March 6^th, 2003 (12:00am) - Softimage Co., a subsidiary of Avid Technology, Inc. announced today the immediate availability of a new suite of utilities and tools designed to speed-up and simplify the creation of games animation and effects for the Sony® PlayStation® 2 platform. This new Platform Development Kit (PDK) for the SOFTIMAGE®|XSI® software brings the industry’s leading nonlinear 3-D production environment directly into the hands of PlayStation 2 title developers and artists, offering them unrivalled in-context control over their art and dramatic productivity boosts.

The SOFTIMAGE|XSI PDK offers games artists an advanced suite of tools and libraries that deliver a robust asset-previewing and delivery platform for SOFTIMAGE|XSI artists and developers working on the PlayStation 2 system based projects.

In addition, the new PDK allows users to create and edit shaders directly from within the SOFTIMAGE|XSI software with immediate on-target feedback. This greatly reduces creation, iteration, and validation time and gives artists the most accurate possible review feedback.

Softimage’s PDK contains support for the PlayStation 2 on-target previewing via Sony’s monitor and viewer applications. The PDK also features a File Tool Kit (FTK) for flawless integration of the dotXSITM file format to facilitate the integration of the SOFTIMAGE|XSI software into any interactive media pipeline. In addition to the viewer and the FTK, the SOFTIMAGE|XSI PDK also includes a wealth of add-ons for simplifying the creation of surface and texture effects - making it easy to build rich, custom real-time shading effects for the designated platform, while allowing tight integration with the SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.3.0 environment.

The SOFTIMAGE|XSI PDK for PlayStation 2 includes:

Support for Sony Computer Entertainment graphics libraries.

Dedicated SOFTIMAGE|XSI Real-Time Shaders for authoring of sophisticated rendering effects.

Dev Tool Remote Fileserver for Windows.

SOFTIMAGE|XSI FTK v.3.62 for PlayStation 2 featuring new Semantic Layer API technology, delivering a robust art-pipeline deployment SDK that gives developers open access to extract game-optimal representations of art created using the SOFTIMAGE|XSI software.

An intuitive high-level UI that gathers all the PDK components for the PlayStation 2 platform into one integrated Net View-based management utility.

Pricing and availability

The SOFTIMAGE|XSI PDK for PlayStation 2 is available from the Sony Computer Entertainment Developer Network website.

The SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.3.0 3-D nonlinear production environment, which supports Windows, Linux and IRIX operating systems, is available today with a suggested retail pricing starting at $6,750 USMSRP. Additionally, for a limited time, Softimage is offering attractive trade-in credits of up to $6,500 USMSRP for old 3-D software towards the purchase of the SOFTIMAGE|XSI environment.

Visit Softimage at www.softimage.com or call 1-800-576-3846 for more information on the SOFTIMAGE|XSI software and other Softimage products.