Transcript Technology - BTECFIRSTITP

TECHNOLOGY
TECHNOLOGY
Computer games have always been driven by technology.
For many years it was advances in graphics that changed
the way computer games were designed – the early twodimensional (2D) games like Pac Man were made up of
simple sprites, whereas games such as Heavy Rain now
feature complex three-dimensional (3D) worlds made of
realistic graphics that can almost pass for the real world.
2D GAMES
A simple 2D game needs to have an artist who designs the
characters, items and the layout of the levels. Next it needs
programmers who can create them.
The characters, items and layouts are created individually at
first and then they are brought together with a set of rules that
controls how they behave. After this stage a sound designer or
an audio engineer finds and adds sound effects and music to
the game.
At this stage the game is finished, but it still needs to have a
graphical user interface (GUI) built onto the beginning of it and
the game needs to be integrated into the system that it is
being run on.
3D GAMES
Things get even more complicated when it comes to creating a 3D game.
Specialist 3D designers are needed to design the characters and the
environments where the game will take place. Some of these
environments are amazingly complicated – it is the ambition of many
games studios to create more advanced environments that will eventually
be as complex as the real world.
One of the attempts to do this on the Playstation 2 was a game called
Spiderman 2. This game was an open world super hero adventure game
where the player had to swing around New York and climb up its buildings.
The city in the game was an exact replica of the real city, but scaled down.
This involved a huge amount of development work, as well as a very
detailed and complicated program. To create the city would have required
many different 3D developers each designing some of the streets and
buildings.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The Playstation 2 was able to run a game like Spiderman 2
because the processor that it had was powerful enough to cope
with the 3D graphics, the sound and the artificial intelligence (AI)
of the nonplayable characters (NPCs) within the game.
AI is a set of rules and code that control the behaviour of the
NPCs – it is often this that makes a game fun or not. If a character
in a computer game doesn’t have very sophisticated AI, they will
not behave in a way that seems natural or likely.
• For example, in early games like Frogger the NPCs moved
along set paths, at the same speed and in the same way every
time. In Frogger the NPCs were trucks and cars and they
moved in perfect unison along the road with the same space
between all of them. Have you ever seen a motorway where
the cars and trucks behave like this? Probably not.
• As computer games technology has improved, so has the AI of
the NPCs. In modern computer games, in the sports and
fighting games genres, the AI will make the computercontrolled players adapt to what you are doing and make it
harder for you. As with most things, as the technology gets
better, so does the AI.
TASK
AI is all about rules. The developer puts in codes of behaviour for all of the important
NPCs in a game and sets how they will react to certain things. For example, the
ghosts in Pac Man move around the maze at a set speed and they have three rules:
1. If you touch Pac Man, eat him.
2. If Pac Man has eaten a power-up that makes you change colour, run away from
Pac Man.
3. If Pac Man has eaten everything but your eyes, fly back to base to regenerate.
Pac Man was made in 1980, over 30 years ago, and computer games technology has
come a long way since then. Discuss with a friend: If Pac Man was going to be made
today, what kind of behaviour would the ghosts have? Would they have strategies?
Would they lay traps? See what ideas you can come up with.