It may have surprised some people that the Midlands Chapter decided to hold another event so soon after the previous one, but with all the E3 news, we thought it would be a great idea for Andrew Oliver to give a round-up and some personal opinions on how recent announcements might affect us developers. Once again the event was held at the Royal Pump Rooms in Leamington Spa; although not as many people attended as in April, it was still a good turn-out! (This time was on a Wednesday, so maybe we should go back to Thursday as people seem to prefer it.)

THE TALKS

Andrew posed the question “who will win the next generation battle?” Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are all pursuing different, though equally determined, strategies. He argued that they all deserve to sell tens of millions of consoles and thus none of them need be losers, as long as none of them decide to subsidise their console too much, just to be perceived as the market leader. During this, he showed a selection of the games that will soon be appearing on each of these machines.

Moving on to the handheld market, there are now only two dominant players here, both very strong and both winners in their own right; but which, Andrew asked, is actually the better games console? The audience demonstrated by an overwhelming show of hands that the DS is the popular choice.

So here we have a machine with inferior processing power winning out over the technically far superior PSP, and of course the reason is the games: Nintendo have done a superb job in creating some absolutely brilliant games which are selling in their millions. Although the PSP has many games available, none of them have grabbed gamers quite like Nintendogs, Brain Age, MarioKart and MarioWorld.

So it all comes down to the games, which suggests that the imagination and creativity of game developers will eventually win through, despite the teething troubles that plagues all new console development. Andrew stressed that what people buy is the entertainment that we create; the power inside these consoles helps us, but ultimately that isn’t what the players are buying. They are buying the games that we create.

Our other speaker on the night was Iain Cantlay of nVidia with his talk on ‘Havok FX: GPUs beyond triangles’. He showed how modern graphics cards are so incredibly fast that they can be used for more than just rendering graphics. nVidia have a partnership with Havok who produce the industry standard physics middleware. Between them they have developed Havok FX, a physics and collision engine on the graphics CPU which frees up the main CPU for running the rest of the game. As physics is very computationally heavy, processing this in parallel is obviously very useful.

Iain used various demos to prove that the GPU graphics processing is actually far faster, and explained how all modern day graphics cards have this ability to run other code and pass results back to the main processor. He showed a demo with a chess board with a hundred chess pieces falling from the sky, all reacting and colliding correctly, which was very impressive on the CPU; but when he ran the same demo using the GPU and was able to show a thousand pieces falling with the same accuracy and results and at the same speed…!

MSI GeForce 7600 Graphics Card – nVidia
Winner : Simon O’Dwyer from Blitz

GPU book – nVidia
Winner: Richard Geary from Rare

360 faceplate – Microsoft
Winner: Lee Winder from Blitz
Winner: Ollie Clarke from Blitz
Winner: Kieran Bloomfield from Awesome Studios
Winner: Eike Umlauf from Rare

T-shirt – Audiomotion
Winner: Jim Horth from Rare
Winner: Adam Parsons from Codemasters

nVidia mouse – nVidia
Winner: Mikey Higgs from Blitz

Thank you!
We would like to thank our sponsors:

• Autodesk, and Neil Parmer from BlueGFX for the sponsorship of the bar.
• Mick Morris from Audiomotion for paying for the venue.

Our guest speakers:

• Andrew Oliver from Blitz giving an overview of the recent developments at E3.
• Iain Cantlay from nVidia for speaking on Havok and for donating a cool nVidia gfx card for our raffle.

And lastly thanks to our volunteers:

• Kim Blake, Emma Morle, Andrew Wallen, Matt Black, Rob Blake and Pete Smithies, all from Blitz, for helping organise the event and manning the entrance on the night!

IGDA Midlands will return in September 2006 with a purely social evening!