November 2000
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NOVEMBER 2000 GAME DEVELOPER MAGAZINE ON THE FRONT LINE OF GAME INNOVATION GAME PLAN DEVELOPER ✎ 600 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR t: 415.905.2200 f: 415.947.6090 w: www.gdmag.com Publisher Jennifer Pahlka [email protected] EDITORIAL Editor-In-Chief Mark DeLoura [email protected] Senior Editor Jennifer Olsen [email protected] Sunset, Sunrise Managing Editor Laura Huber [email protected] Production Editor early four and a half years reality and an arcade game that never R.D.T. Byrd [email protected] ago, Alex Dunne first shipped. I spent quite a few years working Art Director Audrey Welch [email protected] appeared in this space. Four with virtual reality at the Human Interface Editor-At-Large and a half years! That’s a Technology Lab and UNC-Chapel Hill, Chris Hecker [email protected] Contributing Editors long time to be doing any- and I co-moderated the Usenet newsgroup Daniel Huebner [email protected] Nthing, even more so in our industry, where sci.virtual-worlds. Then there was the Jeff Lander [email protected] it’s rare to be working on something for whole networked multiplayer arcade game Maarten Kraaijvanger [email protected] Advisory Board longer than two years (well, except for a thing, which sounded like a great idea, and Hal Barwood LucasArts Noah Falstein The Inspiracy few games!). To give you a sense of per- did actually work as long as you ran it on Brian Hook Verant Interactive spective, in that issue of Game Developer a $250,000 SGI Onyx. Susan Lee-Merrow Lucas Learning Mark Miller Group Process Consulting DirectX 2 was highlighted. At the Com- Most recently I organized and edited the Paul Steed Independent puter Game Developers Conference that book Game Programming Gems, which is Dan Teven Teven Consulting Rob Wyatt The Groove Alliance year, Intel announced MMX, 3Dfx a collection of programming tips and tricks announced the Voodoo graphics chipset, from 40 professional game developers. ADVERTISING SALES Director of Sales & Marketing and Apple announced Game Sprockets. (And yes, that would be a shameless plug!) Greg Kerwin e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6218 Doesn’t that seem like a long time ago? National Sales Manager Many things have changed during these Jennifer Orvik e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6217 Engage Account Manager, Western Region, Silicon Valley & Asia years, but you could always depend on Mike Colligan e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6223 Alex and Game Developer. Month after here are we going from here? It’s an Account Manager, Northern California Susan Kirby e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6226 month, Alex gave readers insight into our incredibly exciting and challenging W Account Manager, Eastern Region & Europe industry, pointed out the shadowy nooks time to be a game developer. In the console Afton Thatcher e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6224 and crannies, and guided developers over space we’re faced with four very different Sales Representative/Recruitment Morgan Browning e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6225 bumps such as software patents. Alex platforms to work on: porting games didn’t just point out industry issues, he cre- between them is going to be ugly. On the ADVERTISING PRODUCTION Senior Vice President/Production Andrew A. Mickus ated things like the Independent Games PC side, the range of performance you now Advertising Production Coordinator Kevin Chanel Festival, an annual showcase for independ- must account for demands scalability and Reprints Stella Valdez t: 916.983.6971 ently developed games. hardcore bug-testing. Handheld gaming is CMP GAME MEDIA GROUP MARKETING It is with sadness that we bid Alex good- launching into completely new areas, with Senior MarCom Manager Jennifer McLean bye, but of course he hasn’t gone very far. cellular communication, four-player multi- Strategic Marketing Manager Darrielle Sadle Alex is now the executive producer for our play and console-handheld connectivity. Marketing Coordinator Scott Lyon sister publication, Gamasutra.com, and I’m And then there’s web gaming, persistent CIRCULATION sure he’ll bring to that forum the same dis- worlds, and the mod community. So we Group Circulation Director Kathy Henry Director of Audience Development Henry Fung cerning eye for what’s important to you. certainly have a lot of material to cover! Circulation Manager Ron Escobar It’s clear that having a resource to help Game Developer Circulation Assistant Yumi Sato magazine is Enter, Stage Right you make decisions about your games is BPA approved Newsstand Analyst Pam Santoro valuable. We’re pleased that one resource SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES o you may be wondering, who is this you’ve chosen is Game Developer maga- For information, order questions, and address changes t: 800.250.2429 or 847.647.5928 f: 847.647.5972 S guy, and what’s he doing here? Hi, I’m zine. Our commitment to providing