Game Developers

BIZ :: IRRATIONAL GAMES GAME PITCH SAMPLE

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 12:08:08 -0400

What makes a studio differente from another, is the quality of its creative workforce, and that talent and quality is usually revealed in several occasions during the process of creating a videogames.

Right from the concept phase, you may feel the expertise and experitse of the team by the way an idea is generated, discussed, documented and iterativly evolved into a game able to make thousands of people to buy it.

Some times just being able to take a peek on those teams are able to organize and work is already a very valuable experience.Irrational Games has been trying to help us, mere mortals , in trying to understand how the first league of developers actually work, by releasing from time to time internal information about projects that they have produced in the past.

In this case, the information is about a cancelled project, Dungeon Duel, but it is really a great experience and source of information to be able to read through the pages of the game pitch they have produced to try to sell the game internally or some external publisher.This is a must read of all wannabe developers out there.

http://downloads.2kgames.com/irrational/artwork/dungeonduel/irrationalgames_d…http://irrationalgames.com/insider/from-the-vault-dungeon-duel/

TECH :: CRYENGINE3 SDK RELEASED

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 07:24:05 -0400

Crytek has finally released the SDK for the Cryengine3 game engine.
The SDK is located at http://www.crydev.net and needs registration before being ran,although not needing it for the download of the SDK which is aproxmatly 650 Mb.The license is free of all non commercial applications and developers are welcomed to contact Crytek for other licenses.

I am not sure the plataforms for which the SDK is targeted, although initially it seems to be only for the PC, when the SDK is ran, the PS3 and XBOX360 are there displayed as not being connected, and since I have not yet connected any of the devkits, I really don´t know if it woud recognize them and allow the deployment of the application.the SDK is including a demo, Forest, which was being displayed during the GDC San Francisco as a showcase of the editor.

More information at

http://www.crydev.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

CryENGINE Free Use

Anyone can now download a full version of the best All-In-One Game Development Engine, for free and use it without charge for non-commercial game development. You can try out the fastest toolset for creating game worlds and use the power of CryENGINE 3 in your own games

CryENGINE Free Use
You can use CryENGINE 3 for free in educational facilities, even if you are charging tuition. We have always offered our engine for free to educators, but now individual students can also freely download the engine and use it to learn about real-time 3D development.CryENGINE 3 is also free for non-commercial use; if you are distributing your game or application for free (and not charging for your work in producing it, whether directly or indirectly), no additional license is required.

CryENGINE 3 Independent Developers Platform
We want you to make games with CryENGINE 3 that people will want to play. We hope that your work will lead to a product you can commercialise. If this is the case, before you can sell your work or your game, you must seek a development license for CryENGINE 3.CryENGINE 3 for Independent Studios, Free To Play Games or Downloadable Games
Crytek has attractive options for smaller games built with CryENGINE 3, with shorter development timescales. If you want to move your game onto platforms other than PC, or you need access to CryENGINE 3 source code, please contact Crytek to find out more about our licensing for Independent Studios.

System Requirements [Developer]

• Supported operating Systems: XP, Vista, Windows 7 (with Windows 7 recommended)
• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz, AMD Athlon 64 X2 2GHz or better
• Memory: GB RAM (4 GB recommended)
• Video Card : nVidia 8800GT 512MB RAM, ATI 3850HD 512MB RAM or better

System Requirements [End User]

• Supported operating Systems: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista SP1 or SP2, Windows 7
• CPU: 32-bit or 64-bit processor (a multi-core processor is strongly recommended)
• Memory: 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended)
• Video Card: ShaderModel 3 capable graphics card (for example an NVidia 6 series card)

NEW AUTODESK 3D LITE

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 08:51:59 -0400

Autodesk has launched a free 3D modeling tool for Windows. This software allows wannabee artists to create three-dimensional objects in a relatively simple way .

The product is associated with a bigger community support service, that is allowing people to get more attention and help on dealing with common problems or bugs.

On the Web you have access to free models available for download with an extension .123 d).

The site gives the user also the possibility to upload their work as to be shared with the community.

It seems that this initiative that EPIC took several months ago with the UDK package, and the Crytek is suppose to follow on during summer by releasing a free version of CryEngine 3.

