Icarus flies with new tools

Six years in the making, the Icarus suite of tools is designed to help developers build 3D world virtual platforms. The middleware incorporates a number of third party technologies to complement its engine, including Vivox for VoIP, Ageia’s PhysX physics engine, SpeedTree from IDV for and OC3 for avatar speech and facial expressions.

The platform is already being used for MMOG Fallen Earth and has been licensed by two other studios.

“Icarus Studios has created the only suite of tools designed from scratch specifically as an integrated 3rd party environment for 3D online world creation,” says Jim Hettinger, CEO of Icarus Studios. “We’re launching our technology suite today after an 18-month stealth period during which our 65-person team completed our six-year development and QA testing efforts.”

“Regardless of whether you are building a MMO, simulator, collaborative or social environment, using the Icarus Developer Tool Suite will allow most of your project to be completed by non-programmer staff, and reduce time to market by an estimated 50 per cent and development cost by 65 per cent,” says Icarus EVP, David Gardner. “Most importantly, the suite includes hundreds of features that represent the ‘polishing’ that so often gets left out of a final product as deadlines rapidly approach.”

“When people see what our tools can produce for the first time they are really blown away by the level of realism and our ability to integrate with the web and real world,” added Jim Hettinger.

“Our goal is to blur the lines between the real world and virtual worlds with features such as integrated working browsers, dial-out to real world phones, and real-time video streaming. We have taken everything to the next level including the network architecture where our servers have the ability to dynamically re-task themselves based on user demand, allowing us to offer a massively scalable solution.”