Game Developer magazine has announced the finalists for its Front Line Awards, which honors the best tools across art, audio, middleware, game engines, and programming/production tools.
New to this year's Front Line Awards is the inclusion of a "Best Free Tools" section, which aims to honor the best free development tools across categories. Public nominations were open from October 4-15, 2012, and only five finalists in each category were chosen.
Game developers can now vote for their favorite tools through November 8, 2012, and can enter a raffle for a free all-access pass to GDC 2013.
In addition, Game Developer has inducted Unity 3.5 into the Front Line Awards Hall of Fame for its power, flexibility, relative ease of use, and significant impact on the games industry over the last year. Previous Hall of Fame winners include Adobe Flash, Unreal Engine and XNA Game Studio. (As such, Unity won't be represented in the Best Engine category for this year only, as was true for previous Hall Of Fame honorees.)
Developers who wish to vote should weigh in only on the categories with which they have direct experience. Now, the finalists!
Art
3DS Max 2013 (Autodesk)
Maya 2013 SP1 (Autodesk)
Modo 601 (Luxology)
Photoshop CS6 (Adobe)
ZBrush 4R4 (Pixologic)
Audio
Miles Sound System 9 (Rad Game Tools)
Pro Tools 10 (Avid Technology)
Reaper 4 (Cockos Inc.)
Reason 6.5.1(Propellerhead Software)
Wwise 2012.1 (Audiokinetic)
Game Engine
CryEngine 3 (Crytek)
GameMaker: Studio (YoYo Games)
Havok Vision Engine (Havok)
Torque 3D (GarageGames)
Unreal Engine 3 (Epic Games)
Middleware
Havok Physics (Havok)
SpeedTree for Games v6.2 (Interactive Data Visualization, Inc.)
Tableau Desktop (Tableau Software)
Umbra 3 (Umbra Software)
XaitControl 3.7 (Xaitment)
Free tools
Blender (Blender Foundation - open source)
Box2D (Erin Catto - open source)
Flixel (Adam Saltsman - open source)
GIMP 2.8 (The GIMP Team - open source)
Ogre3D (Torus Knot Software - open source)
Programming/Production
Bugzilla (Mozilla Foundation - open source)
Cruise Control (CruiseControl dev team - open source)
Jenkins (Open source)
JIRA (Atlassian)
Perforce (Perforce Software)
The results of the poll, which also includes Game Developer magazine readers, will be shown in the January 2013 issue of the magazine.
I'm shocked that Unity3D is not on the list -- that's the tool that I (and I think a majority of mobile developers) use daily. We've got GameMaker but not Unity? Something is wrong...
