FEBRUARY 2000 GAME DEVELOPER MAGAZINE ON THE FRONT LINE OF GAME INNOVATION GAME PLAN DEVELOPER 600 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 t: 415.905.2200 f: 415.905.2228 w: www.gdmag.com Publisher Local Maxima Jennifer Pahlka [email protected] EDITORIAL “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of throughput competition. Now that Editorial Director little minds, adored by little statesmen and everybody’s implemented the same clas- Alex Dunne [email protected] Managing Editor philosophers and divines.” sic SGI-inspired pipeline, no one is quite Kimberley Van Hooser [email protected] — Ralph Waldo Emerson sure what features to implement next. Departments Editor SGI’s not leading the pack anymore on Jennifer Olsen [email protected] t’s conventional wisdom in the features, and so this next generation of News & Products Editor Daniel Huebner [email protected] game industry that desktop per- 3D hardware is going to go every which Art Director sonal computers have to become way as vendors throw things against the Laura Pool lpool@mfi.com more like videogame consoles or wall to see what will stick. Editor-At-Large I Chris Hecker [email protected] they will cease to be a viable platform This wackiness and volatility is not Contributing Editors for which to develop games. necessarily a bad thing. For example, Jeff Lander [email protected] I’m not so sure. No, I don’t dispute when you’re trying to maximize some- Mel Guymon mel@infinexus.com Omid Rahmat [email protected] that PC game publishers spend tons of thing using mathematical optimiza- Advisory Board money on technical support because tion, you don’t necessarily always want Hal Barwood LucasArts PC games rarely work for consumers to keep going in the obvious direction, Noah Falstein The Inspiracy Brian Hook Verant Interactive 4 out of the box. Similarly, I don’t dis- the one that constantly increases your Susan Lee-Merrow Lucas Learning pute that selling seven million copies objective. If you do this, you might get Mark Miller Group Process Consulting of a console game in its first weekend stuck at the top of a foothill when the Paul Steed id Software Dan Teven Teven Consulting looks very nice compared with selling true peaks are a bit farther away. The Rob Wyatt Microsoft 70,000 copies in a PC game’s lifetime. top of this foothill is a local maximum, ADVERTISING SALES And who would dispute the allure of where every direction from here goes National Sales Manager developing games for a piece of hard- downhill and reduces our objective, Jennifer Orvik e: jorvik@mfi.com t: 415.905.2156 ware that’s guaranteed to be there even though we’re not at the global Publisher Relations Manager when somebody runs your game? maximum — our true goal. Ayrien Houchin e: ahouchin@mfi.com t: 415.905.2788 Still, I’m going to miss the current This mathematical concept carries Account Representative, Silicon Valley Mike Colligan e: [email protected] t: 415.356.3486 PC architecture if it truly does go the over to the game industry; these wacky Account Executive, Northern California way of the dodo. The best word I can ideas keep us from getting stuck. Their Dan Nopar e: [email protected] t: 415.356.3406 come up with to describe the trait I’ll randomness bounces us around a bit, Account Executive, Western Region miss is “wackiness.” The PC is a won- shakes things up, and maybe gives Darrielle Sadle e: dsadle@mfi.com t: 415.905.2182 derfully wacky medium, and I think somebody an insight into a completely Account Executive, Eastern Region Afton Thatcher e: athatcher@mfi.com t: 415.905.2323 even the console industry benefits different way of doing things. from its wackiness. Consoles don’t have this level of ADVERTISING PRODUCTION What do I mean by “wacky”? Take wackiness, at least when you consider Senior Vice President/Production Andrew A. Mickus Advertising Production Coordinator Dave Perrotti the original Nvidia NV1 chip, one of the rate at which they change. Sure, Reprints Stella Valdez t: 916.983.6971 the first attempts at consumer-level 3D consoles like the Sega Saturn are plenty graphics in hardware. Now that was wacky when they’re released, but a few MILLER FREEMAN GAME GROUP MARKETING wacky. The NV1, for you young, TNT- months later everybody’s used to it, and Marketing Manager Susan McDonald spoiled whippersnappers, rasterized three years later it’s downright boring. CIRCULATION quadratic surfaces directly. Who cares There’s an intrinsic tie between the Vice President/Circulation Jerry M. Okabe whether quadratic surfaces don’t mesh pace of technical innovation and the Assistant Circulation Director Kathy Henry well with any known modeling para- stability of a platform, and so it stands Circulation Manager Stephanie Blake digm in this universe? Who cares to reason that if we give up our insta- Circulation Assistant