| Game Developer’s Conference
2002 |
By Chris 'Gwynhala'
Burke |
Event: Game Developer’s Conference
Date: March 19-23, 2002
Location: San Jose, CA
Every year,
Game Developer Magazine
sponsors the
Game Developers
Conference (GDC), a week-long event that brings together game industry artists,
programmers, producers, and toolsmiths from around the world to share ideas,
build relationships, and show off the latest in game technology.
This year’s GDC was held March 19-23 at the San Jose Convention Center in beautiful
San Jose, California. I went to the conference in search of some cost-effective
game development tools - here's what I found!
In
addition to writing reviews for
Mindless Games & Entertainment, I
develop shareware tools for the mod community, work on game mods, and write
games professionally. I’m just coming off programming Version 5 of
The
Heretic Fortress, and there’s no telling what I’ll need for my next project.
I headed down to the
Game Developers Conference in San Jose to check
out the new tools and game engines being shown there.
The GDC offers a lot more than just a show floor with over 120 exhibitors. It’s
a week of tutorials and round-table discussions on nearly every imaginable aspect
of game development, from art and sound to engines to patents to interviewing
for a job. Add in the nightly parties hosted by gaming companies, the packed
recruiting booths, a special exhibit of student-developed games, and the chance
for informal meetings with producers and hiring managers from various game companies,
and you have an event well worth the rather steep $200 - $1500 ($50 for students,
free for press) price of admission to anyone serious about breaking into the
gaming business.
The Year of 3D Scanning?
At least six booths featured software and equipment to create high-resolution
3D models and skin textures from photographs. It's cool technology, but come
on, six booths? How big do people think the market is for this stuff?
All of these systems are basically the same: you sit in a booth, or stand in
front of a hand-held unit, and are photographed by three to six cameras positioned
at precise angles. Since the photos are all taken from slightly different angles,
much like the stereoscopic images captured by our eyes, software can guess the
3D shape of on-camera objects (or people) by comparing the photos. The software
calculates the shape of the surface of your face or body, and then divides the
surface into triangles and outputs a 3D mesh in some common format like WaveFront
.OBJ or .VRML.
I
found the booth of UK-based
3Q
most interesting. Their
Qlonerator system optically captures 3D meshes
with medical accuracy at up to 500 frames per second. At the top of this article
you'll find an example of how their
Q-Clone Generator booth captured
my face using three cameras. Q-Clone Generator automatically wrote the 3D mesh
of my face to a CD-ROM, along with a program to automatically create player
models of "me" for
Quake III Arena,
Unreal Tournament, and
Half-Life.
Check out the screenshot of the custom"Gwynhala model"
Unreal Tournament
player model it created.
Paul Otto, CTO of
3Q, also showed me a playback of some full-body 3D
capture from the high-end
Qlonerator Q1000 system. The system isn't yet
capable of skeletal motion capture, but it does appear to scan frames in 3D
at high speed with remarkable accuracy. Remember, this is done completely optically
- no sensors on the moving person at all.
I mentioned I was looking for cost-effective game development tools. Buying
a
3Q system for your own private use is likely to be quite expensive,
but a 3D design house with this equipment (such as San Francisco based
M5
Industries) might be able to substantially lower 3D model creation costs
in the same way that motion capture has lowered animation costs, generating
cheap and abundant 3D content for game designers. Only time will tell - meanwhile,
I'll be playing UT with my new Gwynhala model!
The Under $100 Game Engine
If you're a small developer making a 3D game, you probably need a 3D Engine.
The 3D Engine figures out how to draw everything in the game many times per
second, from whatever angle the player is at, using whatever lighting and graphic
resolution are available. To run well a 3D Engine requires great efficiency
and perfect implementation of complex mathematics, and these are areas of software
design often best left to experts.
Mod developers use whatever engine came with the original game; if you're making
a mod for
Unreal Tournament, you use the
Unreal engine from
Epic;
if you're making a mod for
Quake III Arena, you use the
Quake
engine from
Id; if you're making a mod for
Aliens vs Predator 2
you use the
Lithtech engine, and so on. All players of a mod already
have the original game, so you don't have to "license" the engine in order to
distribute your mod.
If
you're making a game from scratch the rules change: you need to use a freeware
/ shareware 3D Engine, or pay money to the developer of a commercial 3D Engine
for permission to use it, in your game. The license charge for a mainstream
3D Engine can be around $100,000 per game, far out of reach of most small developers.
