ACM Queue - Game Development

Better Scripts, Better Games: Smarter, more powerful scripting languages will improve game performance while making gameplay development more efficient.

Walker White, Christoph Koch, Johannes Gehrke, Alan Demers — 2009年1月08日 14:10:31 GMT

The video game industry earned 8ドル.85 billion in revenue in 2007, almost as much as movies made at the box office. Much of this revenue was generated by blockbuster titles created by large groups of people. Though large development teams are not unheard of in the software industry, game studios tend to have unique collections of developers. Software engineers make up a relatively small portion of the game development team, while the majority of the team consists of content creators such as artists, musicians, and designers.

Scaling in Games & Virtual Worlds: Online games and virtual worlds have familiar scaling requirements, but don’t be fooled: everything you know is wrong.

Jim Waldo — 2009年1月08日 14:10:29 GMT

I used to be a systems programmer, working on infrastructure used by banks, telecom companies, and other engineers. I worked on operating systems. I worked on distributed middleware. I worked on programming languages. I wrote tools. I did all of the things that hard-core systems programmers do.

Big Games, Small Screens: Developing 3D games for mobile devices is full of challenges, but the rich, evolving toolset enables some stunning results.

Mark Callow, Paul Beardow, David Brittain — 2008年1月17日 10:49:28 GMT

Big Games, Small Screens

Developing 3D games for mobile devices is full of challenges, but the rich, evolving toolset enables some stunning results.

MARK CALLOW, HI CORPORATION
PAUL BEARDOW, ECCOSPHERE
DAVID BRITTAIN, SUPERSCAPE

One thing that becomes immediately apparent when creating and distributing mobile 3D games is that there are fundamental differences between the cellphone market and the more traditional games markets, such as consoles and handheld gaming devices. The most striking of these are the number of delivery platforms; the severe constraints of the devices, including small screens whose orientation can be changed; limited input controls; the need to deal with other tasks; the nonphysical delivery mechanism; and the variations in handset performance and input capability.

Outside of the mobile market, developers had to target only two or three devices and deliver games on high-capacity media; in the mobile market they have to consider tens of devices per operator and package their games to fit in a compact download. The number and types of devices are also constantly changing; in a 12-month development cycle many new handsets can emerge. In addition, console development focus has been about length of play and numbers of levels, rather than the short bursts of intense activity that typify today’s mobile games. Furthermore, development time and budget are usually limited by low retail prices in the 5ドル-10 range.

Gaming Graphics: The Road to Revolution: From laggard to leader, game graphics are taking us in new directions.

Nick Porcino — 2004年5月05日 16:31:12 GMT

Gaming Graphics: Road to Revolution

NICK PORCINO, LUCASARTS

From laggard to leader, game graphics are taking us in new directions.

It has been a long journey from the days of multicolored sprites on tiled block backgrounds to the immersive 3D environments of modern games. What used to be a job for a single game creator is now a multifaceted production involving staff from every creative discipline. The next generation of console and home computer hardware is going to bring a revolutionary leap in available computing power; a teraflop (trillion floating-point operations per second) or more will be on tap from commodity hardware. This leap in power will bring with it a leap in expectations, both on the part of the consumer and the creative professional.

The Scalability Problem: The coexistence of high-end systems and value PCs can make life hell for game developers.

Dean Macri — 2004年2月24日 11:42:21 GMT

The Scalability Problem
DEAN MACRI, INTEL

The coexistence of high-end systems and value PCs can make life hell for game developers.

Back in the mid-1990s, I worked for a company that developed multimedia kiosk demos. Our biggest client was Intel, and we often created demos that appeared in new PCs on the end-caps of major computer retailers such as CompUSA. At that time, performance was in demand for all application classes from business to consumer. We created demos that showed, for example, how much faster a spreadsheet would recalculate (you had to do that manually back then) on a new processor as compared with the previous year’s processor. The differences were immediately noticeable to even a casual observer—and it mattered. Having to wait only 10 seconds for something that previously took 20 or more was a major improvement and led many consumers and businesses to upgrade their PCs.

Things have changed considerably since then, aside from talking about processor speeds in gigahertz rather than megahertz. Not every stand-alone application requires the computing power that a top-of-the-line processor presents today. As a result, the PC market has diverged into a wide range of market segments. From 400ドル “budget” PCs to 4,000ドル “hotrod” models, there’s something for everyone and one size certainly doesn’t fit all.

