Qube Software is a British company specialising in advanced 3D technology. It was founded in 1998 by Servan Keondjian, Hugh Steers, and Doug Rabson who created the Reality Lab renderer and who subsequently played a leading role at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

turning it into

Direct3D Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware ...

. Qube Software has produced games, however, its main focus has been the development of 3D software that would address the key problems with 3D

middleware Middleware is a type of computer software program that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to imple ...

Keondjian says he identified during his years working on

Reality Lab Reality Lab was a 3D computer graphics API created by RenderMorphics to provide a standardized interface for writing games. It was one of the main contenders in the realtime 3D middleware marketplace at the time, alongside Criterion Software's Re ...

and

History

Rabson and Keondjian met in the late 1980s, as employees of the British video games company

Magnetic Scrolls Magnetic Scrolls was a British video game developer active between 1984 and 1990. A pioneer of audiovisually elaborate text adventure games, it was one of the largest and most acclaimed interactive fiction developers of the 1980s, and one of the ...

. Along with Rabson and Kate Seekings, Keondjian subsequently co-founded

RenderMorphics Reality Lab was a 3D computer graphics API created by RenderMorphics to provide a standardized interface for writing games. It was one of the main contenders in the realtime 3D middleware marketplace at the time, alongside Criterion Software's Ren ...

to allow him to follow his interest in 3D technology, an interest he attributes in part to the ground-breaking Elite series of games published in the mid 1980s. RenderMorphics developed and released

, a real-time 3D application programming interface (API) aimed at the PC. Its main selling point was predicated on the claim that it was faster than any of its contemporaries. From early 1995, Microsoft moved aggressively to acquire RenderMorphics with the deal being announced in late February of that year. By doing so, Microsoft signaled its intention to target the fast-growing video games market by ensuring that its

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

OS provided a platform for games. Keondjian, Rabson and Seekings joined Microsoft as part of the deal, with Keondjian leading the efforts to integrate Reality Lab with the upcoming

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

release. With Rabson's help, Reality Lab became

, the preeminent component in Microsoft's

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

suite of APIs. Having shipped the first three iterations of Direct3D, Keondjian and Rabson left Microsoft in 1997. Keondjian then set up Qube Software, initially with Hugh Steers, one of the founders of Magnetic Scrolls, later joined by Doug Rabson who had taken time out to work on

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

. Qube's goal was to build 3D software that solved most of the issues that had become apparent during the Reality Lab and Direct3D development period. Steers eventually left to pursue a range of personal software interests while the team grew with the addition of Peter Jeffrey and Jamie Fowlston. The first iteration of the resulting software appeared as Q 1.0, used on projects for clients including the

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

and

Lego Lego (, ; ; stylised as LEGO) is a line of plastic construction toys manufactured by the Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. Lego consists of variously coloured interlocking plastic bricks made of acrylonitri ...

while the second, Q 2.0, was launched in February 2008.

'Q' technology

Qube’s technology platform is called Q. Qube has variously described Q as a ‘game engine,’ a ‘technology development platform’ and an ‘interoperability standard’. Founder Servan Keondjian cites Q’s architecture as the platform's key innovation; a pluggable framework to which modular components or even script languages can be added via common APIs. "In particular, we wanted to let people blow out any component from the lowest level all the way to the very high level, so even the networking libraries and input libraries are pluggable, the scripting's pluggable -- everything's a completely pluggable framework for developing games," Keondjian told Gamasutra in a 2008 interview.'Qube's Keondjian On How Its Modular Middleware Trumps The Monolithic'
/ref> The company claims that Q’s architecture makes ports to different platforms a relatively trivial task. According to games industry media projects, using Q have reportedly been undertaken for the PC,

Wii The Wii ( ) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America, and in December 2006 for most other regions of the world. It is Nintendo's fifth major home game console, f ...

PS2 The PlayStation 2 (PS2) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on 4 March 2000, in North America on 26 October, in Europe on 24 November, in Australia on 30 November, ...

PS3 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE). It is the successor to the PlayStation 2, and both are part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. The PS3 was first released on ...

while Qube says its compatibility extends to any system making use of floating point technology (i.e. excluding the GBA and DS) and has implied that Xbox360, PSP and iPhone ports are either complete, underway or can be implemented. Q has been touted as an ‘in house’ solution for games studios as it allows original code to be plugged into the system offering licensees the freedom to focus on creating specific tools and features for games projects without having to build an entire engine to accommodate them.

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://www.qubesoft.com, Qube official website Companies based in the City of London Video game companies of the United Kingdom Software companies established in 1998