In the past, Autodesk release a lite version of the Maya or 3DSMax package, I am not sure which one it was, but it was removed after only after a couple of months of availability. Let’s hope that this time, it will last longer.

A question that I have not been able to check, is about compatibility with other Autodesk software, and about exporters to other middlewares, because usually, those are some of the features trimmed down when making a tool available for free.

More at http://www.game-developers.org

BIZ :: SMARTPHONES EATING AWAY PORTABLE CONSOLES ?

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 18:26:34 -0400

No, you are not reading the header of a new “pacman” clone, where a small smartphone runs along a blue maze eating off some portable consoles ;)

No, what you are reading is that the gaming applications for smartphones are eating way the portable console gaming market, doubling in one year the revenues.The reasons behind such growth are basically associated with the appstore and android market, associated with the two main smartphones categories available in the market. People are more and more using advanced all in one smartphones, that they use as a replacement of laptops, netbooks, and portable consoles, using them intensivly while commuting or killing time away. The result? Why to bring with you several devices when you can get all of them in your smartphone?

We are becoming digital beings and our smartphones are becoming an extension of our brain, and we are spending more and more time around it, so I think that the only devices that will suffer from the smartphones growth, will not be only portable consoles, but a much more widespread range of devices, like Tvs, cameras, MP3, recorders, netbooks, tablets, etc….

The analysis was generated by Flurry and summarized at slashgear:

Smartphone gaming continues to ratchet up the pressure on traditional mobile platforms like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, with market analysts Flurry releasing stats that show iOS and Android gaming almost doubled their market share against the old-school consoles. The Nintendo DS dived from 70-percent in 2009 to 57-percent in 2010, while the PSP share slipped from 11-percent to 9-percent, judged by revenue.

Interestingly, it’s only the portable segment which is really feeling the squeeze. Smartphone gaming revenue increased from 5- to 8-percent of the US market, while console gaming revenue grew from 71- to 76-percent. In contrast, traditional portable gaming revenue dipped from 24-percent to 16-percent.

Overall, though, it’s billed as bad news for the mobile gaming segment as a whole. While smartphone game sales are increasing, the per-app price is generally less than what’s charged per DS or PSP title; that’s seen the value of the market drop from $2.7bn in 2009 to $2.4bn in 2010. Sony’s push with the PlayStation Suite of development tools for the NGP – which will allow developers to create games for both the new console and Sony Ericsson’s Android handsets – may only speed that drop, as mini-titles on dedicated handhelds become more commonplace.

More at http://www.game-developers.org

TECH :: XNA TOWER DEFENSE

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:18:07 -0400

Ever dreamed about developing your own Tower Defense Game, but always thought that it was to hard, or to complex to learn?

Well if it is the case, and not because you are too lazy, here is the opportunity to learn about it in a very simple way.

http://xnatd.blogspot.com/

Through, more or less, 15 articles, the author will guide the reader through the process of building a Tower Defense game. The technology used is XNA with Nick Gravelyn’s Tile Engine Series, but it can be easily adapter to any technology you wish as the ideas exposed are very simple and straight forward.

Some of the points being explained by the author:

- Building the level

- Sprites or painting the assets

- Implementing the enenmies classes

- Waypoints

- Towers and towers management

- Weapons and Firepowers

- Waves

- The user interface

- Tower Types

- Drag and Drop

- Game polishing

More at http://www.game-developers.org

Untitled

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 15:56:35 -0400

Although you could think that, with the amount of game engines already available, most people would avoid the effort of trying to implement a new game engine from ground 0.

But the truth is quite the opposite, as for all the tech people around the world, the challenge of developing a game engine from scratch is something so important as a climber to try to climb to the top of the Everest, even if 50 other guies beat it to the mark.

With this principle in mind, there is a new game engine, developed in XNA, in the block, and that from the overall descriptions and media materials, seems to be quite interesting (although I have not tested it yet.)

