Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Self-Inflicted Wounds
Red Fly used TRI
s Infernal Engine for all our games until about 2011. During
that time, the programmers at Red Fly were improving the engine almost at
the same speed as the TRI programmers
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but not in the same way or even
with the same programming philosophy. Ultimately, the two engines had to
be brought back together because the Gen3 version of the engine had
platform support for Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo 3DS. It took one
programmer almost six months to reintegrate tens of thousands of individual
changes so Red Fly could have the best of both worlds.
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Games run on cool hardware. Well, most games do. At Red Fly, the Thor project was
one of the first games released on Nintendo
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s 3DS system, featuring stereoscopic 3D
rendering. Thief: Deadly Shadows used the very latest in audio and video hardware
for the PC, especially the new 5.0 EAX environmental audio system from Creative,
and it also ran on the fairly new Xbox. Way back in the day, the Ultima games
from Origin Systems pushed hardware so hard that players would usually buy a
new computer every time an Ultima came out. At the time, this was like spending
$2,500 on a new game. Many of the big-budget PC titles are created on hardware
that has yet to reach any serious market penetration, which means that the hardware
manufacturers are constantly sending game developers the latest greatest stuff and
even a T-shirt every now and then. An established developer can still call any hard-
ware company out there and get on their developer program. You don
t exactly get
free hardware anymore, but you do get access to the developer forums, news about
updates, and other things you
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ll find useful. That can save your day if you find
that your game crashes on the hottest video card or with one of the latest new
controllers
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t fix the bug just by hoping it goes away.
The developer programs offered by hardware manufacturers are a great resource.
Most of them have special developer websites and prerelease hardware programs.
They also have dedicated engineers who can help you with a specific problem. An
engineer at ATI verified a particular bug on one of the Microsoft projects I worked
on, and they had a new driver ready in a few days. Of course, I was happy to have
the big gorilla named Microsoft standing behind us, but most hardware companies
are really responsive when it comes to diagnosing weird driver problems.
—
you can
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There is a wide variety of gaming platforms, and they never stop growing. For many
years, we only had to deal with consoles and desktops. Since 2001, games have
