UMBC's got GAIM

Baltimore IGDA meeting: 7pm Thur 6 August at Firaxis

2009-07-31T14:03:09Z

The Baltimore IGDA Chapter (International Game Developers Association) will hold its next meeting hosted by Firaxis:

“This month we plan to do something a little different and encouraging participation from all who attend. The next meeting will be a round table discussion about “Motion Controls.” More specifically, we will be talking about game design with motion control. The round table discussion could involve any of the current motion control platforms (Wii, Wii Fit, Wii Motion Plus, iPhone, 6-axis, Eye-Toy, etc…), as well as any of the upcoming motion control platforms (Natal, PS Eye). We encourage anyone form any discipline who is interested in the subject to attend and speak their mind.”

The meeting will be held at Firaxis Games, 11350 McCormick Rd., Executive Plaza III, Suite 1100, Hunt Valley MD 21031 (map). Firaxis will be letting people into the office; no one should arrive before 6:45. After 7pm, the front doors will be locked and those coming into the building will need to sign in at the security desk on the lower floor (south side of the building).

Chapter meetings are open to all who want to attend, regardless of IGDA affiliation.

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Baltimore area game studio happenings

2009-06-30T17:08:38Z

Today’s Baltimore Sun reports that online social game studio Zynga is opening their first east coast office in Baltimore. Zynga makes games for the iPhone, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, etc., including the popular Mafia Wars game. The head of this new office will be Brian Reynolds, former CEO and one of the founders of Big Huge Games.

Slightly old news now, but Big Huge Games survived the “sale or close” threat by THQ with its sale to Curt Schilling’s 38 studios at the end of May.

In other (widely published) news, Rockville-based ZeniMax bought industry legend id Software (Doom, Quake, …). Future id games will be published by ZeniMax subsidiary Bethesda Softworks.

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CIGD is live.

2009-06-18T19:46:21Z

I presented the Center for Independent Game Development at the Baltimore IGDA meeting on May 21.

The CIGD is a departmental center at UMBC for the promotion of entrepreneurial game development. It is a collaboration with techcenter@umbc, UMBC’s tech business incubator.

Basically, UMBC wants to help you to start up a little company, make a game, and get rich. Longer-term goals include fostering research, expertise gathering, building a portal site.

A PDF of the presentation slides is at http://userpages.umbc.edu/~mcdo/IGDAMay.pdf

I’ll get a web site put up shortly.

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Video of Senior games online

2009-06-03T23:08:07Z

This semester, UMBC had its first offering of the Senior game development capstone class, with eight artists and seven programmers split into cross-disciplinary teams working on two games. The goal was to give them as real a game development experience as we could. The two games they developed were Jumper and Remnant.

Jumper is a first person shooter/stealth game in which you have the ability to jump into and possess others. The government has been holding you, frozen in a cryotube in a secret lab, but somehow today you thawed enough to jump into an unsuspecting guard. Can you escape? (youtube video)

Remnant is a zombie tower defense game. You build your defenses by day in hopes of surviving the hoards of zombies that descend each night. Can you survive long enough to find a cure and save humanity? (youtube video)

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Your web browser is your game platform

2009-04-21T19:50:57Z

We’ve all seen Flash games, which is great for extremely portable 2D gaming experiences, but what 3D? Well Khronos (the OpenGL standards organization) and now Google are working on browser plug-ins for 3D content. Google just released their O3D plugin, which gives shader-based hardware-accelerated 3D graphics across platforms (Windows and Mac) and browsers. Will it be the next cool game development toolset, or just another VRML/Cosmo3D? Hard to tell, but there’s a lot more capable hardware out there now than there was in the last time anyone tried a major push for 3D web plugins. I’m hopeful.

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UMBC Digital Entertainment Conference, April 25th

2009-04-15T16:09:19Z

The 4th annual UMBC Digital Entertainment Conference is coming up in just under two weeks! This event is organized by the UMBC Game Developers Club, and is free and open to the public, from 10-6 Saturday, April 25th in Lecture Hall 2 on the UMBC campus. This year’s conference features speakers from local studios Firaxis and Big Huge Games, who will talk about programming, game design and art in game development. For more information, go to umbcgdc.org/dec or sign up for the facebook event

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Artificial Intelligence middleware

2009-03-25T15:14:38Z

Middleware is that fuzzy area of software most game studios would write themeslves given infinite time and budget, but ultimately end up being cheaper or easier to buy. Some of these get glommed under the description “game engine”, but there are still lots of third-party tools that hook into the main engine to do just a little piece. Typical non-game-engine middleware components include video, sound, UI and physics. At the Game Developers Conference this week, Havok, maker of the most popular physics engine, announced Havok AI. This appears to be a competitor to Autodesk’s Kynapse (used by about 25% of the developers in Mark DeLoura’s recent survey). Havok also has Havok Behavior, that handles behavioral-level AI. Comparing feature lists of Havok AI + Havoc Behavior to Kynapse, both handle individual behavior and pathfinding in dynamically changing environments. It looks like Kynapse focuses more on crowd and team AI, while Havok AI has more sophisticated pathfinding, including nav mesh generation and predictive motion for moving obstacles. I think it’s good to see some competition in AI middleware, as one of the main results will probably be raising the overall bar on game AI.

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Big Huge Games in trouble

2009-03-19T16:57:33Z

Game publisher THQ acquired Maryland game studio Big Huge Games just over a year ago, January 15th 2008. Big Huge Games is probably most recognized for their “Rise of Nations” series. According to gamasutra, THQ is now looking for a buyer for Big Huge. If they cannot find a buyer “in the near future”, they’ll shut down the studio. Lots of good people there, including a number of UMBC grads, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

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Game Engine Survey

2009-03-11T15:35:19Z

Mark DeLoura (creator & editor of the Game Programming Gems series, former editor-in-chief of Game Developer Magazine) ran a very interesting survey, and has posted some of the results over on his Gamasutra blog. This survey asked 100 people in games industry senior management positions about their use of game engines. His post is well worth the read. Some highlights:

42% are working on titles costing less than $4M, and about 42% on titles costing over $16M.
The top five game engines they’ve actually used (multiple choices possible): Unreal is the big winner at 60%. Torque, Gamebryo and Source all come in around 20-25%, and CryENGINE is 5th at just under 10%
55% are using a game engine, but less than 10% say they’d rather use a third party game engine rather than build their own. This fits with what I’ve heard from people in the industry. A third party game engine never does exactly everything you want, so there’s always a fair degree of frustration when using one. On the other hand, it’s expensive and takes time to develop your own.
For rapid prototyping (with multiple choices possible), over 70% use C/C++, about 50% are using pencil and paper, and Flash and Lua each come in at just over 20%.

There’s lots more there. Check it out!

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NVIDIA announces NVIRT

2009-03-01T00:17:24Z

I’m at the I3D conference this weekend. That’s the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games. Listening to the banquet speaker now, Austin Robison of NVIDIA on Real Time Ray Tracing. They’re releasing an API (Application Program Interface) for ray tracing on the GPU. Sounds interesting, especially for baking images of run-time generated scenes and objects. Don’t think I’d run out and reimplement a full game in it, but could be a nice tool for some load-time or mid-game preprocessing.

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