May 30, 2007 5:41 PM PDT

George Lucas at D5: Pirates and games

by Rafe Needleman
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Walt, Kara, and George talk movies and games.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

George Lucas is onstage at D5, with his video game guy. He's talking about building game characters that the player can "buy in to."

First up, the water effects in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. If you want to make a maelstrom a mile wide, Lucas has your guys.

Next up, a preview of the game, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. One of the concepts is to "amp up" the Force--allowing players and characters to do much more Force-y things than we've seen in the Star Wars movies. For example: picking up stormtroopers and flinging them to their death (or at least grievous injury). Basically, it's Half-Life's gravity gun. Without the gun. Looks like a lot of fun.

The Force: Now with extra zapping power.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Also, using a technology they're calling Euphoria, they're giving nonplayer characters a "nervous system" to allow them to react on their own, rather than having scripted or animated responses to game events. The demo showed Indiana Jones balancing on a wobbly bridge--very convincing. It's all to create "unscripted" interactions.

Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
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Euphoria is from NaturalMotion
by danmd May 31, 2007 7:52 AM PDT
"Also, using a technology they're calling Euphoria, they're giving non-player characters a "nervous system" to allow them to react on their own accord, rather than having scripted or animated responses to game events."

They are not "calling it" anything because Euphoria is a middleware product from NaturalMotion available for licensing, euphoria brings Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS) to games, basically it is an AI and physics driven Animation Blender.

For more info check out: http://www.naturalmotion.com/euphoria.htm

It would be nice if people knew what the heck they are talking about wend they write these articles ;)
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star wars galaxies debacle!
by suske_lightwind June 12, 2007 5:21 PM PDT
i wonder ho ol' gl feels about how sony online entertainment
used his IP to offend over 200k star wars fans by ruining the game they had paid in advance for and then never offered refunds....and told us to "go play something else".
i wonder if he ever had to answer that.....
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Star Wars Galaxies has failed
by Vanive June 12, 2007 6:24 PM PDT
I wonder how he feels about it, a potential goldmine now lays in ruins and no one cares. It?s to bad it killed a lot of the love for Star Wars in so many fans in the process.
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swg fiasco
by voree June 13, 2007 8:49 AM PDT
Obviously from this, George likes his pirates. Now using nge logic since George likes pirates,the star wars movies should all be redone into pirate movies since we all know that pirates of the caribbean makes tons of money and is a huge box office draw. Even though George put alot of love into creating his star wars characters,he should be estatic knowing that the change to pirates will bring in the new generation of pirate movie lovers.If anyone doesn't like pirates they can just go watch other movies.
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