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[In this in-depth article, the editors of Game Developer magazine present the 2008 Front Line Awards, with industry notables ranking and discussing this year's best game tools.]
For more than a decade, Game Developer magazine has been singling out the best in game development tools with our annual Front Line Awards.
Here, we take a moment to honor the products that are most effective at helping developers do great work. Whether in the trenches or on the cutting edge, these are the tools that artists, designers, and engineers rely on.
While the tool business can be hotly competitive with the next greatest thing always just around the corner, we also want to pay special tribute with our Hall of Fame Award to the product that has made a lasting impact on the game industry year after year (and which was also not eligible to win in its specific category).
Nominations for this year's Front Line Awards were open to all new software products and new versions of software products related to game development released between September 1, 2007 and August 31, 2008. In determining the winners of the 2008 Front Line Awards we took a different approach than in previous years.
After a period of open nominations in October we collected the results and combined them with our own picks to come up with a list that we then narrowed down to five finalists in each category.
The result was a mix of focused solutions along with more general applications. We then handed the finalists over to you, the readers of Game Developer and Gamasutra, via an invitational online survey in November, so that you could have a voice in picking the recipients of the Front Line Awards.
We gathered over two thousand responses to the survey and we are proud to present the winners along with commentary by developers from throughout the game industry.
A special thanks goes out to everyone who contributed to this year's Front Line Awards and congratulations to all the finalists and winners.
- Jeff Fleming, Game Developer magazine
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Like: Where is OpenAL? Seriously, OpenAL kick ass (btw: some Unreal Engines use OpenAL)
And, Torque won as the Engine? Have you ever used Torque? It suck! I used SEVERAL opensource engines and they all beat Torque easily, if Torque won why could not Cube 2 win?
I don't bekueve free or opensource was ignored. Subversion is in there as one of the finalists, and rightly so. But this is a survey targetted towards professional game development so should be viewed in that context. For example, whilst both GIMP and Blender are fantastic achievements for free & OSS, the vast majority of the GD Community feels that Photoshop and Max are the way to go, and are willing to pay for the added benefits that those tools bring.
Regarding Torque sucking - when was the last time you used it? Reading the evangelism on the engine from PocketWatch, it would appear to have evolved fairly significantly over the past couple of years, so maybe some/all of the shortcomings you found have been overcome.
Regarding Torque winning. what you have to bear in mind is that the winners in each category are not necessarily the best performing, the easiest to use, the cheapest, but they *are* the one that recieved the most votes from the public. This may well be in part due to an effective lobbying campaign by GarageGames to it's license holders, but surely if they were that unhappy with it, they wouldn't have voted for it?
FYI, I have participated in evaluating 4 out of 5 of the engines nominated for my employers, and have personally held licenses to most of the Torque products for many years now, but ultimately ended up voting for Unity on account of the huge strides they've made in the past 2 years in usability and stability.