Security Architectures for the Rich Web

While Web 2.0 technology and services have been common in the public sphere for a number of years, their uptake into the Enterprise has been relatively slow. Rich Internet Applications and Social Networks introduce new ways to allow users to interact with their applications, data and indeed, other users. They do however, bring with them significant opportunity to expose sensitive information. Whether breaches in security are due to unforeseen use of components of the application itself, or simply, by inappropriate information dissemination; through the use of Social Networking tools, Enterprise Web 2.0 introduces security trapdoors that should be addressed as part of the development framework and application design. In this talk recorded at Saltmarch Media's Great Indian Developer Summit Oracle's Barry Hiern looks at the various points of exposure in building Web 2.0 based applications for the enterprise, and some of the ways developers and administrators can secure their applications before data exposure becomes an issue.

Barry Hiern is Senior Principal Architect, APAC Channels Enablement at Oracle Corporation. With over twenty years in the software industry and more than a decade in leading roles within the Oracle Development organization, he has extensive experience in the areas of product development and delivery, enterprise architectures, business development, partner enablement and sales consulting.

The Entire Game Should Move Onto the GPU, says Rev Lebaredian

As the computing functionality and horsepower of GPUs has grown over the last few years, the role of the GPU is rapidly expanding to game tasks beyond rasterization-based graphics. Now GPU computing can be used for solving a variety of problems in game computing including game physics, artificial intelligence, animation, post-processing effects and others. Rev Lebaredian, Director of Engineering in Nvidia, says that as GPUs grow and become more general purpose, more and more of the game is going to be shifting over to the GPU. The final goal is to have the whole game run on the GPU.

Rev Lebaredian leads a team of engineers developing APEX - a middleware library and tools for integrating realistic and scalable physics simulation into games. APEX is a new technology that empowers artists to quickly create fully interactive in-game clothing, destruction, particles and vegetation. APEX is a middleware library and artist-oriented tools, built on top of Nvidia's PhysX software. The APEX framework streamlines the integration of new effects into games.

Saltmarch Media spoke to Rev Lebaredian during his recent visit to Bangalore, India. The discussion began with a topic close to Rev's heart – APEX. "APEX is trying to handover the power of game physics to the artists directly as they are the biggest section of employees in a game development company. By achieving this, an artist need not depend on a programmer to achieve every task and this in turn will enable the creation of a lot of creative content which the user of today has come to expect from games," says Rev.

Read on to know Rev's thoughts on moving the entire game to the GPU starting with graphics and physics, how video applications are tapping the increasing computing power of GPUs, optimal Direct X 11 support, and advancements in the graphics and digital media processors industry. Rev also shares his experiences with using Optimus technology that addresses the performance/battery life balance by automatically selecting the right graphics processor-between an Nvidia discrete GPU or an Intel integrated GPU

Q. Please introduce yourself to our readership and talk in a bit about your role at Nvidia.
 
Rev Lebaredian: I am the Director of Engineering within the Content and Technology group within Nvidia. This is the group that deals primarily with application developers. My responsibility right now is leading the group that develops a product called APEX.

APEX is a middleware solution we have been creating and implementing in actual games that enables game developers to put hi-fidelity simulation and dynamics into their games with minimal amount of work for the quality that they get out of it.

The goal is to make APEX scalable across platforms and allow game developers to put as much of it as possible in their games by leveraging their artists, instead of just a few programmers in their group who know game physics.
 
Q. One of your talks at India Game Developer Summit specifically revolved around APEX, a middleware library and tools for integrating realistic and scalable physics simulation into games. Can you explain APEX in a bit?
 
RL: What we found while integrating physics with the GPU was that for many years, the bottleneck in most game productions was the fact that most of the actual employees within any game studio are artists and the ratio of artist to other employees remains big because games are getting bigger themselves.

So in order for us to get more content in games we need to address the issue at the artist level and allow and enable them to create physical content without having to depend on a programmer to do everything.

Currently within development companies there are around one or two artists who are experts at doing physics programming and that is not sufficient for us to really enable games with the kind of content everybody wants.
 
Q. APEX is built on top of Nvidia's PhysX software. PhysX was designed by a company called AGEIA, which was acquired by Nvidia in 2008. What do you see as the benefits of the acquisition?
 
RL: AEGIA was a great acquisition for us. We knew that as GPUs grow and become more general purpose, more and more of the game is going to be shifting over to the GPU. The final goal is to have the whole game run on the GPU.

The next natural step after graphics is physics. It is very parallelizable and it is scaleable. There is lots of computation so it is in many ways a good fit for GPUs. So we evaluated and found out that it would take a lot of time to build up a physics library just at the rudimentary level and that it was much better to do an acquisition.

We were lucky as AEGIA were willing to do this and they have also had a lot of experience with accelerating physics on the hardware. So in many ways it was a perfect match for us. What they were trying to do with their products matched our business model and hence the expertise that they had gained matched us perfectly. This also has ramifications in the future.

What we learn from moving physics over to the GPU will apply to everything else we try to move over to the GPU as well. Physics is a great real-time application to try to move to the GPU so it is critical for us to have technologies like this in-house that we can use as beacons for where our architectures need to go in the future on the whole.
 
Q. More and more processing is now being done on the GPU. And video is the killer application for the GPU. What are the new kinds of video applications that are tapping the increasing computing power of GPUs?
 
RL: Encoding and transcoding are already big on the GPU and we are seeing many compute based applications that take advantage of the raw horse power of the GPU. As and when people create more and more digital media, there is an insatiable appetite for computing power in order to process this and archive it and store it in ways that are convenient for people. So we definitely have a big need for this sort of computation abilities.

