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Fallen Earth Announces Enhancements to Gameplay Graphics, Improves Environmental and Landscape Elements.

Fallen Earth, LLC today announced the inclusion of several wilderness graphics enhancements, specifically to the elements of scrub—including grass and shrubs—terrain and fog. Sharpening and blending textures, colors and lighting, the new and improved details enhance the look and feel of the Fallen Earth post-apocalyptic environment and heighten player immersion.

“The environment in Fallen Earth adds so much to the players’ experience,” said Chris Deavellar, art director for Fallen Earth. “We want to capture the mood of the post-apocalyptic world and the improvements certainly enhance the appearance and atmosphere of the game.”

The new, full scrub enhances several environmental aspects, sharpening textures and adding more detail with improvements to the resolution and quality of the previous scrub. With the new enhancements, players who view the landscape in first-person character mode will notice more volume within the brush and grass than before.

Additionally, players will see improvements on terrain as detail textures have been blended to enhance the appearance of the landscape and color maps have also been re-worked in order to provide a smoother blend between shades and augment color variation.

Leaving no environmental element untouched, developers have also incorporated distinctive cloud movement and have further taken a look at fog effects. Improvements on the existing fog equation now enable fog to build up more gradually, distance-wise, to players, creating a more realistic and layered appearance.

“Our team did a wonderful job on the enhancements and we’re sure players will notice the improvements,” said Deavellar.

For the First Time, Video Game Developers Can Create True One-to-One Movement Using Softkinetic’s Full Body Realistic Avatar Control System

Speaking at GamesBeat 2009 in San Francisco, Softkinetic today unveiled the next generation of 3D gesture recognition, a Full Body Realistic Avatar Control system.

Set to be included in Softkinetic’s gesture recognition middleware platform iisu™, the Full Body Avatar Control system will revolutionize the video game space by enabling developers to animate on-screen characters that precisely replicate a gamer’s movement. The Full Body Avatar Control system will enable developers, for the first time, to create realistic, third-person avatars that move, in real time, with the player(s) using a depth-sensing camera that recognizes the player’s spatial orientation, limb positions and combinations of hand, feet and torso movements.

iisu, which is the result of five years of research and development, was first launched at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in February 2008 and has since been incorporated into large-scale applications for gaming, multimedia systems, fitness and virtual training. The technology, which supports all 3D depth-sensing cameras, enables a more natural interaction with the digital world as it removes the need for a controller and allows players to command the experience with their body movements in real-time. 
“The world’s largest media and entertainment companies have already embraced our technology, and have helped us refine our understanding of the requirements for realistic polygonal avatar control system,” said Michel Tombroff, CEO of Softkinetic. “Our team is driving the industry and we are confident that it represents the most advanced 3D camera-based avatar animation solution available on the market today.”

Softkinetic’s technology is in a prime position to capture this market opportunity, not only because of the ease of use and the innovative features, but also because it supports all available 3D depth-sensing cameras on the market, including cameras from 3DV Systems, Canesta, MESA, PMDTec, Prime Sense and Optex.

Tombroff continued, “We strongly believe that the video game industry will embrace 3D gesture recognition technology in 2009, and we believe the first games will hit the market as soon as 2010.” 
iisu is delivered as a Software Development Kit (SDK) with which developers can create applications allowing the human body to become the natural input device removing the need for any physical controllers.

The Unity 2.5 development tool has been rebuilt to look, feel and function identically on both operating systems, each running the same underlying engine. The best part? Unity on either platform can build games for either platform – cross-platform development in the truest sense.

David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies said, “Starting today, Windows users can finally get their hands on our baby that has been generating an incredible amount of excitement. Unity has been used to create dozens of hit games and is already being used by thousands of developers on the Mac, and we have huge expectations of how far we and our community can go.”

Major updates in Unity 2.5 include:
Even easier-to-use tools allowing rapid play, test and improvement of work
A gorgeous tabbed interface
Precise navigation and placement of tools – new flythrough controls and a newly designed rotation tool
Information at a glance – detailed rendering stats of meshes; waveforms of audio clips; model file previews and much, much more
Drag and drop 3ds Max support in addition to existing support for Maya, Blender and all other 3D apps
Completely extensible toolset
The Unity tools have been hailed as revolutionary for democratizing game development, in that the same platform is being used by the big players like EA, Cartoon Network, and Funcom, as well as thousands of indie developers, startups, hobbyists and students. Hundreds of commercial games have been developed with Unity, and more are launched every day.

