The editors of CMP's Game Developer magazine have named the winners for the 2007 Front Line Awards, the magazine's tenth annual evaluation of the year's best game-making tools in the categories of programming, art, audio, game engine, middleware, and books.
In addition, the magazine has revealed that Maya, Autodesk's software for digital image creation, 3D animation, and visual effects, is this year's inductee to the Front Line Awards Hall of Fame. Each year, honor is bestowed upon a product that has made an outstanding contribution to the game development industry for five years or more.
All winners will be profiled in the January 2008 issue of Game Developer, available to subscribers in early January.
The complete list of winners of the 2007 Game Developer Front Line Awards is as follows:
Hall of Fame:
Maya (Autodesk)
Art Tool:
Softimage XSI 6.01 (Softimage)
Engine:
Unreal Engine 3 (Epic Games)
Programming/Production Tool:
Perforce 2007.2 (Perforce Software)
Middleware:
PathEngine SDK (PathEngine)
Audio Tools:
Vivox Precision Audio (Vivox)
Books:
GPU Gems 3 (NVIDIA/Addison-Wesley Professional)
Game Developer's mission for more than ten years has been to provide game developers with information, news, and articles that pertain directly to them. The Front Line Awards are an official way of recognizing one specific aspect of the industry: the tools that developers need to do their jobs.
Each year, Game Developer looks at the powerful lineup of new products and new releases of favorite tools, from game engines to books, and selects the top five in six different categories. After a comprehensive judging process, one winner is chosen in each category.
"Game Developer heartily congratulates the winners of the 2007 Front Line Awards," said Jeffrey Fleming, Production Editor of Game Developer. "These tools represent the most innovative, user-friendly, and useful products from behind the scenes of the world's best video games and we are proud to give them a bit of the glory they deserve."