The engine is called Ploobs Game Engine an it is a full Game Engine developed in C# .Net 3.0 and XNA 3.1 using Deferred Rendering. The principal Features are:

Forward Rendering e Deferred Rendering
Artificial Inteligence (PathFinding, NN, GA, Agents and World Abstractions, Steering Behaviors …)
3D and 2D Sound
Physics Integrated (Bepu API and JigLibX API)
Animation Integrated (XnaAnimation API, heavily altered to fit on the Deferred Render)
Dynamic Water and Ocean with waves
Dynamic Reflection and Refraction
Dynamic Lights (Spot, Point and Directional)
BumpMaps, SpecularMaps,Glow Maps and Paralax Mapping
Vegetation (Real Modeled Trees and Procedurally Generated Billboards)
Terrain with HeightMaps and Multitexture
Dynamic Shadow (Shadow Mapping and Cascade Shadow Mapping) with filtering
Deferred with Antialiasing (PostEffect)
Post Effects: ToonShading, Blur, Noise, Wiggle, Circular Glow, DOF, Bloom, HDR, Radial Blur, Negative, Black and White, SSAO, Color Correction, Gama Correction, Saturation, Contrast, Fog, Ambient Scattering and much more …
Extensible Particle System (soft particles also)
Transparency (with Deferred Shading, extra Forward pass)
EnvironmentMapping
Skybox and Dynamic SkyDome
Billboards (Gpu Spherical and Cylindrical)
Animated Billboards and Textures
Video Player Embedded
Hardware Instancing (static and dynamic)
Trigger System
Message System
Picking System
Input Control System
Resource Management System
Screen Manager System
Culling System
Profilling System (Real Time Graphs, Performance Counters, CSV Result Exporter …)
Works Well with Nvidia PerfHud and Microsoft Pix
Graphics, Physics and Render Targets easily Debuggable
Cameras (First Person, Quake like, Third Person, Static, Follow Path, Interpolators …)
Integrated With .NET Windows Forms
Integrated With 3DS Max using an Exporter Plugin
Scene Loader supporting Lights, Cameras, Models and Dummies
Procedural Textures and Models Facilities
Has Lots of Math and Physicw Helpers
Extensible Design and Easy to Use

More at http://www.game-developers.org

BIZ :: MIRROR, MIRROR IN THE WALL, TELL ME WHAT IS THE BEST SHOPPING EXPERIENCE

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 14:17:23 -0400

Over the last years, with the rise of digital downloads and digital commerce, there as been a very intense discussion about whatever the future of videogames is only digital, or still purely retail.
Some say, that retail is dead, and that it is a question of time before, all the games will be sold online via portals like Steam, Xboxlive, Playstation network, or many other portals that have been or will be launched in the near future.

Others (I include myself in this group) thinks that the retail is not dead, and what we are currently looking at is only an adaptation of the market to a new distribution channel, that have its advantages and its flaws just like any other channel.

Why am I including myself in the advocates of the retail? The answer is not very easy to answer, because mainly it is “gut feeling” that I have from my previous experiences, and other because of some of the clews that other products shopping experience are currently displaying in the market ( I am including below a PPT). Part of the answer, relies on the fact that right from the beginning of telecommunications most of the people were saying that some day everything will be downloaded, which seems to be true when we look at how fast the bandwith has been increasing in the last years. But if you look at how fast the storage has algo been developing you can see, that in fact the ration between storage and capacity to download has been increasing. Back in the 360kb floppies, the analog lines and analog modems were doing between 300Bps to 1200bps, and when they increased the speed to 2400bps, storage jumped to 720Kb and to 1.44Mb.
When modems took the internet speed to 14400bps and to 28800bps, CD appeared in the market and took storage up to 640Mb/800Mb. And finally when connections jumped to the digital age with DSL lines 256Kbps and up (50Mbps), DVDs and Bluerays took the storage to 4,5/9/50Gb.
In this comparation, I am not including harddisks which are currently going over the Terabyte.
Associated with this fact, there is another paragdima associated with the developers, and that basically states, that a software developer will always used all the resources made available to him, ( just like the the gases). Which means that if a game developer has a 50GB media, it will fill it up with content.

Digital download is a singular experience, where a man is seating individually in front of console, and browsing through a catalogue of games, as to download one. No human interaction is done. If there is a problem, there is no one to help you out, unless a Customer Representative Agent is called (which in most of the cases will be an intelligent answering machine). Retail is a social experience, where you go with your friends/family and where you see other people, what they are buying, what they are thinking about a game. If you have a problem you can go to the shop personel and ask questions about the product, and you will be amably taken care. With digital products, you don´t have the feeling of owning anything because you don´t see around you, what you have bought. It is like digital pictures, where you have now over 5000 pictures, but you never watch any, because they are all stored in a hard disk, while previously you only had a couple of tenths of pictures everywhere through your house.
With bookd and DVD you can see them on your library and it will remind you to read an old book or to watch an old movie. With digital information, you eventually forgot that you have it.

