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COTS development in games

Started by eelke_folmer May 2, 2006 at 1:44 AM 2 replies 1.2k views

Original Post

May 2, 2006 at 1:44 AM

There are plenty of Commercial of the Shelf (COTS) Components available for the development of games (see the plethora of 3d engines and for example physics engines like havok). The motivation for using COTS components is that they will reduce overall system development costs and involve less development time because the components can be bought instead of being developed from scratch. This could prove to be useful for game development because of the ever increasing costs. However, COTS have never as successful as claimed in non games software. E.g. many considered COTS to be the silver bullet during the nineties but COTS development came with many not so obvious trade-offs (Overall cost and development time can definitely be reduced, but often at the cost of an increase in software component integration work and a dependency on a third-party component vendor). My question: will COTS succeed in the domain of games or are they just intermediate products on the road to higher granularity artefacts such as application frameworks? (which require less integration) E.g .NET and j2ee frameworks have incorporated most web development related COTS. Will we see the same movement in games? Will the future bring us also complete game frameworks that offer physics, graphics, hardware abstraction, scripting, OO content storage all in one? (which will increase the time to market and reduce costs without the trouble of incorporating numerous COTS).

PaulCesar

May 2, 2006 at 2:10 AM

I have a feeling that in the future we will have engines in a similar vain to how we currently have linux distrobutions. Things are already starting to lean in that direction (Physics provided by .... etc) By that i mean, various organizations and frameworks will be built off of various COTS, and you will choose an organization of COTS that best fits your particular project. Thats just my opinion though.

speu

May 2, 2006 at 2:13 AM

I can see this happening at some point, maybe a future release of "Adobe GameDesigner Plus" HA!.

Its similar to what we are seeing now with Video technology, and how anybody with a new mac and a nice camera can create theatre quality film, not that too many people do it well... its just the fact that 10 or even 5 years ago it was alot more difficult and expensive to do this. Flash is an even better example as an all in one package. For many 2d interactive applications, flash is amazing and relatively simple to learn. Once technology, and algorithms become efficient and versital enough, this is bound to happen.

I really don't know anything though, just my personal thoughts.

BrianL

May 2, 2006 at 9:47 AM

I would consider focusing more on the tools side of game tech than the engine. The tools may require twice the amount of code and are a huge detail given the number of content producers teams have these days.

We already have a combination of parts (ie Granny, Havok, etc) and full solutions (Unreal, Renderware). I don't expect this to change, as building from smaller pieces gives more control but using a large framework gives you the tools, etc.

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