From the evocation of renaissance Italy in Assassin's Creed 2 to the depiction of the world's most desirable cars in Forza Motorsport 3, the visuals of modern videogames can be breathtakingly beautiful. But players never see the most awe-inspiring component: the 3D engine. This vast chunk of programming code powers everything we see on screen, creating and animating virtual environments.
And they are major engineering projects. UK publisher Codemasters has a team of 30 technicians working full-time on maintaining the company's Ego engine, which is used in everything from racing titles to shooters. The Unreal Engine, created by Epic Games, contains a breathtaking 2.5m lines of code – as Tim Sweeney, technical director: "That's roughly comparable to the complexity of a whole operating system a decade ago."
Today some of the most brilliant minds in the world – physicists, mathematicians, architects, aerodynamics experts - are working on videogames. One of the staff at Scottish developer Realtime Worlds wrote the software powering the New York stock exchange, Joe Graf at Epic Games helped design the bill-paying system used by most online banks, and in the mid-90s, Moscow-based flight-simulator specialist Eagle Dynamics employed the ex-military programmers who created the guidance systems for Russia's nuclear missiles. "Game development is at the cutting edge in many disciplines," says Sweeney. "The physics in modern games includes rigid body dynamics and fluid simulation algorithms that are more advanced than the approaches described in research papers."
Now these technological marvels are creeping into other fields. Blitz Games Studios has used its engine to create a simulation to teach paramedics to correctly prioritise victims at an accident scene. While young architecture and urban-planning firms can use a cheap PC and a £50 computer game to visualise new projects – an endeavour that would have once cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Game technology can also be mashed up with other packages to help with urban design. "Google SketchUp is a prime example," says Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith at University College London's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, "It is a free 3D-modelling tool that can be 'plugged into' many game engines. It is a democratising tool, if people don't like what the council is doing in terms of urban design or street furniture they can re-design it themselves and put it online to raise awareness of the issues."
Meanwhile, John D Carmack, the programming legend behind the Doom and Quake games runs an aerospace company as a relaxing diversion from his role as technical director at games developer, id. Which goes to show that 3D engine design isn't rocket science – it's far more complicated than that.
via news:Digital Urban: How the 3D Engine is Changing the World: The Guardian http://bit.ly/8jTopK
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