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=552633Entries from 10/31 - 11/5 Journal Land Pick of the Week IfThen Software LLC - Newsletter #51: A small Halloween game was released; New rendering system; New iScribble sketches; Community spotlight on the interchangeability of mods from SAO to the recent Halloween gamehttp://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552553I want to point out that yesterday was November 5th and I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt as we walked around in 81F weather. Texas is a brilliant place. Also: every time a girl says "Y'all" I swoon a little bit. The big news of the week that, for once, isn't Infinity Ward causing some crazy scandal, but rather that Epic released a free version of their Unreal Editor called the UDK. This is a vastly improved release of the editor that, supposedly, has features that aren't even in any commercial game yet. More to the point, it's a better mod/development solution than the Unreal Tournament 3 editor which, while powerful, has some stability issues (and a painful Generic Browser compared to the UDK one). And while the release of UDK is huge on its own, Epic has also updated the license terms (quoted from Gamasutra): "[...] creators will still need to obtain an official licensing agreement to develop a commercial project using UE3; according to the new licensing terms, Epic receives twenty-five percent of revenue after the first $5,000 is made, with a per-seat yearly fee also potentially applying if the project is solely used internally." Very cool. Between this and Unity (which serves a very different audience), independent developers are having some high-quality tools in the wild now. In case you didn't already know, Dragon Quest IX is kind of a big deal. For comparison purposes: Madden NFL 2010, a hugely popular game, that has been released across the Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, and PSP in the United States and the UK, has sold 2.61M copies from July to September (it was actually released in August). Now, Dragon Quest IX, which has only been released on the Nintendo DS (and, even then, only in Japan) tops the chart with 3.92M units sold. My brain has just 'sploded all over your collective faces with how popular this game is. So Halo: Reach screen shots have leaked. Or may be fakes. Either way, that's a thing. There's also an anime which, um, I guess is a thing that Halo fans always wanted. I'd much have preferred the Neill Blomkamp (District 9 director) movie, but I guess anime is a replacement. Bayonetta still looks absolutely insane. Basically it's a game about the life of super-sexified Sarah Palin in bizarro world. Or something like that. I don't know. Video games are really getting bizarre. None of this news is as important as the fact that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is getting closer to its release. In this case it's a Playstation 3-exclusive demo, but I won't pick hairs. I want this game. Badly. At this point in the Daily, I think it's time for me to admit that I must go play Dragon Age right now. It's not a game that I expected to get, but Tuesday night I discovered that there was a Best Buy near my apartment, so I drove (for the first time in two months) to go get a 360 copy. I am really digging the game, far more than I expected. I'm also, as expected, very engrossed in Forza 3 and all of the things I loaded onto my PSP Go. Yes, I finally caved and got a PSP Go. Don't judge me. I could also tell you about my Halloween night, but I think that's inappropriate for a Daily. Cliff notes: I got in a cane fight with a person dressed as a 105-year-old, Walker Texas Ranger stalked us, there was a Bichon dressed as a Bumble Bee, and if you're the girl that I ran into I could really use your number.http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552546Aurora Feint Inc., developer of the most popular social gaming platform and network for the iPhone, announced OpenFeint Gold, a recognition program for the developers of extraordinarily high quality games that use OpenFeint. OpenFeint Gold titles will be extensively promoted by Aurora Feint Inc. on www.openfeint.com, on the openfeint dashboard in other games and on partner websites. "I am personally very excited to bring this program to our game development community," said Jason Citron, Founder and CEO, of Aurora Feint. "When we launched Aurora Feint: The Beginning, on July 11 last year, I was delighted to get recognition from all over including game of the year on the iPhone and this is our way of recognizing other incredible quality games."http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552545It's time for another Late Night Daily. I'm not trying to make a habit of this, I swear. As always though, it'll be worth the wait. Studio News - Microsoft, Square Enix, Polyphony Digital. Microsoft has completed its current round of layoffs by letting go of 800 employees, pushing the finally tally to just over the 5,000 estimated to be cut back in January. Of course, there's nothing to stop future layoffs from hitting the company, but for now