Posts by Section_Ei8ht

RabidMonkey didnt make that texture, he just made the map.

from: http://pc.ign.com/articles/698/698421p1.html

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GDC 06: LucasArts and ILM: A Case Study in the Convergence of Games and FilmA high-level look at how LucasArts is fusing games and movie teams in-house.

by Douglass C. Perry

March 24, 2006 - On the final day of the Game Developers Conference 2006, LucasArts clarified that it's prepared for the future convergence of movies and games in a way no other company could. Over the last three years, Industrial Light and Magic and LucasArts Entertainment have toiled to merge their two high-tech companies, and finally their "blue-sky" goal has reached fruition.

During the one-hour lecture entitled, "LucasArts and ILM: A Case Study in the Convergence of Games and Film," Chris Williams, project lead, LucasArts, and Steve Sullivan, director of R&D, ILM, addressed how their two companies, virtual strangers to one another, have merged geographically and technologically. More significantly, they explained how the result will drastically affect the production and quality of their films and games as the next generation of systems arrives.

Last year, LucasArts and ILM moved into the same buildings, the Letterman Digital Arts Studio, a newly developed part of San Francisco's national park, The Presidio. Commencing in 2003, executives from both teams proposed joining both studios. In 2004, LucasArts restructured and the brainstorming began, and Zeno, the underlying tool upon which both games and movies will be made, began the shift from Linux into Windows. The following year LucasArts committed to the next-gen pipeline. In 2006, the first game to show off the collaboration of their efforts will be the new multi-platform Indiana Jones, to be unveiled at E3 2006, and due on next-generation systems in 2007. All future LucasArts games will be based on the Zeno platform, Williams explained.

Zeno was created to take advantage of the Academy award-winning tech skills from ILM with the game development of LucasArts, building a next-generation game development pipeline and toolset from which both could prosper. As many as 15 engineers are dedicated to building it, and the team comprises a mixture of LEC and ILM staff, who share offices. There is no "CTG" -- central technology group, and the tools will never actually be finished: it will always be in development. The first fruits of the teams' labor will be shown in LucasArts' two next generation games (one of which is Indiana Jones).

Among the many struggles the two teams have had include balancing the use of both Windows and Linux, creating tools with high usability, smart interfaces, and are stable, and ramping-up and training.

Components of the Zeno tools feature WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing for level editing, familiar controls and manipulators, and an asset browser. "Zeno is great at handling complex scenes," said Steve Sullivan. "It is used to handle incredibly complex scenes such as those in Pirates of the Caribbean. The tool is also flexible, scriptable, and highly scalable. And...we own it."

The tools provide powerful ways to manipulate and show real-time lighting, pre-calculated lighting using ILM's pipeline and renderfarming, real-time and accurate previews of dynamic lighting and shadowing, HDR (high dynamic range) support, and ambient occlusion support. There is an excellent particle editor, a materials editor, and LucasArts has its own digital actor studio, enabling motion-capture work in-house. The team is able to blend animation, and work on non-linear animation, facial animation, procedural animation, in addition to having access to a physics workshop, into which Havok tools have been integrated.

Sullivan also announced that Lucas has started a new studio in Shanghai, planted to take advantage of the country's skilled labor force of excellent animators. A game studio is also in development in Shanghai.

One would think that the shared Zeno tools would only be beneficial to LucasArts, given that ILM is so far ahead in its technical achievements. Not so, explained Chris Williams. The shared techniques also benefit ILM. That technical team now has more interactive authoring capabilities and previews of shots, access to real-time physics simulations and improved user interfaces, procedural animation and character user-interfaces,

multi-user authoring environments, and remote collaboration.

In conclusion, Williams said, there are a few hard-learned takeaway points. Joining the two companies has been really hard, even with a mandate. But game and film technologies really do complement each other. And even though the cultural gap is huge, the next generation of games and movies has provided motivation. Lastly, integrated frameworks need gestation and many iterations to reach their full potential. "It's a big win to know that we're doing it the 'right way.' And, once we get it right, we can then make the process fast."

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Discuss.

I think only good things can come from this. The visual effects and technological advances from ILM joining with the gaming world? This sounds pretty sweet, and I would like to get my hands on those Zeno tools.

Damnit, I'm 19 and this thread makes me feel old.

sigh, indeed. I remember Jedi Knight. Still play it through every now and then. One of the best.

Izuno just said what I was trying to say

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mhh whats so special about old console games? there are emulators available for pc that play all these titles very well for years now.

Yeah, but its just not the same.

zilla, your take on the future seems to be a bit Utopian. I think the war would be more likely to happen than everyone co-existing in skyscrapers. But then again history has shown that war is always the last resort...

oh wait...

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1941376,00.asp

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It's Official: Dell Beams Up Alienware03.22.06

By Mark Hachman

Dell Inc. confirmed Thursday that it had acquired boutique PC vendor Alienware, a move that will add some zing to the company's image.

Although Dell's acquisition was widely anticipated, Alienware chief executive Nelson Gonzalez said that his company will remain a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dell, continuing its own brand, design, sales and marketing, and support. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

For consumers, the purchase will mean that Alienware will now access Dell's well-known supply-chain efficiencies, ideally reducing wait times for new PCs that Alienware executives said have swelled to as much as a month or more. Interestingly, the deal also means that a PC containing a processor from Advanced Micro Devices will finally contribute to Dell's bottom line.

Gonzalez said that to expand Alienware's product line with more, highly-tuned boutique products, the company needed more resources. Although the company sells its PCs to customers in Japan, Korea, and Asia, Alienware didn't have the cash to fund the worldwide expansion it needed, he added.

