heads, so that the whole movement of a character becomes dynamic, elegant and delicate even within the limit of mobile phone memory. It reduces the data requirements by about seventy per cent when compared to other animation technologies.
* Trademarks associated with QUALCOMM Incorpotated and BREW are trademarks and registered trademarks of QUALCOMM Incorporated.
About Sophia Cradle
Sophia Cradle Incorporated is a mobile phone software developer which currently specializes in BREW C++, GUI middleware and mobile Java. Founded in 2002, Sophia Cradle aims to render services to the improvement of everyone's quality of life by creating innovative mobile Internet technology. For more information about Sophia Cradle, please visit www.s-cradle.com/english/.
About R-FORCE Entertainment
R-FORCE Entertainment, Co., Ltd. is a planner and a developer of entertainment and networking software. For more information, please visit http://www.r-force.co.jp/.