Interview: Emergent's John Austin

Logan Booker talks with Emergent's John Austin about Gamebryo, the technology behind Bethesda's Oblivion.

[bio]
Name: John Austin
Occupation: COO, Emergent
Website: www.emergent.net

John, who served as CEO of NDL prior to the merger, is a veteran of the games middleware market, having been around since shortly after NDL announced the NetImmerse product in 1998. He has more than 20 years of experience in the computer graphics industry, encompassing management and engineering positions at Hewlett-Packard, Inc., Sun Microsystems, and the Computer Sciences Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. John earned a M.S in computer science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He holds a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering awarded by Valparaiso University in Indiana.

John Austin, chief operating officer of Emergent.

John Austin has worked with the guy who invented ray tracing and helped Gamebryo become the most gorgeous-looking engine middleware in the business. We managed to corner him at E3 and talk to him about NDL, NetImmerse and Gamebryo, as well as Emergent's plans to create a complete client and server tech package for game developers.

Atomic: How long have you been with Emergent?

John Austin: I've been at what was NDL - which had the NetImmerse engine - since 1998. I was hired as vice president of engineering and shortly thereafter they asked me to be CEO. I was CEO of NDL up until August of 2005, when we did the merger with Emergent Game Technologies.

Atomic: What did Emergent bring to NDL?

JA: What we recognised was that there was an opportunity for a much broader set of tools and technologies for the middleware games market. There are companies out the selling physics, graphics - a lot of single point technology companies. It looked like the time was right to try and create a company that had a one-stop shop for all the tools and technologies that game developers need.

Emergent had been founded in 2000. In 2004 they raised a significant amount of money from some first tier venture capitalist firms and have been working on other technologies for game developers … a server engine, which we will launch next year; some automation tools for building and testing games and a metrics product … allows game developers to collect and analyse virtually any kind of data about their game whether it be in production, beta test or in online games.

Atomic: When NetImmerse was originally created, was it with just PCs in mind?

JA: NetImmerse was originally a PC engine and then we made modifications for Playstation 2 and Xbox. The current version of Gamebryo is much more architected with modern parallel PCs in mind and the parallel kinds of processing you can do with the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

Atomic: What's your relationship with Bethesda? Obviously you supply the technology - do you support it from then on? When you release something new do they get access to it or do they have to pay more?

JA: Our licensing model is typically to license our Gamebryo engine on a per-product basis. So they pay us a license fee up-front then they also pay an annual support fee. We think support is a very important part of the equation. We're doing really hard things; game developers are doing really hard things, so they really want to push our engine to the very limit. So as part of our support, they get two updates a year - we are continually evolving and adding features and capabilities to our engine so they can take advantage of that. We establish a dialog with them on how they can optimise the use of the engine, modify it and basically get exactly what they want out of it.

Atomic: How do you stay ahead of the graphics curve? Do you have relationships with companies such as NVIDA and ATI to find out what features you need to implement?

JA: Certainly. There are really three things that drive where our products go. One is customer requests. Another area is just our own anticipation of where we think games are going to go. We have a lot of smart engineers at this company and they have a lot of good ideas. About a third of our software developers have been in game companies before, so they know games inside and out.

Another set comes from a related industry - our graphics engineers might have been doing scientific visualisation or worked on a computer graphics program. Some of the folks working on the server engine have come from games companies, others from government research projects where they've done research on massive systems and things like that. It's a mix of people from professional software, games and research.

We [also] have very close relationships with Sony, Microsoft, NVIDIA, ATI, Intel and AMD. So we understand where their products are going to be and we can anticipate what we're going to have to do to support their features.