Monday, February 23, 2009

The Escapist Show coveres the Triangle Global Game Jam

The Triangle site of the global game jam was covered by The Escapist Show:



After the "48 hours later" montage, all games shown were developed by our game jam group.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Triangle Game Conference - Confirmed Speaker


I'm a confirmed speaker for the Triangle Game Conference, April 29 and 30, 2009. There's a good line up of presenters, from companies including:
  • Crytek
  • Destineer
  • Emergent Game Technologies
  • Epic
  • Insomniac
  • Red Storm
  • Vicious Cycle
  • Virtual Heroes
(Are you surprised to learn that only one of these companies isn't local to the Triangle?)

Thursday, February 19, 2009

dAb 3D Painting Research Licensed

[Edit 2010-03-15: A new project at Microsoft has been announced that looks a lot like dAb, Gustav]

In 2000 I collaborated with Bill Baxter on a 3D paint brush system that was presented at Siggraph 2001. Less talk, more video:


dAb: Interactive Haptic Painting with 3D Virtual Brushes (Siggraph01)

Bill continued the line of research for his PhD, and you can see some great improvements to the paint model and brush simulation:


IMPaSTo: A Realistic Model for Paint (NPAR04)


A Versatile Interactive 3D Brush Model (PG2004)

Over the years, we've had a few large companies inquire about licensing the research. I'm excited to say that we've closed a package deal for several systems! Perhaps you'll see this technology in consumer applications in a few years.

For more details, visit the dAb webpage.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Building a Game Engine Product vs Internal Tech

Yesterday I was reminded again of the difference between developing Gamebryo as a product and typical studio internal tech.

Joel, over at Insomniac, mentioned how much he enjoyed only working on one platform, and only supporting one version of Maya. While Gamebryo supports several versions each of Maya, Max, and XSI. We cover Win32 with 2 compilers / 2 versions of DirectX / static & DLL configs, Xbox360, PlayStation 3, and Wii. And, for good measure, we keep some of the code running on Linux.

David Boss also happened to have just given an update on our build system. He's running continuous integration on all platforms with unit tests; a full build; extensive regression tests; and packaging into DVD images. This turns over every night. That's impressive for an engine, tool set, and art library this size!

Monday, February 2, 2009

Global Game Jam: Robot Love

The Global Game Jam weekend is over, and I'm excited to say I got to help out on Robot Love:

High Resolution Version available on youtube website.

The theme was, "As Long as We Have Each Other we'll never run out of Problems..."

Gameplay: A 2 player co-op game with a simple gimmick, you need to stand next to the other player to reload! Two robots are escaping their factory, chased by mobs of other zombie robots.

Credits:
  • Demond Rogers (Epic) did an awesome job at the character animations.
  • Jason Connell (Red Storm) built the 2.5D environment.
  • Adrienne Walker (Emergent) was ninja lead programmer.
  • Harrison Moore did sound and UI.
  • Will McGuire coded and placed enemies and props in the level.
  • Mike Daly (Emergent) chipped in on level file format and robot AI.
  • Vincent Scheib (Emergent) helped with collision, a bit of gameplay, and gamestate/screens.
Download it!