Silent_Buddha
Legend
Surely ms has been in detailed discussions with all major third parties on the rendering hardware in Durango, ensuring their engines are ready to leverage what's under the hood? Heck, I'm sure a lot of this design was born out of what devs said their engines *will* look like in 3 years. (From ~2009)
In the beginning, it would have been more along the lines of...this is what we're thinking of doing due to doing analysis of what games and developers are doing. What works well, what isn't working well. Do you have any suggestions. So game conceptualization will likely occur here, but no real "development" will be done.
Later on as hardware and focus were solidified it'd be more along the lines of...OK, this is roughly what it's going to be like, this is what things are intended to do, and this is roughly the predicted speed (in PC hardware terms) of how fast the hardware will be able to do it. Preliminary development is likely to be done here with non-graphical tasks receiving the lions share of the effort. Art assets are likely also started if they weren't started previously. Ideas on how to handle the hardware as well as potential ways to exploit it will be investigated.
Alpha, beta, final development kits. Heavy work done on the rendering engine. Optimization and code cleanup as final kits are received. Bug fixing, game testing, etc.
It may not actually work like that. But it's sort of how I imagine things working.
Regards,
SB