| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| Game technology |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Jez San |
Hi everyone - I'm Jez San from Argonaut. I won't say much about the company other than the fact that we make video games. We also make Microprose technology as well. The backgrounds on the slides are all from a game that we're working on called Croc. You'll see a lot of him. So I'm going to talk about game technology, which is the science behind developing games; game-engines, which is the way we deliver them; a little bit about the platforms that exist today; a bit about the platforms that are coming soon. Just to let everyone know that the games industry - you may not know it - is one of the largest of the media industries. I believe in America, the games industry is worth 20 billion dollars a year. A lot of that goes to Nintendo and Sony but there's plenty for everyone. One of the cool things about the game-industry - which is why I enjoy working in it - is that the hardware is quite often state-of-the-art. Quite often the game platforms push the hardware and the other platforms - the PC, the Macintosh, etcetera - catch up sometimes years later. I'm talking about game technology while a lot of the other people are talking about the more difficult subjects, the creativity behind game-development. But we believe that technology can help to make good games. And the trick there is that the good games are the ones that play well. And how do you define game play? Well I'm sure we're gonna talk about that later. But game play is really hard to plan, really hard to design. It's one of those things that you just have to try the game, see if it's fun. If it isn't fun, change something. Try and make it fun. And that's the trial and error development process. So we use technology to help us tune the game. Sometimes the difference between a good game and a bad game is only that the good games have more time spent on tuning it, tweaking it, making sure that everything is just right. So we've designed some primary development tools and languages that allow us to modify certain aspects of the game while we're playing the game. Quite often we could, for instance, be playing the game on a Playstation and Croc is trying to jump from here to here. And we just edit the positions on the PC, hit the button and play it immediately afterwards. And the trick to be able to do that is not using commercial off-the-shelf tools, because they're just not built for that kind of turnaround. So we developed our own object editors and we developed the connection between the games consoles and their tools so that we can make quick adjustments and see the results immediately. So I mentioned the user-friendly tools, but unfortunately the platforms aren't powerful enough that we're able to do one game-genre. I'm sure some of you heard today that there are different game genres. Here's some examples, but there's many more. Obviously there's the first person shoot-up like Duke Nukem and Quake, where you see from the eyes of your character in the game. Then there's three character platform games I'm gonna show on the videotape. There's obviously racing games, fighting games, role-playing games, all sorts of other things. But there's no one game engine that can deliver every possible kind of game because the platforms just aren't powerful enough to do that - though it might happen one day. Roll the videotape. Here you see some scenes from Croc2 - The Sequel; Croc is a cute, green crocodile. This is a family game. It's one of the few that appeals to both girls and boys equally. You control this crocodile character, you take him on an adventure, you meet other characters in the game and they give you hints as to what to do. And everything is three dimensional; you can move anywhere you want. You can jump on balloons and take them for a ride, you can jump on little bouncy jellies. And so there's lots of different environments, there's different textures and different feelings, for instance when you're walking on snow you leave footprints, when you're walking on ice, you slip about. You can walk on moving platforms and just travel around the environment. It's all very intuitive. It's not physically correct, but it 'just feels correct', but in a cartoon world. In the game you are given goals too; you're putting out fires and you're rescuing creatures. You're learning about a story as you play the game. But this is only one kind of game genre. In a second I will show you some other kinds. Oh yeah - he can hang glide and other things. But equally, this is only one genre and we have to develop games that appeal to all sorts of different people. So on this tape you will see some examples. This is a physics technology we're working on, all this is real time and it allows us to calculate the interaction of the objects with each other. They can bounce at each other. They can float. You could stand on the floating blocks and you'd sink around and so on. And the reason for doing this physics technology was that it would cross the boundaries of some games genres we couldn't. We 'd be able to do not just puzzle games but also character games and driving games and so on. Here you see another technology that we're working on. This is a first person 3D engine but it's one of the first that I've seen that has real-time shadows and real-time lighting. And not only that - we're able to have coloured lights. So if you see here, there's one light behind the door, but now we switched on two lights, we've got a red light and a green light. And as the door opens and closes you see the shadows overlap. With this kind of technology we're able to deliver a more realistic sort of game. Here you see a room with a lot of objects floating and the lights are moving so you could see the shadows travelling around the room. This is