Fun and Games: Multi-Language Development: Game development can teach us much about the common practice of combining multiple languages in a single project.

Andrew M. Phelps, David M. Parks — 2004年2月24日 11:39:15 GMT

Fun and Games with Multi-Language Development

ANDREW M. PHELPS, ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGYDAVID M. PARKS, ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Game development can teach us much about the common practice of combining multiple languages in a single project.

Computer games (or “electronic games” if you encompass those games played on console-class hardware) comprise one of the fastest-growing application markets in the world. Within the development community that creates these entertaining marvels, multi-language development is becoming more commonplace as games become more and more complex. Today, asking a development team to construct a database-enabled Web site with the requirement that it be written entirely in C++ would earn scornful looks and rolled eyes, but not long ago the idea that multiple languages were needed to accomplish a given task was scoffed at.

Massively Multiplayer Middleware: Building scaleable middleware for ultra-massive online games teaches a lesson we all can use: Big project, simple design.

Michi Henning — 2004年2月24日 11:38:07 GMT

Massively Multiplayer Middleware
MICHI HENNING, ZeroC

Building scaleable middleware for ultra-massive online games teaches a lesson we all can use: Big project, simple design.

Wish is a multiplayer, online, fantasy role-playing game being developed by Mutable Realms.1 It differs from similar online games in that it allows tens of thousands of players to participate in a single game world (instead of the few hundred players supported by other games). Allowing such a large number of players requires distributing the processing load over a number of machines and raises the problem of choosing an appropriate distribution technology.

DISTRIBUTION REQUIREMENTS

Mutable Realms approached ZeroC for the distribution requirements of Wish. ZeroC decided to develop a completely new middleware instead of using existing technology, such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture).2 To understand the motivation for this choice, we need to examine a few of the requirements placed on middleware by games on the scale of Wish and other large-scale distributed applications.

Game Development: Harder Than You Think: Ten or twenty years ago it was all fun and games. Now it’s blood, sweat, and code.

Jonathan Blow — 2004年2月24日 11:36:18 GMT

Game Development: Harder Than You Think
JONATHAN BLOW, GAME DEVELOPMENT CONSULTANT

Ten or twenty years ago it was all fun and games. Now it’s blood, sweat, and code.

The hardest part of making a game has always been the engineering. In times past, game engineering was mainly about low-level optimization—writing code that would run quickly on the target computer, leveraging clever little tricks whenever possible.

But in the past ten years, games have ballooned in complexity. Now the primary technical challenge is simply getting the code to work to produce an end result that bears some semblance to the desired functionality. To the extent that we optimize, we are usually concerned with high-level algorithmic choices. There’s such a wide variety of algorithms to know about, so much experience required to implement them in a useful way, and so much work overall that just needs to be done, that we have a perpetual shortage of qualified people in the industry.

When Bad People Happen to Good Games: OK, so I admit it - not only am I a total closet gamer geek, I admit that I actually care enough to be bitter about it. Yep, that’s right - this puts me in the “big-time nerd” category.

Josh Coates — 2004年2月24日 11:33:58 GMT

When Bad People Happen to Good Games
Josh Coates, Internet Archive

OK, so I admit it—not only am I a total closet gamer geek, I admit that I actually care enough to be bitter about it. Yep, that’s right—this puts me in the “big-time nerd” category.

But I think I have a lot of company, which sort of makes me feel better. In fact, at any given moment there are hundreds of thousands of people online playing games. Sure, some of them are playing very simple games like Yahoo! Checkers, and others are playing complicated realtime strategies like Blizzard’s Starcraft—but no matter what game they are playing, they are playing with other people. This is the real attraction of online games. No matter how good games get at so-called artificial intelligence, humans will always make more interesting teammates or opponents. That’s a good thing, but it’s also a bad thing. And this is where the bitterness comes in.

A Conversation with Will Harvey: In many ways online games are on the bleeding edge of software development.

Chris DiBona — 2004年2月24日 11:28:31 GMT

A Conversation with Will Harvey

In many ways online games are on the bleeding edge of software development. That puts Will Harvey, founder and executive vice president of Menlo Park-based There, right at the front of the pack. There, which just launched its product in October, is a virtual 3D world designed for online socializing.