Insomniac chats about the Nocturnal Initiative
The response from readers about the Nocturnal Initiative has been overwhelmingly positive. How has the development community responded?
Well, we've talked to other people in the industry, and whenever we bring this up, they get excited. Other people are excited about doing this kind of thing. One of the great things is Ted's openness. It surprised us that we really was like "do it." Not any kind of push back that you'd expect.
This isn't the first time Insomniac has reached out to the community at large. How was the response to the R&D page that Insomniac opened a few months ago?
We get a lot of feedback about the R&D page, saying "hey, we really appreciate this." I've gotten e-mails from Intel and the industry at large. People are interested in what we have to say.
Are there any specific examples of projects that may have benefited from your research?
I don't want to call anybody out, because I don't think that would be appropriate. I know that we get a lot of e-mails from developers all around the world that appreciate the information that we've made available.
What is Insomniac going to offer to the development community, and how much will it help?
The code is nice to have and is useful, but what's important are the coders. You can have all the source code in the world, but without an appropriate team, you're not going to get anything. You're certainly not going to get good results. At Insomniac, what we wanted to provide is just nice little useful pieces. Other teams that are good teams are going to take those any way they please. Maybe they save a little time, or maybe they find a bug and point it out to us, and we get it fixed in our stuff too. You can't make a bad team better through source code. But maybe we can save a good team some time.
It's hard to say. I know the outside world has this impression of programs and source code and you can just pop it in. For example, Polyphony Digital has a specific way of rendering cars. We can't just take it and use it in our own engine. Everyone has their own method and issues. If another developer came to us in private and wanted to know how we solved something, we'd totally want to share that.
And we're trying to start a broader initiative here. A lot of it this is to lead the industry by example. "It's worth sharing." A common question we get is "Won't other people make games that look just as good as Insomniac games." Well, no. But even if they did, that helps push us to make even better games.
Do you see this as a challenge to yourselves and the developers out there?
It's fundamentally about sharing. But yeah, like Andy was saying, sharing our tech means that we're going to have to up our game. If anyone is using it, we have to become that much better. We have to figure out new ways of doing things.
What's driving the Nocturnal Initiative?
The console industry is all about getting better. If not, we'd all be playing on our Atari systems. We can challenge ourselves internally. We hear anecdotal stories from friends, and there's a desire to access the solutions to the problems we've solved. Why not take a little time and share? We'd rather compete with them by making good games, not by the quality of our code. That's not good for the industry. Nobody likes writing code. Everyone wants to focus on making their games better, and the features that make them better. That's what we're focusing on.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
matthew_neitzer @ Mar 3rd 2008 8:23PM
"The code is nice to have and is useful, but what's important is the code." - Is it supposed to read that way? Good information and interview, though.
Andrew Yoon @ Mar 3rd 2008 8:34PM
Fixed! Thanks for catching that.
Sauvage @ Mar 4th 2008 4:47AM
Insomniac are great! It is good that they and other PS3 developer finally understand that helping everyone on the Sony ship hopefully creates better games, which in turn will sell more hardware and software. Everyone wins if everyone's games are of a high enough standard.
Bring on Resistance 2!
James @ Mar 4th 2008 11:57AM
I like that a little of the Open Source spirit is bleeding through into the console environment. It's a tough balance because you want your work to benefit your company, but if a number of developers get together and share tools, they can spend more time on polishing the stuff that matters for their projects.
The first virtue of coding is Laziness: never do what somebody else has already done for you. That's why libraries that provide commonly-used features are so helpful -- not only do you save time by not writing them, but if there's a bug in the code, there's loads more people working with them, so the bug is that many times more likely to be found and fixed. One of the things that always sounded daunting about console development is that generally you get the tools the console maker gives you, and end up writing all the rest of the foundations yourself (unless you buy a 3rd-party engine). This could really go a long way in helping smaller teams compete.
Musouka @ Mar 4th 2008 10:44PM
Funny how non-programmers started fantasizing about this Nocturnal code being a piece of the holy grail.
It's just a compilation of some tiny tiny functions to help distributed builds and testing, and some debugging printf-like classes. Plus one great idea, that is hidden deep within all that code, but is used only in one fixed place. (coders have to retype it all by themselves to make it useful enough.... if they ever spot that idea). And there is absolutely no code for the PS3 there - it's all Win32 code, except for the simplistic few things that can be directly compiled for any platform.
I guess the gesture is more important than the content/gift.
(I'm almost a diehard IG fan actually)