Spore

Yesterday we had a talk from Ryan Ingram from EA about the use of concurrency in games software, specifically Spore. I'm not a computer games player, but I was *very* impressed with what he demoed. It's amazingly easy to create creatures, and they seem very characterful in terms of their animation.

Ryan's talk was interesting too: he discussed how games are increasingly taking advantage of multicore shared-memory machines, but also how difficult that can be. He showed some of the programming patterns they use, but he also pointed out how some things could be better supported by language design. I found this very interesting - there does seem to be a sweetspot for a practical language that has a constrained scattering of some POPL-esque language design features. if only I didn't have so much on already...