In addition there are lots of problems with video that are naturally suited towards massively parallel architectures. Motion estimation, doing optimal flow, and these sort of image processing problems map very nicely onto the GPU.
 
Q. Nvidia had earlier pioneered a technology called switchable graphics to address the performance/battery life balance. But it was cumbersome to use since users had to manually switch between the two display adapters. Recently Nvidia released the Optimus technology that automatically selects the right graphics processor-between an Nvidia discrete GPU or an Intel integrated GPU. Have you used the Optimus technology and what is your feedback about it?
 
RL: I think its fantastic and it is much better than the switchable stuff that we had before. Optimus is extremely elegant and I think what you will find in the reviews and in the press will confirm this. Everybody loves this and I think it is the ideal solution to this particular problem and it is the sort of thing that we are actually good at.

It has taken a lot more than just developing hardware and the driver in order to produce something like this. We have to go through all the applications people are running, create a profile and invest a lot in QA and there are things we have to do in an ecosystem to create a product like this. So it makes me proud when we actually deliver something as elegant as this as a company.

Q. Will optimal Direct X 11 support be a deciding factor in terms of GPU sales in the next few years?
 
RL: History has always shown that to be true with respect to GPUs. We are not done with graphics. There is obviously a long way to go before we get to photo realism. And with games we are not even close to where film has been for many years now. DirectX 11 is a large step towards that.

We have had a lot of texture complexity for a long time and we have hit the limits of it and it looks kind of weird when the geometric complexities of games do not match the shading and texture complexity that we have become accustomed to. So as soon as we have some games out there that take advantage of DirectX 11 features, it is going to become obvious that all games need to increase their geometric quality to match this.
 
Q. What are the advancements you see in the graphics and digital media processors industry in the coming years?
 
RL: We are at an inflexion point in this industry. The whole parallelization thing was something the world was forced to accept when CPUs started going to dual core. We are not able to depend on the same speed ups that we were getting year after year with traditional CPU architectures. So GPUs happen to be at the right place at the right time.

With the level of programmability we have now, we are slowly converging towards the limits of what CPUs will eventually become. So now it is a race to see who can create the massively parallelizable architecture for the future. My hope is to see applications as complex as games completely running on the GPU.
 
Q. What are Nvidia’s ambitions for the next decade?
 
RL: In the coming years we have a lot of work to do in integrating physics properly onto the GPU. Then we need to ensure that all of it is running in there and it is optimal as possible and coexisting with all other parts of the game that we want to run on the GPU as well – including artifical intelligence (AI) and various sorts of scripting and all the various processes that happen within a modern gaming engine.

Fermi Graphics Chip is Direct X 11 Done Right, says Nvidia's Ashu Rege and Keita Iida

The computer game and hardware industry is advancing at a rapid pace, both in terms of technical innovation and sales. Nvidia is working towards expanding the market reach for games and to continually advance the state-of-the-art in visual computing. Ashu Rege is Director of Content and Technology at Nvidia managing the Content Management, Evangelism, Developer Technology, PhysX and APEX groups. He is an expert on games, graphics, geometric modeling, AI, error-correction codes and networking among other areas. Keita Iida has been part of Nvidia's Content & Technology organization since 2001, working with software developers and publishers to ensure that games and applications are well-aligned with Nvidia graphics and platform technologies. He is also a video game historian, contributing to several books on this subject as well as being cited by CNN, USA Today and others as an expert voice in the field.

Saltmarch Media spoke to Ashu and Keita on about the much awaited release of Nvidia’s Fermi architecture based GPUs. Nvidia's latest graphics card, based on Fermi architecture, is the company's first DirectX 11 graphics card. DirectX 11 is the next generation of graphics technology. Ashu firmly believes the Fermi architecture can truly exploit the possibilities of Direct X 11. Ashu and Keita share their thoughts on optimal Direct X 11 support becoming a deciding factor in terms of GPU sales in the coming years, how Fermi will fare against ATI’s HD5800 series, the most significant result of the AEGIA acquisition and whether modern games getting too dependant on high end hardware. When quizzed on the main skills Indian game developers should equip themselves with to gain a sizable share of the global game development work Ashu says Indian developers should develop a passion for being involved with game development to be truly successful. They should also look at going into high end game development, because what has actually become a critical bottleneck for studios worldwide is talent. Read on to find out more.

Q. Please introduce yourselves to our readership and talk in a bit about your roles at Nvidia.
 
Keita Iida: I work in a team called content management that handles alliances and partnerships with developers and publishers. We are a subset of Ashu Rege’s organization. Myself and my team work for him.
 
Ashu Rege: I am part of the content and technology organization and we work with developers from all over the world on various Nvidia technologies. Within this group we have Keita’s team that manages business, marketing and go-to-market aspects like helping developers take the games and the cool content they have created and help them put it out there. We have other groups like the evangelism group that works with maintaining relationships with developers, making sure they are aware of our latest technologies.

We also have a significant amount of people dedicated to engineering. We have developer technology engineers who work directly with developers by going on-site and helping them with any issues they might be having - all the way from driver issues to really pushing new technology into games.

We also have a sizable team devoted to developing PhysX, the PhysX SDK that we provide and support on multiple platforms including consoles, CPUs, GPUs, Wii, iPhone and so on. So my team, as our CEO Jen-Hsun Huang likes to say, we do not generate any revenue whatsoever for Nvidia but we do help our company and our developers. It is a commitment on the part of Nvidia to the developer community.
 
