News: 17-April-2000: Hyperion presents its Amiga release schedule for 2000.

Leuven, 17 April 2000

Introduction

In the next few days Hyperion entertainment software will celebrate its first birthday. When we started this venture, our stated goal was to bring high-end, high-quality entertainment software to the Amiga.

We feel that we are well on our way to accomplish this. Over the past year, we built up an impressive code-base that will allow us to dramatically cut down on the development time of new Amiga conversions. Part of this code-base has already been made available to the Amiga development community: MiniGL, chunkyppc.library, an improved version of Warp3D (together with Sam Jordan) etc.

We mastered two of the most impressive 3D engines out there: the Quake II engine and the LithTech engine. Together with Titan we brought Smacker, an industry standard video-codec, to the Amiga.

We are now ready to accelerate our development cycle over the course of the next few months.

At this point we would like to address some frequently asked questions.

Why does Hyperion only port old PC games?

Whilst it is true that we have licensed some titles from December 1998, we do not limit ourselves to older games, as will become apparent in the next few weeks. Titles like Shogo, Heretic 2 and SiN were chosen for a reason. First of all, it should be remembered that the current Amiga PPC hardware is already two-three years old and that it will be hard-pressed to keep up with state of the art PC games. Secondly, we prefer to port older, quality titles rather than newer games nobody will remember six months down the road. Finally, it should be remembered that most of the time there is period of many weeks and usually even months between the time a title is released on the PC and the time it is actually finished and the last patch is made available.

Will Hyperion support new Amiga hardware based operating systems not developed by the Amiga Corporation?

The answer is simple: no. Leaving aside considerations such as further market fragmentation which would lead to sharply reduced sales in the Amiga market and the fact that we would need to rebuild our code-base, we want to make it clear, once and for all, that licenses are tied to a specific operating system, not to a specific hardware platform. If it were otherwise, we would just get a license for PPC and we could port for any OS running on PPC including MacOS, AmigaOS, Linux PPC, Beos etc. In reality our license agreements limit the scope of our rights to AmigaOS meaning ports for AROS, PowerOS, MorphOS, Neutrino/QNX etc. are LEGALLY IMPOSSIBLE and would require prior re-negotiation of our license agreements. We would think it highly doubtful that large entertainment software companies would even consider this without very substantial upfront royalty payments which would be impossible to recuperate due to low sales. Obviously, the new Amiga OS based on Elate IS covered by our existing license agreements as it is an OS developed and marketed by the Amiga Corporation. We therefore can and will support the new Amiga OS.

Work in progress. An overview.

Heretic 2: The Amiga conversion of Heretic 2 was completed some weeks ago but is currently stuck in Quality Assurance at Activision due to problems with the test-machine we sent them. We have dispatched James Sellman to Santa Monica in an attempt to get these problems out of the way. Heretic 2 was demoed extensively on two machines at the Saint-Louis show and despite running continuously for two days, never produced a crash.

SiN: Development of SiN is progressing very rapidly thanks to the code and knowledge-base we built up for Heretic 2. We anticipate completion in 2-3 months at most. More information will follow soon.

Shogo: Porting Shogo:MAD proved to be quite a challenge. Our contract-work for Monolith on the software renderer for LithTech V2 (all platforms) has caused further delays but we are now rapidly nearing completion. More information will follow.

LithTech V1 & V2: The significance of the Shogo port goes far beyond the specific game in question. Hyperion is bringing this world-class 3D engine to the Amiga platform which will allow for easy porting of upcoming titles based on LithTech. The list of licensees for the LithTech engine is growing rapidly (see: www.monolithnews.com/lithtech2_licensees.html) and each and every one of this titles can be brought to the Amiga in a matter of weeks. Moreover, Hyperion has the right to extend its agreement with Monolith to cover all LithTech based titles developed and owned by Monolith which includes at the time of writing the very promising (and as of yet unreleased) titles Sanity and No-one Lives Forever (for further information see: www.monolithnews.com). If you want an absolutely stunning demonstration of what LithTech V2 can do, go and download Monolith's promotional video at http://www.lith.com/lithtech/release.

Worms Armageddon: Development was delayed because of lack of development resources. We are still targeting an early beta-version for the end of Q2.

Freespace: Development will start soon. Expected completion by early Q3.

The future...

Hyperion is on the virge of finalising at least three more agreements for top quality entertainment titles to be released in the year 2000.

Upgrade your machine and stay tuned!

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