We may hear word of them this year, or next, or not until 2014. Not surprisingly, speculation has been ramping up for several years about the next wave of game consoles. The Xenos graphics processor in the Xbox 360 can handle roughly 240 billion floating point operations per second the latest high-end processors for PCs can handle around 3 trillion. But as the seventh-generation consoles-today's PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360-approach their sixth and seventh years on the market, respectively, the current hardware has grown rickety with age and is now easily outclassed by high-powered PCs.
It was the only way to keep pace with the exponential improvements in chip speed and processing power. Indeed, since consoles became the primary way to play videogames at home in the 1980s, the industry has rolled out a new generation of consoles roughly every five years. And once a game studio puts all those elements together, the engine is also responsible for running them as the game is played, controlling a never-ending cascade of complex interactions, scenarios, and outcomes on the fly.īut six years is a long time in binary code, and it represents a lifetime for gaming hardware. Lighting, physics, artificial intelligence: These are all the purview of the game engine.
It's an essential collection of programs and algorithms, a periodic table of the elements that allows a game's programmers and designers to create the rich and varied worlds gamers have come to expect. At the heart of every videogame-underneath the art direction, the writing, and the action-is an elaborate piece of software called the game engine. Sweeney is living in the future, and he wants us all to see it. His eyes light up, his voice grows stronger, and he begins measuring the world in orders of magnitude and processing speed. Only when small talk turns technical does the founder of Epic Games seem to come truly alive. Tall and thin, with hair slightly unkempt and glasses thick enough to focus sunlight into a lethal, ant-killing beam, Sweeney often sounds short of breath while talking, which makes his already wispy voice seem as though it might fade out entirely at any second.