State of Unreal talk from GDC

The best way to catch up with all things Unreal is to watch the very recent GDC Epic talk which is now also available on YouTube.

If you are using Unreal as a student, developer, educator or merely hobbyist this is a must in my opinion, the roughly 90 minutes it lasts is a great overview of where the popular engine is at the beginning of 2017.

ICGIP 2017 IPC

Another conference I have been invited on the International Program Committee for is ICGIP 2017 (International Conference on Graphic and Image Processing).

To take place in October in China, you can see more about the event here on its official website.

iGBL 2017 IPC

I have been invited to sit on the International Program Committee for iGBL, the Irish conference on Game-Based Learning (2017).

More information on the conference here, it is to take place in June this year.

Edutainment 2017 and four special issues in journals

Edutainment 2017 that I am involved with as a chair, taking place in the summer this year, has recently had a number of special issues confirmed; these will be for selected, significantly expanded and having undergone another review articles of the conference.

The journals are the following four, Springer's Multimedia Tools and Applications, Springer's Journal of Vizualization, Elsevier's Entertainment Computing (which I have been the guest editor for in the past for a special issue) and, finally, IGI's International Journal of Distance Education Technologies. 

More details here.

Book on level design

There are not many books on (game) level design and I thought it would be of interest to mention a recent (December 2016) release which is certainly worth looking at, that of Chris Totten's Level Design Processes and Experiences.

For anyone immersed in the discipline this is certainly a good read, you can find out more about this here.

Principal Academic in Games Development position at BU

An academic position is now open in the Department I am in, that of Creative Technology at Bournemouth University (at the Faculty of Science and Technology).

This can be found here, has an early April deadline and is for a Principal Academic in Games Development.

VS Games 2017 IPC

I have been added to the International Program Committee for VS Games 2017, which takes place in Athens this September (the conference has in the past taken place here at Bournemouth in 2013 but also Athens too, back in 2011).

More on this here.

Extension of deadlines for Edutainment 2017

Edutainment 2017 which takes place here in Bournemouth now has an extended set of deadlines (for submissions).

Full papers are now in on the 19th of March; this is worth checking out here in full. 

UE4 4.15

4.15 of Unreal is now out (properly and not as a test version). You can read the (full) headlines of new features and enhancements here though for me at least it is the texture streaming enhancements that stand out from the rest.

I am sure 4.15 will be refined over the next couple of months but till then this first iteration of 4.15 is a very welcome addition for people using Epic's engine.

CIE article

An article I am the co-author on has recently been published on ACM's Computers In Entertainment journal.

More on the article, which is titled Transition Contour Synthesis with Dynamic Patch Transitions, here.