timely, e: [email protected] Mark DeLoura, the new editor-in-chief for innovative material is unwavering. We plan INTERNATIONAL LICENSING INFORMATION Game Developer. Like many of you, I’ve to broaden our coverage of many types of Robert J. Abramson and Associates Inc. worked at numerous places, but my pri- gaming, as interactive entertainment contin- t: 914.723.4700 f: 914.723.4722 e: [email protected] mary gig for the past five years has been as ues its transition from a niche activity to a CMP MEDIA MANAGEMENT software engineering lead at Nintendo of truly mass-market art form. These next few President & CEO Gary Marshall America. While at Nintendo, I was the key years are going to be a doozy! Corporate President/COO John Russell Nintendo 64 developer relations person, CFO John Day Group President, Business Technology Group Adam Marder and I wrote the November 1999 article on Group President, Specialized Technology Group Regina Ridley rendering Bézier surfaces using N64 micro- Group President, Channel Group Pam Watkins code. For the last year and a half I’ve led a Group President, Electronics Group Steve Weitzner Senior Vice President, Human Resources Leah Landro team of brilliant software engineers, work- Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing Bill Howard ing on demos and libraries for Nintendo’s Let us know what you think. Send Senior Vice President, Business Development Vittoria Borazio Gamecube and Game Boy Advance. e-mail to [email protected], or write General Counsel Sandra L. Grayson Vice President, Creative Technologies Johanna Kleppe My background prior to working at Cto Game Developer, 600 Harrison St., Nintendo includes a heavy dose of virtual San Francisco, CA 94107 www.gdmag.com WWW.CMPGAME.COM FRONT LINE TOOLS ZWHAT’S NEW IN THE WORLD OF GAME DEVELOPMENT | jennifer olsen NETIMMERSE 3.1 INTRINSIC ALCHEMY BETA RELEASE new version of NDL’s NetImmerse game A engine has arrived, featuring additional ntrinsic Graphics has announced the plug-in support for real-time previewing, better Ifirst publicly available version of their Playstation 2 performance, and new animation Intrinsic Alchemy game development plat- features. In addition to improving the existing form, aimed primarily at simplifying sim- MaxImmerse plug-in for 3D Studio Max, ultaneous cross-platform development, which now features real-time previewing for something many game companies are pon- ODDWORLD: MUNCH’S ODDYSEE, Oddworld Inhabit- PS2, NetImmerse 3.1 adds two more plug-ins: dering for current and upcoming projects ants, All Rights Reserved MyImmerse, a real-time previewing plug-in for as the next generation of game platforms Maya 3 with multi-texturing support, and emerges. Intrinsic Alchemy works by sepa- MultImmerse for Multigen Creator 2.3. Other new features include an optimization rating a game’s processing blocks from the library and keyframe verification tools, aimed at helping programmers to write better-per- application structure and data flow of the forming code, plus support for the Miles Sound System on PC, as well as better animation underlying platform, and using an Appli- blending and control over sequences. NetImmerse currently supports Windows, MacOS, cation Graph as the identity of processing Linux, and Playstation 2, with Xbox support planned for the near future. blocks and the data connectivity between them. A developer’s NETIMMERSE 3.1 | NDL | www.ndl.com compiled C and C++ functions can then traverse the Application ALIENBRAIN TURNS UP THE POWER Graph at run time and execute the processing blocks on the xN has introduced a new, more powerful server for its Alienbrain data intended platform. Nmanagement system for game development, the Alienbrain XTreme The current beta release sup- server. Largely a response to the rapidly increasing content demands of ports Windows, Playstation 2, and next-generation games, Alienbrain XTreme is optimized for projects Sony’s GS Cube, with licenses with well over 100,000 files and more than 20 developers, num- available for single or multi-plat- bers which are increasingly characteristic of today’s game develop- form use. Support for Gamecube, ment projects. The Alienbrain XTreme server allows users to widen the scope of Xbox, and unspecified STB systems is the projects managed by the Alienbrain system, handling larger data sets and providing planned for upcoming releases. simplified backup options plus faster startup and shutdown times. INTRINSIC ALCHEMY | Intrinsic Graphics | ALIENBRAIN XTREME SERVER | NxN | www.alienbrain.com www.intrinsic.com MULTIGEN CREATOR 2.4 SAFEDISC 2.0 TRIES TO THWART HACKERS ultigen- M Paradigm has acrovision has released a updated its Mnew version of its SafeDisc Multigen Creator PC CD-ROM copy protection 3D modeling pro- system for publishers, develop- gram with a major ers, and replicators. SafeDisc 2.0 new release. includes a major overhaul of the Creator 2.4 adds SafeDisc code architecture, in an effort to circumvent auto- multi-texturing of mated hacking tools and provide additional encryption to up to eight textures delay hacking.