Game Development at the University of Denver

I was recently asked to join the advisory board for the new game development curriculum at the University of Denver. There was a story today in the Denver Post about it and a quote or two from me at the end.

I think my goal on the board will be to make sure the computer science curriculum comes as close to a general computer science degree as possible, while still being about game development. I fear that all of the students graduating in 4 years from all of these new game development programs across the nation will find it hard fighting over the few real game development jobs in the industry.

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Shockwave, Not Flash

Amazing. the Site of the Day at Macromedia’s site gives a mini game for the CD-ROM title Stronghold 2 the honor. But they wrongly credit “Macromedia Flash MX 2004″ as the platform for the game. It is Shockwave. It even uses Shockwave 3D, one of the key differences between Flash and Shockwave.

How could a mistake like this get made? Macromedia doesn’t even know their own products. I wonder how many people are now saying “I didn’t know you could do 3D in Flash!” and buying Flash instead of Director?

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Macs, Intel and Director

So we’ve got the second major shake-up of the year. First Adobe buys Macromedia and now Apple is switching to Intel processors.

For Flash users, neither of these news items mean much. Adobe will continue to treat Flash like a star product and I’m sure it will be ported to Mactel before we can even get our hands on one.

But both of these moves make Director developers nervous. I’ve already stated that I think the Adobe buyout is more likely to be good news for Director than bad. And I thinkt he same holds true for the Apple Intel news.

While I’ve been a big fan of the PowerPC chip, I have also thought for years that Apple should make OS X work on Intel. Having different OSes and different processors just makes it too hard to compare the systems. It was too easy to go for a Windows box simply because the processor speed number was higher. But now there will be a level playing field in terms of processor speed and OS X and the Mac way of life can compete head-to-head with Windows.

As far as the transition, I have high hopes. APple has done this before with the transition from 68K to PowerPC chips and then from OS9 to OS X. But times we’ve needed to use emulators to run old software. Both times the speed increase in the new machines has meant that the emulated softwar has run faster than the original software on old machines. So I predict that Director MX 2004 (or whatever) for PowerPC will run faster under emulation on a faster Intel-based machine. Then, hopefully, Adobe will give us a native version of Director (MX 2007?) and the Xtra developers will follow suit.

There may even be some interesting potential for a MacTel machine, like the fact that VirtualPC could run without emulation. So we could have single machine that is a super-fast Mac and super-fast PC. Also, a lot of games don’t use much int he way of Windows functions. And a lot of them already run on OpenGL as well as DirectX. So it might be easier to port AAA titles to Mac, or even run the PC versions witha simple and fast emulator.

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