Q. What are your thoughts on the cultural significance and historical importance of electronic entertainment?
 
KI: That is a very broad question but an interesting one. In terms of cultural significance, the one thing video games have brought is that it has made engineers ‘cool’. It really is the case that in the past engineers and programmers went straight into working for defense contractors and governments, which is not bad, but making games that your brothers, kids and cousins play is kind of a cool thing and its fun.

Video games have made technology fun and it is also kind of the starting point of people becoming very comfortable with technology and not being intimidated by it.

The other significance of games, aside from it being fun, is that it has actually percolated into various fields -- from learning and cognitive skills, developing hand-eye coordination and social interaction through MMO’s and many others where it is really useful. So all of these factors have combined to cause video games to transform society as a whole in numerous ways.
 
AR: It is cool that video games break down a lot of barriers. You get to know and meet a lot of people from various parts of the world that you would have never have interacted with. So it is creating the one world community, which is something that can change the dynamics of society going forward.
 
Q. As a video game historian, Keita, can you tell us in brief about the growth of video games over the years and where you see it heading?
 
KI: We firmly believe video games are the driving force of technical innovation. It is the most complicated thing, both on the processor side from the tools, the APIs, as well as actually creating content for it. Consumer electronics products in comparison are very tame in terms of technical sophistication so I guess that’s the one thing that has significantly shifted over time.

From the early days of computers a user is accustomed to performing basic word processing and database management functions on a computer. But those can be done on a machine that is 10 years past its time in terms of hardware. Games on the other hand are driving people to want to continue to have better hardware.

A lot of that credit goes to game developers who continue to push the envelope in a way people can immerse themselves in interactive entertainment. That is kind of the one big thing that is accelerating at a more rapid pace than ever before.
 
AR: The other thing that has been very interesting is from an Nvidia perspective. We began with creating hardware for games. But now that is coming full circle where the hardware created for driving video games, in the last four to five years, is being used to solve socially significant problems like breast cancer research. This is done by using our GPU computing technologies in CUDA.

It is exciting for our company to see scientific research and medical research being driven now by something that probably would not have existed if it had not been for games.
 
Q. Nvidia new Fermi architecture based GPUs are the GTX 470 and the 480. Can you tell us a bit more on this particular architecture and what makes it different from the previous generation hardwares.
 
AR: My group in particular, which has a lot of people who work directly with developers, is very excited about the Fermi architecture and the products that are going to be based on it. There are multiple features of the architecture and we can spend hours talking about it but some of the things that are really exciting are that it is a Direct X 11 GPU and we believe it is Direct X 11 done right. Some of the characteristics of Fermi are going to enable a new level of geometric realism that has never been seen in games before.

When you look back at when the Direct X 9 API was introduced and how it unleashed the power of pixel shading, which moved pretty rapidly over the last three years where pixel shaders are pretty common to do all kinds of effects. What has lagged significantly behind has been the actual geometry that has been used in games. Using a character with more than 10000 polygons is unheard of in most games because most systems cannot handle that. With Fermi I really believe you will see new levels of geometric realism.

The other part of Fermi we are really excited about is building up on the GPU computing aspects specifically related to games. A cool new feature of Direct X 11 is called Direct X Compute that basically uses the computing horse power of the GPU to do more than just graphics. You can do physics simulations, artificial intelligence and all kinds of new post processing effects that was not possible earlier.

So I can’t wait for the content and the games that exploit all of Fermi’s features to come out. It is going to be an exciting year for us.
 
Q. How in your opinion will Fermi fare against ATI’s HD5800 series?
 
AR: Obviously I am a biased observer so I am going to say that it is going to fare extremely well and the proof will be laid out when Fermi launches and independent reviewers will see for themselves. I particularly think that as far as the newer features go, Fermi will be the development and gamers’ platform of choice because of the level of things it can do is going to be surprising for a lot of people.
 
Q. In your talk at India Game Developer Summit, you said Nvidia is working with various players in the gaming industry to increase your market reach. Is there any particular collaboration you can tell our readers about? A partnership that harnesses the GTX’s capabilities, perhaps.
 
KI: We continuously work with developers and its an ongoing thing. What we do with games depends on what would make the games better so certain features would work for certain games and they might not be applicable for other games. So there’s no generic answer that would work. That said, Ashu’s talk during India Game Developer Summit 2010 had some videos that contained a few snapshots of the possibilities -- turbulent smoke or destruction of walls and things like that. These really add a new level of immersion to video games.

 Q. Will optimal Direct X 11 support be a deciding factor in terms of GPU sales in the coming years?
 
AR: I believe so. If you look at Direct X 10 [which was the previous API], one of the challenges for developers for adoption was that it was not supported on Windows XP so you had to have a Vista-based system. And the other big problem was that you could not create a Direct X 9 device through Direct X 10. So essentially you had to write a separate renderer for Direct X 10. Combine that with the consoles – the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 that were both essentially Direct X 9 capable hardware -- it did not really provide much incentive for developers to go out of their way to work with Direct X 10. 

While Direct X 10 was a really good API in many ways from a pure software engineering point of view, it did not introduce a whole lot of new features. So making your game visually or otherwise distinguishable from a Direct X 9 game was challenging. Direct x 11 solves all those problems and I think Microsoft has done an excellent job with designing Direct X 11.

Firstly, Direct X 11 runs on both Windows 7 and Vista so you do not have to worry about OS compatibility. And Windows 7, if you see the surveys, has done fabulously so far.

The other thing is you can create a Direct X 10 device and support Direct X 10 GPUs through Direct X 11 so you don’t have to have to have a separate path.

