Metrowerks provides CodeWarrior for the GameCube

Metrowerks has announced that it has reached an agreement with Nintendo to provide its CodeWarrior tools, including a compiler, debugger, and integrated development environment, to licensed GameCube developers. The company has been working with Nintendo essentially since the inception of the GameCube project, and the console's operating system, the SDK, and all of the libraries have been designed and written using CodeWarrior from an engineering standpoint. In terms of new development, the CodeWarrior toolset lets developers, particularly third parties interested in multiplatform development, write and compile the same code for multiple platforms within the same development environment.

"When it came time to develop the operating system for the Nintendo GameCube, Metrowerks' CodeWarrior was our tool of choice," said Ramin Ravanpey, director of the software tools support group at Nintendo of America. "What that means for the GameCube developers is a set of tools providing unmatched integration with our operating system, enabling them to create high quality games and get them to market quickly."

In addition to the CodeWarrior development toolset for the GameCube, the company will also make the CodeWarrior Analysis tool available to GameCube developers. "We have a product that is called the CodeWarrior Analysis tool suite, and we will be releasing this for the GameCube product as well," Brian Gildon, director of core technology and game platforms at Metrowerks, told GameSpot. "There is a framework of core technology that it is based on, and very soon we will be making an announcement that, for all of our game console products, we will allow developers to access the core technology that a lot of our things are written on. This enables them to write a whole series of tools and anything they want based on a framework. Really, it will be the first product of its type anywhere in this space."

Gildon spoke further regarding Metrowerks' relationship with Nintendo and the ease of cross-platform development provided by the CodeWarrior development toolset. Our entire Q&A with Brian Gildon follows:

GameSpot: Is the CodeWarrior toolset for the GameCube already available to developers?

Brian Gildon: We have the first development toolset for the GameCube. Nintendo has been primarily using it to develop the Dolphin operating system, which is the operating system that runs the machine. All of the internal parties within Nintendo, and the developers that are currently signed up with Nintendo, are using our tools as the development tools suite of choice right now. So, all of the initial titles from all of the vendors--you can kind of guess what those titles might be--are all being built using CodeWarrior.

GS: Does that include third-party titles?

BG: Yes, that is inclusive of first, second, and third parties from Nintendo's perspective. I will go as far as to say that some third parties that are already licensed by Nintendo are working on ports of games that they have written for other consoles or game titles that they have had sitting in the wings. They are using our tools now in some cases to port to the GameCube and get things moving.

The great thing about this--although not directly related to Nintendo's interests per se--is that we have the capability of installing all of our other console tools with our GameCube tools. So developers, particularly third-party companies such as Electronic Arts and companies like that, can retarget any applications they have built for other consoles such as the PlayStation 2 toward development for the GameCube and vice versa. They can do this without having to change toolsets--they don' t even have to change applications. They can just tell it to build it for a different machine and it will do it. It is the only type of development software in the world that does this right now.

GS: This must expedite ports from other consoles.

BG: Absolutely. There are a couple of inherent advantages to doing this. One is that you eliminate the learning curve for developers, which cuts out the first initial development time. The second thing is that as long as they are writing standard C or C++ for most of the code, then all of that code is immediately portable. You don't run into any problems where you say, "Well, this compiler works different from this one, so things don't really compile right."

We can allow games to be retargeted on multiple platforms, with all of our tools working together simultaneously. The goal is, particularly for third-party developers, a large advantage in customer penetration. It used to be that when you had a PC, or when only a couple of consoles were on the market, game developers and publishers knew how to reach their audience. They could write an application and people bought it because they had the same platforms to run it on. Now, you have what amounts to four consoles in the space, including the Dreamcast, the Xbox, the PlayStation 2, and the GameCube. You also have the PC platform, and you have a variety of handheld devices. The real issue now with developers and publishers is how do they reach all of the same people they used to before. The only way to do that is release their games on as many different consoles and products as they possibly can. So, that is the big advantage that we're trying to bring in with our toolset, a perspective that no one else has approached. We're going to try to enable simple cross-platform development the best we can, and that is strategically the point where we are heading with our product.

GS: Thanks for your time, Brian.

Metrowerks' familiarity with the Power PC environment has been essential in the company's ability to provide a highly functional compiler to GameCube developers. "This is an IBM processor that is primarily being used in the GameCube, but it is still a Power PC, and the core architecture is the same," Gildon explained. "Because we've been working with Nintendo since day one, we've been taking advantage of the specific optimizations for this particular processor, the Gecko. We have been supporting that for a very long time, so any developer with a generic Power PC compiler out there is not going to get that level of optimization." The CodeWarrior for the GameCube version 1.0 is available now at a suggested price of $3500. Six-day evaluation copies are also available to GameCube developers.