A friend sent me a link to a wiki of computer game innovations a few weeks ago. It’s a nice idea from the Entertainment Technology Centre at Carnegie Mellon (I’d no idea such a thing existed!).
I’d definitely question the accuracy of some of the information on there, but it looks like it’s pretty easy to post corrections.
The innovations that I’ve been enjoying recently are the Steam system for delivering games (http://www.steampowered.com/) and the use of physics engines, such as Havok (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havok_%28software%29), for simulating particle and body motion under the influence of gravity, friction, wind resistance etc.
The common thread in there is the game Half-Life 2, which was the first I had played for many years. I wouldn’t have bothered going to the store to buy it (hence my liking for Steam, as I just downloaded the whole thing) and I wouldn’t have been quite so goggle-eyed about the experience without the accurate simulation of real-world physics, which really have to be seen to be believed.
It seems that future games might be benefiting from hardware acceleration of physics calculations in the form of “Physics Processing Units” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_processing_unit — I’ll be keeping a slot free!
Oh, David, *do* keep up! It’s 2006. for goodness’ sake!
😉
HL2 is very, very good, though, isn’t it? Every now and again a game comes out that I’m just entranced by and play to death for a few weeks. Fortunately I got stuck (near the end) just prior to the Hotsos acceptance or I would have been stuffed!
Personally, I’ve been playing MULE again a bit recently. Which is really quite sad.