Imagination Technologies has teamed up with game engine developer Chukong Technologies to create a version of the cross-platform Cocos2d-x engine that's optimized to run on MIPS CPU cores and PowerVR GPUs. The companies said that the engine will even run on the $65.00 Creator CI20 board, which includes an Ingenic JZ4780 SoC packing two MIPS32 (XBurst) cores clocked at 1.2 GHz and a PowerVR SGX540 GPU.
Used by more than 400,000 developers worldwide, the Cocos2d-x game engine is currently the foundation of a number of popular mobile games such as Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Onepiece Treasure Cruise, Tales of Asteria, Plants vs. Zombies All Star and more. The software is dubbed as "the world's most popular open source engine" and is based on Chukong's Cocos2d engine.
So how did this partnership come about? Imagination's Alexandru Voica said in a blog that he sent Chukong chief architect Ricardo Quesada three Creator CI20 boards for development. Quesada determined that the Cocos2d-x engine could easily run on the MIPS architecture, which led to the development of the optimized version of the engine, Cocos2d-x v4.0-alpha.
"He was able to easily cross-compile all the required libraries and get the game engine up and running in a few hours. The end-result of this collaboration was an official announcement between Chukong Technologies and Imagination," Voica said.
Cocos2d-x v4.0-alpha is based on version 3.4 and adds unified rendering for 2D and 3D objects, which enables advanced 3D effects. The optimized engine also includes custom allocators to increase memory management performance, a smaller footprint on iOS and Android, and frustum culling, which only sends elements to the hardware if they're in the frustum. The engine can also use Lua, JavaScript or C++, Voica said.
Under the MIT license, developers can use the Coco2d-x engine without having to pay a dime. The software can be used for virtually anything and supports iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. Chukong also offers a JavaScript version of Cocos2d-x that includes Cocos2d-html5 and Cocos2d-x JSBinding.
Chukong's Ricardo Quesada said in a press release that the company has worked extensively with Imagination Technologies on performance optimizations for games built with the Cocos2d-x engine. Chukong is also using the MIPS Creator CI20 boards to optimize the engine even more and provide support for MIPS-based hardware.
In addition to the engine, Chukong offers Cocos Studio, a free toolkit for game development. This suite includes a UI Editor, a Data Editor, a Scene Editor and an Animation Editor. For more information about Cocos2d-x and related products, head here.
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