"We were at a crossroads, we were at a point in time where we had to make a decision to go public or to perhaps merge with another entity if it made sense," Gonzalez said. "There were very few organizations out there that we would do this with—and there's only one that I could think of, and that was Dell, just because of the similarities in terms of the direct business model, and that we have a lot of similarities with the [company]. The problem is that we were at these crossroads, we needed to raise capital, and we had never raised capital at this company from day one."

"We needed to get bigger, and we needed to release more products," Gonzalez added. "We do our own designs and our own form factors, and that costs a lot of money, frankly."

That won't come at the expense of the Alienware brand, however. Gonzalez said that Alienware PCs would not carry a Dell logo, and that he would report directly to Jim Schneider, Dell's chief financial officer. "I think that you'll find it very hard to find the Dell name on the [Alienware] web site," he said.

"The reality is that you're not going to see a whole lot of changes," added Mark Vena, Alienware's vice president of marketing and the former chief of Dell's Dimension consumer PC business.

The Dell-Alienware deal was first "reported" by a blogger and rival, VoodooPC chief Raul Sood, who predicted that a then-rumored deal would make sense. "Why the potential for a Dellienware and not another? Alienware is widely considered to be the volume leader in gaming, they have scale," Sood wrote.

Somewhat ironically, Dell announced the Alienware acqusition on the same day as it released the Dimension XPS Renegade, its own boutique PC sporting a ramped-up design, four graphics chips, an overclocked CPU, even a physics accelerator – and a price tag above $9,000, aimed at the well-to-do enthusiast that Alienware, Falcon Northwest, and its competitors covet. Unsurprisingly, Alienware PCs will also use the Ageia physics chip.

And that means competition will undoubtedly occur, Gonzalez said. "Dell is going to do what they do," he said. "I'm sure they have no plans of eliminating the XPS," he said. "They're going to have their lineup; we're going to have ours."

The Alienware and Dell Renegade lines will "complement, not compete with one another," said Jess Blackburn, a Dell spokesman. Alienware will not sell Dell PCs, but may sell Dell peripherals, he said.

What Alienware does plan is a further expansion into the server and Media Center PC market, with a few specialized sidelines, such as government offerings. While Gonzalez readily admitted that Alienware would never develop a business PC, he added that the company plans to launch a new all-in-one PC in a few weeks' time. A specialized home media server is also in the cards, as is an aggressive push into the high-end workstation space, Vena added.

Customers of both product lines will also be able to tap into Dell's financing options, Vena noted.

Being added to the Dell organization also means that the company can take advantage of the Dell supply chain and its relationships to suppliers like ATI, Intel, and Nvidia. According to Vena, customers were being forced to wait up to five weeks for new PCs using the latest technology, a trend that he said should be far easier to buck now that Alienware can tap into Dell's supply chain.

Finally, the deal also allows Advanced Micro Devices to finally gain access to Dell, the last major PC OEM that existed as an Intel-only shop. While the deal doesn't mean that Dell will ship an AMD-based PC under its own label, the deal could provide a way for AMD to move closer to Dell over time. Gonzalez appeared to be one of the few people in the PC industry that said he didn't care, however.

"We're completely agnostic to any one vendor," Gonzalez said. "We talk about performance."

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its real.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/697/697313p1.html

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Battlefield 2142 RevealedBattlefield series leaps into the 22nd century.

by Wade Steel

March 21, 2006 - Swedish developer Digital Illusions first had us fight on the virtual battlefields of World War 2 and Vietnam. Next they allowed us to engage each other on a modern battlefield using today's current weapons technology. Today, the company revealed -- via a Swedish press release -- that the next iteration of the Battlefield franchise will take place in the future -- 136 years in the future to be exact -- and will be known (perhaps unsurprisingly) as Battlefield 2142.

According to the company, the new game will be a standalone product that uses the existing Battlefield 2 graphics engine technology. While few details were revealed at the time of the game's announcement today, the game's premise involves a world in which "two military superpowers" are locked in a "decisive battle for survival" due to a new ice age which is crippling the planet Earth.

While no definite gameplay details were revealed, DICE stated that the game will support up to 64 players competing against each other in two teams with the ability to earn "promotions and awards in form of new weapons, medals and much more" as the player progresses.

The game will be published by Electronic Arts (who recently completed full acquisition of DICE) and is slated for a Fall 2006 release.

Needless to say, today's announcement was somewhat surprising when we consider how recently Battlefield 2 was released, but the opportunity to have Battlefield-type gameplay in a futuristic setting has certainly gotten our attention. We will definitely be bringing you more information as it becomes available.

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and mathematics technically isnt a science.

correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't something no longer a theory when you prove it to be true?

But then again, I guess if you use another theory to prove it, you still have a foundation of theories you are assuming to be true in order to make other assumptions that are true.

Sah-weet!

I havent really used it much, but when I was trying to play Dark Forces awhile back I remember using DOSBox and VDMSound

Didn't really run all that well, but it was playable.

well in that case you accomplished everything you set out to do. Nice work, indeed!

I agree with mino. Yeah, its okay but its nothing special.

But then again, a map doesnt have to be different to be special...

you're just making me want to play STALKER more and more. damn you, good sir, damn you, indeed!

Sweet pics, nonetheless.

holy shit that far cry map is hot!

i like it.

Thats good old radiant. You either love it or you hate it.

/me pets radiant.

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(pps: my first idea was to make a normal map out of goatse, and i did, but then i decided it would be a bad idea to post it, so i didn't.)

I would have laughed. then I would commend you for staring at goatse long enough to make a normal map of it

dissonance, you gonna release a normal map?