TOOLS NEWS | BUILD
Autodesk is looking to form a closer bond with the games development industry by bolstering its Gameware website
You mentioned the Project Skyline pipeline concept. Where is that today? Is it a finished product yet? Most of this stuff is still under confidentiality with the specific companies we have been working with. We’re even exploring what the workflows of the next-gen are. We’re looking at the Wii U coming out, and while I can’t confirm anything, everyone keeps hearing about other consoles potentially coming out. We’re working with some developers – I want to call them charter customers, because it’s not really a beta we’re doing; it’s a collaboration where we learn together as we go. We have it, and a year ago we had it, and
we’ve got it so people can play with it, and it’s integrated with their pipelines. But we’ve really done it as a next-gen pipeline and not for current-gen pipelines, which is kind of done, where people are crunching on timelines and money and don’t have the opportunity to change things. Skyline is about what would make a better pipeline for next time, and we’re engaging with a couple of our customers on it. They are helping us with what next-generation pipelines should be like, in terms of what we think they should offer, but also in terms of what they really need to be in practice. It’s part of the same approach to the way
we do things when, for example, we picked up Scaleform.
So how does the acquisition of a UI company tie in with a vision like Skyline? Interface – like workflow – for games development is only going to get more important as we move forward, and how we can build that out into a nice neat workflow is important. Skyline was actually about animation, but we are looking at how we can take not just animation but UI, or maybe
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building environments, or whatever it may be, and apply the same logic to it. So we’ve been looking at all sorts of things like that – we made another acquisition of a company called Grip here in Montreal. They do higher-level behavioural technology. Grip have done the AI systems in some pretty successful triple-A titles. We’re kind of getting enough pieces there so that people will be able to apply these workflows to different disciplines across the
At GDC we’ll have some news for the
casual and mobile space, as that remains a great area of interest for the business.
Marc Stevens, Autodesk
gaming pipeline. But we’ll also continue to stay open enough, because we know there are people that still have their own technology that they developed. We still live in a world where the majority of people use in-house custom technology, versus the ten or 15 per cent of the market that choose to buy off-the-shelf engines.
Will we see Autodesk make or acquire an engine in the near future? For us that’s a tough place to be in, due to the fact that there are so many people that use so many solutions and there seems to be no ‘one size fits all’. Making a commitment like that would exclude us from a large part of our customer base today.
What can Autodesk video games customers expect from you at GDC 2012? Well, back at MIGS last year we launched our Gameware brand and website. What we wanted to do in creating that is build a direct channel to games developers to address the programmers more directly. That kind of came from the fact that
Scaleform had a great website where developers could go and get information, get technical support and all sorts of product information and trials. What we’ve done is take all of our middleware products – things like Human IK and Beast, and the Grip products are going up there, and then there’s Kynapse – and we’ve built them into this nice neat environment we’ve branded Gameware. It’s going to continue to grow as our focus site to talk to the games development community. As Skyline matures, and as we move our
technologies from being middleware to being a whole workflow from which you can create your content out to the runtime, we’re going to continue to grow that site and continue to grow the investment there. There will be a wider launch and more from
Gameware at GDC. Also at GDC, well, you can take your best
guess. We’re going to have, or definitely would hope to have, some supporting new releases of the middleware products. I can’t confirm that 100 per cent and tell you what products and what releases and everything, but we’re going to show up with a strong line-up and a very clear message to the community that we’re investing a lot here. At GDC we’ll also have some news for the casual and mobile space, and that remains a great area of interest for the business, both at GDC and throughout the year.
www.autodesk.com
MARCH 2012 | 57
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