EA releases Spore Creature Creator

Electronic Arts, which will launch Will Wright’s Spore in September, has released Creature Creator — a module that let’s players create Spore creatures.

Technology review interviewd Lucy Bradshaw, Spore’s executive producer, about the use of procedural generation in Creature Creator (Creating Creatures).

The Creature Creator, the first piece of Electronic Arts’ highly anticipated evolution game Spore, launched Tuesday. Created by Will Wright, who’s known for the video games SimCity and The Sims, Spore begins with a player controlling a single-celled organism and progresses through various evolutionary stages until the player controls an entire space-faring race. The Creature Creator part of the game consists of a modeling interface that lets players build their own organisms from a set of highly customizable and flexible … The Creature Creator’s free trial edition is available today. A full version is available for $9.99 on the PC, with a Mac version to follow. The full version of Spore will launch in North America on September 7.

Posted in General, Programming, industry news, virtual worlds | 1 Comment »

UMBC 3rd Annual Digital Entertainment Conference

First, the announcment:

UMBC’s Game Developer’s Club along with the Computer Science Department, is hosting their annual Digital Entertainment Conference on April 12 from 10:30am - 6:00pm in Lecture Hall 3 in the Administration Building. This all day event includes speakers from local video game companies like Breakaway, Big Huge Games, and Firaxis. They’ll be speaking about different aspects of the video game industry, including art, programming, and design. If you have any interest in getting into the industry or just playing games, mark your calendars and come join us on April 12!

DEC’s official web site: www.umbcgdc.org/dec/
For Facebook members, you can join the DEC event here:
www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=9446589599

This has really been a great event in the past. It is open to the public, so whether you are a UMBC student or not, if you want to find out more about what the games industry is really like, you should come.

Posted in Art, Careers, Events, Game design, News, Programming | No Comments »

Make games for OLPC with the Etoys programming environment

Etoys is a computer environment and object-oriented programming language for use in education that is getting increased attention these days because it is included in the One Laptop Per Child XO. A post in Lambda the Ultimate notes:

“Etoys was invented by Alan Kay’s research group and is in continuous development and use as an integrated feature of Squeak Smalltalk. The Squeak/Etoys community includes lots of researchers, programmers, teachers, and kids around the world. Squeaky Tales is a series of short tutorial screencasts designed to each people to program with Etoys. I’m very excited that this may be what’s needed to make Etoys programming easy to learn for people at home. My experience has been that it’s easy and fun to teach Etoys programming face-to-face with everybody using their own laptop, but that it’s very slow and frustrating to try and learn Etoys by yourself just by installing it and clicking around. If Squeaky Tales makes it easy and fun to learn Etoys all by yourself at home then it’s quite a contribution to the world!”

Posted in CS, Programming, social media, sofware | No Comments »

UMBC Multicore Computing Center

With support and collaboration from IBM, UMBC has established the UMBC Multicore Computing Center (MC2) to investigate applications of new parallel processing technologies, including the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. We will integrate 12 IBM BladeCenter QS20s, each with dual 3.2-GHz CBEs into our existing Bluegrit supercomputing cluster, which includes a a 116 core PowerPC cluster. The new processors will be connected by Gigabit Ethernet and 20-Gbit/second Infiniband links.

So, what does this have to do with games? A lot.

The CBE was jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba and first used in Sony’s PS3. Game consoles can take advantage of high-performance computing to support their graphics and the CBE is what makes the PS3 special. But looking beyond speeding up 3D graphics, there are many more demands that games will make on processors — managing large artificial worlds, making computer controlled game characters more intelligent, adding speech and language processing, etc.

The UMBC MC2 will provide our game programs with a unique asset — a chance for students in the computer science track to learn about multicore and cell processors and, importantly, how to write programs to take advantage of them. Software engineers with experience with these new processor technologies are in high demand in the game industry as well as for any applications that have high computational demands.

Posted in Parallel programming, Programming, UMBC Research | No Comments »

HGE open-source 2D game engine

The game industry today is mostly focused on producing 3D games, but there’s still life in 2D games, especially if they offer something novel and fun. Creating a 2D game is also a good way to to develop your confidence and skills in some universal game aspects and features, like game logic, HCI, scoring, narrative, etc. HGE is an open-source game engine for developing 2D games for Windows.

HGE is an easy to use yet powerful hardware accelerated 2D game engine. It is a full featured middleware for all who want to develop commercial quality 2D games rapidly and easily. It covers all imaginable 2D game genres: you could create everything from a simple puzzle to advanced multilayered platformer or strategy without even thinking of any non game logic code! And you don’t have to know anything about “window messages”, DirectX programming and all that stuff. Instead you can start developing your own game within 15 minutes!
    HGE runs on Microsoft Windows 98, 2000, NT, ME, XP and requires DirectX 8.0. It will run even on low-end video cards, including built in video cards such as Intel Solano (i815 chipset). HGE can be used with virtually any C++ compiler including Visual C++, Borland C++, MinGW and Metrowerks Codewarrior.

HGE 1.7 has just been released (28 May 2007) and includes all required libs, headers, tutorials, authoring tools, documentation and source code.

Posted in CS, Game engines, Programming | No Comments »

Multi-core and cell processors for games

The game industry has a strong need for software engineers that know how to take advantage of the new multi-core and cell processors. An article in CNET (Game developers adapt to multi-core world, explains it this way:

PC game developers appear to finally be getting the message: the free ride is over.

For years, developers were able to take advantage of faster and faster processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. All they had to do was write their program once, and it would run faster and faster as Intel and AMD cranked up the clock speed.

But overheating forced chip companies to adopt designs with two or more processor cores running at slower speeds, which meant that some applications written to run on a single thread couldn’t take advantage of that extra horsepower. This has required an entirely new way of looking at software development, prompting Intel this week to release another batch of software development tools aimed at helping developers make that transition.uote>

The CSEE department will offer its course on Parallel and Distributed Processing next in the Spring of 2008. In the mean time, if you are interested in exploring how to use these new architectures, you might check out Intel’s Multi-Core webinar series.

Posted in CS, Parallel programming, Programming, UMBC classes | No Comments »