Change and unpridictability were the features of the game industry 15 years ago... Change came fast in tools, the way of work, the hardware, the support and the programming languages.
Lately it is seen that game industry is stable, or can I say 'stagnent'??

We keep using the good old libraries... and in terms of programming too, we started with ASM, went through C, and ended up at C++ (the point of saturation).
Will in predictable future , there could be a move from stagnent principles? Or will see some interesting upsurps?

Cars are still build with mostly 4 wheels, so, must every single concept evolve to get better ?

yes man, automobile industry is practically stagnent now....

what do you think about the positive changes in vedio game technology, both hardware and software wise??
I would argue that the changes will be of less importance.
We will continue to see middlewares, tools and design in upgraded form only, nothing new.
Going to the programmers' way, we will continue to see C++ as the game engine development tool... And lua & stuff for logic for a very very long time, if not our lifetime. We would draw with same old directx and opengl.....

Video game software is going through a very rapid advancement right now... I'd go as far to call it a renaissance.

The tasks that are being accomplished with the "same old C++/DirectX/etc" are completely different than tasks we were using them for 10 years ago.

Screwdrivers can be used to put together furniture, but they can also be used to build space-shuttles. The tools that are used pale in comparison to the feats accomplished by the machines they are used to build.

So, no.

yes man, automobile industry is practically stagnent now....

What about the fact that the first all-electric (no petrol/gas required), mass-produced, vehicles are currently in production? That's pretty a revolutionary milestone to be alive for! What about materials research that will have us "growing" car chassis' from synthetic DNA in a completely pollution-free and energy efficient process? What about windsheilds that absorb photons to refill your battery, or levitating flywheels that store energy that's usually wasted by your brakes?

@Hodgman I must complement that you appear to be intelligent guy...

So you are saying that we will be using direct x/ c++ for a lifetime of anybody reading this??

At the end of the day, all your COBOL/C++98/C++11/C#/Lua code ends up as machine code running inside the CPU. Does this mean that we're stuck in the 1950's, because that's when CPU's were invented? You could write your game in assembly if you wanted to, and still do something new, that's never been done before! It would just be harder -- all that new tools do is make the process of building something easier, they generally don't make new things possible/impossible, just easier/harder to accomplish.

All that DirectX and OpenGL do is let you control the machine code running inside the GPU. Just because we used DirectX 10 years ago, doesn't mean that we can't do new things with it. Look at the amount of computer graphics research that is being published each year -- all of those papers are presenting some kind of new idea, which you can implement using old tools -- just how in the 60's they used screwdrivers to get to the moon.

@hodgman You actually are good...

Yes, people will use a screwdriver for eternity... Can this be a case in computers too? By your stunning refrence, can I say that id tech 6 or idtech 7 will be C++ / Opengl or C++ / Directx ??

just how in the 60's they used screwdrivers to get to the moon.

+1

can I say that id tech 6 or idtech 7 will be C++ / Opengl or C++ / Directx ??

You can say, that the development of a single language or library, like C or zlib, is stagnant, but to derive that technologies like id tech X will be stagnant too, because they use old languages/libs/tools is nonsense.

So you are saying that we will be using direct x/ c++ for a lifetime of anybody reading this??

Yes, people will use a screwdriver for eternity... Can this be a case in computers too? By your stunning refrence, can I say that id tech 6 or idtech 7 will be C++ / Opengl or C++ / Directx ??[/quote]

The DirectX and OpenGL we use now are very different from what we used in the past. They may still be going by the same brand names, but they are different tools that have been changing and evolving. Even something as stable as C++ is undergoing pretty dramatic changes with the new standard being released and gradually implemented.

Graphics cards are just starting to mature as general purpose massively parallel processors, rather than specialized pieces of hardware that are designed to do one thing.