http://www.gamedev.net/Maximum game development!en-ushttp://www.gamedev.net/pics/gdnet-88x31.gifhttp://www.gamedev.net/Maximum Game Development!http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=507416Here's some reading material to keep all you folks (including me) occupied along the east coast as you hunker down and wait out Tropical Storm Hanna over the weekend. The rest of you out in the wide world can stop by if you have some free time over the weekend to catch up on any projects you're following along with over at Journal Land, as well as check out useful links and development insights from the past week. After last week's rather lame "highlight", I give you a more bountiful feast this week, so enjoy!http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=507404A greatly expanded 9 level demo and massive FREE content update for the FPS Environment Pack...http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=507397GDC Austin Audio Track Preview: flOw Composer Austin Wintory discusses his views on the current state and future of game music: "Game composers are going to start losing work to more 'art-minded' film composers if an industry-wide attitude change doesn't start to take place."http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=507358I hate to be a broken record of the whole developer/journalist thing that I started last week but the "Sore Thumbs" blog that Dan Hsu and Crispin Boyer, both formerly of Electronic Gaming Monthly, have been writing over the course of the last couple of weeks is simply a gold mine of superb reading material. Today I bring you part four and then a suprise entry which describes gaming journalism from the view of a gaming publisher. This time around the more interesting discussion material comes from the publisher's entry which discusses some of the reasons why a publisher may be hard or particularly bribetastic in order to make sure that their game(s) get a fair shake from reviewers. And, since this is a site for game developers, I'm sure that a lot of you will understand the publisher's point of view quite well. I spent a year or so as an actual games journalist myself and have a history of writing independent pieces and, from my viewpoint, I can see both sides of the argument. I think developers can learn a lot from the perspective of a journalist (such as the kind of environment a journalist typically reviews games in) whereas the journalist has to know just enough about the game development process to be able to competently write an intelligent analysis of a game. I think game developers can benefit more from learning about the journalistic process than the other wayaround and, to all of my super amazing lovely readers of this piece, I'd encourage actually making friends in the games journalism industry. In less editorialized news, Sony thinks that the game they're publishing can be a global success. I'm not sure I would really expect any other slant placed on the release of their own game but, yeah, okay. LittleBigPlanet, developed by Media Molocule, can be seen sitting in the same sandbox revolution house as EA/Maxis' upcoming Spore as a game that places content creation at its forefront and provides game mechanics as a means of utilizing that content in any number of imaginable scenarios. Sony Worldwide Studios president, Shuhei Yoshida, said of technology potentially creating culture differences in game reception: "We've overcome some of the cultural issues so far, but looking forward, because of the hardware, the technology, we're making very realistic human characters, and bringing a lot more production values, storytelling, humour - and that's very powerful if you're in the same culture. But that may start making a title unacceptable in a major way. So there's a fine line between furthering our art, but still trying to appeal to everybody." The difference is, of course, that a game like LittleBigPlanet could transcend culture, age, and gaming audiences due to the freeform nature of it. Really, though, it just comes down to the fact that if I don't have the game soon I may, in point of fact, explode. Speaking of games that I want sooner than now, Spore came out this week if you're anywhere other than the United States and despite every gamer and his mother outside myself and intelligent people saying "I don't see what's so great about it, it doesn't look that good" as if it was some kind of faux-edgy mantra, Will Wright's evolutional opus is scoring pretty well. Unfortunately, though, it would appear that the game has already been pirated due to broken street dates for the Australian release of the game. Luckily, though, there's most likely no real worry for Electronic Arts as the game will still sell millions and can, most likely, be developed for many other platforms and still like even more copies on the various releases on the Wii, Nintendo DS, Xbox 360, and the inevitable expansion packs that the PC version will see. I don't really care. I want to play it now. Why couldn't the US have been the last country to see a game release for a game that I don't wantneed? Your game of the weekend is probably best served by the X-COM: Complete Pack on Steam. Yeah. You should probably see about that. Now.http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=507263I'm not in the United States of America, and I'm not in Canada (so, it's really a country?1) so my week is 5 days long. I'm jealous. Something pretty cool happened a couple of days ago: Timothy Martin of GameDeveloperTools.com announced on GameDev.Net that he implemented a rating system on the aforementioned website. Of