In the last twelve months, gamers have been glued to their controllers playing titles featuring technological innovations. Voice recognition finally found success in EndWar and a move towards more stylised games like Mirror’s Edge and Prince of Persia brought an end to the industry deadlock on graphical realism.

Rather than invention, it’s been innovation of existing technologies that led to the biggest successes of 2008, and this trend looks set to continue. The guys behind the games  - although bound by blood oaths not to discuss their own ‘top secret’ titles yet – have strong opinions on what this year may have in store, and think certain technologies and features will be at the forefront of the 2009 gaming experience. Here’s an introduction to the biggest features that will be gracing your console screens…


User Generated Content (UGC)

UGC - where gamers are given the tools to create their own features and levels - is just getting started as a console concept, although it’s been around for a long time in the PC world. Within roughly a month of release, the PS3’s LittleBigPlanet users had created almost 180,000 levels and played them over 22m times online. Expect to see a lot more chances to create your own content in 2009, as developers hand over their creation reigns.

‘The PC has had UGC for eons and we’ve seen fantastic content created by dedicated players, many of whom are now professional developers. Judging by that it’s clearly an extremely exciting area to explore,’ says Tom Farrer, producer at DICE.

‘To create the kind of content I’m sure we would all like to see requires serious effort and work. The hope is that we’ll see skilled and dedicated groups of players begin to develop truly excellent content for the community. I think right now a lot of people are just dabbling with it, experimenting and learning the ropes.’

Creating your own in-game content this year could be your first step onto the games development career ladder…


Physics affecting gameplay

Developer opinion is that physics will shift from being an eye candy set dressing to something that has major gameplay relevance.

Building game mechanics around physics is something that’s being done with greater frequency, as can be seen in The Force Unleashed and LittleBigPlanet amongst others. Imagine a game where you have to apply tactical destructibility to achieve your goals: toppling a building so that the rubble blocks a road, or shooting the supports of an overpass so that it falls on your opponent. These are examples of gameplay mechanics that rely heavily on physics for their unpredictability and fun.

Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) is just one of these physics-based technologies that we can expect to see more in 2009. It is used to create games where anything can fracture, bend and break, based on their physical properties.

‘There are the authoring tools that let you build DMM objects and set their physical properties (it can simulate anything from diamond to jelly), and then there is the DMM engine itself which runs inside of a traditional game engine and simulates things breaking, bending and deforming,’ says Vikram Sohal, chief operating officer (coo) at Pixelux Entertainment. ‘Developers can create physically-based props with DMM and populate their game world with them. These props act much more realistically than their traditionally animated counterparts. For example, if you were to build a tree out of DMM and throw a boulder at it, the tree's branches would bend and flex and it may or may not break, depending on how hard you hit it.

‘This is an exciting time where people are trying a lot of interesting ideas that they just couldn't try before. The whole idea of playing God with material physics is something very addictive.’

Ghostbusters is one of 2009’s big games that’s focusing on improving the gameplay experience through physics.

‘We will see more interactive environments and the start of dynamic destruction that has real meaning to the player,’ says Brendan Goss, executive producer at Terminal Reality. ‘This is something that we started in Ghostbusters with characters that can be formed dynamically out of physics objects which really pushes the limit in the number of items and interactivity. Thanks to the power of this generation of consoles - in particular when it comes to physics - we can really achieve massive numbers of simultaneously simulated objects and apply that to gameplay that has not been seen before in console games.’


Lighting

Many games in 2009 will be using Geomerics’ Enlighten technology. Aside from speeding up the rendering process, it gives designers control over the mood they are trying to create. Game artists can now approach lighting their virtual world in the same way a film cinematographer would; creating dynamic lighting by applying area lights, texture and colour rather than simply using a restricted colour palette, as they have until now.

‘Enlighten takes in geometry and performs a complex pre-compute step on this to convert this into data that can be accessed at run-time,’ says Chris Doran, coo of Geomerics. ‘At run-time (either in the game, or as part of the asset pipeline) the results of the direct illumination are fed into Enlighten in the form of a light map, and Enlighten returns the full global illumination, taking into effect all of the bounced light. The calculation takes 4ms for a typical game world.’

All this tech means that in-game lighting will be more dynamic and make games looks even better. Enlighten will debut in the next expansion pack of Eve Online, out in March, and many of 2009’s big titles will be using it. Keep your eyes open…


(More) Peripherals

2008’s huge number of peripheral-orientated games cannot be overlooked, and their popularity means that we can expect even more ‘gimmicky’ games this year.

‘Looking at the way things are heading, 2009 is going to see us having an extravaganza of new peripherals,’ says Arthur Parsons, head designer at UK developer Traveller’s Tales. ‘Stylophone Hero anyone? Or how about Virtual Parking Attendant? Perhaps even Pro Plumber with a Plunger peripheral. The thing is though, there are still some games that shouldn’t be fun arriving and being immense fun, and fun regardless of your gaming heritage. This is what it is all about.’

Sony is giving some big tech support to its PlayStation Eye peripheral, with some real ‘brains’ working on its upcoming EyePet title.

‘We’ve a dedicated RnD team full of vision and technology experts from gaming and academic backgrounds, some even have letters like PhD after their name,’ says Sony London Studio technical manager Mark Lintott.

‘The team have all but exhausted nearly every piece of image processing and engine technology we’ve ever developed in the group. There’s so much exciting technology bubbling away under EyePet only some of which has been seen. The drawing technology is one of my favourites though. We’ve got at least half a dozen very different variants including the car game in the video that we’re really excited about,’ he says.

Sounds like there’s even more to come. With all these techs and more helping developers evolve the experience, 2009 looks set to be a great year to game.