at least things are back in equilibrium. Square Enix has also been reducing its workforce after being bought out by Eidos, most likely largely due to redundancy. So far the global headcount reduction across SE offices has be pinned at about 10% - Square says the integration with Eidos is proceeding "smoothly". Polyphony Digital's main man, Kazunori Yamauchi, was at SEMA motor show, where he did a rough calculation of the cost of GT5 over its 5 year development cycle. The result? Around $60 million. That's about 35 Bugatti Veyrons. Education News - Penny Arcade, Abu Dhabi, Activision. Penny Arcade has awarded its 2009 $10,000 scholarship, which means it's time for all you kids out there in school to mark your calendars to find out details of the 2010 scholarship, which will be announced this spring. Abu Dhabi, best known as the city Nermal always ends up in, is now starting up a games academy to help grow and attract industry. They've already got Gazillion dabbling in an MMO studio over there, so seems like they're off to a running start. Activision is taking a slightly different tack, creating a video campaign that aims to educate parents on game ratings and the benefits games can have for their children besides teaching them how to get money back from hookers. Litigation News - Activision, Sony. [B]Activision[/b] can't seem to catch a break. First Courtney Love sues them for allowing players to actually play her late husband Kurt Cobain in Guitar Hero 5, and now No Doubt are hopping on the bandwagon based upon the fact that their characters can be used to play any song in the game's album. Now - the key in both these lawsuits is that the artists in question did not expect their virtual selves to be able to sing anything but their own music. So, is it Activision being purposefully (and evilly) sneaky in their contract wording, or did both Love and the group No Doubt (and their lawyers) simply have no understanding of the game at all? Either way looks like a chunk of their massive profit will be going to legal fees. Sony is dealing with another class action lawsuit from PS3 owners who had their consoles bricked due to a firmware update, perhaps spurred on by this one I reported back at the beginning of October. The complaint and charges are much the same, although they've listed every PS3 system owner who installed the firmware. No word on whether the install had to be successful or not. Sure, I'll take a few bucks in restitution for all my non-problems with my PS3. Symbian App Store open for business. If you like going against the grain, or forging out into new territories, or whatever you use to describe your pioneering spirit (or are simply a Symbian developer) then Symbian has details for developers about their new "Horizon" app store, which has launched with 50 apps already in the catalog. Daily Remainders - more cool stories that didn't make the cut along with game dev articles/features. Everyone loves pinning the Devil horns atop Microsoft's head, but every now and then they pull a great PR stunt out of their tails, like this story of the dog who spent $60 on XBL while he chewed up the controller. Instead of ridiculing the guy for leaving his console on overnight and wasting electricity, MS refunded his money (and then some), gave him a new controller and even created a Gamertag for his dog. I have 4 dogs, and one of them is bound to gnaw on my controller if I leave it on the floor overnight. Now, I wonder if Sony would be so generous... Hey, if you were one of the apparently many indie developers that were put off by Game Lawyer Tom Buscaglia's stance on the Langdell issue, he's trying his best to apologize to you. Tom's a personal friend and a great guy, he can do a lot to help you and your business and really does have the best interest of indies in mind. Finally, here's a quick follow-up to the image I used in my last Daily - the orgins of the shirt and the Mac versions. Read this post in Chinesehttp://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552515Epic Games, Inc. announces the launch of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), a free edition of Unreal Engine 3 that provides community access to the award-winning toolset like never before. This software release is available to anyone interested in using 3D game engine technology, including game developers, students, hobbyists, researchers, creators of 3D visualizations and simulations, and digital filmmakers. Anyone can start working with the industry-leading Unreal Engine 3 toolset by downloading UDK at www.udk.com, where detailed product features, technical documentation, commercial licensing terms, support resources and more are also available.http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552512The 2010 Independent Games Festival (IGF 2010) has received a record number of entries to the Main Competition. In total, this year's Main Competition has garnered 306 game entries, many of which were created by leading independent game developers. The record-setting number of Main Competition entries represents a 35% increase over last year's record 226 entries, which