Unity 2.5 will be on show at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco from 23-27th March 2009. Stop by booth #5110 for a chat and full demonstration.

Blade Games World, the newly formed company from the merger of Digini and Vyk Games, today unveiled its plans for the upcoming 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Next week, the company will reveal improvements and additional features for its Blade3D engine and will also be discussing its outsourcing services.

Blade Games will be at Moscone Center North Hall Booth 6306, and the company will be hosting a cocktail reception on Wednesday March 25 at their booth from 4:30 to 6:00 pm. Blade Games is also attending Game Connection in San Francisco during the same week.

“We have made great strides in development technology that will dramatically affect how our customers and our industry approaches making games,” said Tony Garcia, CEO of Blade Games. “Over the last few months, we have been working closely with our rapidly growing community to expand functionality while adding elements from our never ending “wish list” of enhancements. We look forward to showing these new features to the attendees at GDC.”

Among the features being shown at their booth include:

Terrain Editor:

Blade3D now includes a fully integrated terrain editing system that is powerful, extensible and easy to use.  As well as basic operations such as raise/lower and smooth/flatten, the new editor lets you paint color channels and level of detail directly on the terrain.  The new editor also allows any shader based material to be painted anywhere on the terrain with automatic blending.  Finally, all terrain editing operations can be used with the visual programming system to enable physics based deformation at runtime.

Audio Support:

Blade3D now has full 3D audio support for both Windows and the Xbox 360 – including Doppler effects, pitch shifting, volume falloff and more.  Support for audio formats has also been expanded with support for Wav, Mp3, Ogg, Wma, Flac and many additional formats.  And, with symmetric deployment on the Xbox 360 and Windows, your games will sound the same no matter what platform you play them on.

HDR Support:

Blade3D now supports high dynamic range (HDR) rendering, this allows you to light your scene with a much higher range of light values. The new HDRToneMapping lens shader adapts the HDR scene into a viewable range with intensity dependent adaptation tone mapping. You can also adjust the overall intensity, contrast and alteration limits to tweak for your needs.

“Try Before You Buy” COMING SOON

This spring, the company will launch a trial version that allows access to all of the functionality within Blade3D, without requirement of entering a credit card. With the Blade3D Trial Version you can use all of the tools within the Blade3D tool set, go through all of the Blade3D training materials and tutorials, and browse assets in the BladeMarketplace.

What is Blade3D?

Blade3D is a revolutionary “all-in-one” game engine and authoring platform that enables every developer, from an individual to a team of professionals, to build their dream game. The innovative application removes the traditional barriers to success with its low-cost, highly robust tool set. The intuitive, easy to navigate interface seamlessly blends all disciplines of game creation, from artist to designer to programmer.  The subscription-based technology works with Microsoft’s XNA game development platform, allowing for easy publishing to Xbox 360 and Windows. To assist with development, Blade3D‘s first-ever integrated asset Marketplace is designed to put “in-game” resources a mouse click away. Blade3D is available with price points of $14.95 per month for hobbyists and students, $29.95 per month for independent developers, and $99.95 per month for professional developers.

Flashman Studios, a leading business management firm in the interactive entertainment industry, announced today that it has finalized an agreement with Transmission Games, an Australian game development studio that has been creating award-winning, top-selling multi-platform titles for over 10 years. Under the agreement, Flashman Studios will handle business management responsibilities for the studio, including negotiation of new deals with publishers and first party platforms.

“The folks at Transmission have a clear focus on developing industry leading titles across several different platforms, and have a strong reputation for delivering great aerial combat, sports and action-adventure games,” said Brad Young, founder and CEO of Flashman Studios. “We’re looking forward to working together with Transmission to further their success and explore exciting new business opportunities.”

