IndieGamesCon 2007
by Drew Sikora

Day One - Lectures

InstantAction.com

Andy Yang, the General Manager of GG Networks, is one of the key players behind InstantAction.com, coming over to the Garage after they came under IAC’s wing. Throughout the process of developing InstantAction, Andy has been the IAC contact, having years of experience in the web space through IAC and lending his perspective and knowledge to the development of the platform. He’s learned just as much about game development from GarageGames as they’ve learned from him regarding the idea of an online platform. The previous day at the associates gathering he made a point to tell everyone how IAC recognized their lack of knowledge in the games industry, which is part of why their deal with GarageGames isn’t a scary as many people believe, as GG still retains a large amount of freedom regarding their industry-related decisions. But I digress – more on this when I talk about Josh’s keynote given Day Two.

So what is InstantAction? Josh Williams sums it up in a blog entry:

“InstantAction is a new place to play games. We're working on games here at GG and we're working with great indie studios of all kinds, from some of the biggest names in the industry to total unknowns with great ideas and the ability to get them done. We're building a bunch of great new games that focus squarely on being fun. They'll all be playable in the browser, and they'll be rich, core-oriented, and often multiplayer games. Effectively, we are building a web-based console... and just like a console, we'll have a wide variety of games and will be working with lots of developers and eventually perhaps even other publishers to create games for it.”

So what does this really mean? Well obviously independent developers now have a new platform to target their games, one that’s been created to appeal to an already existing market – the online space. Being able to play games in a web browser makes them immediately accessible to billions of people around the world. It’s important though to remember that this is practically, like Josh said, a platform (a web-based console) – which means people are not downloading these games to play standalone on their computer and you have to log on to InstantAction.com in order to play titles you own.

All that said, the obvious questions start to arise. How do you pay for the games? What technology do they have to be developed in? How are the games downloaded and stored on the computer? What kind of browser is needed? How do I get my awesome MMORPGTSFPS on it????

Well I can offer an easy answer to the last one, which is you can’t – so go back to your day job if you have one or grow a brain stem and make something more reasonable. Fortunately the others are pretty easy too. Pricing models for the games will vary, with some games being offered for free initially, with priced add-ons and downloadable content; some will be paid for upon initial download; others may follow a subscription model. All that is in the hands of the developer, although GarageGames will also recommend what it feels would be best for the title. InstantAction games can be developed using virtually any tech out there, from Torque (obviously) to Unreal to Flash. Games can be chunked for download so that initially a user downloads (for example) an interface and first level, and while their playing the game the rest of the content streams through in the background. In case someone wishes to remove a game from their computer, an interface will be provided to let users track the games they own for such a purpose and more. GarageGames is working with both Microsoft and the Mozilla foundation to target the most popular browsers, additional support would be forthcoming from the initial launch.

Andy also demonstrated the community aspect of InstantAction, where a persistent account is maintained on their servers that follows you through all of your game plays. Games you download will be stored in your catalog for easy access when you login. You interact with other people through chat rooms and in-game chat – voice wasn’t demoed but it wouldn’t be unexpected to see it at some point. You have the ability to form “parties”, which are groups of other users (usually harvested from your Friends list) that remain together from game to game. So if you’re playing Marble Blast Ultra together and decide to hop over to a game of Cyclomite (Wideload’s IA title) when the party leader changes games, everyone else in the party comes along for the ride. So, similar in some ways to Live Arcade’s sessions. Another IA community tool is the ability to contact a friend, send an email link, or copy and paste a link into a chat window and invite other people in to play. Finally, while no official word was announced and because Andy goofed slightly and overstated a few things, it’s pretty sure they’ll be including some sort or Achievement system similar to that found on Live Arcade, as well as other as yet unannounced cool stuff.

So when is all this expected to land in consumer’s laps? Well right now the launch date is set for Q1 of 2008 and the beta test is already gearing up to get under way. If you’re interested, head on over now to InstantAction.com to drop your email address and sign up.

