KEY POINTS:
If the usual trend in movie special effects is to take a digitally created world and make it seem real, a Dunedin computer game developer is doing the reverse.
Whereas the likes of Weta Digital and Pixar create computer-generated images that are so life-like they almost make the real world redundant, Clocktower Games is using tens of thousands of digital photos to construct a virtual world in which actors and players interact in a PC-based detective game, Casebook.
It's a technique developed by another Dunedin company, Areograph, which is associated with Clocktower. The technology brains behind both is Luke Reid, a 29-year-old software developer.
Clocktower has done a deal with Big Fish Games, a Seattle-based online game distributor, to sell Casebook, developed to showcase the technique.
Casebook features a cast of characters played by human actors who, in several episodes, are caught up in a variety of crimes. The main character is detective James Burton, with whom players work to unravel the sinister goings-on.
Episode one takes place in four rooms of the Bircherman home, where there has been a kidnapping. Rather than create the house digitally, Clocktower built four sets that were photographed robotically, the camera moving just 20mm between shots.
Each room was recorded in about 30,000 digital images, representing a couple of terabytes or so of data, an impossible amount for any computer to manipulate.
"The hard part is managing the volume of data, so the clever bit is around compression - what you don't store rather than what you do," Reid says.
"If you look around a room from 10 different points you're looking at the same object 10 different times, but you don't need to store it 10 times. You can store it properly once, and lots partially."
For a game developer, this has two big benefits. For a start, compared with digitally creating an object-filled room, the photographic approach is much faster.
It takes about one person-week to go from concept, to building the set, photographing it and processing the images. In contrast, Reid guesses that creating a room in Pixar's animated Toy Story would take a couple of person-years.
Playing on a computer screen, as opposed to Toy Story's cinema screen, Casebook's sets don't need anything like the same level of detail. Even so, Casebook has a realistic look that similar games can't match - the second advantage of the photographic technique.
Reid professes to never having been content to develop software for its own sake. "I find the commercialisation the interesting bit."
He set up his first business, Entropy Creations, while studying computer science at Otago University.
Entropy was peer-to-peer software, developed before Napster had established itself as the favourite in the MP3 file-swapping world. When the music industry started pursuing Napster and others over copyright breaches, Reid moved on.
"I wasn't interested in carrying on with something that wasn't on particularly firm legal ground."
With the Entropy experience under his belt, he went to Britain and started Skinkers, a company in which he retains an interest, that provided messaging software to the likes of the BBC.
Skinkers, in collaboration with Microsoft, started another business, Livestation, which streams television programmes from a variety of broadcasters over the internet. Reid returned to New Zealand to form Areograph in 2006 and Clocktower last year.
Graham Hambleton, Clocktower's chief executive, says Casebook takes its place in the "casual" niche of the computer game market, thought to be worth US$2.5 billion ($4 billion) in annual sales. The stars of the genre include Solitaire, Tetris and Mystery Case Files and, contrary to the usual perception of computer gamers, female players slightly outnumber males.
There's nothing casual about Clocktower as it sets about staking a claim in the market. The company raised $2 million in funding last year, and has a dollar-for-dollar grant from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, to a maximum of $250,000, to produce a proof of concept for a driving game by next May.
Games are "the low-hanging fruit" for Areograph's technology, says Hambleton. The driving game will extend it in a direction that could take it out of the game market. He can see it also being used to take visitors on virtual guided tours of art galleries, say, or historic sites.
Reid isn't getting too excited about the Big Fish deal, which gives the distributor a bigger cut of Casebook's US$7 sale price than Clocktower gets. It does have the merit of exposing the game to Big Fish's million daily site visitors, however.
With an eye to other commercial opportunities, Reid set off last week for Japan. On the itinerary was attendance at the Tokyo Game Show and meetings with game console makers Sony and Microsoft. "The usual sort of biz dev," he says.
Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist
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