Transmission Games (formerly IR Gurus) is a globally recognized studio and Australia’s leading multi-platform game developer. The studio is currently near shipment on Heroes Over Europe for the PS3, Xbox 360 and Windows PC. Some of Transmission’s earlier titles include AFL Premiership 2006 and AFL Premiership 2007 for the PS2 computer entertainment system, Heroes of the Pacific for the PS2, Xbox and Windows PC, and Heatseeker for Wii, PS2, and the PSP, among others.

“This is a tremendous step forward for our business,” said Mike Fegan, CEO of Transmission Games. “Flashman has a dedicated team of professionals that are experts in managing development studios and maximizing our business potential. Their track record is beyond impressive, and we can’t wait to be their next successful client.”

Transmission Games is building on their previous successes, with new titles in the works for the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3. For more information about Flashman Studios, please visit www.flashmanstudios.com. For more information about Transmission Games, please visit www.transmissiongames.com.

NaturalMotion, the animation technology company behind the revolutionary euphoria engine, is heading to the 2009 Game Developers Conference to bring partners and members of the media up to date on the company’s product offerings. NaturalMotion recently released version 2.0 of its morpheme animation middleware, with tight integration of NVIDIA PhysX technology.

The company is taking meetings with game developers and publishers of all platforms, as well as technology and games industry press that are interested in how NaturalMotion’s technologies bring game characters to life.

Interested game developers should contact Christian Staack (U.S.) at christian.staack@naturalmotion.com or Andy Payne (UK) at andy.payne@naturalmotion.com

Additionally, NaturalMotion CTO Simon Mack will be presenting two sessions in the conference’s Visual Arts track:

Authoring Runtime Animation and Character Physics with morpheme 2.0 - Wednesday, March 25 at 10:30am – Room 3005, West Hall

morpheme & PhysX: A New Approach to Combining Character Animation and Simulation – Thursday, March 26 at 4:30pm – Room 3002, West Hall

NaturalMotion is also participating in the Game Connection America event.

Vicious Engine to Power Two New Games for the Wii System

Leading Animation Engine Now Offering Unprecedented Level of Physics Authoring and Integration

NaturalMotion, the animation technology company behind the euphoria engine, today announced the immediate availability of morpheme 2.0 together with integrated NVIDIA PhysX™ technology.

morpheme is robust animation middleware designed to give developers and animators intuitive, creative control over the look of their final in-game animation by allowing them to author and preview blends, blend trees and transition graphs in real time. Since its launch in 2007,morpheme has seen rapid adoption in the games industry, including customers such as Bioware, Eidos, Disney, and CCP.

morpheme 2.0 introduces full integration with NVIDIA PhysX technology, encompassing both graphical authoring in themorpheme:connect tool, as well as the animation runtime engine.

In morpheme 2.0, NaturalMotion believes it has solved several fundamental problems holding back the combined application of physics and animation. As a result, morpheme 2.0 allows for the seamless mixing and matching of animation and physics methods within and across animation skeletons, thus providing a whole new toolset for creating lifelike characters.

“In previous animation solutions, physics has often been an afterthought, often only allowing for the addition of ragdolls or other basic physics methods as an ‘all-or-nothing’ effect at the end,” said Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion. “With morpheme 2.0, we have developed a method to give programmers and animators much more targeted and differentiated control over physics and animation. It is now possible to add arbitrary physics modes to different parts of the same body – all graphically. We’re also giving animators intuitive 3D tools to graphically author physics joints, joint limits and parameters. We believe this new method of treating animation and physics in tandem will become a fundamental requirement for more believable characters.”

morpheme 2.0 is a major release featuring many enhancements in addition to physics. In summary, version 2.0 provides the following new features: 

• Physics integration powered by NVIDIA PhysX™ technology
  • Graphical authoring of physics skeletons, collision shape and joint-limits 
  • Mixing of animation, hard- and soft-keyframing and active animation in the same skeleton 
  • Support for different physics modes on different body parts
  • Transitions between animation and physics
• Enhanced multithreading model for runtime performance 
• Enhanced animation compression methods 
• LiveLink library to simplify connecting application to remote runtime target 
• Pass-down pins provide support for animation network referencing

Availability 
morpheme 2.0 is available starting immediately.

* NVIDIA PhysX is licensed separately, and is not required for licensingmorpheme 2.0.