The Future of Torque Technology

Clark Fagot (pronounced fa-goh, lest there be any *ahem* confusion), GG’s Director of Engine Development, gave a talk about where Torque technology is headed in the not-too-distant future. Obviously one of the biggest things that are hindering GarageGames these days is that fact that is has so many different engines, all with their own code bases and none of them fully compatible with one another. There’s the Torque Game Engine (TGE), Torque Game Builder (TGB), TourqueX and the TorqueX Builder (TXB), and the Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA). It’s literally running the GG guys ragged to keep all the engines on their feet with bug fixes and point releases. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to have one uniform engine that can do it all? Well they do, and it’s aptly named Juggernaut.

But hold on, Juggernaut isn’t what you’re going to get to play around with. Right now Juggernaut, while in use for some in-house projects and a small select group of external developers, is still a proof of concept model that the GG folk are constantly reiterating upon. Right now the major strengths of the engine involve 2D shaders, a combined 2D/3D renderer, a uniform platform and far less duplication across the code base. Other changes that have been worked on in Juggernaut include a complete reorganization of the directory tree, which means more separation between the application and the engine (a good thing, if you haven’t guessed). A project generator handles the task of generating project files for use across multiple IDEs. They’ve successfully imported the graphics engine from TGEA, with a fall-back option included for fixed-function callback code. The sound layer uses Direct Sound in addition to OpenAL, however they are looking to eventually transition fully over to FMOD. An improved window manager and platform code allows for multiple windows to enable the development of better tools.

So where is all this leading? Obviously there’s no official date yet but hopefully sometime in 2008 we’ll hear about the official release for Torque 2. Yea I know, Juggernaut sounds cooler than Torque 2 but generally code names are always cooler than the released product. Torque 2 is essentially an iterative refactor of Juggernaut, with the following goals:

Minimize system dependencies
Modular, pluggable systems
More 3rd party systems
Strict engine and application separation
Stable core over additional features
Ability to use as much or as little of the engine as you want

The last goal may be a bit hard to understand – obviously you can always choose to ignore certain aspects of a game engine. However in the case of Torque 2 you don’t just ignore areas you don’t want, you simply do not include them in the engine at all. GG is basically taking their Components model from TorqueX and expanding it to a larger scale to include entire engine subsystems that you can plug and un-plug from your game so that they aren’t present and unused, but entirely unavailable. Yes this can make game file sizes smaller (not likely by any substantial amount), but its biggest benefit is that you are essentially optimizing the engine to your game, which is a pretty nifty concept. If you’re still confused, Components (as currently applied in TorqueX) are pieces of small functionality added together rather than one monolithic class that is constantly derived from. So for example you could have a health component, an inventory component, an animation component, a rigid-body component for physics and a mount component for weapons. All these together can describe a game character, but they can also be detached and used separately elsewhere in your application. So if a character doesn’t need to carry something, it won’t need a mount component. This saves you from having that one monolithic class that describes everything about a character, even stuff one might not need. One example Clark gave was a time when they had butterflies flapping around a game world – the butterflies were derived from the base character class, which included mounting abilities. And sure enough, if the conditions were right a butterfly could fly right through a weapon and have it mounted to it – so all of the sudden and without intent you had crossbow-wielding butterflies wandering about.

More technical details poured forth from Clark, who at this point was afraid he had lost the attention of over half the audience – I was sitting up front so I couldn’t see if anyone was nodding off but I doubt too many people were disinterested about the future of Torque. In brief, the graphics layer will be handling state blocks and constant buffers as they prep for DirectX 10, they also plan to implement OGL shaders. A data-driven rendering system means no more hard-coded lighting or sort orders. Collada will be supported. Upgrades to the built-in rendering systems including terrain, three space, decals, foliage and water effects. A flexible network model enabling Peer-to-peer and client-server models, using the Torque Network Layer to allow encrypted connections, tunneling and anti denial of service. 3rd party plugins will be available for physics, with network-enabled support built in using Bullet for collisions. Multi-threading will be considered for tasks like physics, loading and media. Vector fonts and vector GUI rendering (oooohhhhh) for better multi-resolution support with help from the Anti-grain Geometry library. Low-level refactoring to include a string class, volume system and resource manager. Other scripting languages (like Mono) will be able to be plugged in, and of course they’re still planning for Torque 2 to be multi-platform and support Windows, Mac, Linux and 360.

Day One - Roundtables

Contents

	Introduction
	Day One - Keynote
	Day One - Lectures
	Day One - Roundtables
	Day Two - Keynote
	Day Two - Roundtable
	Conclusion

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