I believe there will be a very fast adoption of Direct X 11 by developers. For most of the next generation consoles Direct X 11 will be the minimum level they would have to support. So it is profitable for a developer to invest resources into getting an understanding and using the Direct X 11 pipeline.

There will be a lot more Direct X 11 content that will be compelling and different from previous generations, therefore. This will make a lot of difference in terms of support for Direct X 11, and with special features like tessalation and many others, this will have a direct impact on sales.

Q. Are modern games getting too dependant on high end hardware? Is the limited scope for improvement in terms of software fuelling the gaming hardware sector?
 
KI: There are two parts to that. First of all Nvidia does offer products from top to bottom that address all the various segments that exist in the PC world today. All the way from SLI and multi GPU and supercomputer class hardware with billions of transistors all the way down to entry level netbooks that run on Atom chipsets. We call this our ION platform. This is the fastest growing segment of the PC market and we bring gaming capabilities to that platform.

Similarly we address all the market segments and we feel that in each segment we offer products that are compelling enough that users would want to invest in our GPUs to experience the kind of usages that they want in their PCs.

The second thing is what we call Optimized PC. The GPU is becoming increasingly high end and users have a tendency to get apprehensive on spending a lot on the latest GPUs. If you actually think about it, as Ashu said earlier, GPUs are becoming more relevant in not only graphical usages and taking games to the next level but also in many other usages such as cancer research and even video decoding and encoding amongst others.

If you want the best experience, like HD video on Youtube, it is in your best interest to get a GPU that offers the best performance for your money. Spending a little bit more on the GPU in relative to the other components in your computer ensures your total PC budget does not have to go up or down. By investing a little more on the GPU you can have an exponential increased performance improvement and features for every extra dollar you spend.
 
Q. It has been almost two years since Nvidia acquired AEGIA. Can you tell us what has been the most significant result of this acquisition.
 
AR: It was in February of 2008 that we acquired AEGIA and it has been a fabulous acquisition for us. We acquired an extremely talented team of engineers who had implemented the leading physics SDK on all platforms. The most significant result of this has been our ability to push the technology -- the GPU part of it.

The AEGIA team worked really hard after the acquisition to map their PhysX SDK onto the GPU and they got it done in amazing time. We were able to put that technology in the hands of developers. If you look at some of the games that came out recently, like Batman Arkaham Asylym and other great games of last year, developers have already started using these features of GPU PhysX in games in a very compelling fashion. So getting this technology into the hands of users has been huge for us through AEGIA.

Q. What do you foresee as the future of GPU?
 
AR: I believe that a GPU as a general computing processor is going to become a must in any system. We are already seeing that in areas of scientific computing and in medical research where the GPU is becoming a critical part of the research for a lot of people. In Japan a supercomputer has been built with GPUs.

The future of GPU is expanding all the way from high end supercomputing nodes all the way down to mobiles, where our products are branded as Tegra. This allows you to do HD decoding and video playback on your cellphone. Many more multimedia functions will be available in the future through the GPU. GPU is going to span this wide range of activity that will make it a critical component in any system.

Q. India is known as a cost conscious market. Does Nvidia have a different pricing strategy or marketing model to increase its Indian customer base?
 
KI: For the budget that any user has in terms of purchasing a product, whether its 3000rs or 30000rs, we want them to think about the GPUs. Think about the way they use the hardware they buy and we are very confident we can cater to anything a user might want to do with a computer or a computing device.

Rather than spending a lot on the best possible CPUs and using the remaining budget on the rest of the components of the PC, you should spend more of the money on GPU. For example, if you see our ION based chipsets for the Intel Atom processor, with just a little incremental extra spend you can actually play mainstream games like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and SIMS and experience them -- it may not be the ultimate experience but it is fairly good.

So rather than telling a customer that they should spend more money on the PC they buy, we just feel that as the GPU becomes more relevant and continues to innovate in concert with application development, users will vote for the GPU with the percentage or proportion of money they spend on it.

Q. Is Nvidia developing anything in particular for its Indian customer base?
 
KI: Not right now. However we have developed other custom products in the past and there is no reason why this will not happen for India, especially if there are any unique requirements for specific products. One example of that is in China where the single biggest expenditure of running an Internet café is electricity. We custom designed low power, low heat dissipating chipsets and graphic processors specifically for China.

Once a market grows and becomes big enough, we can invest and differentiate, and can create custom products for a market that requires it and there is no reason why we won’t.
 
Q. What, in your opinion, are the main skills Indian game developers should equip themselves with to gain a sizable share of the global game development work?
 
AR: Game development is a rather unique field. Historically if you look at some of the most successful game developers, they had a passion for being involved with game development. This is required more so especially in a country like India where there is a more traditional outlook. You are expected [in India] to follow an established path rather than strike out into this ‘game thing’, as a lot of parents here would say. It can be challenging.

I say, if you are really committed to game development you are more than half way there.

I find it surprising that most Indian developers focus on a lower end approach to gaming, which is basically mobile games and other games that do not necessarily require high investment and technology to take it ahead of the game -- no pun intended.

I would suggest to game developers in India, programmers and artists and companies included, to at least take a look at going into high end game development, because what has actually become a critical bottleneck for studios worldwide is talent.

The ability to program on the next generation consoles when they come out is going to be a huge need in India and everywhere else in the world. That is, those who have good experience with the previous generation consoles today – the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360 -- and also can adapt themselves to the next generation consoles. Approaching from that high end which involves GPU computing, besides understanding Direct X 11 and Open Computing Language (OpenCL) and so on, would give Indian game developers a leg up if they address that need.

