Future-Proofing Bungie's Next-Gen Game Engine

A new crop of consoles isn't too far in our future, says Hao Chen, senior graphics architect for Bungie. This isn't a surprise, of course - hardware companies make hardware products, and software companies make games to support them. But there was speculation in the past that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 might represent the last round of big powerhouse consoles, as cloud gaming picks up steam, and new hardware gets tougher to move. In an exclusive interview, to be run in full in Game Developer magazine's December issue (and later on Gamasutra), Chen gave some insight into the next set of consoles. Bungie is a company in transition itself, now working multiplatform, outside the confines of the Xbox-only Halo universe, which the studio created. "We have a brand new game, a brand new IP," says Chen. "Our project right now is at a very exciting stage. For the first time we're now shipping on multiple platforms, and then the new consoles are at least not far on the horizon." Hardware transitions have never been easy, not least because they're hard to predict. Packaged engines like Unreal or Unity will assuredly make the transition easier on smaller studios, but Bungie still uses its own engine, which it is currently trying to future-proof. Chen outlined the biggest hurdles to getting a new graphics engine running on current and future hardware. "You need to identify the kinds of things that we're currently not doing very well, and also combine that with what you think you need to be doing in the future," he says. "So we place a huge amount of emphasis on this architecture that allows us to be efficient in a multi-core, multi-threaded environment, and then we hide all the platform complexity without losing the ability to be efficient with the rest of the game engine," Chen says. "The majority of the challenge comes from this design problem." He adds, "We want to match all of this different hardware across generations and still be efficient enough for the future. You want the rest of the game or rest of the engine to not even know about the platform." Making your engine as platform-agnostic as possible is a good step, but just how unknown are the specs of these future consoles? Chen couldn't speak to this directly, of course, but gave some useful hints. "There is some confidence we can have from where the hardware is trending toward. You make educated guesses on the things that you can, and then you have isolated, potentially binding decisions on things where you have no idea what's going to happen," he says. "The worst thing you can do is design something that prevents you from being efficient on the future platforms," Chen adds. "So on the things where we have sketchy details, we'd rather leave that isolated decision open until later than make the wrong decision. But there are plenty of things we know already, so we try to design an engine that's very efficient based on our knowledge." So here's what we do know - new consoles are on the horizon, and some developers already have a bit of information regarding what shape they will take, which means they've gone past the theoretical stage to something a bit more tangible. The most obvious hardware trends are more memory and more cores, but as for what other surprises the next generation has in store, we'll just have to wait and see.