Today at WWDC in San Francisco, Apple showed off its latest and greatest software, with upgrades to all three of its operating systems — OS X, iOS and watchOS. Video games didn't get a ton of love during the event, but a few things grabbed our attention. They're not things that will impact the lives of gamers so much as developers, but the end result promises better and more immersive games.
Apple's graphics core technology Metal is getting a jolt of an upgrade with the new operating systems. Metal breaks down the system barriers between games and your device's graphics processor, vastly upgrading the speed of things like image rendering and resource efficiency. Apple says that some processing aspects of your favorite games will perform up to 10 times faster with the upgraded Metal.
During the WWDC keynote, a representative from Epic Games appeared to show how Metal is helping with the creation of the developer's next game. Epic has a long history of working closely with Apple, having frequently shown off iOS games like Infinity Blade at Apple publicity events. For WWDC, Epic demoed behind-the-scenes content from its upcoming free-to-play title Fortnite. The thrust of the presentation was that Metal is enabling Epic to build Fortnite faster and more interactively than has ever been possible before, with faster, richer graphics performance even in the developer environment.
It's unknown what platforms Epic is planning to release Fortnite on, though it working so well with Metal indicates that it could easily appear on Apple devices. A graphic displayed on stage showed that multiple other game developers are using Macs enabled with Metal technology to build their games. They include Aspyr, Blizzard, 2K, Unity and others.
Additionally, Apple introduced some new game-related technologies to its Swift operating system that will make it easier for developers to incorporate frequently used features into their games. One of them, "GameplayKit," will let Devs now much more easily map real-world behavior onto nonplayer characters, for example, or randomize gameplay. These features will find their way into games after developers have a chance to try out Swift 2 later this year.
Epic Games has not yet announced an official release date for Fortnite, but the game is currently expected sometime in 2015.
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