All About 3D - Part One

It's the question that everyone asks. I'd say it's been hugely expensive to do the engine and buy all the TVs, get all the drivers... that's been a pain in the arse. But we have a very powerful engine which we're very proud of, and we're trying to push it into new areas. We're now licensing it to others, and we were thinking about what other unique elements we could add - 3D was another thing we could add that would make it unique, and once done it could go into the games.

So yeah, we've probably sunk tens of thousands into it to-date, but we can now just put it into games. The point about 3D is that you can actually do some very cool things. It gives you extra immersion, you actually start to believe in it - our game looks like you're looking into the world, more than on TV. Ours is slightly cartoony, but you can imagine there are certain things where it will just draw you in more.

But on how much more it costs to put 3D in - there will still be about an extra 10-15 per cent of stuff that you'll have to put into the budget of a game to make it 3D.

Because when we make games, we cheat - we have flat sprites for things like trees in the distance, but as soon as you put it into 3D, you can see that it's flat. Your eyes can see it's a floating, flat plane, so you have to model more things up. So you've not only got the speed issue of trying to run it really fast, you realise that you can't use some of the old tricks.

The obvious one is the special effects - the smoke, fire and so on. We always layer up and do flat planes, but it looks really obvious in 3D. You can above four flat smoke effects over the top of each other that makes it up - looks great in 2D, but in 3D the illusion is broken, so you have to think about doing some sort of volumetric particle effects, which is really hard.

But that's because the illusion is working really well, and you are seeing into a 3D world. You can't cheat quite as much - you have make those things more representative of the 3D world, which I think is really interesting, even if it does make it slightly more challenging.

We found that. We've made our own game and pushed it in there at our own expense, but we have a publisher with whom we're just agreeing a 3D project, so frankly it will progress, it will go into a big, full game and we will learn more lessons, get our art tuned and so on.

So when people start coming around to 3D, the movies are in homes and it's common that over half of new TVs are 3D-compatible, we'll have grown up with this stuff and know it. Others will go in, and there'll be lots of hurdles - we've had a lot to this point, but there're still a lot of new things you can do with it.

The film companies are doing some pretty clever tricks - Coraline was the one that impressed me, because they did quite a lot of extra tricks to do with fooling the brain into thinking there are other things going on. That's stuff cool when you think about games.

One of the things I have to say, though, is that most of the tricks make things feel frightening, because they confuse your brain and it gets uneasy. It does lend itself to making horror games...

There are all sorts of things you do for reputation. There are different ways of marketing yourself, or your middleware, or whatever. One way is to pay for lots of print adverts to say that our middleware is available.

There's another way - just to show off what cool stuff it does, and that's effectively what we're doing. We decided, rather than pay thousands on print adverts, to give that money to the programmers to add stuff that gets talked about.

The 3D stuff is interesting because, yes, we're ahead of the game a bit and the TVs aren't really out there. But I have absolutely no doubt that it's happening - every TV manufacturer wants to put it in their TVs, but they want the content. It's expensive to make, but all the Hollywood blockbusters are going 3D, so it's a bit of a no-brainer to see that it'll work its way onto TVs.

The content will be there. When? I don't know, but without doubt it's coming.

They'll build 3D into HDTVs - the Samsung we've been using looks like a regular HDTV, you just have to know which one. InvincibleTiger.com is going to have a compatibility list of all the 3DTVs. Suddenly people will start to realise that some of the TVs are capable of 3D, so you're future-proofing yourself.

Even if you have to go out and spend GBP 50-100 more, soon it's going to be very cool. I'm not expecting people to buy a TV for our game, but there will be the appreciation that it' coming.