Interview with Corrinne Yu. Principal Engine Architect at Halo Team Microsoft

What is her favorite platform for gaming on? How many platforms has she developed on? What is her favorite platform to develop on? What are her thoughts on PC gaming. What does she think the future of consoles gaming?

If she could restructure gaming , how would she do it? Would there still be separate consoles, separate developing platforms. Or would she like it unified?

It's been over seven years now. Are there any plans to "move on" after Halo and develop some new IP?

I'd like to know where she sees game programming going forward and by proxy DirectX/OpenGL as well as programming languages, if she has any thoughts on that. Will there be a paradigm shift in engine technology towards full ray tracing, return of the voxel engine or what not 5-10 years from now? What is the next paradigm shift?

With the current push for 3D on TVs, are game developers once again looking at 3D? I remember shutter glasses back in the mid 90s but they never really caught on.

Or is this more a driver issue?

Does she work together with other big people in the gaming world like John Carmack and Tim Sweeney?

The Xbox 360 will be 5 years old soon, how much further can graphics be pushed on the console?  Can we still expect to see new rendering techniques implemented, or is it starting to show its age?

Hey Corrinne thanks for the opportunity to ask you a question. Also Hi from Twitter (JamboGT).

I am currently at University where I am studying C++ programming, game design and game system architecture as well as a few other related modules. What I want to ask you is what extra things should I take onboard myself to learn that would help me in regard to the industry and would help me stand out from other prospective games programmers.

JamboGt said:

Hey Corrinne thanks for the opportunity to ask you a question. Also Hi from Twitter (JamboGT).

 

I am currently at University where I am studying C++ programming, game design and game system architecture as well as a few other related modules. What I want to ask you is what extra things should I take onboard myself to learn that would help me in regard to the industry and would help me stand out from other prospective games programmers.

It's a given but worth restating: Work on an independent games project, bonus points if it's in a team. Ensure you complete the project to a publishable state and include it in a 'demo reel' to potential employers, they're always interested in seeing what their new hires are capable of. Always do something fun and original, no-one wants to see yet another FPS or RPG. Using pre-made middleware (like Gamebryo or Torque) is acceptable but obviously "Game makers" are right-out because they involve little actual programming. If you're going in for games engine development then show off your skills by building your own engine without any middleware assistance, that'll demonstrate you understand how things work so well you can do it yourself.

If you're thinking of getting into console games development I strongly suggest getting into the homebrew scene. Whilst Microsoft apologetics would advocate XNA, in reality very few games are made using the Managed framework and you'd get far more useful practical experience by using leaked or otherwise illicit homebrew techniques for the Wii or Xbox. A friend of mine got started doing homebrew for the Nintendo DS and ended up getting hired by an indie Nintendo developer and earns a very nice salary despite being only 22.

Given the possibilities the raw horsepower of the SPU has opened up for parallelizing graphics techniques that would be otherwise be impractical in real-time, what sort of processor architecture would you like to see prevaling in the next generation of Xbox and consoles in general?

Something similarly asymmetrical with a potential for higher performance but which takes more work to optimize for and use for parallelization? Or an increased number of traditional symmetrical cores with shared memory (perhaps with more explicit cache control to get data access performance closer to the SPUs) but which would be much more accessible to the developer? Or something else altogether?

This application is only 4 KB big. Why don't we see more games that don't use textures but only shaders?

ZippyV said:

This application is only 4 KB big. Why don't we see more games that don't use textures but only shaders?

This is a good question, might want to say "why don't they use procedurally generated textures?" to be clearer.  I think even that demo uses textures they're just generated at load-time.

Does she feel that engines will continue to be written on a per company basis or will we start to see big extremely powerful generic engines run most of the games on the market?

Also, does she feel technology distracts from fun (e.g. 2D-ish Mario on the Wii Vs. Just Cause 2 )?

CreamFilling512 said:

ZippyV said:

*snip*

This is a good question, might want to say "why don't they use procedurally generated textures?" to be clearer.  I think even that demo uses textures they're just generated at load-time.

= shaders

ZippyV said:

CreamFilling512 said:

*snip*

= shaders

I mean everything is rendered with a shader, its just that in most games most of the color in the shader comes from sampling textures that were created by artists.  She'll probably get it though.

CreamFilling512 said:

ZippyV said:

*snip*

I mean everything is rendered with a shader, its just that in most games most of the color in the shader comes from sampling textures that were created by artists.  She'll probably get it though.

It took 2 minutes to load from the replies. Thus, I believe procedure synthesis would be taking a lot of processing power to generate those content. I think the tesselation has much more performance and expressiveness in comparison. Certainly not as low K as that demo, but, tesselation should be easier to use in development in comparison. And tesselation under DX11 spec requires almost no performance hit.

Sorry, I can't keep myself from asking this one:-

 Halo 3 for PC: When, if ever, and if never, why?

Or at least: Will we ever see it?