Kausha Jackson-Crain whether anybody ever actually used bility, we’ll have to reduce our pace of Newsstand Analyst Pam Santoro this hardware to make a game? It cer- innovation. Don’t get me wrong, I INTERNATIONAL LICENSING INFORMATION tainly caused a ruckus and made for think consoles are great, especially for Robert J. Abramson and Associates Inc. t: 914.723.4700 f: 914.723.4722 some very interesting conversations their users. It’s probably inevitable that e: [email protected] among game developers. the PC will evolve in that direction. Or how about Aureal’s 3D sound API However, I will definitely miss the that expected you to upload your technological wackiness of the PC. ■ CEO/Miller Freeman Global Tony Tillin world geometry? Definitely wacky. Chairman/Miller Freeman Inc. Marshall W. Freeman Intel’s MMX instructions? Wacky. D3D President & CEO Donald A. Pazour Executive Vice President/CFO Ed Pinedo execute buffers? Beyond wacky. There Executive Vice Presidents Darrell Denny, John Pearson, are infinite examples. Galen Poss I actually think the PC 3D hardware Group President/Specialized Technologies Regina Ridley industry is about to go through a renais- Sr. Vice President/Creative Technologies KoAnn Vikören Sr. Vice President/Human Resources Macy Fecto sance of wackiness after the last couple Chris Hecker years of relatively boring fill-rate and Editor-At-Large GAME DEVELOPER FEBRUARY 2000 New Products: Famous Technologies ships new Famous Faces, Realviz intro- duces Stitcher, and Human Machine announces Inmotion p. 7 Industry Watch: Sony’s on the work- station warpath, Sega coughs up a $182 million loss, and EA inks a five-year deal with AOL. p. 8 Product Review: Mel Guymon flirts with Maya 2.5 and contemplates whether the package is one-stop shop- News from the World of Game Development ping for game development. p. 10 tive to keyframe animation. Open blurred, color-blended, and warped so New Products motion-capture channels provide easy they won’t require additional editing, integration with common 2D and 3D and Stitcher also provides its own set by Daniel Huebner mo-cap sources including Motion of flexible production tools. Analysis and Vicon. Stitcher is available for Windows NT Famous Faces 1.5 is available as a at a suggested retail price of $2,000 and You Look Familiar... stand-alone for Windows NT, and also an IRIX version is in the works for includes plug-in support for most release by the end of the first quarter. FAMOUS TECHNOLOGIES has shipped major animation software, including Realviz also offers a pay-per-use licens- Famous Faces 1.5, adding to the influx Lightwave 3D, Softimage, Maya, 3D ing plan, an appealing alternative for 7 of new facial animation software for Studio Max, and Filmbox. It is priced small budgets that only need the soft- 3D animators. Unveiled at Siggraph 99, at $4,990. ware on a limited basis. the package a is stand-alone system ■ Famous Technologies ■ Realviz S.A. that aims to accelerate character ani- San Francisco, Calif. Sophia Antipolis, France mation workflow by allowing anima- (415) 835-9445 +33 (4) 92-38-84-60 tors to extract 3D facial motion from http://www.famoustech.com http://www.realviz.com .AVI files and NTSC video. Designed for use in the film, broadcast, games, and location-based entertainment Sew It Up Putting Sound In Motion industries, Famous Faces uses an actor’s performance to animate dialog and REALVIZ is serving up another image HUMAN MACHINE INTERFACES has facial expressions quickly, enabling ani- processing technology designed to announced the Inmotion 5.1 Sur- mators to create more lifelike and con- make life easier for 3D modelers and round Producer, a professional appli- vincing facial animations. special-effects professionals. Stitcher’s cation designed to let users create true Among the new features for version task is to combine multiple vertically- multi-channel audio mixed for 5.1, 1.5 is multiple input support, allowing and horizontally-overlapping 2D 6.1, 7.1, or any other desired speaker for the use of motion capture, video, images seamlessly for fast and simple layout, without affecting the quality puppetry devices, voice recognition, creation of wide-angle and panoramic or tone of the original audio stream. or a combination of these methods. images. Those images can then be Inmotion’s interface works by allow- The system has also added support for exported into a variety of compositing ing users simply to draw the path the real-time game animation, an alterna- and 3D modeling packages, including sound should follow to a set of virtual Realviz’s own speakers. Imagemodeler. Inmotion’s environmental modeling The minds capabilities include Doppler motion behind Stitcher see effects, air absorption, occlusion mod- it as an alternative eling, reverberation, and distance to costly and time- modeling.