During Thursday's Austin Games Convention, MMORPG.Com's Aaron Roxby had the opportunity to talk to Emergent Game Technologies Senior Engineer Vincent Scheib about their Gamebryo game engine and Metrics database system. Gamebryo, the successor to the NetImmerse engine, is a game engine designed with flexibility in mind. Case in point: Gamebryo made its debut with Bethesda's Oblivion, and the second game created with it was Sid Meier's Civilization IV. Two very different games running on one engine. That's how flexible Gamebryo is. This flexibility comes from its ability to be re-engineered and integrated with existing technology.
Back on the console front, Scheib explained that they're currently hard at work on optimizing Gamebryo for use with the PS3. It's been said that while the PS3's multi-threading Cell processor is definitely powerful, it can make development complicated. To address this they are developing Floodgate, a Stream Processing Engine that hopes to simplify the process. One of the more exciting things about Floodgate is that it's being developed as a cross-platform engine, meaning once a PS3 game has been developed, it can easily be ported directly to the Xbox 360 or PC.
With the Floodgate, it appears that game development for Sony's next-gen console will be much breezier than first anticipated. Maybe we'll get to see the full power of the Cell much earlier than most of us thought.
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