[This article originally appeared in the IEEE Eastern North Carolina Section Newsletter. March 2008. Volume 44, Number 1. To see the original, click here.]
written by John Powell & Darrin West
IEEE ENCS members attended the Triangle International Game Developers Association (IGDA) meeting hosted by Emergent Game Technologies on January 24. Emergent Game Technologies packed in over 230 game developers and enthusiasts into their recently expanded office space in the Quadrangle Office Park in Chapel Hill. "We had at least 230 in attendance last Thursday, and the energy in the room was palpable," said Dana Cowley, chapter coordinator for the NC Triangle IGDA. This is truly a testament to the rapidly expanding game development industry in the area!
Attendees came to meet with their colleagues and hear one of two relevant talks:
TRACK A: Going Online with Emergent's Shared Entity and Simulator Framework with Darrin West, Chief Engineer, Emergent Game Technologies. Emergent's local engineering group is well known for its Gamebryo product, and Emergent's server team has been developing distributed systems technology for future products. Darrin West, Emergent's server architect, talked about a few interesting aspects of Emergent's shared entity and simulator framework.
He spent about 25 minutes sharing personal and classical development experiences from the Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game industry. He described amusing player exploits and their underlying causes, as well as good software engineering principles that would help avoid those issues. Underlying the information were references to the capabilities of Emergent’s Server Element product. The talk briefly covered the distributed multiprocessor architecture of MMO game servers, and the market forces on such a product. The conclusion was that Emergent has experienced MMO industry engineers and is building a generic MMO infrastructure that can save a game development studio a lot of time and money while avoiding serious reliability and security issues.
West, an IEEE member for almost 20 years, is Chief Engineer and Server Lead with Emergent Game Technologies, building a multi-genre, ala carte, online game server system. He received his M.Sc. degree from the University of Calgary, Canada. After 10 years of research in parallel simulation and distributed systems (including significant contributions to the DoD’s HLA, and RTI), Darrin jumped into massive scale online games. He then had a 5 year stint at EA mainly on The Sims Online before joining Emergent. Darrin is passionate about making it possible to build high quality games more rapidly, less expensively, and without the pain.
TRACK B: Next-Gen Narrative Design with Rafael Chandler, Creative Director, Media Sunshine This lecture, originally presented at the 2007 Russian Game Developers Conference in Moscow, presents the process of writing a video game. Subjects covered include story creation, character development, writing dialogue, team interaction, scheduling, documentation, asset integration, and testing.
Chandler is currently writing a number of unannounced games for Zipper Interactive and Slant Six Games. Prior to that, he worked as a writer/designer on the Tom Clancy games at Red Storm. His most recent titles include SOCOM: Confrontation, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Rainbow Six: Lockdown, and Ghost Recon 2. He's also the author of The Game Writing Handbook, which is a finalist for the 2007 Game Developer Front Line Awards.
Both presentations were well received by the local IGDA membership, and generated fair bit of follow up interest. The evening concluded with several competitive bouts of the video game Rock Band in the Emergent engineering department’s multi media and game “testing” lab.
About the IGDA
The International Game Developers Association is the largest non-profit membership organization serving individuals that create video games. Its nctriangle mission is to advance the careers and enhance the lives of game developers by connecting members with their peers, promoting professional development, and advocating on issues that affect the developer community. Information on the North Carolina chapter of the IGDA at www.igda.org.
About Emergent Game Technologies
Emergent Game Technologies is the single source for all the tools required to build, test, manage and expand interactive games.
Emergent was founded in 2000 and merged with NDL, the company that created the Gamebryo engine and tools, in August 2005. Gamebryo enjoys widespread adoption among game developers, and has been trusted to create instant classics such as Sid Meier's Pirates!,Civilization IV, the Dark Age of Camelot series, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Freedom Force. Gamebryo is designed for use with every major platform, including next-generation platforms such as PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Emergent’s primary goal is innovation in game development. Emergent provides game developers with all the tools they need to focus on innovation-in graphics, content, game experience, ment, and advocating on issues that affect the developer community. Information on the North Carolina Triangle chapter of the IGDA at http://www.igda.org/genre, and technology. Their approach is to develop technology that is flexible enough to meet the needs of the full range of users, applications, and development pipelines.
Emergent is backed by well-known organizations such as Worldview, Jerusalem Venture Partners and Cisco Ventures.Information on Gamebryo and Emergent Game Technologies at www.Emergent.net.