BRender is a 3D rendering library from Argonaut. It supplies machinery for describing and drawing a scene, leaving the game to decide what happens in it. Its name expands to Blazing Render.
The preserved credits name Sam Littlewood, Dan Piponi, Simon Everett and Philip Pratt for programming. They also identify work on ports, testing, documentation and support: a reusable library needed more than a fast drawing routine to serve another development team.
Describe the scene
BRender’s source distinguishes a model from an actor. A model holds geometry: points in space and triangular faces connecting them. Faces can refer to materials, and vertices carry coordinates that place a texture on the surface.
An actor places something in the scene. It can refer to a model, light or camera, and carries a transform describing its position and orientation relative to its parent. Actors form a hierarchy. Moving a parent can therefore move its attached parts together, while each child keeps a local position of its own.
That separation is useful whenever several objects share a shape. The geometry describes what they look like; their actors describe where they are. Texture mapping supplies surface detail without requiring every mark to become another triangle.
A shared part of the work
A rendering library does not supply the rules of a race, an opponent’s decisions or a game’s story. It gives those systems a way to show their results. RenderWare belongs to the same broader history of teams licensing reusable graphics technology.
The BRender source release preserves a version identified as approximately November 1998. Its maintainers record that Foone Turing and Scott Hanselman helped make the release available with Jez San’s approval. The archive makes the library’s data structures and implementation available for study alongside the games and company history.
Sources
- Argonaut, BRender 1.3.2 source release: Preserved late-1998 library; release README records provenance, programming credits and permission from Jez San.
- Argonaut, actor.h: Original actor types, parent/child hierarchy, transforms, model and material references.
- Argonaut, model.h: Original model definitions: vertices, triangle faces, mapping coordinates and materials.