Picking the Right Technology for Enterprise RIA

We are entering an era of Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and many enterprise development managers are facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with tried and true Java or .NET or experiment with relative newcomers such as AJAX, Flex, Silverlight or JavaFX. While the Internet brings a lot of noise, where "it's cool" is the most popular definition. In this talk recorded at Saltmarch Media's Great Indian Developer Summit Yakov Fain presents an overview of what's out there on the enterprise RIA market. He talks about the pros and cons of using various techniques and technologies for the development of the front end for complex distributed systems.

Yakov Fain is a managing principal of Farata Systems, a consulting company specializing in rich Internet applications for financial applications. He has authored several books on Java and Flex and dozens of articles on software development. Oracle's Sun Microsystems nominated and awarded Yakov with the title of Java Champion, which was presented to only a hundred people in the world. He leads leads the Princeton Java Users Group.

A Game without Sound is a Story Told with No Emotion

It is common among writers, story tellers and even the audience/game players to believe that visuals alone can tell a story well. While visuals can bring life to the story and connect to the audience actively, sound can connect to the audience passively and most unobtrusively. This is what makes sound - a combination of music, dialogues and sound effects - very important in story telling & enhancing realism in game play. Visuals without complimenting sound is like a story told with no emotions. Varun Nair, a Sound Designer at Blue Forg, gives sound an importance rating of 15 on a scale of 10 and believes the effect sound has on a player at the subconscious level cannot be substituted by any other sensory medium. Sound is one of the key emotional drivers in an audio-visual media piece across all formats – be it a game, a commercial or a feature film.

Saltmarch Media spoke to Varun about the importance of sound in enhancing realism in game play, the technology are essential for you when you are creating game audio and the state of the game sound design industry in India among others. He also shares his thoughts on the negatives and positives of working in a high-end game development studio and freelancing, games that have inspired him and  tips for startup game development companies.

Q. Please introduce yourself to our readership and tell us how your earlier work in the music industry and post production for commercials and feature films helped you in game sound development?
 
I work at Blue Frog Studios in Mumbai where we have four state of the art studios that cater to a variety of sound industries and we also have a production house that helps produce sound for various media. My job primarily is of a sound designer and I work on creating sounds, mixing music, recording and editing dialogues for commercials, games and feature films. I have had quite a few years of experience in the post-production industry while working mainly on commercials for television. It is this collective experience that helps me understand sound on both the creative and technical levels, how it affects the audience or a player or a listener and how it helps form a connect with them and therefore act as a form of communication to get the right information out at the right time. For example, making game play a lot more enjoyable.
 
Q. Your talk at India Game Developer Summit revoles around quality asset creation and sound. What would you like to tell the game developer about sound and using it to enhancing realism in game play?
 
Sound to a lot of people is an after thought. It is generally used to just fill up space. But if properly planned and thought over, sound can play an important role as far as story telling is concerned. Sound along with visuals is a strong sensory tool. As humans we use sound every day at both conscious and subconscious levels, to understand the environment around us and also to learn how the environment affects us. This is what I am stressing on at India GDS.

If sound is understood and implemented well in a game it can make game play more enjoyable and interesting, thereby allowing for better user experience. It is usually not about having sounds that "sound cool" but more about getting in the right sound in the right context at the right time. That is what ultimately makes a game enjoyable and it is this interplay between visuals and sound that can make or break a game.
 
Q. On a scale of 10, how critical is the aspect of sound in terms of enriching the gaming experience? And what is the 2.5 rule?
 
I will say 15. But it actually depends on the genre of the game, such as if it is RPG or casual game. Some games require sound to play a key role and help extend game play whereas some games require sound to be some sort of feedback for the player to understand things in the environment. But sound does play a very important role because it ultimately communicates to the player on a completely different level. Visuals help to see what’s happening but sound can affect a player on a subconscious level and therefore communicate on a completely different dimension altogether.

The 2.5 rule concerns linear media formats like film and television. It was thought out by a famous sound designer and film editor – he is in fact one of the fathers of sound design – Walter Murch. He has worked on some brilliant films like Apocalypse Now and The Conversation – films that were groundbreaking as far as sound being used as a story telling tool.

The 2.5 rule basically states that the human brain can pay attention to 2.5 themes at one given point in time. An example of this would be – say you are watching a film that contains an intense argument between two characters. The first theme that would occupy us would be what we see, like body language and emotions. The second theme would be the dialogues that gives you an idea of what is happening; that is, the characters' words and tone of voice give you an idea of what the argument is about. So a majority of our thinking would be used in understanding the visuals and the dialogues. The last half theme would be the background score which might be a very strong emotional tool and might push you to feel compassion for one of the characters or even sadness, depending on what the scene requires. And this is as as our brain would be able to process.

Other sounds, like the ambience or footsteps, would easily be disregarded by the brain and therefore we won’t be able to pay attention to it. Putting all of this together in post production or as far as gaming is concerned, it is important to understand what is important for the scene and what is important at that moment in time, so that the right ques are sent out at the right time to the player and they understand efficiently what is happening in the game.

Q. Do you feel sound is given as much importance as it deserves during the game development process?
 
Some developers pay a lot of attention to sound. They bring the sound team early on, sometimes even before the development of the game. There is an ideating process that happens and they figure out how sound can be used as an efficient story telling tool.

On the other side, there are other developers in this country who bring in sound at the last stage, like a month or a month and a half before game release which is really not enough time because you spend all that time in getting your assets together and you spend very little time in a creative process of finding out ways in which you could do things better or maybe ways in which you could use particular assets to get the story across in a better fashion. Ultimately time-crunch doesn’t really help.

