Frederick County “Future Link”, and memories of the past

I gave three half-hour hands on presentations at the Frederick County, Maryland Future Link conference for high-school sophomores Thursday. It was pretty fun, and the students (about 25-30 in each group) were great!

Preparing for this, I remembered that back when I was in junior-high and high school, I’d learned a ton about programming by typing in the game programs in SoftSide magazine, a little bit at a time to see what they did and debug them. Later I branched out to writing my own (very simple) games, which I gave away to my friends. One was a snake game, using the IBM PC’s line characters for the snake body. I wrote it as a high-school student in Maryland, then went off to college in Illinois. One day, I came back from classes to find my roommate from Washington state playing it! I don’t know how it made it coast to coast, but I really hoped to be able to give that sense of possibility to the students Thursday.

We used Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio, in part because it’s free and very accessible, in part because it has a rich set of examples, and in part because their new community game distribution system gives a way for individually created games to get out there. Plus, I was able to bring one of our XBox 360s to show what we did running on a game system. We started with the catapult mini-game example. With only half an hour, we could only do relatively simple things, but I wanted to show how easy it is to get started. First I dropped in an image of my head to replace the pumpkin that the catapult normally flings, then we walked through changing the bounce logic to do random bounces instead of the simple predictable bounces it normally does. Some of the students went off in their own directions, creating other simple modifications beyond the ones I’d suggested. Not bad in half an hour!

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THQ buys Big Huge Games

Timonium-based Big Huge Games, makers of Age of Empires III and the Rise of Nations/Rise of Legends series, announced on January 15th that they’re being acquired by games publishing powerhouse THQ.

According to the press release, Big Huge Games, with all 100 employees, will become a wholly owned subsidiary of THQ, presumably staying at their current location in Maryland. They had published some games with Microsoft, but were trying to branch out into other platforms. Since publication and distribution are such a critical component in the success of a game, this is probably a good thing for reaching those platforms. It will certainly be interesting to see what changes, if any, result.

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Price cut in PS3 Development Kit

Looks like Sony is making a play to boost third-party game development for the PS3. At $10,250 for North American developers, it’s not quite at Christmas Stocking levels, but it is half what it used to be. We’ll have to wait and see if that translates into more PS3 games from small third-party development houses. Here’s the Wall Street Journal article if you want references.

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Survey reveals gamers unaware of console capabilities

Ars Technica reports on a survey of 6,260 people that game console users are unaware of some of the advanced capabilities of their boxes.

“The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles are marvels of technology. The PlayStation 3 features a Blu-ray player, the ability to stream video and music from your PC, and it’s a very impressive upscaling DVD player. The 360 has a robust selection of movies and television shows you can purchase and rent through the Xbox Live service, and with VGA or HDMI connections it will also upscale your DVDs. For some gamers, these functions go a long way towards justifying the high price of these systems, but a new study from the NPD Group suggests that not only are people not using these functions, they’re not even aware of them.”

(spotted on slashdot)

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Understanding Nintendo’s success with the Wii

Nintendo has had a big hit with the Wii, which has been outselling PS3 and Xbox combined this Spring. An article in the New York Times, Putting the We Back in Wii, attributes this, in part, to a new willingness on Nintendo’s part to collaborate with other makers of game software.

“Nintendo is known for turning out hits with memorable characters like Donkey Kong and the Super Mario Bros., but it has had a reputation for cold-shouldering game software developers because it preferred to make both its hardware and software internally. …
     The secretive company is coming out of its shell. It has made a concerted effort to woo other makers of game software as part of a broader change in strategy to dominate the newest generation of video game consoles.
     The new Nintendo surprised employees at the software maker Namco Bandai Games when during a routine meeting at Namco Bandai’s Tokyo headquarters a year and a half ago, Nintendo’s usually aloof executives made a sudden appeal for their support. The Nintendo group had come to demonstrate a prototype of the Wii, which had not then been released. They handed Namco Bandai employees the unique wand-like controllers and as the developers tested a fly fishing game, the Nintendo team urged them to build game software for the console, listing arguments about why Wii would be a chance for both companies to make money.”

Another reason is that developing games for the multi-core parallel processors at the heart of the PS3 and Xbox is more difficult, so new titles have been slower to come to market.

“The Wii’s simplicity is also the selling point for software makers. Mr. Wada said developers had been slower to write games for PlayStation 3 because of the greater complexity of the console’s main processor, the high-speed multi-core Cell Chip. He said PlayStation 3’s production delays had also made Sony slow to provide developers with the basic codes and software needed to write games for the new console.
    At Namco Bandai, Mr. Unozawa said PlayStation 3 was so complex, with its faster speeds and more advanced graphics, that it might take 100 programmers a year to create a single game, at a cost of about $10 million. Creating a game for Wii costs only a third as much and requires only a third as many writers, he said.

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Nick Baker on the XBox 360 Architecture

Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) has a half-hour interview with Nick Baker, director of the Xbox 360 hardware team, on the architecture of the XBox 360.

“What is the XBox 360, exactly? How do you go about designing and building a game console that meets the high standards of today’s gamers and handles the computational pressures of today’s highly realistic games (think real time physics computation, incredibly rich graphics, etc)? Did you know the XBox 360 team saw into the multi-core future before most anybody else?”

If you are interested in how computer architecture and systems support games, it’s worth listening to.

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