actually running on a very slow PC, so we're able to deliver this kind of graphic technology for almost anyone who owns a game console or a PC. Here you can see it's kind of like a disco in a medieval castle but we've got a bunch of coloured lights floating around the room. Forgive the quality of the demo's but they're done by programmers. We haven't involved any artists at this point. Here you can see a fire-effect, we've got a flickering light inside. And this is a mirror, where we can do real-time reflections. And this is what's called a portal, a window to a new part of the world. This is demonstrating an effect where you can have a box that is bigger on the inside than on the outside. And here we have a character walking through the corridor. You can see the shadows are cast all over the place, red shadows and green shadows and the shadows that are cast onto the character himself. The last game demonstration is very different. This is an extremely violent game as opposed to Croc, which is a cute cartoon game. Here in this game you're kind of a freedom fighter in an alien world and you're attacking this race of aliens who are all breeds of dog. And you're given multiple vehicles to drive in, learn to drive. Here you are driving a tank. You could also fly planes and go into boats and so on. So in the graphics engine, here's some of what I consider state of the art. Texture mapping is applying pictures onto 3D objects and give them texture. But lighting is something that hasn't been really implemented in the past and is getting better all the time. Same with shadows; there are very few games that have real-time shadows to-date, and we believe that that will be one of the next big things. Some of the other things that are listed there - filtering, multi-texturing and bump mapping have only just come into existence in game-engines. So what do I predict the next big thing to be? Well obviously we're betting on physics, animation and photo realism as the first few, and you've seen demonstrations of those in our game-engines. But also artificial intelligence is something that is often quoted but rarely implemented very well. And then we move on to multi-player games. And here I have a couple of things to say. The reason why we haven't seen any good Internet multi-player games is because there are infrastructure problems in delivering them. It's possible to design games that run on a low bandwidth, you know, a slow modem for instance, but it is not possible to do action games very well with the latency problems on the Internet. Latency is the time that it takes for a signal on one side to be delivered to the other side. For instance if someone presses on the joystick, the actual input of that joystick takes a while to be sent along the line through the Internet. And by the time it arrives at the other player's computer, the information is already old, maybe half a second or a second old. And if you're playing an action game that has reaction-reaction, like a fight game, you know: punch, block punch, block, it's just not possible to do that with high latency. So we need a new infrastructure and that's why I can't wait for ISDN to be established or ADSL. Luckily they're now trialing in London. And cable modems. Because these have much better latencies than (standard) modems. And also of course we need the Internet infrastructure to be improved. Just a quick summary. The PC market tend to be older. The machines cost more and so the average age of a PC-owner is the twenties or thirties. So the kind of games that they play tend to be more first person, they tend to have more spatial awareness, they tend to have more strategy and storytelling in their games. Where the Playstation for instance, which is the most popular game console right now, has a younger audience because the machine is very inexpensive. Also the Playstation works on a TVset where PCs work on their own monitors. But the Playstation market is massive - I believe there's over 14 million of them to date and they're not letting up. Maybe there'll be 15 million by this Christmas. And that's 50 million Playstations that are actively being used - the owners of them are buying lots of games. If we use some of our games as an example, we've sold perhaps eight or ten to one of our games on the Playstation than on the PC. And yet the majority of the people in the industry work on the PC and far less actually develop Playstation games, because there are other machines too; the Saturn, which is about 1 percent of the market; set top boxes are becoming standardised now with digital television. A quick word about what we believe to be coming. Obviously the Sega Dreamcast has been announced and in fact is available in Japan this week. But we're beginning to hear rumours about the Sony Playstation2. Toshiba has leaked information about the chip that drives the Playstation 2 and Sony hasn't really admitted it, but it sounds like a very powerful machine, and it will probably be arriving in the next year or two. And obviously there's rumours about the Nintendo 2000, which is designed by the same team that designed the Nintendo 64, except for now they're a private company. One of these things with the PC is that it is a moving target, so who knows what the PC will look like in the year 2000. Obviously it will be faster and it will have a DVD-drive and it will have lots of memory but we're not quite sure what kind of graphics technology it will have and what kind of audio technology 'cause it just moves so fast. That's one of the reasons that us game developers like the consoles because at least they stick around for a few years at a time. If we're lucky, we'll have a machine for four years in the market which gives us time to develop good games. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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