A Game Developer’s Perspective On Parallelism
- Andrew Brownsword | Chief Architect, Electronic Arts (Vancouver), Inc
The game console market has gone highly concurrent, and the PC market is heading that way fast as well. The software development side of the game business has been reeling to catch up and deal with the new hardware, and the problem is far from solved. With a few products under our collective belt it is time to take a step back and assess where we are at, where things are headed, and how we are dealing with the recent and future changes to our hardware platforms… and how we would like to be dealing with them.
Speaker Details
After joining Distinctive Software, Inc. in 1990, Andrew Brownsword became part of Electronic Arts Canada when the former was acquired in 1991. For seven years he was responsible for developing core runtime libraries and tools to support multi-platform game development throughout the rapidly growing studio, now the largest studio in EA and one of the largest game development studios in the world. This work included 2D/3D graphics blitter software, serial and network communications, asynchronous file systems, threading, audio and texture authoring tools, early 3D hardware drivers, and platform support for Macintosh, Win95, 3DO, and PlayStation1. In 1998 Andrew joined the team developing the Need For Speed franchise and led the transition from C to C++ and object-oriented data-driven design. For one Need For Speed project and three products of the James Bond franchise Andrew was responsible for key core infrastructure components and overall game architecture, delivered on the PlayStation2, XBox, GameCube, and PC platforms. In 2004 he transitioned to the new EA BlackBox studio in downtown Vancouver and has been leading the internal Vanguard shared technology team. This team’s core objectives are improving how game content is developed, and guiding the transition to the highly concurrent next generation PlayStation3, XBox360 and PC platforms. Andrew earned a B.Sc. in Computing Science at the University of British Columbia.
