Software application development
This blog is intended to provoke discussion and exchange between like minded software application developers, engineers, architects, project managers - and keen hobbyists too.
Wednesday 23 January 2008, 4:38 PM
Are games developers different?
I used to be editor of a cross-platform software engineering magazine that every year ran a special games development issue - and we used to sell more copies of that issue than any other throughout the year. Strangely, games development specials sell better than an in-depth series of pieces on mainframes, storage or networking.
Funny that isn’t it?
I’m reminded of this as I was talking to Perforce today about some fairly standard Software Change Management issues. While I was chewing the fat with our spokesman du jour (European director of ops Dave Robertson) he mentioned that the editors of a certain game developer magazine (that shall remain nameless) had cheered up his mantelpiece with an award for best programming tool.
So, for those not in the games industry, rather than deride games developers for all the time they spend rendering nice graphic models and designing high-score sheets – let us instead recognise that both designers and developers in this space need the same kind of tools that the rest of the industry relies on. Change management is as good an issue as any to consider the fact that there is a need to manage the wide variety of game assets from large binary files and 3D models to sound effects, music and dialogue.
Having said all that – our games issue might have been the top seller, but our systems integration issue wasn’t far behind. So maybe there’s hope for us all.
PreviousComments on this post
Games developers are the absolute pinacle of software development. If something as crappy as SAP was written with the same rigour as a game we'd have much better corporate software. Console games developers have fixed hardware. They can't bloat their code or say it needs more memory or a faster processor. Yet everything in the game happens is real time. You can't have "shooting alien please wait".
They ship on a CD or DVD, there is no option for patches or fixes.
And they very often ship to a fixed schedule, you won't get Warner Bros holding up the next Batman movie because the game isn't ready.
Games are the ultimate in user interface. You know what everything does. Is that sword glowing red because it's going to hurt you or because you need to pick it up. The game gets the context right and you just know. You don't have to read the manual and find out that shift+F8 means save.
A massively multiplayer system does a fantastic amount of real-time processing, and some like PKR.COM with money in a totally secure way.
This happens because all the cool programmers want to write games. They want to do something which impresses their friends. The people to whom programming is just a job go off and do SQL or SAP, the people who live tight efficient code want to work where their abilities will be respected and they end up at EA or Lionhead.
They don't rest on their laurrels, if something which works well can be made to work better they throw away the original and start again. Everything has to be optimal in the vicious chart-driven world of games.
SImon
