Launched on 2 November 2005, the Online Games Development Programme aims to establish a world-class development platform to facilitate the efficient production and distribution of online PC, console and hand-held games.

The programme is set to create a suite of integrated tools and middleware to address some of the key issues associated with online game development. It will investigate and address the requirements of game developers in the key elements of online game design such as story creation, digital asset management, digital property management and workflow. Research into Procedural Content Generation (PCG) has also commenced, aimed at developing a system for the automatic generation of highly tunable game assets, primarily the procedural generation of buildings.

In North America and Europe alone the online games market is currently estimated to be worth $1.5bn, and this is expected to double to $3bn by 2010.

In June 2008, Metaforic signed an exclusive licence to a key element of technology developed by the Online Games Development R&D Programme. The company, headquartered in Glasgow, has entered the software protection market with its unique 'MetaFortress' anti-tamper software security solution. Metaforic has exploited the Online Games Development platform to offer high performance security solutions designed to protect the software industry from attacks which currently cost companies around USD40 billion every year. To learn more about MetaFortress and to keep up-to-date with its progress please visit the Metforic website here.

The ITI Techmedia Online Games Development R&D Programme is now complete and has generated exciting novel intellectual property in areas including Metaprogramming, game design tools, Network Scripting Language and procedural content generation. Opportunities to licence technology developed by this Programme are available. Please contact Gillian Brown, ITI Techmedia Director of Commercialisation on +44(0)141 240 1187 or email gillian.brown@ititechmedia.com to discuss these opportunities further.