2021 - A Retrospective

First of all, we would like to thank everyone who worked with us and / or recommended us. Thanks for your trust! We will not disappoint you.

The year 2021 followed the trajectory of the previous year in growth and company development. We built more loyal customer relationships with integrity and trust. We grew our own senior and principal level even more so that we have more leadership in the company with distributed responsibilities. This way, we are hoping to continue our growth in projects, people, and profits even more. To be prepared for our continued growth we moved into a new office in Solana Beach, leaving the Encinitas office building -our home base for the last 10 years- behind. If you ever visited our old office you were probably treated to some Ironsmith coffee (https://ironsmithcoffee.com/) from around the corner. We are going to miss Encinitas :-)

More than before it became obvious that one of the reasons for our growing success is our open-source rendering framework The Forge. It now runs in even more AAA game engines, business application frameworks and is actively used to bring "old game IP" -sometimes 20 years old- to new platforms. It is also used in projects that need more custom solutions like in the visualization and movie industry. Many conversations we have with hardware and software companies start around this framework. It helps us to test drivers, define API standards and -most important- ships games :-) We can "upgrade" game engines in a fraction of the time it would take to write custom code each time.

We strive to continuously update The Forge framework by improving current features and adding new ones. We recently added support for several GPUs that are unlinked and added support for VR platforms. Many more updates were made and progress can be found in the readme of the repository:
https://github.com/ConfettiFX/The-Forge

Now let's move on to the list of most notable projects this year:

Activision Call of Duty (Future Mobile)
We continue through the year to help building the future mobile game engine for Call of Duty. Although it doesn't use The Forge directly, we used The Forge as a blue print to extend the existing engine. It is exciting to see the Android / Vulkan run-time cover high-end graphics. This will allow the franchise to raise to new levels of visual fidelity.
https://www.callofduty.com/content/atvi/callofduty/mobile/web/en/home.html

Facebook Business Framework
One of our forward looking projects, is redefining how we render business applications on mobile phones. This project is running now nearly since a year and we consider it one of the most exciting ones for The Forge rendering framework. Running The Forge on 100s of million mobile devices will make it hopefully the most used rendering framework in the world.

Quest SDK Examples
We also did some tools development for the Quest SDK. We integrated Crashlytics, Breakpad, and Analytics into Unity and UE4 and for the Quest SDK.

Qualcomm VR SDK
Since more than two years we are refactoring parts of the Qualcomm VR SDK. When you develop on Qualcomm hardware new VR experiences you are using the Qualcomm VR SDK because any vendor SDK is build on top of it. We are improving this SDK with the focus on performance and quality. A major focus for this project is to ensure the SDK is compatible with the latest OpenXR specification. We also enable support of future hardware.
https://developer.qualcomm.com/software/snapdragon-vr-sdk

AppOnBoard
The middleware game engine BuildBox is now using The Forge (click on Image to go to BuildBox website):

Lethis
The game Lethis Path of Progress, developed by Triskell Interactive & General Arcade, now uses The Forge (click on image to go to the Steam Store):

Build A Rocket Boy
We help Build A Rocket Boy with an unannounced game build in Unreal Engine. We do graphics and optimization work for them.
https://www.buildarocketboy.com/

Turn 10 / Forza Motorsport
We started working on improving graphics on the Turn 10 Forza Motorsport game.
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/forza-motorsport

Primal Space / Concurrents
We helped Concurrents to develop and optimize a UE4 plugin that helps streaming game content in an "intelligent" way, predicting what needs to be streamed next.
https://www.primalspacesystems.com/

If you are interested in reading our previous retrospectives, please check out the following links:

2021 a retrospective
2020 a retrospective
2019 a retrospective
2018 a retrospective
2017 a retrospective
2016 a retrospective
2015 a retrospective
2014 a retrospective
2013 a retrospective