Those are my reasons. There could be more like limited editions of boxes, or exclusive gifts (t shirts, dolls, accessories, etc), but I think that those are already very clear to anyone. I am attaching a very good slide presentation found on linkedin, where retail and digital are merged as to create a better shopping experience. Could this be the future, most probably, as most of the game portals are starting to have physical download vouchers instores to be bought be people while going at their local gaming store.

More at www.game-developers.org

ART :: INCREDIBLE PIXEL ART

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 12:37:03 -0400

A very interesting work from Eric Boulton (http://www.whereismyeyeball.com/2d.html) which has left most of the people commenting the picture simply astonished.

The author is also responsible for a very good version of a Steampunk Star Wars that can be found at http://www.whereismyeyeball.com/2d/starwars.html

More at www.game-developers.org

Incredible

FUTURE :: MAPPING PROJECTION

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:07:18 -0400

Could this be part of the future of videogames? A mix a augmented reality at large scale with mapping projection on the walls of cities or of your living room?

The video is certainly impressive and the possibilities of this for game are really impressive, can you think of playing a tetris in a building your city, or just to be surrounded by throusands of enemies inside the confort of your living room?

For now the technology is only being used for public shows as to catch the attention of people in the streets of great cities, and this particular case, advertising, as it was used by Samsung to get the attention toward a new display that they were releasing.

The difficulty is not too much and it is something that could be easily done, the only problem, the video cannon that needs to be done is certainly very powerfull, which means that very expensive aswell, but if an application in the homeplace, like this one, can certainly be done more easily and less expensive.

What do you think? What are the possibilities?

More at http://www.game-developers.org/

TECH :: NEW VERSION OF JMONKEYENGINE

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 09:53:20 -0400

The java Monkey Engine, jME3, has just released the first release of 2011 with many improvements and additions like lighting support for terrain, post-process water and physics controls which bring jMonkeyEngine3 a big step closer to its final release. The SDK steps into a whole new dimension of visual editing with a new terrain editor plugin for jMonkeyPlatform and many internal improvements in the platform make extending and improving it even easier.

From their website :

“The jMonkeyEngine3 SDK has really become a mature product by now and success stories like those of Mythruna and other projects further strengthen our belief in providing a complete game development package that keeps all aspects around the development under control so that you can concentrate on creating your game.

From this release on the jMonkeyPlatform with all its plugins will be referred to as “The jMonkeyEngine3 SDK”. While the jMonkeyPlatform application itself will keep its name, the amount of available plugins that come preinstalled and can be added make the whole package more than just a simple application, hence the shift to the SDK name.”

Some of features that are included by the new version:

Changes in the engine

- Lighted terrain
- Post Process Water
- Depth Blur Filter
- Movement paths & cinematics tracks
- Physics Controls
- Improved physics character
- Overall improved physics flexibility
- NiftyGUI 1.3 (changes may break current xml)
- OpenGL 1 support (currently all materials are unlit in OpenGL1)
- Support for mat param -> renderstate binding to support OpenGL1 for your own shaders
- Uses lwjgl 2.7.1

Notable deprecations
- PhyiscsNodes have been deprecated (in favor of Physics Controls)
- Most unshaded material j3md files are deprecated: (in favor of Unshaded.j3md)
- SolidColor.j3md
- VertexColor.j3md
- SimpleTextured.j3md
- ColoredTextured.j3md
- The m_ prefix for material settings has been deprecated (its kept in the shader source only)
- JOGL support has been deprecated

Changes in the SDK

- Terrain editing and painting
- SkyBox creation wizard
- Vehicle editor (WIP)
- Improved Material Editor
- Undo/Redo support (WIP)
- Adding of items via SceneExplorer
- Executing of functions like tangent generation via SceneExplorer
- Editing of UserData for Spatials
- Support for Controls in SceneExplorer (AnimControl, PhysicsControl etc.)
- Improved physics support
- Improved switching between plugins in open scene

Changes in the jMonkeyPlatform Plugin API
- Generally improved internal and extension APIs
- Support for creating custom items via the SceneExplorer
- Support for Undo/Redo
- Support for custom Controls in SceneExplorer
- Improve support for custom Spatials in SceneExplorer

TECH :: CG_GL ENGINE

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 10:31:46 -0500

From time to time you are able to find really interesting new engines developed by people trying to create some groundbreaking new technology, or to just learn how engines work.

