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Sun Games Technologies Group Works on Several Fronts Online Gaming Receives New Emphasis Sun, through its recently created Game Technologies Group, is committing its expertise in building back-end systems that support online game play and in creating interoperable JavaTM technology systems to enlarge the portable gaming experience. According to Chris Melissinos, chief gaming officer in the Game Technologies Group at Sun Microsystems, "Sun Microsystems has been focused on building highly scalable, connected, secure environments for more than 20 years. We believe that we can bring this expertise to the games industry and help to develop next-generation, massively connected environments." The Sun Game Technologies Group is at work on a number of fronts, including:
Sun's expertise in designing and building massively scalable, reliable network and server systems makes it an excellent candidate to help ISPs architect their data centers to support the loads of online gaming. "The last thing the games companies want to do is maintain infrastructure," said Doug Twilleager, chief architect for Sun's Game Technologies Group. "Why have those companies worry about alternate pathing or UNIX or downtime, when an ASP or ISP can do it much better?" Sun is investigating putting together a set of products and a network architecture that's tuned to handle high volumes of network traffic from a community of online gamers running multimedia code with audio, video, and 3-D components. As a benefit to the client side, Sun is encouraging end-to-end game software development using Java technologies, which can offer comparable performance to games written in C++. Game applications written in Java programming language can be efficiently moved from one gaming platform to another so game developers can reach more markets with each title. "Java technologies will help developers to reach a broader audience than ever before by giving them the capability to run their games on more platforms without having to port the applications," said Sun's Melissinos. "New revenue opportunities will also emerge as Java technology-enabled devices -- PDAs, mobile phones and set-top boxes -- are able to connect to these real-time game environments. Sun's Game Technologies Group is also working with the open source development community to create a set of Java platform client APIs to help facilitate cross-platform play of popular game titles. For a look at the work going on here, visit the Java Games Web site. The discussion forum hosts threads for Java language bindings for OpenGLR and OpenAL and a Java language Game Controller API. Also part of the effort at Sun is the formation of a Technology Advisory Board, including such key players as Criterion Software, Nihilistic Software, and Capital Entertainment Group, whose goal is to articulate the engineering requirements of a back-end infrastructure that will support today's games, and tomorrow's business requirements.
"What we want is a solution directed by games companies, built by
people who know about fault tolerance, serviceability, and
scalability," said Sun's Twilleager. "You could even create a
standardized back end, if you're an ISP and need to replicate these
architectures across multiple sites."
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Sun Games Technologies Group Works on Several Fronts
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