So I don’t believe sound is given as much as importance and if game developers can spend a few weeks extra thinking about sound and working with the sound team it can end up creating a holistic experience for the gamer.
 
Q. What pieces of technology are essential for you when you are creating game audio?
 
Creativity is more important than technology for a sound designer or game developer. You can have the best tools and equipment but without putting in the right approach and the right thinking behind what you are doing you could end up with a product that doesn’t work.

For me the first tool would be to understanding the game, understanding the intent behind the game, the character, the action and what is happening and then it would be about thinking about the possible sounds. It is all about having a sound that works -- sounds that push a gamer to think, sounds that give him clues about where he is, what he is doing and what is happening. After that I would think about the technology and about what microphones I use to record, the software, the synths and the samplers I use. These are not as important to me as the thought and intent behind what I am doing.
 
Q. What would you say are the negatives and positives of working in a high-end game development studio and freelancing?
 
Working in a high end game development studio would mean security because you are probably working for a company that’s producing several regular titles every year. What you might also have is freedom in terms of what technology and the level of involvement in the game. as a freelancer you may be called in just for a very specific purpose so the involvement might not be that high. On the other hand, as a freelancer, you may have the option to choose what you work on and to take breaks when you want to. This is important but you also have to spend a lot time networking and trying to get as much work in.
 
Q. Can you name a few games released in the past year that have inspired you?
 
I am inspired by every form of media and I am inspired right from the very early games. One of my favorite background music pieces is the theme for Mario. To think of what was done with the technology available at that time is mind blowing. The amount of work put in to make the game so much more enjoyable and we know the result of that – it is a huge game even today. I am a big fan of racing and sport games and I was blown by the sound on Need for Speed Shift. That was some amazing work done by EA and their team of sound designers. Basically I am a fan of sound in any form that is applied right.
 
Q. How mature is the game sound design industry in India right now? And where would you like to see it go in the next five years?
 
I would say it is largely non-existent because there are very few people actively involved in gaming as far as sound is concerned. There are only a few who understand the process behind it. At Blue Frog I believe we are at the forefront of this because we not only have our advertising and postproduction experience behind us in understanding sound but we also have a great network of voice over and dialogue artists, actors, a range of music composers and directors -- from freshers to big names in the industry. We also have amazing studios where we make sure to give the highest quality sound possible. It is still a nascent industry and I would like to see it grow over the next five years and turn into a more active process as far as game designing is concerned.
 
Q. Do you have any words of wisdom for startup game development companies?
 
Spend more time trying to understand the player and the intent behind your actions as far as designing a game is concerned. As a sound designer I will say that my peers should pay more attention to sound. I can give you examples of where sound has worked wonders in delivering what’s needed. All said, I don’t mean they should pay all their attention to sound and ignore visuals -- there needs to be a balance between the two and that is where we come in because we are professionals and we know what we do.
 
Q. What, in your opinion, are the main skills Indian game sound engineers should equip themselves with to gain a sizable share of the global game development work?
 
It would be to understand what is out there. Understanding what you are playing against and understand the competition. Learn from the masters, play a variety of games, watch a lot of movies, watch any form of audio-visual media where sound plays a key role and understand not only the technological process of arriving at sounds and tweaking sounds but also how to put them all together, how to edit dialogues, how to ensure they sound right. Behind all of that you need to understand the creative intent of these sounds. There is a reason why a car sounds the way it does in a particular game because ultimately it affects game play. It is important for game developers and designers to understand that its not only a technological process but a creative process that goes behind the technology.

Mobile Internet for Emerging Markets

Internet is the key driving force in the market gearing towards its promises of reaching 4 billion subscriptions during 2010. This wave of the Internet is making it truly MOBILE -- creating new ways for people to connect with each other and to access information on the move. In this talk recorded at Saltmarch Media's Great Indian Developer Summit, the VP & MD of Nokia India D Shivakumar says music, navigation services and mobile TV are part of what had been anticipated to play a key role in spearheading this growth. But it had been notably clear that the driving business force backing this up is no other than the emerging India market where an increasing numbers of people are accessing the internet for the first time on their mobile rather than a PC. The proliferation of this demand in an immerse market like India has unveiled a world of opportunities left un-tapped. Shivakumar strives to review and evaluate current trends while anticipating new movements of the mobile internet alongside with in-depth consumer insights that are key to the makings and being part of this technology convergence revolution.

Backed with over two decades of management expertise and deep insights to the consumer market in India, Shiv heads up and drives the Nokia mobile phones business in India while providing strategic direction and operational focus. Besides working at consolidating Nokia’s market presence, he also focuses on building the Nokia brand, driving partnerships and strategic alliances and developing the capabilities of the Nokia organization in India. Over the years, Shivakumar has been able to chart an excellent track record of managing businesses, people and customer relationships and has gained a good understanding of the changing needs of customers and a wealth of experience in delivering solutions.

Every year, GIDS is a game changer for several thousands of IT professionals, providing them with a competitive edge over their peers, enlightening them with bleeding-edge information most useful in their daily jobs, helping them network with world-class experts and visionaries, and providing them with a much needed thrust in their careers. Attend Great Indian Developer Summit to gain the information, education and solutions you seek. From post-conference workshops, breakout sessions by expert instructors, keynotes by industry heavyweights, enhanced networking opportunities, and more. Click here to register.

Managing Rich Web Innovations

"My passion is to work with new technologies, incubate and deliver innovative solutions and define & drive product vision and strategy," says the Director Product Management, Emerging Markets Incubation at Yahoo!, Chintan Mehta. In this talk recorded at Saltmarch Media's Great Indian Developer Summit, Chintan explains his outlook on product and design for Rich Web innovations.