Most of those engines cannot be used, and have an added value to the game developers community a zero value, and could be only used to learn on what mistakes should be avoid when developing and engine.

But there are a couple of cases where the result is actually very interesting, and the the outcomes of the development is worth following it as to evaluate and learn how the developer was able to implement the features.Are those engines suitable to develop games? Well probably amateur games without high pretentions, or just to get introduceed to game development without having to buy or to use other commercial engines with more features and that will be probably much harder to understand or to start to use.

So what is CG_GL engine?Based on the information from its webpage, it is an excercise from it author, Stanisław Gąsiorowski, to implement an engine that would work on the GeForce 4. with such effects like fullscreen blur, glow, disort.
Some of the Engine features are: dynamic lighting, stencil shadows, skinning, transparency with disortion (pseudo refraction of light on bumpy surface), nice particles , dynamic memory management (also not visible in this demo, but you can see it in source). Engine has also some other things like: better interpreter or console (like in Quake) with binds and variables.

I particulary was interested in the implementation of the BOKEH depth of field implementation, which how I actually found the engine.

more information at http://www.game-developers.org

TECH :: NEWTON GAME DYNAMICS MOVING TO OPEN SOURCE LICENSE

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:28:26 -0500

Most of you out there, that have been developing indie games, already know the Newton physics Engine, a very well implemented game engine, that was being used by several developers to manage the physics simulation in their games.

From their home page, you can read that the description of the engine is as follows:

“Newton Game Dynamics is an Open-source zlib-licensed integrated solution for real time simulation of physics environments.

The API provides scene management, collision detection, dynamic behavior and yet it is small, fast, stable and easy to use.

Our engine implements a deterministic solver, which is not based on traditional LCP or iterative methods, but possesses the stability and speed of both respectively. This feature makes our product a tool not only for games, but also for any real-time physics simulation.
You can integrate Newton Game Dynamics into your projects with ease. With our technology you only need to know basic physics principles to produce realistic physics behavior. Tuning time is reduced to a minimum because you don’t need to wrestle the targeted hardware nor set up esoteric parameters to get the correct timing for your simulation.”

Their license was not fully open source, and now they have moved it to the zlib licensing mode. The zlib License has been approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as a free software licence, and by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as an open source license. It is compatible with the GNU General Public License. For the developers the implication is:

Software is used on ‘as-is’ basis. Authors are not liable for any damages arising from its use.
The distribution of a modified version of the software is subject to the following restrictions:
1. The authorship of the original software must not be misrepresented,
2. Altered source versions must not be misrepresented as being the original software, and
3. The license notice must not be removed from source distributions.

The license does not require source code to be made available if distributing binary code.

More information at http://www.game-developers.org

TECH :: UDK MARCH RELEASE

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 21:04:19 -0500

Epic has just released the March release of UDK which includes the new features that were demonstrated during last week San Francisco GDC, “the samaritan”.

The size of the forward leap taken by Epic with this release is only possible to understand by having seen with his own eyes the the realtime demo of ”the samaritan”, which was really impressive.

Parallely to this, Epic has also modified the licensing options of the developers agreements increasing the threshold after which royalties need to be paid to Epic, up to 50000 Dollars, being above that in revenues, a 25 % being paid to Epic.

the new commercial developer agreement has also been made simpler an can be found in the following link commercial UDK developer

The summary of the newsletters:

March 9, 2011 – Epic Games, Inc. has released the March 2011 UDK Beta, the latest version of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the free edition of Unreal Engine 3 that provides access to the award-winning toolset used in blockbuster video games, 3D visualizations, digital films and more.

Epic recently presented a brand new Unreal Engine 3 real-time demonstration entitled “Samaritan,” which leverages DirectX 11 support, high-end rendering features, NVIDIA APEX physics technology and other engine upgrades. These new technical additions are now available in the March build of UDK. Check out coverage of “Samaritan” at Wired, TIME and IGN as well as thevideo.