in itself represented a 30% increase over the previous year, providing further evidence of the growing significance and prominence of independent game development.http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552498John W. Ratcliff has released a demonstration application and binary plugins for his MeshImport library. The MeshImport library is an open source project which allows developers to easily import and export full skeletal, animated, deformed, meshes using a simple API in a wide variety of graphics file formats. This release showcases the EZmesh graphics format. http://www.codesuppository.blogspot.com/http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552397Bearing fruit: Apple have confirmed (after third party speculation) that there is now over 100,000 apps on the App Store - a gushing endorsement. Whilst perhaps over editorialising here, I can't help feel that this isn't great news for developers. With such an already huge (and growing) number of apps people are already saying that success comes from being close enough to Apple to get featured. I'm holding out for the "get featured by Apple" app. Ubisoft posts huge loss: Ubisoft are reporting a 80 million loss in the first half of their fiscal year. The company are still claiming to be on track for the rest of the year as it's weighted the biggest titles, games such as Assassin's Creed 2, for the end of this year. Charity Starts at home: At least it does for Zo Mode anyway. The games industry chraity inititative OneBigGame who raise money for children by the power of gaming have released details about "Chime" developed by Zo Mode. It's available on XBox Live this winter and has seen contributions from music artists such as Moby and Paul Hartnoll. Nice one, guys. iRage: John Carmack of id Software has talked about his desire to build an iPhone game based on Rage to coincide with its release on the other platforms in 2010. However the team at id are struggling to allocate resources to the iPhone with only 2 people working full time on the platform. Time is money. Money is time. XBox 360 Scuttles Pirates: Modded your XBox 360 console to play pirate games? Well you've probably been forced to walk the plank along with the rest of the scurvy dogs that Microsoft have banned from the service. An important point is raised, however - if you've bought a used machine that was previously banned - you ain't covered due to non-transferrable warranties. Jumping ship: Following on the pirate and sea-based theme, OTX are reporting (via Gamasutra) that up to 15% of people that play on the XBox 360 are looking to buy their sequels on the PS3. I'd say I was included in that stat myself. Odds and Sods FIFA 2010 is doing well in JapanDon't expect Modern Warfare 2 on the Wii just yetUK Sci-Fi Writer Richard K. Morgan writing for EANow-defunct studio Midway are claiming they were forced to add Multiplayer to StrangleholdFable III's concept art looks prettyhttp://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552393Registration is now open for the 2010 Game Developers Conference (GDC 2010). GDC 2010, produced by the Think Services Game Group, returns to San Francisco on Tuesday, March 9 through Saturday, March 13, 2010 for five days of lectures, panels, summits, tutorials and roundtable discussions on a comprehensive selection of game development topics taught by leading industry experts. The first two days of the conference will feature a total of eight summits, two of which are new to the GDC lineup: the iPhone Games Summit and the Social & Online Games Summit. GDC 2010 will also play host to the GDC Expo, the GDC Career Pavilion, the 12th Annual Independent Games Festival and the 10th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards. GDC continues to serve game developer attendees with core educational one and two day tutorials and sponsored developer days. Registration and conference information is available online at the official GDC website http://www.gdconf.com.http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552314I apologize for the late evening post, but I've been mired in exams once more. Let's move forwards with an Unproductive Evening GameDev.Net Daily, shall we? I thought I'd mix it up a bit today and start at ShackNews, where it seems that World of Warcraft has been ordered to shut down in China. I'm a little confused about why exactly they're supposed to shut down, but it seems to be related to the Ministry of Culture not liking certain elements of the beta. It's not clear what'll happen at this point, although personally I'm assuming that all WoW players in China end up at internet addiction treatment centers anyway. In fact I have a few friends who could do with treatment. In any case, Joystiq has some more info about the whole thing. Remember they're making a Prince of Persia movie? Well, the trailer is out at least. They've gone for an adaptation of the Sands of Time plot from the look of it, and I think the special effects may have all come from The Mummy. (Except that first shot, which is clearly Assassin's Creed.) The dialog is cheesy, and the story sounds