EIAS version 9 Developer Kit

published in Oct, 02, 2010

Ola my friends!
Hello gentlemen

We present a new EI Developer Kit for plug-in and shader developers:

http://www.eias3d.com/downloads/

The SDK has been updated for two reasons:

First off, the previous SDK was written in the 1990's. It was totally obsolete long ago. The new Kit has been completely updated. All documents have been re-written, new ones have been added. A lot of new API features are documented. The SDK examples have polished and new examples of plug-ins and shaders have been added.

Secondly, this updated SDK is necessary for developers to make their plug-ins and shaders compatible with EI 9.0 multithreading and 64-bit rendering..

Our goal is to provide all developer needs in order to port their products before release, not after. The porting details are:

- 64-bit rendering support is not mandatory, the user can choose between 32 and 64 bits, both are multithreaded. Nevertheless, many users will be interested to use all RAM of their machines so please consider porting your plug-ins and shaders to 64 bits as soon as possible.

- model plug-ins. We realize it's impossible to require everyone to port to 64-bit mode immediately. That's why Camera 9 provides a special service to call 32-bit plug-ins from the 64-bit render core. So all plug-ins will function with the 64-bit renderer. An exception is plug-ins that use undocumented features. Although we don't know of any particular plug-ins that do this, it's possible in theory. At the same time we hope that all developers understand that native 64-bit plug-ins are faster. Leaving model plug-ins in 32-bit is short sighted.

- shaders and flare plug-ins - they should be ported to 64-bits on both platforms: Mac and Windows. All available Konkeptoine products will be ported during EIAS 9 beta-testing.

- multithreding. No changes are required for model and flare plugins. Multithreaded shaders are desired for faster rendering. In most cases no extra effort is needed to make a shader multithreaded.
However, a developer can inform Camera that his shader is not multithreaded. It would produce some overhead but rendering remains ok.

The new SDK provides all tools and examples for both 32 and 64 bit plug-ins and shaders for the Mac and Windows platforms.

Dear developers, EI 9.0 beta is ready for you. There is definitely enough time to port all your products without any hurry. Together let's make this porting easy and pleasant for users.

Thanks
EIAS3D Team