PCShooter: Is it difficult as developers to keep up with growing and improving technology?

Name: Ken Veale

Company: RayLogic

President/ Game Designer/ Dark Ore (NEW FPS GAME COMING 2001)

<Ken V> I think when graphics programmers don't have new technology to implement, they get all shaky and irritable. If your a big company with someone assigned to graphics programming, its no problem. If your a small company with just a few people doing it all, it is very hard. Using a modular design when writing a game engine helps. 

Name: Ken Levine

Company: Irrational Games

Co-Founder/ Executive producer/ Freedom Force

<Ken L> No, in fact I think it's gotten easier. For instance, the ready availability of licensable technology has certainly made our lives easier. The great FPS [games] of the last year were ALL built on existing technology and I don't think that's going to change soon.

Name: Kenn Hoekstra

Company: Raven Software

Project Administrator/ Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force

<Kenn H> It is challenging, yes.  For each new game you have a new set of tools that you need to learn, but fortunately, most software and technology builds on existing tech.  In this sense, there is a natural progression to what you're learning and using now and each experience prepares you for the new challenges ahead. Things are many times more complex now than they were early on in game development, however, so it's becoming more difficult to learn if you come into game development cold. For example...if you started building game levels in the Doom and Duke era and then moved on to Quake and Quake II, it's much easier to learn how to design levels for Quake III and/or Unreal.  Similarly, programmers have a much easier time picking up new languages if they have used Basic and Pascal and then worked their way up to C and C++.  It's never easy to sit someone down with no experience and say "here...build this" or "here...code this." In the future, I expect to see game and software development prep programs in more colleges and technical schools.  It's a growing field and it's getting to be more complicated than ever to get started these days if you haven't been involved all along. Bob: What is your degree in? Doug: I have a Bachelor of Science in Game Design with a minor in Computer Art.

Name: Herb Flower

Company: Rewolf Software

President, Lead Designer/ Gunman Chronicles

<Herb F> Absolutely. It seems that in this year's X-mas season, many of the games people have been looking forward to the most have been delayed till next year.  Just a sign of things to come as complexity and costs increase for developers. Games dont have Hollywood budgets yet--well, necessity may change that soon.

Name: Warren Spector

Company: Ion Storm

Game Designer/ Deus Ex

<Warren S> Heck, yeah! Keeping ahead of the curve is incredibly hard, especially when you decide to license technology. It's all about tradeoffs, though --you build your own  technology and maybe you're a little closer to the bleeding edge but, on the flip side, your designers and artists spend a lot of time waiting for technology to reach the point where it's useful and redoing stuff as the technology changes. Being a half a step behind the technology curve can be a good place, from a development process standpoint! 

Name: Jon Gwyn 

Company: Shiny Entertainment

Character Modeler/ Sacrifice

<Jon G> Developing for the PC nowadays is a real chore.  More and more teams are having to not only deal with publishers, but also hardware manufacturers. It seems like you have to spend half your time either courting the hardware people or trying to convince them that their products need work. And once that is done, the next version comes out and the nightmare starts all over again. When projects have the potential of taking 2 or 3 years to developed, the uncertainty of just what the specs are going to be from beginning to release is impossible to guestimate. When sacrifice started in late 97, the idea that the minimum spec would be a P2 300 was insane. No one in the office had much more than a 266 at that time, and that was pushing it.  Compatibility is a real growing problem, and its forcing a lot of developers to think twice about doing any more PC titles. 

Name: Tim Williams

Company: Planet Moon

Senior Producer / Giants: Citizen Kabuto

<Tim W> Yes, it is. But we knew this job was dangerous when we took it. :-)

Name: Chacko Sonny

Company: Savage Entertainment

CFO/3D Artist / Battlesuit MK1

<Chacko S> Actually, keeping up with the technology isn't that hard.  The hardware developers are great about keeping us up to date on their next-gen plans, and they have an incentive to make sure that we're developing on the very latest...while the stuff they do is amazing, unless they have great content to run on it, it's just a bunch of really warm silicon. So, they're always coming around to demo the latest features and give us sample code on how to implement the new stuff. The harder thing, actually, is to determine which new features are the right ones to implement. Is the speed hit associated with multi-texturing worth implementing? Which cards will let us do multiple passes for free? Is bump-mapping really going to make a difference on these objects? Where would stencil buffered shadows be most effective? Basically, we wrestle with the question of which combination of features will strike the right balance between performance and appearance, all within the constraints of our budget and schedule?

Name: No One Lives Forever Team

Company: Monolith Productions

No One Live Forever

<NOLF Team> Developing for a continually evolving platform has always been a tremendous challenge for PC developers, especially when new technology must cope with literally hundreds of hardware configurations throughout the world.  Each game team has to strike a fine balance between the time it takes to create great content and the time it takes to create great technology. The two tend to be mutually exclusive, and many games have erred too strongly to one side or another.  With No One Lives Forever, the team used the LithTech 2.5 engine as its base technology, but we also spent a great deal of time adding new features on top of this base in order to support the unique game design required by NOLF. This included spending significant time on engineering features such as AI, for example, which we feel was definitely worth the extra time and effort. The bottom line is that while supporting new technology is important, it cannot guarantee an enjoyable game.

Name: Michael Chang Gummelt 

Company: Raven Software

Programmer/ Writer/ Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force

<Mike G> In a way, yeah. Mainly because you start out with a certain technology and know you can aim higher because the technology will (hopefully) be there to run it when you're done. So during development, you might find that the performance of the game is bad at first and that limits you.  Or you may find that the technology available when the game is done is either much higher than you expected (making your game seem outdated) or much lower (making your game not run). But, since game publishing dates never change, we have a pretty good idea what will be available once the game hits the shelves. ;)

Name: Keith Fuller

Company: Raven Software  

Programmer/ Soldier Of Fortune Gold Edition

<Keith F> Keeping up with technology isn't always a goal for developers -- it depends on the type of game you're producing. Since Raven focuses on action-packed shooters, however, it is very important to us to use the latest and greatest technology insofar as it's viable. By "viable" I mean we have to ask ourselves, "Will enough people be able to make use of this tech and will we be able to incorporate it easily enough to make it worthwhile?" I think the
short answer to your question, though, is "yes". It's pretty tricky to add new, nifty graphical features and such during development, especially when they weren't planned for originally.

Name: Dan Kramer

Company: Raven Software  

Assistant Lead Programmer/ Soldier Of Fortune Gold Edition

<DK> Developing for the PC requires that you test on a variety of hardware configurations. That in itself can be daunting. Add to that the arrival of new technology during development and the need to continue to support technology that is several years old all at the same time, and yes, you often find yourself facing very difficult problems. I would go so far as to say that only someone who has ever developed a game for the PC can truly understand this special kind of pain ;).