An Afternoon with Ben Wallace

Hello again everyone, it has been awhile since I have posted here. James wanted to start blogging again, and since he is focusing on doing a Monday post, I said I would have a post up by Wednesday for all of our non-existent readers.

Monday afternoon I had the privilege of meeting and listening to Ben Wallace, Engineering Lead for the Halo series. Ben gave a very interesting presentation on how he developed solutions to creating highly realistic lighting and material for Halo 3. Halo uses the tried and true method of bump mapping to apply textures to their models, and this gives the model much more depth without requiring more vertices. Bump mapping using take a flat texture that has different normal values (how much and in what direction the light bounces off) for different areas on the texture. When this texture is applied to a flat object, that object acquires depth.

Much of the depth on the textures in Halo 3 comes from this technique. This by itself is not a huge contribution to game engineering, however Ben’s techniques for dealing with the massive amount of calculations that need to be performed is more so. Unfortunately for all of you, I did not take any notes during this talk (I wasn’t really thinking about blogging at that time). To sum it up, many calculations need to be done in order to deal with reflections of the world on shiny objects, light reflecting around the world, High Dynamic Range lighting – which is what happens when you are standing in a shadowy area, and there is incredibly bright light coming in from an outside source – and Ben and his team created and modified ways to approximate all of this so that Halo could be played with anything resembling a decent frame rate.

All in all it was an interesting presentation, and Ben is a very nice guy. I have rediscovered why I don’t think I will ever truly be a software engineer like he is, I just don’t have the penchant for learning math and honing my skills to the degree of sharpness that is required. Some things that he did mention at the end: If you want to be a game engineer you should definitely pursue some high end calculus, vector geometry, and other middle level mathematics. Along with that, make sure you are actually working with implementing these kinds of things on your own. Nothing will convince a game company to hire you more than seeing you have the initiative to do work for your own sake.

In other news, in the next few months, James and I should be starting on a couple new XNA projects for our own enjoyment. I am sure more details will be put up here and we flesh out the ideas we have right now.

Next week – talking about Braid and probably Rock Band 2!!!

-Matt

Dream, Build, Play

AKA: Dream, dream, and dream some more.

Microsoft has set out to, as they say, "democratize" the game industry with XNA.

For those of you who have not heard of XNA (and are too lazy to look it up) here are some helpful links: Gamasutra feature and Official Page. You will also find many references to it in past blog posts, as Matt and I have used it extensively and have even made some video tutorials on it: Blog Post or Download Page.

The idea is to give the power to make games to mere mortals. No longer will games only be produced by huge teams and EA's sweatshops, but by anyone with the with determination and a little bit of know how. XNA (you don't want to know what the acronym stands for) allows you to write games in C# that can then be played on both windows machines and the XBOX360. And other than the account required to play the games on your XBOX, it's all free! And if you sign up for Dream Build Play, you can get a four month Creators Club account free too.

So instead of having to learn C++, one can start of with managed C#, which is much easier to learn. As far as the amateur programmer is concerned, there are no make files or pointers or any of that other confusing C++ stuff. I originally learned how to program in Java, and I must say, the transition was quite smooth.

But XNA is more than just a language choice: there are a multitude of included libraries designed to make writing a game easier, and a plethora of examples and tutorials. There are libraries for interacting with a gamepad, doing matrix operations, and collision detection. I really don't know how they could have made making games any simpler.

But... where are all the games? There are some notable examples, such as some of the previous Dream Build Play competition winners (XBOX.com news), but I haven't really seen a major explosion of indie games. Maybe I haven't given it enough time, and maybe my expectations are too high, but so far the most Dream Build Play has done for me is taught me that "democratize" is actually a real word (I though for sure they had made it up!). I was hoping for a resurgence of the maverick game makers, a new John Carmack or Richard Garriott to show those big game publishers that we don't need them! If a kid gets sick of WWII shooter 12 and thinks he can do better, than gosh darn it he can! All it takes is some dedication and a spot of help from XNA.

But the industry has changed to much, and the best we seem to be able to do with XNA is make some slick looking arcade-style or casual games. Even so, and please correct me if I'm misinformed, we haven't seen an explosion of these games either. XBOX Live has had some successful arcade games (such as geometry wars and Matt mentioned "Braid") but we have yet to see a gaming revolution. I don't see people buying XBOX 360s just so they can play these games, and I definitely don't see "democratized" game making. But what can I expect? After all, a democracy depends on the involvement of it's people, and I certainly haven't done my part.

Which brings me back to the start of this post: despite being interested in games and even making some with XNA (such as the demo one Matt and I made for the video tutorials), I have yet to make a concerted effort to enter in the Dream Build Play competition. I have plenty of ideas and was really excited about this iteration of the competition, but now the deadline is looming and I have nothing to submit. I've got the "dream" part down, but have yet to execute on the "build."

Well, I think it's time for that to change. Although it's a bit late for this competition...

Where did all of the updates go?

As Matt mentioned, we have finally finished our XNA tutorial videos. Matt and I are extremely proud of these videos, and hope that they will be of use to fellow amateur game developers. Each of the videos took hours to produce, from writing the code, filming, editing, and revisions. And that is why we have not been updating this blog.

Actually, that's not true. In our packed schedules we still managed to find time for Rock Band. Thank you Harmonix for bringing us such a genuinely fun and accessible game. I love rocking out, and it's great being able to get all my friends to play, even the non-gamers.

Matt and I graduate in two and a half weeks, at which point we are going to have to change the description of this blog. And hopefully we will have even less time to update it, as we will be employed in the game industry. We'll see.

SMP is DONE!

Well, all those people who read this blog (are there any?) good news. The tutorials for XNA are finally done. I am mainly posting here in hopes that people Googling for beginner tutorials will find their way here, and can then be passed on to the real site.

XNA Tutorials

Enjoy, and please give us feedback!