Javaground’s Xpress Suite is a comprehensive development and porting solution. It enables easier and faster development and porting with enhanced quality. Hudson Entertainment Inc. has improved the quality of its games along with an easier porting thanks to it

Hudson Entertainment announced today the benefits of using the Javaground Xpress Suite for the making of their mobile games. Hudson has been using the Xpress Suite for the past two years and it has helped improve the quality of their games and expedite the porting process significantly.

“Since 2007, Hudson has used the Xpress Suite from Javaground for the development and porting of our game applications. Bomberman Land and Military Madness 2 were also developed on Xpress, and the game quality has dramatically improved compared to previous versions. A high level of porting is needed for a single game title to support close to 200 terminals. For this to happen, a system is required that all programs can easily understand. In this regard, we feel the Xpress Suite is an exceptional tool,” said Yoko Tsumagari, Vice-President of Mobile Games at Hudson Entertainment, Inc.

The Xpress Suite^TM features components like the Resource Manager and the Level Editor that enable fast development of high quality games by allowing developers to focus on the game design and playability instead of the technical details. Using the Javaground Xpress Suite^TM, a single developer can create a mobile application that works on over 1500 devices in a record time.

“Having a customer like Hudson, one of the most established game companies, is a great testament of the efficiencies brought about by our Xpress Suite in the development of games,” said Alex Kral, CEO and co-founder of Javaground.

New Production Company to Unite Well-Known Entertainment Talent and Content for Game Audio Production

Bangolia announced today that it has formally launched its efforts to provide A-list entertainment audio resources to the videogame industry. It is backed by industry leading audio production company Bang Music, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. As games continue to expand the market into the mainstream behind an ever-expanding user base of console owners and games played on the PC, audio will play a crucial role in ensuring widespread consumer assimilation. No longer is there a distinction between mainstream entertainment and videogames, supported by NPD predictions putting the US videogame industry at $22 billion in 2008, with continued growth anticipated despite the recession.

Bangolia was formed by a group of videogame audio production veterans and is poised to offer the industry a collection of the world’s best audio talent and content under one centrally managed organization. In addition to focusing on the technical aspects of game audio production, Bangolia will also focus on providing top quality audio resources from the traditional entertainment industries, including the record industry, feature films, television programming and commercial advertising. Among its many high profile talents is composer Mateo Messina, Grammy Award nominee in the Best Soundtrack category, recognized for his work on the major motion picture Juno.

“We have a truly unique and diverse collection of top audio talent from around the world that is unlike anything being presented to the game industry,” says Chris Peterson, President, Bangolia. “We have united these resources under one centrally managed organization that makes client consultation and smooth asset implementation top priorities. This level of talent and meticulous service will help the games we work on continue to compete in the greater media universe and will help the game industry continue to develop into its own unique art form.”

Bangolia brings this quality and diversity to videogames through music, sound design, voice direction and project management. On the music side, the company draws from a distinctive, hand-picked collection of musicians ranging from artists in platinum-selling bands, to composers of award-winning film scores and virtuoso street musicians culled from New York City’s subway “underground.” Most recently, co-founder Brian Jones handled the licensing of George Thorogood’s “Who Do You Love?” into a Sam Adams Beer commercial. Partner company Studio 8 Sound’s Oscar-winning sound designers have produced sound effects in films such as Spiderman 3, Batman Forever, HULK, and the upcoming Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li. Bangolia’s voice offering combines studio locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Stavanger, Norway, leveraging relationships with major talent agencies that run twenty years deep. Jones recently capitalized on these resources to create the music, sound design and voice-overs for the television trailer for the Iron Man videogame. Leading the company’s efforts, Chris Peterson brings years of experience serving as Executive Producer on a number of videogame audio projects for various developers and publishers including Obsidian, Blue Fang Games, Atari, K2 Network and Eden Games.

“An audio asset can be the best-sounding thing ever made, but if it doesn’t work in-game, it’s a wasted effort,” continues Peterson. “Every project Bangolia undertakes is considered a consultative process, where we partner with the developer and stay engaged throughout the entire process of pre-production, production, and implementation. While making sure we’re offering game producers sounds they may not have thought of before, we also make smooth asset implementation a top priority.”