PSP2 and the Unreal engine

The PSP2 spec and details were finally revealed by Sony last week. Touted as NGP (Next Generation Portable) it hosts a gamut of features such as, to name but a few, a touchscreen function allowing for ‘touch, grab, trace, push or pull’, augmented reality features using camera and player movement, a front and rear touch-sensitive input, front and rear cameras, gyroscopic motion control (using the same technology as the PlayStation Move), GPS location sensors and others.

Of even more interest however is the simultaneous announcement of Epic Games (at the same launch event in fact) of the Unreal Engine appearing on this new mobile device (see video below). This is essentially a PSP2 upgrade of the popular free iPhone demo Epic Citadel with additional anti-aliasing and post-processing effects (not seen on the iPhone version).

According to Tim Sweeney from Epic Games these additional effects were made possible "by the [PSP2]’s multi-core CPU and shader-based multi-core GPU, which delivers roughly four times the performance we’ve seen on other platforms". Could this sway me to finally invest in a PSP? Whatever the answer to that is, mobile graphics developments have just become, as of last week, even more interesting and exciting.

MSc in Computer Games Technology at Bournemouth University

Starting in October 2011 the University where I am lecturing, Bournemouth University in the UK, will be offering a new MSc in Computer Games Technology. This is offered on either full-time or part-time routes (and I will of course be teaching on it).

The course aims to provide you with the ability to plan, implement and produce computer games using modern methods and tools. In recent years there have been significant developments in the philosophies, methods and tools for planning, implementing and producing computer games. This course is designed to provide industry with personnel who understand the technical tools and techniques required by the gaming industry.

The MSc provides an in-depth knowledge in key areas of games technology and production. It prepares you for employment in sectors such as games programming, game engine design and game management and production. This course also takes into account the radical changes in the gaming industry from PC to console gaming to Mobile and MMOs bringing new challenges and opportunities for gaming.

A mix of practice-based research through the use of state of the art game production facilities and taught classes by academics and industry experts is offered. Finally, the MSc is comprised of five taught units and an independent project, which can be a dissertation, a portfolio of work, a software application or a combination of deliverables.

More information about the course (including detailed info on applying for it) here.

Kinect used for 3D urban modelling

It appears that the possibilities of using Microsoft's Kinect are really capturing many users' imaginations, prompting the emergence of a variety of cool experimentations with it, with most of them of course related to gaming (which in fact I may have to come back to for a post or two in the future).

One of the most amazing non-gaming ones however is the one by Martin Szarski who strapped the device to his car, connected it to his laptop and a Nexus One mobile phone and thusly recorded a point cloud of the car's journey. The results are very impressive considering the modest equipment used and according to Szarski could been more accurate had a phone with a gyroscope been used. For more details of this great "home-made" 3D urban modelling experiment check out the link here.

Road Blaster iPhone game, another non-photorealistic game for a mobile device

On a roll of posts on games with non-photorealistic graphics I have been train-spotting recently, Evolutionary Concepts has released, on the Apple iPhone/iPad, Road Blaster (also known as Road Avenger). This is best remembered as a Sega Mega CD title (although it is a lot older than that, first released on the arcades in 1985).

The game features very striking anime-style visualizations and is, as the title suggests, a racer. This comes with additional new features over the original such as the usual tilt controls, enhanced graphics for the iPhone 4 and the iPad, leaderboard and GameCenter support and others.

It is however the unique visuals that make it stand out and appear so impressive. Non-photorealistic racers are very rare, even more so on mobile devices, so it is nice to see this particular title brought to the limelight again.

A retrospective look at The Last Express

Picking up from the previous post which discusses a contemporary cartoon-shaded game (Eat Them), I have recently read an article in Edge magazine featuring a 'making-of' discussion of an older adventure game called The Last Express which at the time (it was released in 1997) sadly passed me by.

