Great news! Coherent Labs‘ latest game UI SDK,  Hummingbird, is coming to Sony PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC (Windows and MacOS). Previously available only for iOS and Android, Hummingbird now supports a total of six platforms.

Hummingbird is a game UI SDK, based on HTML5 technologies, designed from the ground-up for the requirements of game developers. When we started the development of Hummingbird two years ago, we envisioned a lightweight software library that fulfills  three goals:

• Great developer workflow
• Scalable architecture for the modern gaming platforms
• Awesome visuals to create UI

The first version of Hummingbird, which was mobile-only, helped us see that our software design decisions were right and they made the library both fast and scalable. The next step, was to combine the architecture of Hummingbird and the know-how we have gained from Coherent GT on the specifics of game consoles. The result is that we now have all the benefits of Hummingbird translated to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One! So, console developers are now able to harness the power of Hummingbird!

Example of a complex HUD screen for console games

Designers can use visual workflows with Adobe Animate, combined with the powerful styling and layout of HTML to create the user interfaces. The game can be seamlessly integrated with the UI through Hummingbird’s data-binding system for MVC/MVVM-style UI designs. Hummingbird is characterized by its performance – developers can have both great looking and complex user interfaces that render in sub-millisecond times on console. The task-based software architecture of the library frees precious milliseconds in your game loop.

Hummingbird is great in combination with Coherent GT, on PC and consoles, and will take care of UIs in the most performance-critical spots of the game – the HUD. In this spot, every cycle is precious and the ability to run the UI layout on different threads/cores is particularly important. Hummingbird and Coherent GT are fully compatible and can be tightly integrated together.

Hummingbird for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One is currently available for C++ engines. Also, an Unreal Engine 4 plugin is coming soon, so stay tuned!

If you have any questions about Hummingbird, you can contact our Sales team at sales@coherent-labs.com for more information. If you want to try the product, Request a Demo.