Computer Game Components™

The game engine components are designed for building:

• Grid-based game engines where many specialized computers are used to provide high quality games.
• Traditional single computer game engines where the games execute on a single computer.

Grid-based game engines is a new idea we have worked on for some time. The idea is that since games execute on servers, when using remote play techniques, it would be possible to make more advanced and very specialized techniques for designing and developing the games. The server system computer environment is not as limited as end-user computer environments. Special computers can be used for typical game engine tasks, such as graphics rendering, “artificial intelligence techniques,” physics, as well as new tasks, such as collaborative authoring, improved user interaction (new physics techniques), etc.

The figure above illustrates an example ray-tracer computer grid. Employing ray-tracing (instead of raster graphics) for real-time computer graphics has long been the focus of many engineers and researchers. Ray-tracers provide efficient solutions to many graphics techniques that are difficult to accomplish with raster graphics. The primary problem is that ray-tracers are highly computationally demanding, and difficult to implement unless the run-time context has many CPU or GPU cores. We propose a grid-based solution that can offer near photo realistic graphics. Ray-tracer techniques, such as nVidia OptiX™ and SceniX™ can easily be used for this purpose.

The game engine components consist of:

• An effective Java 2 Micro Edition implementation
• Custom Java APIs (DirectX 11, PhysX, audio, etc.)
• Graphics functionalities
• Remote play techniques
• Heads-up display techniques
• Desktop application integration
• System functionalities

The figure above illustrates an example game engine system that we are planning on using in a computer game (“Asteroid Field,” with concept art in the figure below). The game engine is a grid-based game engine that will typically use many computers for ray-tracing graphics, high quality physics simulations, “artificial intelligence” simulations, as well as community-driven game design and development (or massive multi-authoring). The game engine may also be downscaled to be a single computer game engine that is used on the end-users computers as a traditional game. The single computer game engine uses raster graphics with DirectX 11, 9, and OpenGL. The single computer game engine features lower quality graphics, physics, AI, and does not enable users to add any content (e.g. avatar). With this design, we are basically able to offer two levels of experience (or two products) to the end-users. The remote play/grid-based game is the high-end version of the game (with a subscription income model) and the single computer game is a low-end version (with a regular product sales/licensing income model).
 

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Selected Research Papers
Ole-Ivar Holthe. "A Multimedia Presentation Framework for Web 3.0 Computer Game Experiences." IEEE MultiMedia, October-December 2010, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 70-79.
Ole-Ivar Holthe. "Geelix InGame: Searching for Serious Games." Proceedings of the 7th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference 2010.
Ole-Ivar Holthe, Ola Mogstad, and Leif Arne Rønningen. "Geelix LiveGames: Remote Playing of Video Games." Proceedings of the 6th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference 2009.
Ole-Ivar Holthe, Kristian Amlie, Richard Tingstad, and Leif Arne Rønningen. "Geelix HUD: Capturing and Sharing Live Video and User Input from Computer Games." Proceedings of the 5th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference 2008.
Ole-Ivar Holthe and Leif Arne Rønningen. "Geelix.com: Sharing Gaming Experiences." Proceedings of ACM Multimedia 2006.