Autodesk – Gameware Workflow – GDC2012
March 2012 – San Francisco, CA – Autodesk held an event at their San Francisco Gellery to give an overview of their new enhancements to their middleware and workflow product line Gameware. The enhanced workflow tools are bringing a larger portion of the development cycle in to a common platform to allow developers to have a easier and more unified migration path to multiple platforms. This shift is being driven by the requirements for commonality of experience over multiple screens and platforms from the gaming community.
Historically, there were console games, PC games and mobile/casual games. Recently, with the increases in compute and display capabilities in mobile devices, smart interconnected TV’s, and dedicated high performance mobile handheld gaming, gamers are seeking the performance and immersive experience of the console while not in a single location. As a result, the developers are having to cross-platform develop to industry standard interfaces to allow for porting across these domains without having to recreate all the design objects – just scale, transcode, and re-render.
The new Gameware flow has a a centerpiece the new Autodesk Scaleform 4.1 which has a UI development environment with enhancements for mobile, 2D and 3D games and is also applicable for App development. The new version also brings Action Script 3 compatibility by adding support for BitmapData, AS3 XML and regular expressions in addition to an updated user-friendly front-end client for the middleware’s export/cooking tool, with graphical preview of assets. These supplement a new version of the Analyzer for Memory and Performance (AMP) tool for fine-tuning Flash applications and well as improved graphics processing unit (GPU) interface capabilities The Scaleform product as well as Kynapse and HumanIK are fully intergrated with the Unity 3 engine as awll as the Microsoft Win 8 Metro products. They recently licensed the development flow to Nintendo for all developers to use for the Wii and the new Wii U platforms.
Autodesk Scaleform Scene & Menu
In addition to the Scaleform product, they have brought out a number of engines for specialized task optimization for multi- platform game development. These include their new AI tools Congnition and Poplulation as well as the 3D pathfinding tool Kynapse. The Cognition tool manages new advanced behavioural trees which allows for better code organization and interactive / dynamic character development in the stories. The new code organization allows for easier collaboration between developers so unified actions and directions are simplified.
The Population tool (version 2013) is designed to help manage and develop secondary characters ina scene. The tools is optimized to allow for large diversities of non-play characters (NPC) to put in a scene and managed for more meaningful interaction of the main characters. The Kynapse tool (version 2013) has been enhanced to support more complex paths. The tool now supports dynamically updating pathdata based on aggregates of dynamic objects in a game level. The automatic path smoothing capabilities help improve the anticipation of motions and produce more naturally movement in the characters. The tool has now improved the memory optimization and is specifically targeting the reduction of the memory footprint of AI bots, which allow for the support of higher numbers of NPCs in a game level.
To enhance the main characters, they have released Beast which is a new interactive scene, global and character lighting tool, as well as HumanIK which is an improved character animation tool. HumanIK brings simplified access from its two-bone IK solver, a new shoulder solver and an improved spine solving technique that uses new parameters to control spine curvature. This allows animators to identify problematic issues and pinpoint corrections areas in character animation more easily by loading the character in Autodesk MotionBuilder 2012 using the improved HumanIK plugin.
These products form a new middleware base in the Autodesk Project Skyline next generation development workflow. The goals are to bring (1) live linking to other tools such as Maya to the game engines, (2) enhanced node editing bringing visual programming to the flow without the complications of the code details for high-level development and (3) bringing an animation engine to the workflow that is platform and detailed programming portable. The game development community has long used the lighting and 3D art tools for point development, and the goal is to now bring game aware tools around this graphics objects to create a complete environment.
These tools are available for Linux and Windows platforms. The goal is to expand the awareness of the tools though social and mobile platforms by bringing training, tutorials, and webinars to the open community. As mobile is a rising space, and the console market is encountering dynamic power issues in extended gameplay, all of the tools are targeted to help designers be power and compute/memory resource aware so they can optimize thier storylines and character dynamics within the constraints of the hardware platforms available.