Important DirectX features now shipping with UDK include:

- Tessellation and displacement;

- Geometry shaders;

- Multisampled textures; and

- Shader Model 5.

High-end rendering features include:

- Image-based reflections that allow surfaces of any shape to reflect an approximate version of scenes, with varying glossiness across surfaces, anisotropic HDR highlights and anti-aliasing;

- Subsurface scattering (SSS) that simulates the light that scatters inside semi-translucent materials, making character skin come alive;

- Anti-aliased masked materials that super sample the edges of masked and alpha-tested materials, making character hair more look realistic than ever before;

- Deferred rendering with MSAA support;

- Bokeh depth of field providing close to film-quality DOF, with artist-controllable Bokeh; and

- High-quality dynamic shadows from many lights on the environment, such as shadows for point lights and other light sources.

NVIDIA’s APEX technology has also been integrated into the engine and ships with UDK.

In addition, Epic has raised the royalty-free revenue threshold for UDK commercial developers. Under the new license agreement, developers don’t pay any royalties until their total revenue exceeds $50,000 (US). Beyond that, developers keep 75 percent of each dollar they receive and Epic receives 25 percent. A great article to reference is here.

UDK projects can be promoted to the community in the Works in Progress forum and the Released Projects forum.

It’s easy to sign up as a commercial UDK developer online. Have questions? Check out our FAQ.

TECH :: NEW VERSION OF 3D ENGINE KOCHOL

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 10:51:28 -0500

KGE (Kochol Game Engine) has reach its 0.0.6 version with new features added to the engine like: tile terrain, physics, particle systems, shadow maps, …
This version has more than 1180 KB of source code.
The authors of the engine have added tutorials and an API document but the engine is still lacking most of the documentation that would make it more developer friendly.

Watching the screenshots and the other materials released in their homesite, there is no doubt that the progress is interesting, but the engine is still a couple of versions before being appliable to a developement.

Some of the features of the engine are:

Object-Oriented Design
Easy to use and flexible
Dynamic lighting
Projected planar shadows
Shadow mapping
Multitexturing
Shader 3 support in ASM, HLSL and GLSL
MS3D mesh, Skeletal animation
Refraction, Reflection
Render To Texture with Anti aliasing
Multi Rendering Targets (MRT)
Tile based terrain
Fog
Particle systems
Basic GUI
3D sound with OpenAL
Rigid body physics
Physics dynamics
Collision Detection
Triggers
Joints

The engine can be found at http://kge3d.org

More information at http://game-developers.org

BIZ :: EPICGAME REDUCES PRICES FOR UDK

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 10:38:54 -0500

According to a news story published at gamesindustry.biz, Epic Games has decided to lower the fees for indy projects made with their free version of the award-winning Unreal 3, UDK. Previously to this measure, any project that generated revenues above 5 000 $ was to pay to Epic a 25% of the game revenues. With the new pricing, the threshold is raised to 50 000$, but in turn you have now to pay a 99$ fee to be able to start working in this new mode with Epic.

It is a great step from Epic, in line with the ones that they have been given during the last years, and that has generated a vast community of developers (and wannabe developers) using their powerfull toolset to develop their products. What is the real cause behing these actions? I think that basically assuring a large community of Unreal 3 development, which will make more easy for studios to find Unreal 3 aware professionals and consecuently by the Unreal 3 licenses, which has been drastically reduced over the last years, as they were times were a license for the Unreal engine would cost above 1 M$ plus a share of the game revenues.

New times forces to new solutions, and Epic has certainly be very aware of what is going around in the 3D technology scene, that there are new competitors in town that could be a future thread like Unity.

More at Game-Developers.Org

TECH :: NEW VERSION OF PIXELLIGHT AND SPARK

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 10:22:51 -0500

There is a new version of the free open-source, cross-platform 3D framework PixelLight , which includes also the new version of the plugin SPARK_PL integrating the free open source particle engine SPARK, and includes new demos, one of them shows how picking works. . From the project webpage:

“PixelLight is an open-source framework that allows you to create 3D
applications easily. As a cross-platform library it is designed to create
desktop applications for several platforms (Windows, Linux) . Due to it’s
modular design, it is suitable not only for games, but for any kind of 3D
applications like e.g. product presentations or simulations.”