course, the coolness factor is not that he did it (although that's great) but because because you asked for it. And that's hyper cool. Thanks Tim - you rock. When you're an 11 year-old girl, you have many things to do: school, homework, room cleaning, eat with parents, school, homework again, room cleaning again, eat with parents and so on. Occasionally, you can also take the time to save them from some kind of atrocious death2 that may happen if your dad's car just went berserk and decided to rest on its side after 4 rolls. You unlock your belt, go through the broken rear window, grab your parents arms and help them to leave the car. You have pretty good reasons to do that, as your mother says: "She just knew, from playing 'Grand Theft Auto.' She saw on there that when a car rolls over, it can blow up. She knew that could happen to us.". While I agree that the whole thing is amazingly cool, a few words retained my attention: namely, "GTA" and "11 years old". Wasn't this game supposed to be M-rated? Apart from the fact that cars don't explode very often (especially when they are not on fire), isn't that odd to see some random parents thanking their child because she plays a game known to be violent and cynical? Unless - of course - they use video gaming as a substitute for parenting. Anyway, the news will please at least one game development company (I'm now waiting for "GTA IV - 11 y.o. special edition" with T rating). The Kingdom of Wild Rumors hit hard with it's last, well, rumor: apparently, someone said once that maybe a guy at ESA told to an unknown level 8 bard that there exists a possibility that next year's E3 would go public again. The ESA doesn't comment on rumors so it's impossible to know whether next year's E3 will draw good reviews or not but it seems that the industry is pushing hard to get its advertevent back on the gamer's radars. I already foresee the next E3-related rumor: the return of booth babes. I promise you we'll feature that on our front page2 if it ever happens. Also, {DI|F}A*O* 3 {DI|F}A*O* 3 {DI|F}A*O* 3 {DI|F}A*O* 3 {DI|F}A*O* 3 {DI|F}A*O* 3 {DI|F}A*O* 3 (yes, that's a lousy regular expression). Footnotes 1) Awesome Chuck knows I'm kidding. 2) bonus: the awesomeness was brought to you by the daughter of the Norris family. 3) with pics, I mean. http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=507226A new Unigine-powered "Tropics" demo is released and available for download now. Key features of the demo are dynamic sky with light scattering, live water with a surf zone and caustics, special materials for vegetation, and real-time ambient occlusion. It supports all modern graphical APIs: DirectX 9, DirectX 10, and OpenGL. Both Windows and Linux version are available. There is a benchmarking feature in the demo also. Read more in the official press-release.http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=507156As of late there hasn't been very much to sink our teeth into as far as game industry news goes, but you already knew that and have heard it several times already, so at the risk of disappointing you, I'll just go ahead and summarize what is going on out there right now, albeit not much. Gamasutra reported recently that Stardock, the Galactic Civilizations creator, has announced a PC "gamer's bill of rights". CEO Brad Wardell, talks about the ten commandments with Gamasutra, it will be interesting to see what the overall response is from the consumers. From the developers perspective we can all nit-pick little issues, but maybe the conversations and debates about the content of the "gamer's bill of rights" are more important than the actual content. Also from Gamasutra, it appears that Senior Producer Rod Fergusson has said that he believes we're getting close to maxing out the xbox 360. He admits there will continue to be improvements but they may not come as fast as they have in the past. Does this mean that devs are really starting to write code utilizing all of the cores on the 360 and maxing out the Xenos? I guess we'll see as future games release and we get feedback from devs through their post mortems whether everyone is feeling this way. In other news today, Disney Studios plans to double its video game development in the next few years. The Euro Gamer expo has been announced and Spore is expected to sell 2 million copies in the US this September alone. Hope you're having an awesome (short, if you're in the US or Canada) week!http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=507143Lyon, France. September 3rd 2008. PathEngine announces release 5.17.00 of their pathfinding and agent movement SDK, with the main focus being some very significant optimisations to the SDK preprocess save and load mechanisms. We're also very pleased to announce licensing (since our previous release announcement) to Lionhead (UK), Skyfallen Entertainment (Russia), Colourblind Entertainment (UAE), SK imedia, Goorm Interactive, Ntreev Soft, PlayBuster, and Pseudoware (Korea). http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=507102The GameDeveloperTools.com Ratings & Reviews system is now live! Visitors are encouraged to stop by and rate their favorite books, engines, libraries, and other tools. At the heart of the new system is the Total Score, which is calculated using both the average rating and product popularity. Read more about the Total Score here.http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=507071So I come in today, like any other Monday, and set about doing some work, and generally feeling quite productive for the beginning of a week. Except...yesterday was in fact Labor