Chintan leads the India Incubation “Cellar” in Bangalore for Yahoo! India R&D. He has 14+ years of software development, management and leadership experience in designing and developing complex software products for diverse industries globally. At Yahoo! India he has been responsible for product and engineering of several rapid innovation products focusing on Desktop Search, Advanced Products and Emerging Markets.

Over 6500 attendees have benefited from two game changing editions of Great Indian Developer Summit. In 2010, the biggest independent summit for software developers in India is bringing together over 100 sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, Awards to honor software excellence, engaging networking events, and over 80 of the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. The summit will be held 20-23 April 2010 at the IISc in Bangalore. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/.

Adobe Flash is the Obvious Choice for Game Development, says Harish Sivaramakrishnan

The Adobe Flash Platform is the leading platform in the world for developing games on the web and devices says Harish Sivaramakrishnan, a Computer Scientist at Adobe Systems. Harish is immensely passionate about anything pertaining to Adobe Flash, Flex and other platform technologies. He is a hardcore UI / UX enthusiast and strongly believes that building great user experiences is the key for the success of any application. He has worked in the Flex Engineering team @Macromedia and Adobe for the Flex 2.0 – Flex 3.0 releases, and in the Adobe Media Player team implementing the Digital Rights Management features to AMP (now known as OSMF).

Harish spoke to Saltmarch Media about the reasons for which the Adobe Flash platform is so popular for developing games on the Web and mobile, the packager option that Adobe has for Flash developers in order to help them develop applications in Flash and to port them onto the iPhone and the NVIDIA-Adobe partnership to develop GPU accelerated Flash. He also shared his thoughts on the fastest growing places for game development, words of wisdom for startup game development companies and the main skills Indian game developers should equip themselves with to gain a sizable share of the global game development work.

Q. Please introduce yourself to our readership and and tell us how a Chemical Engineer from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science in Pilani became a flexgeek?

My name is Harish Sivaramakrishnan and I work as a computer scientist and platform evangelist for Adobe Systems. I have a day job that requires me to speak to the developer community and basically tell them about how cool our technologies are and find out what is and what’s not working for them. I used to dabble with a little bit of programming when I was in college while trying to do some automation work for some of the chemical processes and that’s how I got started.

By the time I graduated 10 years ago people were finding software jobs irrespective of what they studied so I got placed in one of the large MNCs with a nice five–digit salary and that really helped me make a decision at that point in time. Honestly speaking, that’s how I ended up in software but then I realized through the years as to the potential of the software industry and I stayed on without ever feeling the need to go back. It’s not an elaborately different story and it’s the same as any average college student who comes out of college and gets hooked into the software industry.

Q. What, in your opinion, are the reasons for which the Adobe Flash platform is so popular for developing games on the Web and mobile?

Adobe Flash is a mature 10+ year legacy technology so it’s not an innovation that we started one or two years ago. We have spent many years innovating on that technology and what it has really translated to is that 99% of all connected PCs have Flash players running on their systems. So for a game developer who’s trying to build a game and trying to get it distributed to people, it fails me to think of a better medium than the Flash platform because it’s one platform through which you can be quite sure your product is going to reach your target audience. The runtime makes a huge difference and Flash’s runtime availability is fantastic.

On the flipside, if you look at the tooling we have for developing games, we are far ahead of the tooling that comes for casual gaming. Of course this is not so for some of the serious gaming that’s not web specific where it’s a different story all together. But pertaining to the Web – the Flash Professional CS 4 and Shockwave and other tools that Adobe has been building for years, are immensely popular and has made many enterprises successful in building games. So I think it is the tooling coupled with the very popular runtime that’s widely accepted and distributed that makes Adobe a very obvious choice as a platform to building games.

Q. Can you tell us in brief about the packager option Adobe has for Flash developers, to help them develop applications in Flash and to port them onto the iPhone?

Adobe recently announced a way by which developers working on Adobe Flash can continue to build on Flash and port those applications to run on Apple’s phone. So the Adobe Creative Suite 5 allows you to build applications using your favorite tools and Action Script and you can package it to run as a native application on an iPhone. This enables all Flash developers to continue to use the tools that they love and tools that they are familiar with and target Apple’s runtime on iPhone. That software is in a pre–release right now and we’re hearing some really good things about it.

Q. Can you tell us a bit about the NVIDIA–Adobe partnership to develop GPU accelerated Flash?

Recently there has been a lot of developments on what NVIDIA has done to help and develop Flash to perform better. The QUADRA that NVIDIA has right now helps Flash to perform far better on all possible environments. It is excellent that such a partnership exists and users of both Adobe and NVIDIA technologies are now reaping the benefits that they get from better performance across the usage.

Q. In your opinion, which are the fastest growing places for game development at the moment?

If I look at casual gaming I see a great expansion. I personally work with folks in China and Japan where they have localized gaming for their own community. Some of their games might not really make too much of a differentiation to folks outside these countries but they have their own set of games that they build and there’s enormous opportunity in China and Japan.

I notice that even in India we are taking largely to casual gaming and social gaming. Almost everyone I know is playing Farmville on Facebook. So there’s a growth of people playing games in this country.

Looking at India Game Developer Summit 2010 (Lit Ed.), the buzz that I’m seeing and judging by the number of people who turned up for my talk, I think it is seriously happening in India as well. It is growing in a very big way over here and I had an interaction with a couple of the companies and I think we are coming up in a significant way in terms of game development. I think, generally, the emerging markets, as they call it, holds a lot of promises.