At a time when FMV (full motion video) was quite prevalent in adventure games and viewed as the future of interactive storytelling, The Last Express took a different approach, and, by using a combination of rotoscoping and line-drawing, attempted to recreate a non-photorealistic style which according to the producer of the game was heavily influenced by Scott McCloud's seminal Understanding Comics book. This was in regards to providing just enough detail in a character and in a visualization (i.e. not too realistic, not too abstract) for the player to better identify with the depicted action.

The game was (for a variety of reasons explained in more detail in the Edge article) not very succesfull commercially and reached a small audience (which explains why I never got into it despite being heavily into adventure games at the time!) but is now available at DotEmu (here) and, according to Jordan Mechner, its creator (and also creator of the seminal Prince of Persia games), could well be soon adapted to an iPad version, subject to interest.

The Last Express is definitely well worth checking out for evidence on how non-photorealistic rendering can enhance a character-driven, dialogue-based interactive story.

Eat Them, new cartoon-shaded game for the Sony PS3

I've just come a cross a great example of a new cartoon-shaded game for the Playstation 3 called, rather imaginatively, Eat Them. As the title suggests, the game allows you to lay waste to a variety of urban areas (and their inhabitants!) with customizable monsters while military forces try to stop you.

It's definitely not an original idea (I still remember the great Rampage made by Midway I had on my 8086 PC that was based on very much the same concept) but the incredible comic book visuals combined with the urban models used here definitely piqued my interest and, game aside, it's worth looking at this just for the excellent non-photorealistic content employed.

Crytek showing interest in iPhone/iPad development

While id Software and Epic Games have already played their cards with the impressive Rage and Infinity Blade respectively, it now appears that another major player in first person shooter gaming is looking for a lucrative opening in the mobile game development field.

Borne out of a job opening that Crytek now has for “designing and developing complex, integrated iPhone and iPad applications” (found on Develop magazine) the company, which has a very strong reputation of pushing the boundaries of computer graphics with titles such as Crysis or Far Cry, joins an ever-increasing number of studios targetting the mobile platform as well as traditional ones.

Looking at the quality of a title such as Crysis 2 (see vid above) it is easy to understand why the news has created excitement to the community, especially if Crytek can bring the same tech quality commitment to a mobile title.

Member of the International Program Committee for ECGBL 2011

I have now been added to the International Program Committee for ECGBL 2011 (5th European conference on Games-Based Learning), which will take place in Athens, Greece between the 20th and the 21st of October 2011. The venue for it will be the National and Kapodistrian University.

Over the last ten years, the way in which education and training is delivered has changed considerably with the advent of new technologies. One such new technology that holds considerable promise for helping to engage learners is Games-Based Learning (GBL).
This conference offers an opportunity for scholars and practitioners interested in the issues related to GBL to share their thinking and research findings. Papers can cover various issues and aspects of GBL in education and training: technology and implementation issues associated with the development of GBL; use of mobile and MMOGs for learning; pedagogical issues associated with GBL; social and ethical issues in GBL; GBL best cases and practices, and other related aspects.

The event is particularly interested in empirical research that addresses whether GBL enhances learning. This conference provides a forum for discussion, collaboration and intellectual exchange for all those interested in any of these fields of research or practice.

http://www.academic-conferences.org/ecgbl/ecgbl2011/ecgbl11-home.htm

Bournemouth University joins TIGA

Bournemouth University (BU) has joined TIGA - the trade association representing the UK’s games industry. The University’s membership is led by the School of Design, Engineering & Computing which offers a BSc (Hons) in Games Technology. I am the co-ordinator of the Degree Programme (and a Lecturer in Media Technology) and I believe that BU students will benefit from the extensive network of industry contacts available through TIGA.

“Bournemouth University is committed to working with the industry to further enhance our courses and create benefits for our students”, I stated in the recent press release. “We would love to speak to TIGA members about opportunities for guest lectures, research collaboration and student placements.”

