2024 - A Retrospective

First of all, we would like to thank everyone who worked with us and / or recommended us. Thanks for your trust!

2024 was a special year for The Forge Interactive, as we proudly marked 15 years of making an impact on the gaming and adjacent industries. Like 2023, the year 2024 exceeded all our expectations in growth and company development. We built even more loyal customer relationships with integrity and trust.

We are hoping to continue our growth in projects, people, and profits this way even more. Our new office since 2021 is still serving us well: https://www.thebungalowsdelmar.com/.

The plan is to move into a bigger space towards the end of the year ..

Like in previous years, one of the reasons for our ongoing growth is the success of 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.

This year, we added General Arcade and Jumpgate to the list of licensees of The Forge Framework.

Star Wars: Bounty Hunters

General Arcade brought back Star Wars Bounty Hunters with the help of The Forge Framework:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbelFolo5jc

The list of most notable projects is populated with some of the most exciting and successful games and applications:

Activision Call of Duty Warzone Mobile

We have been helping with this title since August 2020. We added Vulkan support to the engine, Android support, made the engine more mobile-friendly, and worked with the main hardware vendors on driver fixes and helped them to improve their Vulkan support.

We finished working on this title in December 2024.

https://www.callofduty.com/warzonemobile
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXzs5zWK_NE

Hello Games No Man's Sky

We have been helping to bring this game to macOS and iOS since November 2021. The macOS version was featured on Apple's WWDC 2022.

It shipped on June 1st, 2023, on Steam and the Mac App Store. We are still working on the iOS version.

https://www.nomanssky.com/
https://youtu.be/q5D55G7Ejs8?t=4949

Hypixel Studios

Since May 2022, we have been helping Hypixel to develop a new custom game engine from scratch with the help of The Forge rendering framework. This game engine is specific to the needs of the underlying type of game. It uses our Visibility Buffer rendering architecture to improve rendering in high-resolution displays that are 4k and higher. We saw large speed-ups coming from this with 4k resolution (as documented in our talks since 2016).

We finished working on this project in June.

https://hytale.com/news/2022/7/summer-2022-development-update

Qualcomm

For more than 15 years, we have worked with Qualcomm, and for the last four years, we have been refactoring parts of the Qualcomm VR SDK. When someone develops on Qualcomm hardware new VR experiences he is using the Qualcomm VR SDK because any vendor SDK is built on top of it. We are improving this SDK with a 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 for future hardware.

https://developer.qualcomm.com/software/snapdragon-vr-sdk

Meta Audio SDK

We integrated the Meta Audio SDK into Horizon.

Meta Quest SDK Examples

This year, we worked again on several projects, extending Unreal Engine and Unity integration with better Quest support.

Meta Big Box Population: ONE for Quest

Over the last five+ years, we helped several games launch on the Oculus Quest platform. Population: ONE was the first one using the Unity game engine.

http://www.populationonevr.com/

Turn 10 Forza Motorsport

We have been helping with Forza Motorsport since September 2021. This year, we finished our work on Forza when the game shipped.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHgceB5vzhk

Fable

After we finished Forza, we started working on Fable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h77gcgE1b8

Google WebGPU

We were working on a comparison and performance analysis of WebGPU compared to Vulkan on Android phones. We provided performance numbers and made suggestions for improvements. The resulting demo was posted in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/ConfettiFX/The-Forge-WebGpu

We uncovered some performance issues with WebGPU. A general problem was that the code base didn't follow game development rules of "game developer has to control memory" and used C++ constructs all over the place that were countering that idea. So we couldn't integrate it into The Forge Framework as it is but we published a branch on GitHub that uses it.

If you are interested in reading our previous retrospectives, please check out the following links:
2023 a Retrospective
2022 a Retrospective
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