Day, and a Monday, and thus today is Tuesday. You know, the day I write the Daily. Oops goddamnit. You all owe Trent for reminding me. In decidedly non game development news, Google has announced their new web browser, Google Chrome. Beta, of course. Apparently they set out to build a modern browser based on the modern day web. It includes such features as keeping tabs in isolated sandboxes (quiet IE8) and keeping the tabs above everything, including the address bar (quiet Opera). It also seems to be quite blue, and was introduced via a comic book. Now that's innovation, market fragmentation be damned. (At least it's webkit based, although the &#106avascript engine is apparently something new.) PAX 08 is over, but there's still some lingering news -- mainly that attendance was a mind boggling 58,500 people, putting it very nearly at the size of the former E3. There is of course, one key difference -- PAX, unlike E3, isn't a giant marketing party. Amongst its decidedly non-marketing events was the sex and violence in videogames panel, which I can only assume involved much demand for both, in every game. Notably, former Nintendo VP Perrin Kaplin expressed some pretty strong views: Quote:The filled crowd exploded into cheers when Kaplin restated her opinion that parents who use videogames as a babysitter should not be allowed to have sex to begin with. Which is of course nothing but hyperbole, and I'm shocked that an executive would just blurt out something ridiculous. There's basically no real news today, or at least no particularly interesting news. I could point out that the Germans hate Spore, or that Live Arcade is getting not one but three new games tomorrow, but honestly, those things are pretty weak. I suggest reading about the biggest hole in the world instead.http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=507049The 2008 Retro Remakes Big Competition is on! Head over to http://www.retroremakes.com and get going!http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=506989I must apologize in advance for today's unseasonably late GDNet Daily. You see, I was busy dealing with the Labour Day traffic and trying to track down a copy of Mercenaries 2. My quest unfulfilled, I must now sate myself by providing evening news bites for you all. This weekend was PAX, as you may know, and so a lot of developers had a bit too much liquor and shot their mouths off. In attendance are Todd Howard (Fallout 3), The Behemoth, Telltale Games, Jonathan Coulton, Freezepop, Ken Levine and an inexplicable puppet-oriented Fallout 3 dance troupe. Cliffy B may or may not have been in attendance, but he still broke PC gamers' hearts by denying them another chance at Steroid Infused Third Person Shooter. Those of you like me, who were looking forward to romping through the fairyland of Chernobyl with an assault rifle at their hip, must wait even longer for Clear Sky, as some intern has screwed up and forgotten to include CD keys with the retail copies. TIGJam 2008, which I've mentioned previously, is going absolutely crazy. Their first venue is packed to the rafters with serial killers independent game developers. The good news? If you couldn't make it out to Arizona for this one, Yu and co are encouraging you to start your own TIGJam! If you're too indie for the indies, this is the short period of time for you! How can you participate? Sit in a room! Be creative! Wear a beret! Invite your non-creative garbage friends over and yell at them as only you can! Some people took offense to a little game called 9/11 Invaders, so the author had to pull it from the Leipzig games convention. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more coverage, to be honest. It's obviously disturbing subject matter, but it deserves at least the same level of debate and discussion as the utterly repulsive school shooting games which captured the media over the last few months. Perhaps your local Fox affiliate is too busy worrying about exploding party vans to cover the game Taito went ballistic over. The TIGSource bootleg demakes contest is drawing to a close next week! If you have an idea, you have to make it right now! Otherwise, tune in next week for coverage of my favourite demakes, or view the mockups thread for some of the best anachronistic bastardizations of popular entertainment software money can buy. Before I go, Mini LD #3 is this weekend! If you want to enter, and I know you do, you could do a lot worse than to hang out with the Ludum Dare guys. Their previous competitions have produced some great stuff, and why don't you want a part of that? Promit will be by tomorrow to touch you inappropriately in most (but not all) bodily areas. Better program the indecent assault hotline into your speed dial!http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=506855Ever wanted to actually affect the objects you shoot at, applying a bit of damage, maybe destroy it altogether in a ball of fire smoke and sparks, leaving only a smoking wreck behind? Now you can. Kaboom!Pack or Destroyable Objects for Torque will give you just that.http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=506700The Nvscene demo competition was held during the NVision 2008 conference. The results of the competition are available now online on pouet.net.http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=506642It's a tight schedule for me today, so I was a bit picky on choosing entries for this week's Weekend Reading. There wasn't a whole lot of entries this past week, so you can easily find all the recent updated on the main Journal Land page. The highlights are after the jump.