TIGA is comprised of members drawn from the independent games development industry including games publishers, technology businesses and universities. TIGA's vision is to make the UK the best place in the world to do games business by focusing on political representation, generating media coverage and developing services that enhance the competitiveness of its members.

Dr. Richard Wilson, TIGA CEO, stated: “TIGA is committed to working with its university and academic members to help facilitate greater knowledge exchange to benefit both students, universities and the wider industry. We welcome Bournemouth University to TIGA and look forward to working closely with them in the future.”

The University’s degree in Games Technology is designed to help students improve their knowledge and skills of the technological aspects of media and games programming. The course looks at game development on the latest game platforms and also addresses the growing area of mobile phone game development.

The subject of entrepreneurship is highlighted through learning in the area of business development, including company creation and business planning. The course also offers an optional 12 month placement to give students the opportunity to put the skills and knowledge acquired during the first and second years of the course into practise and will help students make an informed decision about their future career.

Other websites running with this story include;

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/pressreleases/67402/Bournemouth_University_Joins_TIGA.php

http://www.develop-online.net/news/36704/Tiga-adds-Bournemouth-Uni-to-member-list

http://southernfriedgamer.com/industry/tiga-adds-bournemouth-university-as-latest-member/

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/bournemouth-university-sign-up-now-a-tiga-member--complete-with-its-bsc-in-games-technology

http://www.train2game.com/2011/01/bournemouth-university-among-igf-student-winners/

http://www.gamedevelopment.com/view/pressreleases/67402/Bournemouth_University_Joins_TIGA.php

http://www.industrygamers.com/releases/19999/

Google Maps for Mobile receives an update, version 5.0 now out for Android

For the first blog post of the new year, an important piece of news which came about during the last couple of weeks of the previous month; Google has now released Google Maps for Mobile version 5.0. While only available on Android (for the time being at least), this new version of the application offers new features which, most notably, include the adoption of vector graphics and offline access.

The aforementioned vector graphics update (which, it should be noted, was originally a Nokia Ovi characteristic feature that Google has now also fully subscribed to) means that Google Maps now draw maps in a dynamic manner, thus enabling the user to use a tilt function to see them in 3D. This of course comes complete with building model representations from over 100 cities around the globe.

No doubt the iPhone version will appear soon enough, looking forward to seeing these new updates in action on my 3GS device! Till then you can read more about this update here.

New Blender book Blender 2.5 Lighting And Rendering

For all the Blender enthusiasts amongst you there is now a new book focusing on the package's abilities towards rendering scenes with realistic lighting (using both interior and exterior lighting techniques) as well as providing guidelines to reconstructing impressive results by applying light rigs and shadow effects.

The book, called Blender 2.5 Lighting And Rendering written by Aaron W. Powell and published by Packt Publishing, also offers instructions on applying color effects and step-by-step guides with practical examples that help add dimensionality to your scenes. Well recommended for the numerous Blender users and also a stark reminder of just how far a, let's not forget, free application like Blender has come in rendering quality which approximates photorealism and matches output of other more commercial packages.

https://www.packtpub.com/blender-2-5-lighting-and-rendering/book

Publication accepted at VS Games 2011 conference

I have received confirmation that a publication I have co-authored has been accepted for publication at the upcoming VS-Games 11 conference (3rd IEEE International Conference in Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications), which will be organized with full support of National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) Athens, Greece, May 4-6 2011. The conference, which will take place on the NTUA campus, aims to meet the significant challenges of the cross-disciplinary community that work around these serious application areas by bringing the community together to share case studies of practice, to present virtual world infrastructure developments, as well as new frameworks, methodologies and theories, and to begin the process of developing shared cross-disciplinary outputs.

