« October 2006 | Main | February 2007 »

January 04, 2007

Get those nominations rolling!

Enter your Choice Awards nominations! If there's a game you feel showed great innovation and creativity, and you just down-right loved it, here's how to tell its developer how great you thought it was. Nominate as many games as you like until Jan. 12th. (Sorry, student members and members with free user accounts are not eligible to vote.)

Posted by RaquelBujans at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)

XNA 1.0 Released

XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 was released on December 11, 2006. XNA is a great way for hobbyists to create high-quality games with faster turnaround times. XNA puts the power of a large code framework at your fingertips at a fairly low cost. You can even publish your game for Xbox 360 if you join the Creators Club (membership is $99 a year).

Check out the wikipedia page for uber-amounts of information about the tool (including links to video tutorials) and the offical XNA blog for news related to the tool.

Also on the same date, Garage Games released a version of its Torque engine that has been ported to the XNA framework titled Torque X. Torque X is a 2D and 3D game engine that has a multitude of features built-in right out of the box. This is a great tool particularly in academia, where students/hobbyists may want to start a game curriculum but don't necessarily have the funds to plunge into expensive engines and tools.

Posted by RaquelBujans at 09:12 PM | Comments (0)

Community Updates

Thanks to Jay Koottarappallil for keeping an eye on some recent trends in tools development! Here are some innovative tools that have caught his attention.

Intuitive Modeling

Ever since the popularity rise we’ve seen out of Z-Brush, we’re starting to see more and more of a trend towards surfacing through camera placement, gestures, simple curve editing and scene analysis (not to mention the glut of hi-resolution modelers that have hit the streets). A few products catch my eye here:

Google Sketchup
A simple concept modeler with CAD level accuracy and a very smart surfacing method based on the users placement of points in space. A lot of devs are using SketchUp to rough out levels due to its ease of use and cross-platform interoperability.

(Edit: See the SketchUp page on game development here, and review of an attempt to get SketchUp models into SecondLife).

Moment of Inspiration
Works in a similar fashion to SketchUp, but more tools geared towards organic shapes. Also a heavy emphasis on pen/tablet workflow.

Free Design FreeDimension
FreeDimension is a product that makes NURBS modeling much more accessible and practical for games application. Similar to T-Splines (http://www.tsplines.com), FreeD uses N-Sided Surfacing, which allows the user to break free from the quad patch requirement of NURBS.

CB Model Pro
This modeler works through the concept of “sticky” surfaces. There are a few basic modifiers, but where CB Model Pro gets interesting is in its use of spline drawing that sticks to the surface and allows the user to modify the surface through the spline shape.

NaturalMotion Endorphin 2.7

NaturalMotion has updated it’s behavioral animation tool, Endorphin to 2.7. I’ve had great success using this tool and Euphoria and Morphine are equally impressive.

Posted by RaquelBujans at 08:48 PM | Comments (0)