At the Game Developers Conference held earlier this month in San Jose, California, Microsoft officially revealed to the world that it is to enter the console market. And along with its announcement, Microsoft gave developers from around the world a first peak as to what can be accomplished with its new hardware platform dubbed X-Box. The company showed off several tech demonstrations that wowed most everyone in attendance - us included.

　　Last week, a company by the name of Pipeworks Software announced that it was responsible for the demos that Microsoft used to first show off its X-Box console. According to Dan Duncalf, president of Pipeworks Software, their goal "was to show the awesome power of X-Box and the ingenuity, creativity, and technical expertise of Pipeworks." And that they did.

　　One demo was based on a room filled with ping-pong balls and several hundred mousetraps. When a ping-pong ball was thrown into the room it triggered another ball poised on one of these mousetraps, and then it triggered another ball, and so on. Eventually the room was filled with several hundred ping-pong balls flying about. This was all accomplished at 60 fps. There was no slowdown.

　　Another demo showcased a Japanese garden with a Koi pond. Thousands of butterflies began to appear and showed off dynamic lighting and reflections. And one last demo showed a desktop with lots of objects on top of it. The camera panned about, but everything remained crystal clear. There was one point in which the camera zoomed all the way up to the book resting on the table, and every word was perfectly legible.

　　Pipeworks states that with the powerful tools of the X-Box, it only took a day to get each demo up and running. Each demo took approximately one month to complete and fine-tune. Pipeworks also mentioned that Microsoft gave it a lot of creative freedom to do whatever it wanted. Microsoft's only requirement was for Pipeworks to put together demos that truly showed off the power of the hardware. However, four days prior to the GDC, Microsoft actually came to Pipeworks and asked that the number of butterflies in the Japanese garden scene be doubled. Pipeworks pulled it off.

　　According to Pipeworks, the X-Box demos were created using 3D Studio Max and some internal tools. Most of the development was actually done on a PC, and then, as the GDC approached, the developers switched over to the specific X-Box hardware requirements.

　　As for Pipeworks itself, the company was founded in November 1999 and it employs several former staff members of Dynamix. One of the founders of Pipeworks met with one of the X-Box project leads in 1995, and this is apparently how the company landed the exclusive deal to design the technology demos. Currently, although nothing has been announced, Pipeworks is developing software for the PC and X-Box platforms. We'll surely be hearing a lot more from the company in the near future.