RAD Game Tools Updates Granny, Bink

RAD Game Tools has updated two of its products, Bink and Granny. With regard to Bink, the company's true-color video codec, the company has added Nintendo GameCube support. Bink SDK pricing starts at $5000. In Granny news, RAD released version 2 of the 3D animation system, which has been entirely re-written from version 1.x. According to the company, Granny 2 built from the ground up to allow you to decide, on a case-by-case basis, how Granny should be integrated into your code and art pipeline. Granny features game content exporters for all the major 3D content development tools. These exporters feature detailed manual and automated preferences that can be set per object, texture, and material in your scenes, and complete automation support via each art tool's native scripting interface. Granny's run-time library features a character animation system that supports b-spline-based animation playback, animation modification, animation blending, and inverse kinematics. The product includes routines for skeletal deformation. In addition to the run-time operations of skeletal animation and mesh deformation, Granny also features tools for 3D engine development, from standard ray-casting operations to utility objects for handling common things like camera movement. These functions are decoupled, so they can be used within the context of a Granny-enabled run-time system or as stand-alone helpers inside a mostly non-Granny application. The Granny library provides a number of non-run-time tools such as custom, better-than-ZIP file compression, automatic structured file I/O and conversion, Bink and S3 texture compression, vertex format conversion, pixel format conver