The project seems to be heading to be heading forward although with some low latencies as the released versions of the technology are somewhat happening in the months time frame, but doing opensource projects has becoming harder overtime, as it has become more difficult to find good team members.

More information at http://www.game-developers.org

TECH :: GOOGLE RELEASES HONEYCOMB SDK

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 13:28:54 -0500

After a couple of months about buzzwording about the Android 3.0, Honeycomb, and after teasing everyone with the news about the news tablets and the new features that will be coming into the market; and after a first preview version promptly removed from the site; Google has finally release the final version of the Honeycomb SDK.

From now on developers, and this case, game developers, will be able to start their engines for the upcoming tablet race that is about to get wild.

Is this an interesting market? Most of the people are saying that the android market is no way near the Apple’s appstore profitability for developers, but Google has also said that there not very happy with the performance on the Android Market, which makes more or less predictable that they will try to solve that issue.Tablets are becoming on the best assistant and entertaiment tools around. They are light, they are mobile, they have a good form factor, they are workable on and they have good performance with good battery time. You can watch movies on them, you can play good games on it, you can read game on it, and all of this without letting your eyes on it.

So, I would definitivly take a look at it and develop for it. If on top you are a clever game developer, you can use the Unity3D game engine, and you will be able to develop or any of the latest gaming platforms.

The Android 3.0 Honeycomb platform highlights are here, with a list of differences between APIs. It includes an update to SDK Tools (r10) and ADT Plugin for Eclipse, including such niceties as improved rendering of what the final on-screen app will look like.

Instructions for downloading the Android 3.0 SDK. Here.

More at http://www.game-developers.org

TECH :: MICROSOFT OPENING UP KINECT SDK

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:53:06 -0500

As read back at slashgear.com is opening the Kinect SDK to the community in march, as to support non commercial applications, being followed in September by the commercial SDK that will allow developers to start to create their own commercial application, for one of the more interesting devices released into market during the last years. With this news, all the developers that were until using the hacked kinects drivers can now use standard and supported tools from Microsoft itself.

The results will certainly be an incease of the number of applications being released for the Kinect, which will certainly result in more innovation as more and more people are thinking in different ways to use the device and its possibilities to revolutionize the way we interface with our computers and electronic devices.

Let’s see if they follow on the plan, and gentleman … start your kinect engines.

more at http://www.game-developers.org

TECH :: UDK TUTORIALS AND TRAININGS

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 10:24:23 -0500

There is no doubt that Epic Games has done something very interesting for the videogames industry, when they decided to release for free their version lite of Unreal3, the UDK.

The framework is really powerful and lets you really develop high content materials that you can use to generate your game with high quality. High quality if you are able to understand and to master the tool, as if not, you will be probably lost in the middle of menus, parameters and other functionalities of a tool so powerful as complex to master.

But, there are a large set of good tutorials and trainings materials that I will are available across the internet and that allows to create a very good knowledge of the platform, in this article I will try to gather as much as information available possible over the internet as to create a pool of useful links.

More at http://www.game-developers.org/

TECH :: OPEN SOURCE GAMES

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:34:15 -0500

Usually when you talk with other developers about the possibility to get the source code of older games, you get a mixed type of answers:
i) the most experienced ones, will say, that there is no value in getting the source code, as it will take more time to try to understand the code, than to actually code it.
ii) the less experienced ones, will say that this is great as it will help them understand how some problems were solved in other games.

The result of blending the two answers together ( Based on my understanding) is:
To have access of the source code to other games is only as good as how recent the game is, and how experienced is the developer. A new developer will learn a lot by browsing the code created by other developers, and an experienced one, already know most of the tricks of the industry and can reach any technique based on the knowledge already gathered.

Most of the times a lot of importante is being given to accessing the source code, but most people forget that the most important and the most costly aspects of videogames is not actually the code, but the Art, Animations, effects and other visual components of the game, and in most of the cases, you don´t have access to the sources of that art, but only to the “compiled” versions of it, or in some cases to nothing at all.Netherless, since I think that looking at the code is good for new comers, and since I have been listing during the last years the games that I was able to get my hands on, I have decided to create a page to list all the source codes available on the Net.

http://game-developers.org/node/228

More at http://www.game-developers.org