In order to produce ever more powerful computer chips designers have begun to produce CPUs with duplicated infrastructure and machines with multiple CPUs. This allows these devices to perform actual simultaneous calculation. The most recent generation of video game consoles are built with this manner of technology, thus adding a new dimension of complexity to the design of the underlying system. Taking a traditional computational task and dividing it for parallel execution is not trivial.

Radical Entertainment is a video game developer which creates and develops games for all current and next generation platforms. Collision detection forms an indispensable part in today’s 3D game engines. Due to increasing size of the 3D objects used in game development, high-performance collision detection running directly on these objects requires a significant amount of work. To allow for real-time collision detection between a 3D object and other objects in the game environment, the typical approach is to first find for each object a set of best-fitting convex hulls.

Radical Entertainment is a video game developer which creates and develops games for all current and next generation platforms. Each year, computer games become graphically more realistic due to advances in computer technology and animation. The object of this project is simulation of deformable objects (such as a mattress or jelly-like substances) in real-time for computer gaming purposes. The equations of motion for such objects is quite different and more difficult to solve than those used for rigid bodies.

Video games must be able to present things in ‘real time’, with no delays thus performance is critical. A modern processor can deal much quicker with information that is in one continuous section of memory as opposed to divided into smaller chunks. When information is split, it causes a delay in processing. The intern’s research will focus on optimizing a new system for memory management that will attempt to achieve greater performance through a system that organizes memory into collections of whole blocks in order to prevent the need for data to be split.

As computer hardware becomes more powerful, the ability to produce effects approximating physical phenomena in soft real-time for computer games becomes an achievable and important goal for game realism. Interactive smoke effects are one such phenomenon. Despite advances in game architecture, however, computing gas/fluid motion with a high degree of physical accuracy is prohibitively expensive. This project's immediate goal is to research the optimal balance of physics and aesthetics so that this particular effect can be provided to gamers in soft real-time on current hardware.