Hardware is changing but teaching isn't, says Insomniac's engine director
Mike Acton, engine director at Insomniac Games, has hit out at computer science and game degrees for not keeping up with the changing nature of console development.
Speaking in the second part of his exclusive chat with us, Acton spoke on how recent programming paradigms of the past five to eight years - paradigms that are taught heavily at university - are struggling on modern architectures such as the PS3.
"It's interesting because I think that probably the oldest programming methods are the most relevant today," he said.
"It's the habits over the last five or eight years that are struggling, and it's interestingly the people that are more recently out of school that are going to have the most trouble, because the education system really hasn't caught up to how the real world is, how hardware is changing and how development is changing."
He continued: "The kinds of things that they're teaching specifically is to abstract things and make them more generic - treating software as a platform, whereas hardware is the real platform - but performance, and the low-level aspects of hardware, aren't part of the education system. People come in with a wrong-headed view on how to develop software."
Advertisement
The solution, he says, is that courses should teach more to-the-metal material, such as parallel processing and low-level programming with assembler. "You have a lot of people leaving school now who not only have never written any assembly but don't even understand how it works in general," explained Acton. "But it's something that as a professional programmer you should know - it should be part of the job description."
For more from Acton, including what lessons Insomniac has learnt as it develops its third PS3 title, check out the second part of our interview here. Part one, which covers Insomniac's new Nocturnal code and knowledge-sharing initiative, can be found here.
This is totally true for 'computer _games_' courses, which should be ahead of the curve and predict the near future trends in the games industry and teach appropriately.
However, Computer Science is a much broader topic, not aimed at a very specific industry. The only places low-level programming is really relevant anymore is games console tech programming and operating systems and driver coding.
On the whole, a lot of games companies have a technology platform anyway. Most coding is done on top of this 'software platform', and companies only really hire a small number of engineers to get down and dirty in the hardware level coding. For these posts, you may be better off hiring Computer Engineers or Electronics students for these roles, as they usually have more assembler coding skills.
Another solution is for the platform providers (Sony, MS etc) to provide a better software platform on top of their complicated architectures. Their engineers understand the brain-bendingly complicated architecture: why make hundreds of other developers around the world try to understand it too?
You've got a point, Rikki, but while making those technology foundations might have been a job for a few coders several years ago, it's now a much bigger job, especially if the company is developing something that it intends to use on multiple titles (just think of all the money that both Blitz and Codemasters have spent on tech - it's not just a small number of people anymore).
Besides - I kind of see what Mike is saying with regards to the fact that everyone should understand what's really going on rather than just relying on their compiler - all programmers should be aware of what effect the code they're writing is going to have on performance ('should I be unrolling loops and reducing branching here?' etc).
I don't know - maybe I'm biased, having come through the education system and been disappointed with what I learnt. I did a degree in AI and we didn't even touch C - the only mandatory language taught was Pascal. Pascal! If I hadn't had the foresight to see that learning C and C++ would have been a good idea, I'd have left university in an even weaker state than I did.
I really have do disagree with this point, and this generalization seems to be far too common. In the UK there is now skillset accreditation for games related university courses to ensure they are teaching the correct things.
Sure, there are a number of courses with games in the title that doesn't teach you anything good but there are still courses that teach you amazingly.
I am just about to complete a degree doing Computer Games Technology at Abertay Dundee. And this is a 4 year course that teaches you networking, programming on the GBA (using assembly), PS2, PSP, Mobile, Flash, DirectX, OpenGL, Hardware Architecture, Multithreading, AI, lots of Maths and Physics. We are taught C++ as our main language, and have had experience using source management software, graphics engines, and are in talks of getting new hardware and middleware to play with. We have multiple industry talks, including from Sony explaining us the hardware architectures of the PS3.
I believe our course teaches you more than enough, and it is unlikely that you will get such a course in plain Computer Science that will prepare you well enough for the games industry.
