Plenty of us enjoy relaxing with a video game, being able to completely shut off from the world and focus on our hobby. However, surprisingly few of us pay much thought to how these games actually work. Some of them inhabit a world that is so believable that it’s crazy to think that it’s computer generated. Some people will be more fascinated with how games are monitored in order to keep people safe and how that level of moderation is possible by humans alone. Whatever it is that fascinates you about video game technology, we hope to provide you with some of the answers right here.
Physics Engines
Physics engines are one of the most essential parts of modern video games. They make the virtual world make sense by employing the laws of physics. It’s easiest to understand how these work through an example and a great one is to compare two games with vastly different physics engines, Super Mario and Grand Theft Auto. In the Super Mario games, the character is sometimes able to defy the laws of physics, he can consume a mushroom and bounce higher than ever before. He moves on a two-dimensional plane, going forwards, backward, up, and down, but never appearing to move into the screen. In Grand Theft Auto your car can turn in all directions and appear to accelerate into and reverse out of the screen. As well as this, you can lose traction in the wheels, skid as you turn a corner or stop abruptly and bounce off something that you collide with. The reason for this is that GTA has a much more complex physics engine than Super Mario. The physics engine in Grand Theft Auto considers traction, refraction, acceleration and deceleration, as well as different types of terrain. Programming these engines is incredibly complex, but if a developer wants a video game to be realistic then it is nothing less than essential.
AI Fraud Detection
If a company is offering their customers the opportunity to play games for money then it’s in their best interests to ensure that everybody’s money is kept safe. Unfortunately, there are some unscrupulous people who look at these kinds of websites as the perfect hacking opportunities. This has made it increasingly difficult for companies to keep our finances safe, but AI is proving to be the answer that gaming companies have been looking for. A particular sector that uses these tools to keep their customers safe is the online casino sector, where customers deposit real money and wager it on games. They have cleverly employed the use of AI to analyze people’s playing patterns and spot when something looks different. For example, if someone regularly plays roulette, placing bets of $0.20 each time and occasionally places a $0.50 blackjack bet or two, only withdrawing their winnings in $10 and $20 increments, then it would be out of the ordinary for them to suddenly switch to $20 bets on roulette, or making an enormous withdrawal from their account. AI can scan hundreds of thousands of accounts and all of their activity to flag up any suspicious behavior and catch any fraudsters in the act.
Blockchain Technology
One of the most pioneering pieces of technology that plenty of video games are now using is blockchain technology. This has proven to be revolutionary, so much so that a whole new genre of games have sprung up, known as pay-to-earn games. These games invite you to invest in an item from their marketplace and use it to play the game, giving you the potential to earn money as you play. The item that you buy from the marketplace will almost always be what is known as an NFT (non-fungible token). These tokens are stored on the blockchain, which is a public ledger that shows where the token has been stored, transferred, or bought. Before this technology, in-game assets didn’t tend to have any real-world value, but since the invention of blockchain, it’s now possible to trade in-game assets for real money, usually in the form of cryptocurrency.
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