Digital TV Games Hurdles

The public Digital TV system is being implemented on Brazil, and people are talking much about DTV games here. I believe it is an incredible opportunity for game developers, but there are hurdles that they must know beforehand:

Render

It is not possible to make real-time 3D games right away, because digital TVs only display what it receives from the transmitter. It won’t render in real-time anything more complex than 2D HTML-like menus. Think of it as a web browser with a very good dedicated channel for video broadcasting, and that’s about it. It will take time to have embedded video cards for real-time rendering on set-top boxes and TVs. The way to overcome this limitation is to use just pre-rendered 2D graphics, but see the next topic.

Video memory and CPU limitations

Game developing for DTV receivers (set-top boxes) are like developing for those old video-game consoles and mobile platforms. When it comes to hardware power they are very low and challenging, specially on cheap and popular set-top boxes. CPU speed won’t be higher than 300 MHz (at the very best case),  and video memory is of course very specialized for the TV broadcasting, not aimed for real-time applications. Game developers should have three or four popular models and test on it all the time, to make sure the games run smoothly.

Input

User input isn’t good. The remote control has to be used as a joystick, and they definitely are not designed for such a function. Some remote controls might have a technology similar to the light pistols of the consoles, recognizing where the user is pointing to, but they are rare and expensive. Response times of remote controls also doesn’t help at all. Game developers should aim for very simple input, and consider  “turn-based” games so that response times aren’t critical.