Gamebryo Lightspeed consumed nearly all my GDC hours. I was slammed with setup, demos, client meetings, partner tech meetings, and selling on the show floor 16 hours a day all week. ;) Friday 11pm when I thought I was finally free, I was pulled into a group of Japanese developers to pitch some more.Other things I did see:
- OnLive - cloud computing video games delivered via low-latency live video/audio feed. They've got a little hardware box to connect to your TV. AMD has made some vaporware news on this topic too. I'm not certain OnLive will make it, and get publishers to sign on etc... but I am certain that we'll see this technology eventually. More likely that it will stick vs:
- Stereo - NVIDIA has been pushing it, Sony had some R&D passive displays and games with stereo, and some other vendors have contacted me about it too. A nice suit from a market research firm interviewed me on the topic... just about everyone except users and game makers seem keen on this. I'll put my money down that it's a short term flop of a gimmick.
- Engines - So many engine companies... alpha sort: BigWorld, Blade3D, C4, Crytek, Evolution, Gamebryo LightSpeed, Hero, Infernal, Project Offset, Source, Torque, Unity, Unreal, Vicious, Virtools, and some not-yet-announced engines walking the show floor. Somehow I don't think they're all going to make it...
... If you checked some out - drop a comment and let me know what you thought. - Tools - A few different "platform" companies have shown some very nice tools for developers in the works. NDA blocks me, but the good news is that game development on increasingly complex machines will be a tad easier.
Hey Vincent !
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for your time.
It was great talking to you.
I hope you don't hold a grudge against me for eating so much of your Friday evening :P
Hi Vincent. It was nice to meet you at GDC! If you missed it the coolest thing for me was the NVidia Ion. Not really game development, but I was very impressed all the same.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget about the Phyre Engine, Trinigy's Vision Engine 7, and ID Tech 5.
ReplyDeleteI've seen tons of engines pop up over the years that made big promises when they were first announced. The impression I usually got was that they were regular game studios that decided they could make a little extra money by selling what they already had without really committing to the additional work it takes to make good middleware.
After a while I realized that with almost every announcement I never heard from them again.
It's also interesting to note how many of the engines that have persisted a little while did not come out of a traditional game development studio.