Power Engine (game engine)

Power Engine is a 3D game engine originally concieved in 1997 for Rhode's Playstation games, and is still used by Rhode to this day.

Versions don't necessarily mean how advanced the 3D engine is or which is the latest version, but rather the generation of consoles it was used on.

Power Engine v1.0
Originally released in December 22, 1997 with the release of Amber Gold, this 3D game engine was deemed to be quite advanced compared to it's competitors. Supporting culling and tesselation, it was quite advanced and also quite fast, hence it's name, Power Engine. It wasn't used for long, however.

It also has a limited implementation of alpha textures. Alpha textures are 2-bit grayscale, and can only lighten. This is useful for lights and lens flares, but isn't really used by any game that used this version of the Power Engine.

Most games that were released on PC used a beta version of DirectX 5.0 (4.05.00.0155, RC55) that supported Windows NT 4.0.

Games using this engine

 * Amber Gold (PS1, Saturn, PC, DOS)
 * Home Alone 3 (PS1, Saturn, N64, PC)

Power Engine v1.0a
Released in May 4, 1998 with the release of Bambi: Forest War, this version of the engine fixed one of the worst problems with the original engine - lack of audio with a bit resolution higher than 8, causing noisy sound and speech.

It also slightly updated the alpha mode: alpha textures are now 3-bit.

Most games that were released on PC used DirectX 5.2-6.1: Bambi: Forest War used an early release of DirectX 5.2 (4.05.01.1600, RC00,) Racing Spirit Zero used a later release (4.05.01.1998, RC0.)

Games using this engine

 * Bambi: Forest War (PS1, N64, PC)
 * Racing Spirit Zero (PS1, PC)

Power Engine v1.1
Released in May 16, 1999 with the release of Amber Gold 2, this version has more improvements over the last version, indicated by the "v1.1" designation. This engine ditches the old chunk/block-style of animation (where each individual limb is it's own separate 3D model) for skeletal mesh animation (where the whole character is one singular model and movement is achieved by deforming the mesh.) This was quite ambitious for it's time, because not many PS1 games actually used skeletal animation, with some PS2 games still using chunk-based animation.

It also has other features, like face groups in 3D models, transparency on the Sega Saturn, RLE texture compression and lossless audio compression using it's own propietary audio compression format (quite similar to FLAC.)

Multitexturing was used to add reflections to cars and hair in Amber Gold 2, similar to the 3Dfx version of the original Amber Gold, except with a more elaborate reflection texture (the original Amber Gold only had a 32x32 white circle texture, similar to the 3Dfx version of Need for Speed II or the PS2 version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.) This also coincided with DirectX 6.0 (with 6.1a used in Amber Gold 2 PC version) supporting multitexuring.

It also updated the alpha mode: alpha textures are now 3-bit, and have two modes: Alpha Lighten and Alpha Darken, with the latter being used mostly for shadows.

Games using this engine

 * Amber Gold 2 (PS1, N64, PC)

Power Engine v1.1a
Released in September 11, 1999, this is a minor revision with audio file stereo sound support. While earlier versions did support stereo sound, the audio files themselves could only be mono.

Power Engine v1.1b
Released in January 7, 2000, this is yet another minor revision of the Power Engine, which adds lossless text compresssion.

The alpha mode was yet again updated: alpha textures can now be 4-bit.