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Impressive visuals, although I personally know nothing of the game.

Graphics ps3, sports, videogame, xbox

OnLive has come out swinging against the bad report written by Ryan Shrout last week, claming that his experience is not representative of the actual product because of his distance to a suitable hosting center.  Also, apparently the current version of the OnLive system hard-codes routes from users to specific hosting centers, so a user’s account is fixed to communicate only to one specific center.

The fact that Ryan Shrout was outside that area means, according to OnLive, there was no possibly way to give him a good experience. “The reason location is so critical is because of the speed of light. If you are more than 1,000 miles from an OnLive data center, then the round trip communications delay (‘ping’ time) between your home and OnLive will be too long for fast-action video games.”

Unfortunately, some other “anonymous” beta testers have come forward claiming that the experience isn’t much better in the “idea scenario”.  Of course, they are unconfirmed and uncorroborated, so take it all with a grain of salt.

via OnLive responds to bad press, more beta testers speak out.

Hardware onlive, videogame

CGSociety has an interview with Jeremy Bennet, Character Designer, and Randy Lundeen, Environment Designer, who both worked on Left 4 Dead 2.  In the interview they discuss the design of the environment, throughout the Southeast, and get into the various details of the tiny effects that contribute not only to the visual effects but to the subtle player psychology of the game.

“Also, in order to help guide players through the swamps, we wanted to have the water generally flow down the path to the end of the map in a way that was subtle enough to be natural, but clear enough to cue the players to their intended route.  We implemented a new water shader that could have a unique flow direction and water speed at every point on the water surface. We used Houdini to generate flow maps offline by first painting 2D flow directions manually. Another campaign that needed some additional effects work was “Hard Rain.”"

via CGSociety – Left 4 Dead 2.

Graphics interview, videogame

Those great little plastic blocks that kept us all busy with ideas are under fire from the “Maelstrom” in a new Massive Multiplayer Online game from NetDevil.

With a creative and building focus, LEGO Universe invites players to explore, battle, make friends, and flex their imaginations with the brick in a vibrant online world. Developed by The LEGO Group and NetDevil, LEGO Universe is a family-friendly online game, appropriate for players aged eight and above.  The LEGO brick lies at the center of the experience, and several levels of building are available, from simple gameplay-oriented challenges all the way up to sophisticated brick-by-brick building.

The game itself looks like pretty standard MMO fare: Help NPC, earn “Plastic”, use “Plastic” to buy blocks and weapons, repeat.  Unlike other MMO’s, however, it uses the entire Lego brand so that you can fight in medieval castles, space stations, formula 1 race cars, and more.  Watch the trailer above first, then go check out their website.

Graphics lego, mmo, videogame

Montreal based “Artificial Mind and Movement” (A2M) recently released “WET”, their third-person mature shooter combining acrobatics and swordplay that uses an interesting dual-targeting mechanic.  Autodesk products were instrumental in the development of the game and a press release from Autodesk details how they used Maya, MotionBuilder, and Kynapse to pull it all together.

“Our main philosophy with regards to development tools has always been that if it’s good and it already exists with the right price tag, why reinvent it?” explains Martin Walker, CTO, A2M. “That’s why we chose to work with Kynapse as our AI engine for WET. In the game, the player confronts a large number of enemies. We needed a path-finding and location-awareness system to control decision making for these characters in a coherent manner.”

Walker continues, “Kynapse has a fantastic hide-and-shoot algorithm that was used to conceal and disperse the enemies in a natural way throughout environments.”

via Autodesk – Games – Artificial Mind & Movement (A2M).

Graphics a2m, autodesk, kynapse, maya, motionbuilder, videogame

OnLive, the popular but yet unreleased remote gaming technology company, reached an important milestone today by demonstrating their system working on an iPhone.

Today, at a Wedbush financial conference in New York I showed OnLive running simultaneously on 2 iPhones, a TV, and a computer. What is really cool is that all 4 devices had access to the full OnLive Game Service, so they could play the same games, spectate on each other’s (and Beta users’) game play, watch Brag Clips, check out Gamer Profiles, etc.

Now, they’re careful to note that the experience is tuned for Computers, and I have to admit I’m not so sure how the latest Modern Warfare 2 would work with nothing but a touchscreen interface.  Nonetheless, it’s an important step towards bringing remote gaming to the masses.

via OnLive in the Palm of Your Hand « OnLive Blog.

Hardware iphone, mobile, onlive, videogame

All of you young budding game developers have a new toolkit in your arsenal, the newly released Unreal Development Kit.  A new free version of the popular Unreal3 & Development tools, it brings the power of the Unreal Engine into hands of game developers worldwide.

“I’m excited about the possibilities the Unreal Development Kit opens to those who are looking to get into the game business but don’t otherwise have the means to acquire world-class technology and tools like ours,” said Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games. “UDK is Unreal Engine 3, which has been used to create games in a wide range of genres, as well as military simulations, 3D architectural walkthroughs, animated movies and more. Users are only limited by their imaginations. Go ahead make something Unreal!”

The UDK comes with PhysX, LightMass, AnimTree, integration systems for SpeedTree, Bink, and FaceFX, and all of the usual Unreal Engine features like UnrealScript.  Licensing restricts it to noncommercial or educational use, so you’ll eventually need to purchase a commercial license if you plan to sell your game.

via News – Epic UDK.

Graphics, Science engine, library, sdk, unreal, videogame

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

The new commercial for the Madden NFL10 was created by The Mill and showcases some interesting use of Massive, the large agent modeling and simulation tool.

What were the challenges of creating the Massive agents for this spot?

The main challenge of the Massive work was trying to get the crowd to work as a diverse crowd and then work as for one team or another team. In the wide shot there are about 17,000 agents. It was tricky to get them all to do what we wanted. We had to make the agents a little random, to act like a huge crowd, but also consistent because the whole point of the spot is to make the players and fans of the opposing teams push against each other.

via VFX Football Standoff for Madden NFL 10 | Studio Daily.

Graphics commercial, massive, the mill, vfx, videogame