Matthew Hopwood of AGB Games, took some time out from the continued of their hand-held gaming technologies, to answer a few questions related to their most interesting creation, the WFR engine. The engine’s already brought true-3D (polygonal) environments to life on the Game Boy Advance; and now their showing us how Quake might look on a hand-held! It really is quite impressive...

Firstly, how many polygons can the engine push on the GBA, and how closely can it replicate the visuals of the original?

Mat: Bantering around polygon figures don't actually mean much from a GBA developers point of view because we could easily push 100,000+ polygons a second, but they would only be only a few pixels in size each. Realistically in terms of useful game polygons that are texture mapped we can probably push around 10,000 per second, this figure does drop slightly when real-time smooth shading and perspective correction are added, to more like 7,000 per second. We also allow the tiling and transparent textures. We don't mind losing a few thousands polygons per second for the sake of added environment complexity / variation and special effects that can be created using this type of polygon renderer.

How well-suited is the GBA to true-3D visuals, and what compromises / opportunities has this resulted in the development of the WFR engine?

Mat: The GBA is at heart a 2D machine, but fortunately added a half-decent CPU and 256 and 32,768 colour display modes, which are all you need really to create games. Any type of 3D on such a limited device is going to be difficult, its just a case of making the best of every single polygon that you have.