Satori

Have you been enjoying playing the iPhone game Flight Control? It’s a game where you have to route planes and helicopters to land on a set of runways, keeping the aircraft from hitting each other as slowly more and more aircrafts come on the screen. Here’s a sample screenshot. It’s great fun!

Now check out this radar screenshot from around Chicago’s O’Hare Airport today, with multiple storms having passed through the area during the course of the day, and another huge one coming from the west. Yikes!

I’ve been conducting a middleware library survey for any game developers who are currently using middleware in their projects. As with the previous game engine surveys, this one is also largely focused on the core games audience, so the middleware discussed in the survey tends to focus on middleware for those types of titles. (Please visit this site for a great list of middleware libraries available!)

The survey has been kept deliberately short (5-10 minutes) in order to maintain sanity levels – hopefully it will provide useful information without driving survey takers crazy.

If you’re interested in taking the survey, we’d love to hear from you. Please take the survey here. Thanks for your interest!

A few months ago I did a survey on game engine middleware, posting the results up to gamasutra, Game Developer magazine, and this blog. Now I’m digging a bit more into component middleware libraries. In trolling around the net, I came across this fantastic site, gamemiddleware.org. It’s just a great list of the engines, libraries, tools, etc that the site organizers are aware of, which is exceedingly handy! The only question now is: dang, which of these as a game developer do I really need to look at seriously?

A great site for discussion of tools and middleware is “The Toolsmiths“, the IGDA Tools Blog. The posts on the site are frequently thought-provoking and focus around issues in tools development. Dan Goodman, founder of Robotic Arm Software, recently conducted a tools-related survey and is currently collating the results. I’m really looking forward to his results!

I’m currently in the process of conducting a middleware library survey that is similar to the engine survey. I hope it will shed some light on what we’re all looking for in middleware libraries, giving useful information to both the technology creators and the technology users. Results will be published in Game Developer magazine.

Seems like a lot of surveys! But surveys are sure a useful way to gather a lot of great information in one shot.

I’ve been keeping a close eye on O3D, a project at Google that seems well-targeted for game development (and quite a few other things). Unfortunately, I blew registering for the Google I/O conference in time, so missed the handful of 3D- and game-related talks they had there. However, I found a few interesting O3D-related videos in the GoogleDevelopers channel on YouTube.

Gregg Tavares talking about the talk he will give (gave) at the conference, “Adding Interactive 3D Content to your Site”:

Some game art done by Crazy Pixel for a Tower Defense-style game, running in O3D:

And last, a game demo from Large Animal Games, also running in O3D:

Howdy!
I’m still alive. I swear! That nasty flu took me out for a little over two weeks, but I’m finally back up to full speed.
I haven’t been posting here much lately, largely because I keep intending to get around to flushing this blog and installing WordPress. I’ve been messing around with WordPress on the IGDA-SF blog site and have found it to be much more user-friendly and extensible. And hey, I haven’t updated the tech for this site since like… 2004. So, it’s probably about time.
I recently had an article published in Game Developer Magazine. I suspect it will go up on Gamasutra at some point too. It is a more thorough version of the game engine survey summary than I posted previously. The GDMag folks did a great job of helping me consolidate the info and laying it out with images from all the game engines referenced in the piece.
In the wake of that survey I find myself really wishing there was some resource for game industry technologists who are seeking deep technical info on middleware of all types. Unfortunately there really isn’t, and it seems that it’s all so caught up in NDA’s that it would be hard to put something like this together. But when folks email me and ask my opinion on which game engine or middleware library they should use, I just wish I had a big book of charts and graphs and API descriptions and benchmarks and shipped titles and costs somewhere. The Big Book of Game Middleware. The alternative is to download trial versions of each engine or library and give them a go, which can take an awfully long time in an already-tight development schedule, or to just use what you’re already familiar with if your team has used an engine or library previously. I keep thinking about this.
Recently I worked with a team of folks to finish up and ship the “Real-Time Cameras” book. This book was written by Mark Haigh-Hutchinson and edited by myself and a group of his friends and co-workers (Mark passed away shortly before completing it). I think the book turned out great. Check it out! I’m planning to post up some sample text from the book soon.
As for me personally? I’m considering what’s next. Doing short-term contracts has gotten a bit wearing – I miss building things, whether they are platforms, games, strategies, or developer marketing plans. There are so many interesting things going on in the game industry right now. Certainly the economy is not in the greatest shape, but the game industry is filled with brilliant people who dream large. So I have a fair number of conversations in flight at the moment and am looking forward to seeing whether any of them become the right fit.
I’ll be at E3 this year so hope to see some of you there. I’m excited to have something more closely resembling the old E3 come back! I wonder if we can still get a “Big Cheese”. MMmmmmm tasty.

GDC was crazy this year. Although many people – myself among them – thought that GDC would be a bit down in attendance, it sure didn’t appear that way. Everywhere I went was total chaos. I’ve never, ever seen a line for a keynote at Moscone like the one for Iwata’s speech. If my personal observations are useful as a metric, it seems GDC had a good year.
I’ve been focusing a lot on the game engine space lately, and the show saw really strong showings from a number of middleware companies. Crytek’s CryENGINE (in their booth) and Digital Extremes’ Evolution Engine (behind closed doors) have really come out fighting to take some market share from Epic’s Unreal Engine. (And I assume Id and Valve were both having conversations about their technology behind the scenes!) Emergent’s Gamebryo Lightspeed, Trinigy’s Vision, Terminal Reality’s Infernal Engine, and Vicious Software’s Vicious Engine are battling it out in the middle-priced tier. And Unity and Garage Games’ Torque both came in with strong low-cost solutions. Other companies showing their products in this space that I got to look at were Dassault’s 3DVIA Virtools, Digini’s Blade3D, and Terathon’s C4 Engine. I’m sure there were more… and that’s not even counting the MMO engines like HeroEngine and BigWorld, or the vast array of middleware libraries and tools!
I spent more time on the expo floor this year than ever, and I still didn’t get a chance to see everything. If you saw anything you thought was particularly cool, I’d love to hear about it! I am very excited about the evolution of tools and services available to game developers. But now I’m wondering… how can anyone keep up with them all?