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Vincent Scheib from Emergent Technologies has posted his presentation on Rapid Prototyping and Rapid Iteration with Gamebryo Lightspeed on his blog. The presentation was delivered at the Triangle Game Conference.
Studios succeed by securing solid publisher deals, and then delivering games on time and budget. Great games can’t be started until that deal is in place, which places great prototypes as one of the most essential stages of development. This presentation discusses several technical strategies that can be used to facilitate rapid prototyping. These include discussions on asset management systems; live tool-game connections; and data driven designer tools and extensions. This presentation is intended for attendees experienced with game development. It will dive into the technical design of these systems and demonstrate their features. Concepts learned will be directly applicable by developers preparing to build a game content pipeline and tool set.
Rapid Prototyping and Rapid Iteration with Gamebryo Lightspeed
This isn’t strictly game related, but is interesting from the usage of games technology for offline productions. Mach Studio Pro from startup studio|gpu is a 3D animation software that takes advantage of real-time GPU rendering. This allows the software to have truly WYSIWYG viewport rendering and interactions and very quick output. What is cool is the ability to see exactly what you’re going to get in the viewport and edit them directly — while you can’t strictly do this in an offline 3D package, tools like XSI’s Render Region, Maya Viper and 3ds Max Reveal have been actively addressing this as an issue. The examples shown are pretty good from a real-time perspective. I think it’s got a way to go before it can be compared with output from offline renderers.
Mach Studio Pro
Over at Gamasutra, Bungie’s Steve Theodore discusses in-house custom tools, focusing in particular on environment artists and game editors.
Tools may not make an artist, but they can certainly break one. Planning and advocating for the right tools is a critical job for every art department. It’s also a difficult and delicate game of hot potato, as it can easily devolve into arguments about making other people work hard so we don’t have to.
Custom Tools: Environment Artists and Game Editors
Modders and XNA developers rejoice! Autodesk has begun shipping the Softimage Mod Tool version 7.5. The Mod Tool is a free version of Softimage (formerly XSI) for non commercial game creation. Huge new improvements in this new version are that it’s on the XSI 7 core now, which includes ICE (visual programming), support for Windows Vista, and other features such as export to XNA Game Studio 3.
Autodesk Softimage Mod Tool 7.5
Crytek has posted information on CryEngine 3 on their website, including the GDC 2009 video trailer and screenshots. The big news is that CryEngine 3 will run on consoles.
CryEngine 3
Here’s a great video of Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, showcasing some of the new features.
Watch on YouTube
Great article over at Gamasutra on choosing a game engine. Increasingly game engines and middleware are becoming a no-brainer in production. What used to be a build vs buy argument is veering towards a “buy” simply because it just costs too much and is far too risky to build your own. Great quote from Ulf Andersson (GRIN):
“I get the feeling that most developers who want to build their own are cocky bastards who just want to prove themselves,” he observes, “and that’s a good attitude to have, a very healthy one. But, for most start-ups, it’s far less risky to license somebody else’s engine. Today’s climate is very different from when we started in ‘97.”
Capcom/GRIN's Bionic Commando
Choosing the Game Engine that Can
Some exciting things are happening over at Garage Games as they prepare for the release of the new Torque 3D engine. Brett Seyler posted this update over at the GG site, along with some videos of the new engine in action. Nice!
http://www.vimeo.com/2814500 http://www.vimeo.com/2965415
GDC Torque 3D Post
Loads of great video content from Autodesk’s GDC theatre are available from The Area.
Customer Sessions
- Ubisoft, Prince of Persia
- Mythic Entertainment, an EA Studio Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
- Janimation, 007 Quantum of Solace Cinematic
Product Sessions
- Autodesk® HumanIK® / Autodesk® Kynapse®
- Autodesk® MotionBuilder®
- Autodesk® Maya®
- Autodesk® 3ds Max®
- Autodesk® Softimage®
- Autodesk® Mudbox™
http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/events/gdc_2009_videos
Autodesk showed its HumanIK animation middleware solution at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
HumanIK is a procedural motion adaptation middleware that complements existing animation engines. The three main benefits of HumanIK are:
- Free animators from having to produce every combination of animation to achieve realistic results. HumanIK uses procedural motion adaptation to ensure that characters interact with dynamic environments realistically at run-time. Retarget animation to characters of different proportions at run-time.
- Reduce the burden of animation data. Because HumanIK does its work at run-time, it reduces the amount of animation data that needs to be dealt with.
- Achieve realism. Characters can interact with environments more realistically than ever before.
One of the most common uses of HumanIK is dynamic foot placement. Characters will place their feet correctly on uneven surfaces.
Using a single climbing animation, HumanIK is able to procedurally place the character’s hands and feet on ladders of different rung spacing.
www.autodesk.com/humanik
