Hello,
If any game developers are around, feel free to chime in. I come from the other side: the hardware. Now that we've got dual and quad-cores (and we are working on an 8-core design), we've got all this untapped potential for multithreading. And as far as I can see, the gaming industry hasn't really found a way to take advantage of it yet. Am I wrong? Instead, it seems most of the work is being done on the high-end graphics end of it.
What are the ways the gaming industry is taking/could take advantage of multicore/multithreading? The only one I can think of is MMORPG, and that is only on the server side. How could you take advantage of it on the client side? Could you use it effectively on the AI? I've seen it done in Chess, where the computer thinks at the same time as the human player takes his turn (i.e. one thread is the main event loop, the other is the AI thinking). But even that, while it is technically multithreading, it's not really taking advantage of the multiple cores.
