Industry news

GDC: Sid Meier and his mind games

SAN FRANCISCO--Legendary game developer Sid Meier took to the stage at the Game Developers Conference with a simple message to those who want to create the next best-selling title. The secret of making a great game, Meier said, is to get inside the player's head.

Psychology was never something Meier studied prior to getting into gaming. But as he explained to a crowd of developers at his keynote speech Friday, such a big part of game design ends up trying to figure out how the player will react to the things developers put in their games. Yet, as Meier … Read more

A peek at Unreal Engine on Palm Web OS

SAN FRANCISCO--While at the Game Developers Conference, we just got a peek at Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3 running on a Palm Pre Plus. It's the same technical demo that's been shown off on the iPhone, both at CES back in January and on Wednesday at Epic's talk about changes it had to make in order to get the engine running on Apple's iPhone OS.

According to Epic Games' Vice President Mark Rein, with whom CNET spoke earlier on Thursday, Palm was only given a test version of the Unreal Development Kit two weeks ago and … Read more

Dolby bringing 3D voice chat to consoles, Mac

Dolby Laboratories on Thursday announced its plans to bring its Axon 3D voice chat technology from the PC over to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the Mac.

The software development kit (SDK) will be made available to all game developers in April, though it's already been in beta testing with a handful of developers, which Dolby would not disclose.

The technology, which has been available to PC game makers for the past year, adds three-dimensional location to a game's voice chat channel. This gives gamers a sense of where other players are talking from when heard through … Read more

GDC: What's next for video game AI?

SAN FRANCISCO--Despite video games allowing players to do things they would never be able to do in reality, next-generation artificial intelligence is still striving to be distinctly human. Even if that means being boring.

Three next-gen AI demos at Wednesday's Game Developer's Conference showed off things that would seem like every day occurrences. But if their creators can get them to work, this distinct mundanity is a crowning achievement.

Richard Evans of Maxis and EA fame was the AI lead on the Sims 3. His demoed two new types of AIs, the first--called "Sim Tribe" allows developers to create their own societies. These societies can work on the same social rules as real cultures, meaning that if a player ventures into a different location, the other nonplayable characters (NPCs) will change their habits accordingly.

In terms of the demo, this paradigm shift was with eating, which became a social taboo. This acted out comically as characters could not eat until everyone else was outside of viewing distance. Evans joked that you could also reverse the rules so that going to the bathroom in public became an every day activity. What made the entire system more interesting was that there were also societal punishments built in, so that if players or other NPCs alike disobeyed the social norms, it would change how other characters interacted with them.

Evans' second demo was something equally ambitious that gave NPCs "very long term plans." The idea is that developers can give NPCs hundreds of actions that the characters can (and want) to do in their every day lives. This is as opposed to the three to four actions Evans said most developers will program out for an NPC. … Read more

GDC talk: Legal pitfalls for iPhone app developers

SAN FRANCISCO--To most consumers, Apple's App Store may seem like sunshine and rainbows. But to a developer, getting an application on it presents a number of legal challenges.

No, it's not Apple's historically notorious approval process. Instead, as attorney and Joystiq contributor Mark Methenitis explained to a group of developers during a talk at the Game Developer's Conference here Wednesday, it's the contracts developers have to sign that can get them into some serious trouble if they're not careful.

Apple's contracts, which include the iPhone developer program license agreement, the registered iPhone developer … Read more

How Epic fit the Unreal Engine into the iPhone

SAN FRANCISCO--Getting one of the most advanced 3D game engines onto the iPhone has not been an easy task for Epic Games. But they're close to getting into the hands of developers, and gamers alike.

The makers of the Unreal Engine now say they've kept approximately 90 percent of the code from the PC version, but that process of getting it from PC to Mac, then to the iPhone has been cumbersome.

In a talk to developers at Tuesday's Game Developers Conference, Epic Games' senior console programmer Josh Adams illustrated some of the pitfalls in taking the Unreal Engine, which is--and always has been developed in Windows, over to other platforms. In this case it was Apple's iPhone, which despite being one of the faster smartphones on the market, does not compare to a multi-core gaming PC.

The Unreal Engine is what powers many of today's popular PC and console titles like Gears of War, BioShock, Mass Effect, and of course Epic's Unreal Tournament. What the company builds for its own games, it then licenses out, meaning other publishers can use it on their own titles. The company also has a development kit, which anyone can use (not just big studios), then sell their games for a small fee and a chunk of any revenues. In that regard, it's in the company's benefit to get it ready as something it can sell to other developers, as well as port in-house titles out as iPhone games.

Adams said that the single most pressing issue Epic has run into while porting UE3 to the iPhone, is simply getting the various systems to talk to each other. The engine itself consists of 2 million lines of code, many of which depend on Windows-specific features. In porting it over to the iPhone, Epic has had to make a number of workarounds and simply cut out things that were either too taxing or completely incompatible. … Read more

Eliminate's 3G multiplayer: How'd they do that?

Ngmoco's Eliminate for the iPhone was a groundbreaking game in two ways. One was its pay-to-score business model, which offered the game for free, but required users to have virtual energy units (which could be bought) to gain rank and equipment bonuses. The second, and more important one, was the back-end server technology that let players hop onto online matches over 3G.

This feature was not so simple to implement, as Ngmoco's director of engineering Stephen Detwiler and lead engineer James Marr mapped out during a talk at Tuesday's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. As Marr … Read more

YouTube brings auto-captioning to everyone

On Thursday Google announced that YouTube is turning on its auto-captioning technology to all users--a move it hopes will make videos both easier to watch and find in its search engine.

The company is trying to make the service more accessible to everyone. At a press conference at YouTube's San Bruno, Calif., headquarters, the company touted the feature as useful to not only viewers who are hearing-impaired but also to people who are learning English as a second language.

Video providers are now able to apply for machine transcription on their own videos. And for videos that have not … Read more

Live blog Thursday: YouTube press conference

Update: Things are running a little late. It should be starting around 10:30 a.m. PST.

YouTube is holding a press conference at 10 a.m. PST Thursday and we'll be there live with photos and text updates of whatever it is.

Details are scarce at the moment, but we know for sure it won't be related to mobile phones or movies. That opens up the door for a number of things including new Test Tube features, more TV shows, and that whole live streaming thing which was rumored to be coming out sometime in 2008.

As … Read more