VizWorld.com

Now here’s an interesting announcement right before Christmas.  Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, has just announced a new CEO, and the selection might surprise you:  Format EA executive and man behind the scenes of EverQuest and The Sims Rod Humble.

“Rod is a great new leader for Linden Lab,” said Philip Rosedale, Founder of Second Life. “Second Life has become a consistently large and profitable business with a thriving virtual economy built together with its passionate Resident community. This has always been a big, long-term vision, it is still early and there is enormous opportunity for growth. With Rod’s fresh insights and deep experience in creating and leading the development of fun, intuitive, immersive entertainment experiences that have attracted massive audiences of loyal users, he’s the right leader to understand what makes us special and bring the next level of growth to Second Life.”

“Joining Linden Lab is a very exciting opportunity,” said Humble. “I have a long standing interest in the how the boundaries of society and economics change as communications evolve in new ways. Second Life is unique: it sits at the intersection of virtual worlds, avatars, and human contact. The Residents and developers of Second Life have built something very special, I am honored to join the talented team at Linden Lab to help expand this new frontier.”

While I’m glad to see someone with some experience come to the job, I’m a bit nervous that Second Life may turn into a type of open-area Arcade.  All in all, I suppose that wouldn’t be all bad but I hope they don’t begin to sacrifice features for the sake of ‘gameplay’.

via Second Life’s New Leader: Rod Humble Becomes CEO of Linden Lab | Linden Lab.

Graphics ea, linden labs, second life, virtual worlds

A pair of sad, unusual, and conflicting reports coming out of EA.  With disappointing financials posted for the last quarter (a loss of $391Million), EA has decided to trim the “fat” and laid off an amazing 1500 people including management, support staff, developers, and graphics artists.  An internal memo reads:

First, we announced a cost restructuring that involves reducing the number of titles for FY11, enabling us to focus and invest more in our most important franchises and our most promising new IPs. This restructuring involves the elimination of approximately 1,500 jobs across EA. Cuts are being made for titles we are eliminating and in support and corporate areas.* Some team sizes are being reduced and programs that are not working as we’d like are being cut. This is a tough decision that comes with a heavy price for our colleagues – but it is the right decision for EA.* We are sympathetic to everyone that is affected and appreciate everyone’s help as we regroup and move forward.

Also, amidst all the layoffs, EA has decided to boost its position in the social games space by dropping $300M on Playfish.

EA has acquired Playfish for approximately US$275 million in cash and approximately $US25 million in equity retention arrangements. In addition, the sellers are entitled to additional variable cash consideration, up to a maximum of US$100 million, contingent upon the achievement of certain performance milestones through December 31, 2011.

Good luck to all of you former EA employees, and if I was at Playfish I’ld seriously start brushing up my resumé.

via Icrontic Gaming » Massive layoffs looming over EA.

Graphics ea, financial, playfish, video game

EASports has created the “Fifa Earth”, visualizing the results of the 2 million FIFA 10 Sports games played each day.

The online “data visualizer” consists of 3 distinct live and interactive elements. “Fifa Buzz” shows recent Twitter messages that contain key words or hash-tags such as ‘Goals’, ‘Fussbal’, or ‘Soccer’, or any other number of searches such as players ‘Rooney’, ‘Benzema’, or ‘Xavi’ that relate to FIFA or football. These tweets are geo-located and time-coded and placed in real-time on a 3D football-shaped globe.

It’s a massive dataset to manage with over 2 billion games played last year.

via FIFA Earth: Visualizing more than 2 Million Daily Soccer Video Games – information aesthetics.

Graphics, Science ea, soccer, sports, videogame

EA’s newest Fight Night 4 videogame made a big splash at SIGGRAPH this year, thanks to its fantastic physics modeling and graphics, and now FrameStore has come out with their ads for the game showing off even more of the fantastic details.  They discuss the details of their work in a new interview on CGNews.

“The challenge throughout the project was to stay true to the game footage while creating a more cinematic atmosphere,” said the co-director of the spot, Andy Walker. “It would have been easy to apply the gloss and finesse of pre-rendered footage, but we needed to keep the raw, real time quality, so that we could seamlessly mix post rendered graphics with the game capture.”

via Framestore & Sound Lounge Hit The Ring For Fight Night | CGnews.

Graphics commercial, ea, framestore, vfx, videogame

Looks like the most recent patch to EA’s Spore game has a new hidden feature: COLLADA export.  With this, you can export your creates into COLLADA format, complete with textures and materials, and render them in the package of your choice.

With Spore’s just released patch 5, you can export creatures (and buildings and vehicles) from Spore into Maya (or any other 3D application that supports the Collada format). All thanks to the brilliant Dan Moskowitz.

The exported creations include normal, diffuse and specular maps, and are fully rigged and weighted. So you can pose them too.

Currently it’s only Creatures, although the article hints at buildings and vehicles coming in a future patch.

via Ocean Quigley’s various projects:: You can export Spore creatures to Maya.

Graphics collada, ea, spore, videogame