Task 6

Report on software technologies

In this article I will be investigating some of the software technologies used in the game industry and on game platforms, starting with some of the operating systems used within these game platforms. The first of which I will be discussing is the Xbox 360, which uses its own custom built OS, but it has many of the API’s that windows also has in common. The PC can use one of three broad operating systems, the first and most common being Windows, run by Microsoft, which has its own versions, ranging from Windows XP to Windows 8.1, all of which have been relatively successful, with the exception of Windows Vista. The 2^nd computers can use is OS X by Apple, which is predominantly found on the products that apple owns such as Mac and Mac books, these are less suited for gaming compared to windows though. The 3^rd is Linux, which is sometimes used for games but again, not as often as OS X and Windows. The PlayStation 3’s operating system is CellOS which is a branch from another project of Sony’s. The PS3 uses a graphical interface separate from the OS though to make it look more appealing.

Some of the games (Mostly PC games) require drivers in order for certain tasks to be carried out, for example if your game needs sound, your PC is likely to require a sound card and drivers to go with it so that the sound card can communicate with various other parts of the PC. The sound drivers are basically there to carry information between the application and the operating system and vice versa. The general rule of thumb is such;

 

This means that when the user communicates to the application, the application then needs to export a command to the operating system; if the application is not native to the operating system then the system will need a driver to make communicating between the application and OS possible. The last thing that happens is the operating system communicates to the hardware to check if whatever is being carried out is possible, and to continue with its job. The same thing goes for if a piece of software needs to communicate with hardware, like a printer for example, except the table would change slightly to USER > APPLICATION > driver > OS > driver > HARDWARE.

The job of graphics cards is the same universally, to carry the weight of rendering any sort of graphics to take the load off of the CPU. Graphics drivers are what help the graphics card communicate with the OS and other hardware. Network cards are slightly different as they connect to hardware outside of the computer, but still need drivers to communicate information from the outside hardware, to the network card, to the computer to tell it that it has access to the internet.

The next thing to discuss is the software that is used in the creation of games, and at the end of the day, this totally comes down to what sort of game is being created. If it is a 2D game, the most used program will be Photoshop in order to create graphics. There are also various programs that can be used to program the game, but there are two types of programming; Visual programming languages and written programming languages. One visual programming language would be the kismet engine built into UDK or some aspects of the construct 2 engine, which uses visual scripting to show events within the game. For 3D games different software will be used, for example UDK is a perfect example of software that can create 3D environments in a short amount of time, however, to make more intricate details within the levels, one might need to use different 3D software such as Maya or 3DS Max for modelling static meshes. These programs are also good for 3D animation. Photoshop is also a very powerful piece of software, perfect for most types of digital manipulation, photo editing, digital art and painting and texture creation.

The graphic and sound API’s for most of the consoles are similar to their PC counterparts, where the API can easily communicate with the operating system much in the same way that a driver does.