The tall boy pulled over a chair, sat down, and clicked the image open to enlarge it.
In the photo, investors in suits and leather shoes crowded around a crude folding table.
"We spent half a year on that dentist software and made three thousand dollars total." The tall boy rubbed his dry eyes. "That medical-record retrieval algorithm, if rewritten as item-drop logic in a game, would be more efficient than most RPGs on the market
by a long shot."
"The key is that the threshold is gone." Eric tapped the tabletop. "In the past, to make a 3D game, you had to write your own rendering pipeline and handle physics collisions yourself. Now that there's the UE engine, Carmack has taken care of all that dirty, exhausting work. We only need to stuff in art assets and gameplay logic."
And it was not just Berkeley's computer labs.
On this night, in countless garages across Silicon Valley, in software-company cubicles in Seattle, and even in university dorms on the East Coast, similar conversations were taking place.
The rapid exhibition reports the media posted online were like stones thrown into a lake, sending out ripples far beyond expectations.
The direct game content announced the next day did not have the same visual impact as the first day's.
There was no four-disc CG set for Final Fantasy, no 3D jumping from Mario.
The day's information density was higher, and so was the threshold.
Ordinary players watched the excitement; developers saw the real tricks.
The open-source engine project was like an enormous magnet, drawing the eyes of developers across America and even around the world.
Software teams that had originally been circling around databases, enterprise applications, and even financial models discovered for the first time that a gap had been smashed open in