ecause I am a Mad Scientist, I spend a great deal of time thinking of the future. No I don’t have grey wild hair yet (wild brown hair!)… and no I’m not talking about Flux Capacitors. I’m thinking of Game Design. Game Designs that are optimized for working with the future of Computers.

Multithreading is overtaking us. From Intel’s Conroe to AMDs Multi-Core Technology The future is multithreading. If core chipsets weren’t enough, Multi-Core GPUs are on the horizon. And that doesn’t even take into account SLI technology, which is about to breach into Quad-SLI!!! There is a discussion about some of this right here on ELN.

If that were not enough, there is a Physics Accelerator Chip (Which is basically an extra CPU specializing in Physics). There will soon be a Game Network Processor (which is of course LLR from my own Company, Bigfoot Networks). People are working on AI accelerator chips. Not to mention, there is already Sound Cards that offload sound, etc. etc. etc.!

All this leads to one overpowering realization about Game Design: Games MUST be designed in intelligent multi-threaded ways! That means that for games to be able to make use of all this amazing technology into the future, they must be designed such that compute intensive tasks, weather they be in Networking, Physics, AI, Sound, even UI, and main game loops, all should be coded into separate threads and done so smartly! There are plenty of resources talking about this. But there is something missing, what will all this mean for gamers!

The bottom line is this: the future of interactive gaming is extrememly bright, provided game programmers keep up with everything. The secret to keeping up: abstracting, and code re-use. Multithreaded designs are incredibly powerful and easy to re-use for the most part. Once the bullet has been bitten, keeping up is easy to do!

So, keep up with the Joneses everyone! Write games using many many threads!

Tytus