The publication has been accepted as a full paper and is titled "Elemental: An insight into the development and evaluation of a secondary education chemistry game using XNA". This article discusses the creation of an educational game intended for UK GCSE-level content, called Elemental. Elemental, developed using Microsoft’s XNA studio and deployed both on the PC and Xbox 360 platforms, addresses the periodic table of elements, a subject with extensions in chemistry, physics and engineering. Through the development process of the game but also the eventual pilot user study with 15 subjects (using a pre and post test method to measure learning using the medium and self-report questions), examples are given on how an educator can, without expert knowledge, utilize modern programming tools to create and test custom-made content for delivering part of a secondary education curriculum.

http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ec/~fotisl/VSGames2011/index.html

Unreal Development Kit mobile iOS tutorial

Now that the Unreal Development Kit is out for the iPhone operating system (please see recent post here) we have the first (at least to my knowledge) tutorial illustrating its usage. This is suitably from Epic Games themselves. The tutorial uses an isometric Jazz Jackrabbit setting, for those unfamiliar with the name of the game it is based on an original 1994 2D platformer which launched the Epic Games brand back in the day (and which I vaguely remember playing on my 386 PC!).

Remember, the iPhone Unreal Development Kit is free for hobbyist use and from the video above the potential looks incredible! No doubt there will be many more of these tutorials to come (from Epic Games but also individual users) but this is a great taster of what can be achieved on the iPhone platform with the UDK tool.

You can view the tutorial and download all assorted files needed here.

New city-building game RamaCity

The Hamburg-based developer Bigpoint is now adding a new social game to their string of titles (Farmerama, ZooMumba and Ponyrama) called RamaCity. This game will be free and browser-based and launched in Spring 2011. During the game, the ambitious urban planner will be called upon to turn small towns and cities into expansive metropolises, tackling more than the typical challenges as he/she can also interact with the cities of other players in a variety of imaginative ways.

Always interested to see virtual cities represented in games in such a manner and moreso in RamaCity's case, as it tackles the visualization aspect of the urban models in a (slight, yet noticeable) cartoon-shaded representation.

More about the upcoming game here, looking forward to its release date.

International Journal Of Virtual Reality article

The latest issue of the open access, online journal International Journal Of Virtual Reality (IJVR) has published an article I co-authored with colleagues at Bournemouth University, titled Automating Terrain Texturing in Real-Time Using a Rule-Based Approach.

This publication proposes a novel approach to automatically colour and texture a given terrain mesh in real time. Through the use of weighting rules, a simple syntax allows for the generation of texture and colour values based on the elevation and angle of a given vertex. It is through this combination of elevation and angle that complex features such as ridges, hills and mountains can be described, with the mesh coloured and textured accordingly. The implementation of the approach is done entirely on the GPU using 2D lookup textures, delivering a great performance increase over typical approaches that pass colour and weighting information in the fragment shader. In fact, the rule set is abstracted enough to be used in conjunction with any colouring/texturing approach that uses weighting values to dictate which surfaces are depicted on the mesh.

You can check the article out here, published on Vol 9, Issue 4 (pp. 21-28) of the journal.

The Unreal Development Kit heading to the iPhone and iPad

While the jury's still out on the selling-like-hotcakes Infinity Blade (I have had it on my iPhone 3GS since the weekend and while the graphics are indeed sensational I am not too impressed by the game itself or indeed the lack of freedom/exploration on it, I thought the Epic Citadel demo promised far more than what this eventual title delivers...) rumours are emerging that the Unreal Development Kit will very soon make its appearance for the iPhone/iPad formats. This is reportedly a matter of days now!

The Wall Street Journal reports that the application, like the UDK (http://www.udk.com/), will be completely free to download and use for hobbyist purposes and offer a licensing/royalties model where developers using the engine commercially will have to pay a $99 licensing fee and 25% royalties to Epic Games after the first $5,000 in sales etc.

Eagerly awaiting this, if this is an app matching the quality of the UDK and at the same time easily accessible, it could definitely revolutionise iPhone/iPad game development and perhaps mobile gaming as a whole. As an educator as well, and someone teaching Unreal on several different units in Higher Education, this again is very exciting news.

