EGO Trip
Codemasters CTO Bryan Marshall lifts the hood on his engine and talks next-gen tech
I think it's something we continue to keep under consideration. As you say, it's not been included so far in the titles we've got. It's also something that you need to build your game around, to get the most out of it. It's not something you can retrofit or add on as an augmented system unless it really does fit for a particular function. I think it's one we're still considering - it's definitely fascinating, there's some great stuff out there.
Well, we call it the EGO game technology platform. I know it's a right mouthful but to call it an engine is too simple. It's more of a strategy, a way in which we exchange information between the teams and our tech groups. There are lots of different modules that the teams use - a good example is the terrain rendering tech. For Operation Flashpoint: Red River it's a massive area, 10x20 kilometres, so we don't use the same terrain system as we would in DiRT.
So things are different in different games. It's kind of gone back to its original heritage, from even before I was here, which is to always provide the teams with good base libraries to work with, good flexibility and let the teams innovate within that. We don't want a particular technology base which would force something on a team and then not allow them to innovate. It's important for the teams to push their areas too.
I wouldn't want to make comparisons! [laughs] I think there some really cool stuff out there. Just look at Unreal, it's an amazing bit of tech, an amazing tool. The competition is high, and we need to keep up with it, I think that's the main thing we try to bear in mind.
We want to keep it [EGO] to ourselves, to keep our competitive advantage on that front.
It's whether we go down the route of extensions to our core brands, and stick with that. That's more of a commercial question. I think the technology is flexible enough to attack several different areas. A long time ago, this studio did a lot of sports games, we still have a lot of knowledge around that as well.
We can target things in certain ways, I don't think it's limiting.
I think we do want to keep it to ourselves, to keep our competitive advantage on that front. But also, you shouldn't underestimate the amount of pain and suffering middleware companies have to go through! To maintain that technology is hard. We'd rather innovate than have to keep something stable which would then have to serve a number of customers.
It's important that we stay competitive in that sense.
It is important that we have that attention to detail, certainly. You can see that in the games, we really try to get that over, we'll continue to strive to get better. I think that's a real hallmark of Codemasters games, I think that goes back even to Rich Darling's days - Rich had a real eye for the attention to detail and the underlying physics simulation of things - I think that still really comes through in the games today.