Sexy 3D - on a shoestring…

Broadband slower than text messaging, and computers that smell of corned beef sandwiches and yoghurt, sporting less graphical power than a 1980s Gameboy.

Yes… we’re talking schools around the World in 2016.

Education is the long favoured dumping ground for outdated and often obsolete technology. Bargain basement computers that allow school secretaries to tick boxes in budgetary spreadsheets, and empower headmasters to meet classroom head-count quotas.

Seldom is consideration given to what these digital dinosaurs are actually capable of achieving in the classroom. Couple this with poorly funded internet connectivity, or remote locations that only permit a meagre bit rate, and you have the perfect recipe for a fun-free computing suite.

Given the status quo above, one would expect that software vendors would develop their programs with this in mind? Carefully tailored titles that squeeze the most out of graphics chips that were considered workaday and nothing special in 2008, and use CleverSquishyTechnology tm that delivers great looking imagery down slow rusty wires.

Not so much.

So, this is where Numfum comes in…

We have a history of making things work better. Smaller. Faster. And parking modesty to one side for a brief moment, looking rather damned sexy too.

We are developing a 3D engine and toolset from the ground-up that caters for these challenging conditions, and considers great performance on older equipment as an absolute requirement.

An engine that can deliver over 80,000 polygons at 60 frames per second, render FBX compatible scenes and animation, overlay XML driven 2D user interfaces, nicely render font based text and even have time left to throw out accompanying multi-track music and sound effects.

So yeah, we care about performance.

But there’s no point in developing something that looks great if you can’t deliver it to your audience. So the core engine is ultra compact, and we can tailor content to take up the least number of bits possible. Which means the end user gets the best possible experience, delivered quickly.

We should also mention efficiency too. This can be quite a big issue when you’re students are using iPad or Android devices running on internal batteries. Our technology runs cool. We make the dedicated graphics chips do all the hard work, which leaves the CPU to largely put it’s feet up, so classes can cruise through the day without needing to plug in for a re-charge.

So far so good!

But to develop for this engine, you’re going to need supporting software and a reliable debugging environment. We’ve got this covered too, with a bespoke set of tools that integrate with your preferred IDE.

We also take away the drudgery of developing per platform. You just code once, and our interface (abstraction) layer talks nicely to PC, Mac, iOS and Android devices for you.

So, what can our engine do in real terms? Anything you can dream up! Here’s a quick example of what we put together in a couple of days. A 2.5D environment, featuring a scene originated in Autodesk 3ds Max.