The entertainment industry always tends to be at the forefront of innovation. People are always looking for the latest technologies to help them to enjoy a more futuristic gaming experience. Sometimes the technology is not so advanced but is essential for making games function. Other times the technology seems far more glitzy and modern, adding the ‘bells and whistles’ to new blockbuster games. We at the Maravi Post are going to take a look at technology from both ends of the scale, looking at how it works and what its applications are.
Random Number Generator
Random number generators fall into the relatively basic end of the technology scale, but they’re used widely. One sector that they’re particularly vital for is the online casino sector, where they are used to ensure the fairness of various casino games. Slot games are the example we’re going to look at, because it’s here that random number generators (RNGs) come into their own. Sites such as Vegasslots online use RNGs to ensure that their slot machines all achieve the RTP that is advertised.
RNGs work by taking a seed number, which can come from a variety of different places, sometimes mouse movements as an example. They put this number through a complex equation to generate another ‘random’ number. This number is then used in conjunction with algorithms to decide where the slot machine reels will stop spinning. These algorithms will also differ from spin to spin, to ensure that it’s impossible for the slot machine to be fixed, or worked out by the player.
Haptic Feedback Technology
Whilst haptic feedback technology might sound like a foreign language, almost anybody that’s played a video game on the PlayStation will have experienced it. This technology is used to provide feedback in the form of sensations that you can actually feel to people who are playing video games. This is usually achieved by sending vibrations to the gaming controller when your video game character interacts with something in the virtual world. This could be when you come under fire in a shoot-em-up game, come across something important in a mystery solving game, or struggle to turn the wheels of your car in a driving game. This feedback helps to make the gaming experience more immersive.
Haptic feedback technology works in many different ways, but generally requires vibration motors in order to create vibrations in the game controller. As well as these motors, there will be different elements coded into the game to allow the vibrations to work coherently with the game’s surroundings. There are dozens of different ways that haptic feedback technology is programmed, but touch sensing and force feedback are two of the most commonly found. These help users to navigate the virtual world and receive feedback in a more realistic way.
Ray Tracing
One of the most fascinating new bits of technology in the gaming world is ray tracing. This technology is used to emulate how light reflects off objects, casts shadows, and refracts. It enables game designers to create ever more realistic images, but takes a whole lot of processing power. As everybody knows, light travels in straight lines, so in order to track the path of the light, we need to find the source of the light and track all of the straight paths that it can move in. This requires coders to look at the 3D model of the scene and work out where the light will interact with objects. This could be as simple as hitting an object and casting a shadow, or as complex as hitting a body of water and being reflected into the environment from different angles.
Using this information the algorithm can determine how the light is going to behave. It will take into account the angle at which the light hits the object, as well as the texture and surface detail of the material the light hits. Using this, it will be determined if the light will bounce off, cast shadows, change color, or be absorbed. In a simple model, this can create jagged edges, so it’s important that for high-spec graphics, a form of technology called anti-aliasing is used. This tech helps to prevent jaggedy edges by making sure to cast multiple rays from each point. These rays of light are all blended together until the result is smooth shadows, that seem closer to the kind of light rays and shadows that we experience in real life, and less like a computer generated image.