Q. Do you have any words of wisdom for startup game development companies?

What I’ve seen is the whole ecosystem is now changing with respect to the Web being a part of our regular life. The Web is now accessible, and not just on PCs but on mobile devices, tablets, refrigerators and even car consoles, and is much more of a democratic medium. So Internet has really changed the spectrum of how games get developed and delivered.

My impression is that unless you develop games to have a viral transaction across all forms of Web it’s going to be hard in the days to come. Keeping the social angle intact, building games that will keep people engaged, identifying the right audience for your games – I always take the example of cricket – I believe that any cricketing game is going to be lapped up and if that’s the case then it should be targeted to a country where cricket is appreciated.

So if you are building casual games I think the target should be specific in terms of where you can really find distribution, where you can really find audience and where you are confident of making money out of a gaming business because ultimately people want everything for free.

As a guy who’s playing a game I really don’t want to pay but on a serious context, monetization is very important so is identifying the right pockets to invest your games in.  Break out of the conventional wisdom of building games just for the Web.

Creating your own web site might not be the only way to circulate your games so keep your eyes open. Social media and Web 2.0 provide big opportunities. I believe that anything that forgets the presence of social media might not be taking a very confident step. If you are factoring that in then the business is hot and you can get some good stuff going.

Q. What, in your opinion are the main skills Indian game developers should equip themselves with to gain a sizable share of the global game development work?

This question has multiple manifestations. Game development, however trivial people may make it sound like, is serious engineering. The blood and sweat an engineer puts behind getting a great game out into the market is as complex as an enterprise application.

We have some very senior accomplished game shops in India and they’re doing a great job in mentoring the new ones. Whenever I meet some new programmers who’re taking to game development what I tell them is, you need to understand your user in order to create a good gaming experience. It is not always about engineering a game but understanding the whole humanness of a game which can then be translated by several programming concepts like physics engines, inverse kinematics, implementing bones, implementing perspectives etc.

So it is not just about the theory of 3D perspectives and the theory about kinematics but what is more important is to apply that to the screen you are catering to. So building a mobile game is probably very different from building a tablet game and a PC game.

What I usually see in people is that – game development is seen as a simple programming exercise and building something which is to the specifications. I feel gaming is more of an imaginative process. You need to think if you would really want to play the game you are building. All talented engineers will go through this phase of how to get a program to run in a way that the user would like it. So a user–experience based approach is very important. Performance and size of the game are also important and should not be discounted but at the end what really matters is if the game and game play looks attractive to the person who is using it. That, in my opinion, should be paramount.

It all comes down to choosing the right platform, technologies, libraries and engines. So keep your eyes open and do not get bogged down to one particular stack or one particular line of working. This will not result in imaginative games but games that just work.

To summarise I would say that gaming is no different from engineering so all the engineering stuff that you do directly apply to gaming, but gaming is far more fun and far more imaginative.

Q. What are Adobe's ambitions for the next five years with respect to the gaming industry?

We have been building these tools and runtimes which are definitely helping game developers and publishers. So our tools and runtimes have time and again proved to be very successful for developers and we remain committed to continue to innovate our tools and runtimes to make it more conducive and helpful to game developers so that they can actually take it to the next level.

For example, the Fash player 10.1, which is in beta right now, has got extended features like accelerometer support and geolocation, multitouch and things that are very commonly used in gaming context. We also have optimixation for mobile so application development for mobile gets far more easier. We are in the process of disruptively innovating and helping our customers. We will remain committed and focused and will work very actively with the community and we will listen to what they want.

We believe that the game developers and publishers will benefit from the innovations we do and we will do our best to keep the ecosystem going forward. And the success of the community defines the success of Adobe and we value their success in a very big way. Flash player is a ubiquitous runtime today and we believe we will do innovations to keep it that way and provide features that allow people to do far more than what they do currently.

Plug-in to Rapid Development on WebLogic with Eclipse

In this plenary talk, Dhiraj Bhandari of Oracle demonstrates FastSwap, an Eclipse Plug-in for faster iterative development. While the traditional JEE development cycle comprises of the "Edit", "Build", "Deploy" and "Test" phases, modern IDE's remove the "Build" step through conditional compilation. FastSwap's goal is to simplify this further by removing the "Deploy" phase of the JEE development cycle.

Enhancing the Productivity of RAD Using Websphere

Rational Application Developer (RAD) v7.5 is tightly integrated with WebSphere Application Server (WAS) to provide seamless development and deployment for complex web, Java EE and SOA applications. In this plenary delivered at Eclipse India Summit 2009, Bharat Kasturirangan highlights some of the key areas of function in RAD v7.5 that enhance developer productivity, including tools for Java EE 5, annotations, and the built-in WebSphere Test Environment that allows applications to be quickly deployed and tested locally.

Jon Aizen on the Practical Semantic Web

The semantic web is a decade old vision promoted by web visionaries like Sir Tim Berners Li in which the Web will become a set of semantically interconnected "databases" for programs to interact with, mash together and in general make sense of it all. However, as a bottom up technological adoption approach, it has failed miserably and the web has continued to evolve as a messy technological babel tower. Jon Aizen, co-founder and CTO of Dapper, with his experience with managing large-scale, high-profile web projects like Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive, advocates a new, top-down approach that transforms the existing web into a semantic web, where every site becomes a semantically aware API, using a combination of structure analysis algorithms and user generated effort. In this interview recorded at GIDS 2008, he speaks about the semantic web, the promise it holds for Semantic Search. Jon also shares his outlook on Web 3.0.