generic. My guess is it will be like the first Tomb Raider movie -- pretty decent in its own right, but unremarkable except for being based on a video game. Except this time, you'll be staring at Jake Gylenhaal instead of Angelina Jolie. On GamaSutra, there is an interview with Scribblenauts designer Jeremiah Slaczka. I'm quite fond of Scribblenauts, so it's very cool to hear more about the design process. The interview is unfortunately very short, but still absolutely worth a read. Oh, and Mass Effect is confirmed for January. Hooray! Write me down for a gift card for Christmas. Forza 3 came out last week, and in case you haven't heard, it's brilliant. Reviewers have hailed it as basically perfection in racing game form, raising questions about just how Gran Turismo 5 will raise the bar when it finally arrives. One crazy rumor is that it will have a track editor. No real information on how reliable this is, but it sounds like a real opportunity to construct hellish deathtraps that no one would dare drive in real life. Also known as the Nurburgring in the 60s. Also on GamaSutra is an interview with Valve's writers. I have mixed feelings about the writing approach in Half Life 2, but I am a big fan of their games overall. As usual, it's a solid interview, and I'm forced to repeat myself -- read it! Hm, I believe that we just went through an entire Daily without any sarcastic jabs at all. I must be tired today. In any case, I thought I'd point out that DJ Hero is out this week. My friends tell me it's actually really very good. Check out the GameTrailers review and make up your own mind. My question is, will it allow me to avoid talking to people at parties? Because Rock Band does a wonderful job of that.http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552287Unity Technologies, the leading provider of the multi-platform game development platform for Web, PC, Mac, Wii(TM) and iPhone, today announced a worldwide education distribution and training relationship with Noesis Interactive. Educators around the world have begun to develop academic programs to teach students how to develop video games as part of a game development track, certificate or degree. To enhance and accelerate this opportunity, Noesis Interactive will serve as a one stop shop for education customers to purchase both the Unity Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and Noesis created Video Courseware at special educational prices, along with extensive instructional materials for the Winter Terms beginning in January 2010http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552285Many have told us this year's Kyiv show was the best ever. Who are we to argue? With nearly 600 professionals from all over the world, all the top portals, distributors, and publishers in attendance, (and lots of vodka), they just might be right.http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552211Today at the Unite conference, Unity Technologies, the leading provider of the multi-platform game development platform for Web, PC, Mac, Wii and iPhone, announced the award winners of its third annual contest. This year, there were 129 submissions, twice the number of submissions last year, spanning four categories: Best Overall, Best iPhone Game, Best Visual Design and Best Technical Achievement; prizes totaled $9,500.http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552193UFEC (Unofficial Four Elements Contest) is a game programming competition that started just 3 days ago. The participants' goal is to create a full game containing all four chosen elements (Proliferation, Evolution, Fire, Water) within a time frame of 5 months. The contest is based on Gamedev.net's Four Elements and you too are welcome to join!http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552162Some say that reading the GDNet Daily will render you immune to all known forms of infectious agent, bio-hazard and general punky feeling. Others argue that that is absurd and insulting to the intelligence of the reader. Either way, it can't hurt to read more of the Daily, right? So what's coming out this week? It probably doesn't matter, since Forza 3 and Borderlands are already out. I guess there's the small matter of Dragon Age, if you're one of those people who like sweeping, epic RPGs designed by people who are arguably at the foremost of their craft. If you liked Wolfenstein on the iPhone, there's also Doom for the iPhone. GDNet Daily Hero Jeff Minter appears to also be getting into the iPhone. In indie news, aside from Unity Indie being free, there's Hammerfight, a game you can check out on Steam right now. The deadline for the IGF main competition just passed yesterday, but if you're a student, you still have two weeks to enter in the IGF student competition. The Graveyard is free today only, and Lugaru is on sale for 75% off. You really have no excuse not to at least pick up the free one. Before you go today, check out all this stuff that didn't make it into Fallout 3. While you're at it, feel free to browse around there and see cancelled games that you lusted after but had your hopes dashed on the rocks.