ATLANTA -- Scratch any computer game and it will bleed math.
Pure math, that is, in the form of proprietary machine code that works your CPU until it smokes, calculating distances, animating monsters, coping with things like velocity physics, enemy AI, and, most important, drawing pictures on the screen.
The latter task, of rendering graphics in the form of small units called "polygons," falls to the most critical section of a game's millions of lines of software code, one that is never seen but always felt: the game engine. Here at E3, where literally thousands of this upcoming holiday seasons' games are being shown off, a good engine earns bragging rights and guaranteed buzz.
"Without a great engine, you don't have a game," said David Perry, president of game development house Shiny Entertainment. "It's like trying to be an athlete with a weak heart."
Not that Perry has anything to worry about. Shiny's new cutting-edge game engine, Messiah (and forthcoming game of the same name), is setting the game geeks here on fire. By many accounts, Messiah is truly revolutionary, because it solves a problem with software code that many game developers and publishers have all but given up on, and turned to hardware and chipsets for help.
The problem with games, especially fast-action games, is that the more animated objects -- characters, monsters, rotating spiked wheels, etc. -- are added to the screen, the more the game slows down, because the processor is being asked to calculate and draw a lot of polygons at once.
Perry said that a standard, yet depressing, step in game testing involves running through an environment such as a dungeon, watching to see where, and how much, the movement slows down, and then removing monsters and other neat stuff from the scene until it runs smoothly again. It's why you don't very often see crowd scenes in games -- it's simply too much work for the computer, and things get jerky in a hurry.
Messiah's answer is a technology called "tesseration," whereby the engine constantly calculates how many polygons a particular character or element can support at any given instant, and doles them out appropriately.
"The engine goes, 'This guy can have 500 polygons.' Another one goes, this guy can have 6,000 polygons,' and it does it every single frame, every 60th of a second, it decides how much hardware [the game] can handle," said Perry.
"The result of that is really, really cool," Perry said, explaining a process he calls true scalability. "If you had some really shit-hot machine, if the machine can handle one more polygon, the engine will serve it up. Which means that with every machine this game runs on, you will see the maximum performance of the hardware."
Perry's lead programmer, who goes by the name Reverand Saxs, gave his Messiah engine plenty to do. Within the game -- a fantasy adventure in which the player pilots a small cherub -- he modeled human tissue, and taught the computer how muscles stretch, and how parts of the human anatomy respond to gravity. The result: When a well-endowed female character walks across the screen, her breasts move with the same movement that they would have in the real world. Even in a crowd scene.
The other answer to the polygon crunch lies in hardware, in the form of graphics accelerator cards from companies such as 3DFX that gamers must buy and physically install in their machines. Increasingly, "hardware only" games demand this separate purchase.
"The more polygons I can push, the better, and technology-wise, hardware is where it's at," said Alan Patmore, president of Surreal Software, which is developing a third-person role-playing-game called Drakan for Psygnosis.
They feel the same way across the exhibit hall at Activision. The Santa-Monica, California-based publisher and developer is showing off Dark Side, a hardware-only game engine that the company has been developing for a year. The game will appear in the upcoming action titles Heavy Gear II (slated for a Christmas release) and Interstate 82 (the next episode of a popular cars-with-guns game, due in January 1999).
Heavy Gear II is a hardware-only game, a move regarded by some as bold, given that the market has not totally embraced graphics cards, and the game won't run without one.
"We killed the software [version of Heavy Gear II, an anime-inspired fighting robots game] because we'd have to do two versions of the game, and the hardware version is way, way, way faster," said Jack Mamais, the game's director.
Mamais said that Activision's Dark Side engine allowed him to get 4,000 or more polygons per frame, and 30 frames per second, onto the screen. The results are impressive, as the robots, called "gears," move across landscapes with total fluidity.
But hardware-only games are controversial. John Romero, one of gaming's most renowned programmers and the co-creator of Doom and Quake, said that Daikatana, his forthcoming action game (due this Christmas from Eidos Interactive), supports acceleration but also runs well without it.
"[The version we are showing here at E3] is hardware-accelerated, but we are going to have the best software implementation out there," Romero said, adding that he had not yet seen the Messiah engine.
"Everybody does not have these cards," said Romero. "It is a small market segment that actually does have even a Voodoo 1 [first-generation graphics card]. You have to make sure you have software, it has to look good.... We have paid a lot of attention to the software, while a lot of companies have gone hardware only."
Shiny's David Perry said that, according to his company's research, a scant one in eight game systems have graphics accelerator cards. Sales this past Christmas were less than robust, Activision producer Dave Georgeson admitted, but said that his own company's research shows that 1998 will be the year of the card.
Perry said that, outside of America, very few consumers have bought the cards. According to new research released Thursday by the Interactive Digital Software Association, the trade group that hosts E3, 30 percent of the industry's revenues come from foreign markets.
"You go to Australia, and you hear people say, 'I'm thinking about upgrading my computer,'" said Perry, who wore the smile of a boy who has just solved a jigsaw puzzle.
"And then they say, 'Yeah, I'm going to get a new CD-ROM,'" he said.
