Trends of 2008

It is the end of yet another year of taking on far more than anyone feasibly has time for and time for the annual brain dumping, so I can clear enough room in my head for next years worth of garbage. So here is a run down of all the interesting happenings in 2008 ...


This year has seen a number of interesting trends in computer games, the biggest I think being the continual change in gamer demographics which seen the rise in new markets, alternative revenue streams and different types of games (even 'non-games' such as Wii-Fit). It will be interesting to see how the changing economic climate affects the industry going into 2009, several big studios have already being making redundancies or have gone under. Whilst generally the industry seems to be bucking the trend, there is bound to be some kind of knock on effect leading to smaller budgets, fewer and less risky projects and more closures of the 'fatter' studios. Generally I am all for tidying up the closet (so long as that does not include me of course ;)

But what do I know about such things, I am but a humble programmer. On the technical front in 2008 there was quite a bit of interesting activity; given the success and power of GPUs over the years it was perhaps inevitable that parallel processing would find its way into general purpose computing. Whilst there has been a lot of interest in multi-threaded computing for games for a while, there has been a fair bit of movement this year with the release of CUDA 2.0, "compute shaders" for DirectX and Intel releasing more details about Larrabee and the smoke demo to get us all excited about the possibilities for multi-threading and of course helping them sell lots of new funky processors in the meantime.

Another interesting piece of technology to watch was the Enlighten engine from Geomerics, which makes real-time radiosity a realistic options for games (which is very cool). This interesting thing for me is the technology originated from a branch of mathematics called geometric algebra (which is were we get funky things like quaternions). If geometric algebras offer much more optimised maths then it might be worth exploring them further (oops, there goes my weekends). Given the subtle effect radiosity has I think Enlighten will only make sense for particular kinds of games until the cost is less prohibitive, although there is a lot of potential for real-time light map tools - allowing artists to create light maps in minutes rather than days!

This year sees the release of XNA 3.0 with Zune support. I have been very impressed with how easy and accessible XNA makes game development - particularly cross-platform game development. I had a quick terrain rendering demo (with atmospheric light scattering and reflective water) up and running in a few hours (OK - courtesy of Google and the nVidia shader library, I'm not stupid ;). The uptake for XNA has been impressive and with generous terms I think we will see some interesting things to come in 2009 with the blurring of the hobbyist space and professional space.

With the release of Expression Blend 2.0 early in the year WPF and Silverlight are looking much more interesting. I have been experimenting with WPF and the concept is great, however it will not be every ones cup of tea. The separation between logic and presentation is a good one and allows for a much more sophisticated user experience, you can clearly see the influence from web development at work here. However this means you now need artist and programmer skill sets to develop even the simplest of programs. Also the integration between WinForms and WPF components is not as fluid as it could be which can be problematic if you want to support old code bases. One of the interesting possibilities though is to use XAML as a framework to develop a GUI system for games (and in fact we are already doing this for one of our titles). Whilst there is a quite a bit of work to fully support all of XAML, we found the easiest approach was to derive our own custom components and use Expression Blend as an editor for placement and animation. This seemed like the easiest and most pragmatic approach for our needs right now and has certainly improved the artist workflow. Maybe 2009 will give us an opportunity to develop this further.

Finally, 2008 saw the growth of procedural content in games. Of courses games have always had a fair amount of procedural content but we are getting much more sophisticated in what we are trying to do. The animation system in Spore was particularly interesting in the way it can map and combine artist created animations onto user generated rigs. We also got a taste of Natural Motions 'dynamic motion synthesis' system in games like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and GTA IV. The system is essentially a 'better rag doll' that emulates muscle response on a skeleton through custom AI controllers to give more realistic motion - although creating the controllers in the first place seems to be a bit of a dark art. Also games like Far Cry 2 and The Outsider hold the promise of 'procedural narrative' but I have much more to say on that subject later.

It looks like there will be 'interesting times' ahead for 2009, so hope you all have a Happy New Year, and good luck ;)