Call for papers, IBIMA International Journal of Interactive Worlds (IJIW), "Non-Photorealistic Graphics in Games and Animation"

This is another reminder that along with a colleague from Bournemouth University, I will be the guest editor for an upcoming special issue of the IBIMA International Journal of Interactive Worlds (IJIW), titled Non-Photorealistic Graphics in Games and Animation.

After many years of computer graphics research striving for results which cannot be distinguished from reality, there is now, in parallel, an increasing amount of work focusing not on the approximation of the real world, but on the simulated depiction of more traditional human artwork styles. These styles come with a variety of implications such communicative, emotive and perceptual processing aspects that these approaches can convey, via the inherent abstractive forms and stylization they are associated with.

The research field itself is called non-photorealistic rendering (or NPR in short) and can today be observed in a number of application areas, including real-time computer and video games plus also animated feature films. Contemporary hardware has made possible recent mainstream gaming titles such as Sega’s MadWorld (for Nintendo’s Wii) and Ubisoft’s Prince Of Persia (for a variety of platforms), employing comic-book/sketched and cel-shaded rendering styles respectively. Equally, Disney’s upcoming feature length film Tangled simulates oil-painting techniques. Titles such as these demonstrate that there is considerable interest from developers, film-makers and public alike to explore the possibilities for alternative graphical representations that modern NPR techniques, because of their flexibility in different stylizations, can offer in the area of computer entertainment.

Only original research papers will be considered. Authors should limit initial submissions to no more than 30 double-spaced pages in 12-point font with appropriate margins, inclusive of all materials. A double-blind review will be conducted and papers will be returned to the authors, with explanatory notes for further action. Submissions will be screened to ensure coherence with the theme of the special volume and will be accepted for this theme throughout year 2010.

More information about the journal and the special issue itself can be found at http://www.ibimapublishing.com/journals/CFP/ijiw2.html.

Bournemouth University Research Proposal Review Service

I am now one of the reviewers for the internal Bournemouth University Research Proposal Review Service. This is a responsive, fast-turnaround (approximately four weeks) internal feedback service for research grants that attempts to ensure the provision of more specialised, expert feedback on any given funding proposal.

Alongside other BU academics with successfull research projects, who are also on this reviewing panel, the role of the internal reviewer is to supply timely suggestions for improvement which can greatly enhance the chances of success for a project bid.

More information on this Bournemouth University initiative at http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/rprs (please note that this link and indeed the service itself is and will only be available to other BU academics).

The Centre For Digital Entertainment

As I'm involved (and have been since this October) on the supervisory of a doctoral student under this particular scheme (along with academics from the University of Bath) I thought it would now be a good idea to highlight the Centre For Digital Entertainment in this blog.

The CDE’s purpose is to train the next generation of leaders in the Film Visual Effects, Computer Games, Virtual Worlds and Animation industries and is (mostly) funded by EPSRC to effectively support 50 Doctorate in Engineering studentships. These will be partly based at Bournemouth University where I am located and also the aforementioned University of Bath. The EngD differs from a usual PhD as under this unique doctoral program researchers are placed directly in companies to work on real projects with academic supervision support.

For more information about the scheme (and all the companies involved) please check out the very comprehensive website here.

Using a game engine to create scenes from a known movie

3D game engines have been lending themselves to serious applications for a number of years now, be it architectural, training or even surgical ones. It's not very often however that they're linked to other forms of non-gaming entertainment. A shining example of this, which I came across recently while researching one of my lectures here at Bournemouth University, is a Terminator-themed mod created using the current version of the Unreal engine.

The alpha version of this (aptly called FPS Terminator) is now available here and it looks very impressive indeed, placing the player in a futuristic Skynet-controlled nightmarish setting inspired by the eponymous movie. It garnered praise from an unlikely source too, i.e. from Epic Games main man Cliff Blezsinski who tweeted his approval for the work the three-man team has put together.