Australian start-up
Auran
offers an alternative in their $99
Auran Jet game engine. The $99 pricetag
gets you the full engine and support for non-commercial use including prototype
development and testing. Once you have a publisher for your game you must upgrade
to a no-royalty commercial license for a one time charge of $30,000, less than
a third the cost of other 3D Engines.
The
Auran Jet engine has a rich feature set including compression, encryption,
TCP/IP, serial, and IPX networking, Direct X 8 and OpenGL rendering, skeletal
animation, progressive mesh level-of detail, modeling plug-ins for 3DS Max and
Maya, dynamic lighting, particle effects, volumetric shadows, MP3 playback,
and 2D and 3D sound.
Jet is the same engine
Auran uses in their own games:
Excalibur,
Trainz, and
JRally 2101. Source code for
JRally 2101 is included
with the engine, to kick-start new projects. The demos in the
Auran booth
looked good, but I wasn't able to assess at GDC how the
Jet engine stacks
up visually against its more expensive mainstream competition. Here's a promotional
screenshot from their
Jet-based
Excalibur title under development;
more are available
here.
A detailed comparison of many commercial and non-commercial 3D Engines is available
here.
Wireless Games - The Next Mindless Thing
Industry analyst
Andy
Seybold hosted a provocative all-day seminar on wireless games at this year's
GDC, with about 200 game developers paying an extra $300 each for the privilege
of attending. The audience was mostly small, independent developers and press
members, but a few mainstream game companies sent representatives as well.
Wireless games are games that run on your cell phone. They're either built into
the phone by a manufacturer like Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Qualcomm, or Samsung,
or downloaded to the phone on request. They're written using miniature web pages
(WAP or iMode) or a scaled-down version of Java (J2ME).
Most cell phones offer a very limited game environment. Here's a quick rundown
of their capabilities:
- Processing Power: About the same as an old Atari 2600 game console.
- Screen Size: 320x240 in 16 bit color is about the best you'll find today,
with many phones limited to smaller screens and 4-level grayscale.
- Memory: between 128K and 2MB of RAM, about the same amount of solid-state
disk.
- Internet Connection Speed: No wires needed, but about the same as a 9600bps
dial-up.
- User Interface: Numeric keypad; some models offer a 4-way (up, down, right,
left) navigation button and touch screen.
- 3D Acceleration: Non-existent; several companies are developing accelerator
chips for phones, but these must be built in at the time of manufacture.
- Hardware and Software Upgrades: Some phones support software upgrades,
but for hardware upgrades you buy a new phone.
With such a limited environment, and so many other, more capable platform choices
like Sega, Nintendo, XBox, PlayStation, PC, Linux and Macintosh, why would anyone
develop games for cell phones? Here are six reasons:
- There are more than 120,000,000 cell phones in use - more cell phones
than PCs; it's a huge target market.
- People carry cell phones with them everywhere, even places where there
are no PCs or gaming consoles; there's demand for entertainment on the phone.
- Wireless games are a new frontier in game development; there's still opportunity
to take market share and establish a strong brand name for your development
company, before the large studios move in.
- Development costs for wireless games are very low - between 1/10 and 1/100
the cost of developing a mainstream PC or console title.
- Cell phone companies believe that as much as 50% of their future revenue
will come from entertainment delivered to cell phones, placing wireless
games prominently on the radar screen of the $300B telecommunications industry;
there's big money at stake.
- The game developer can get paid in multiple ways: download of the original
game, download of game upgrades and cheat codes, or subscription fees for
playing the game on-line, for example.
The current generation of wireless games includes multi-player trivia games
like
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and
You Don't Know Jack, as
well as fight games like
Gladiator and solo games like
Tiger Woods
Golf. Since the cell phone platform is so much like early game consoles,
there are also a lot of retro games: for example,
Pong.
If you're thinking of developing a game on a small budget, maybe you should
consider making it a wireless game! And if you have a cell phone, watch out
- the wireless games are coming to a screen
very near you!
Afterword: Who's Hiring?
Many visitors to the Game Developers Conference were looking for jobs at game
companies. The show floor was divided into an exhibit area and a recruiting
area, with plenty of traffic in each. Here's a partial list of the companies
at GDC that were accepting resumes for programmers, artists, level designers,
producers, and other game industry positions.
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