For our featured video this week, NetDevil president and Intel Software Partner Program Member Scott Brown took a few minutes to share with viewers how the studio works with Intel's chipsets, as well as how they've collaborated with the semiconductor in the past to fine-tune their games.

With Jumpgate Evolution, NetDevil's sci-fi MMO, the developer specifically set out to make their game run on as many different computers and setups as possible. According to Brown, the title owed a significant portion of its accessibility to Intel's integrated set: "We've been able to get a lot more users capable of playing our game than without."

In addition to using vTune extensively for all of its performance analysis, NetDevil brought Intel in to help with its vehicular combat MMO, Auto Assault. They were not only able to add server-side optimizations, but push the game towards supporting the entire video chipset.

For its next big project, Lego Universe, the developer is again focusing on supporting all the chipsets: "That's meant to be a kids game ... With kids, they always get the old computer in the family, so you got to make sure, especially with kids software, that you really support it as much as you can."

On future trends, Brown added: "I think you're gonna see more CPU-side work. Now with dual core and multicore, the chips can handle much more than what the video games are giving them. I think you'll see a lot of people doing some really cool stuff with that and taking advantage of the next generation of chips."

Posted by Eric Caoili at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Game artificial intelligence site AiGameDev has rounded up a collection of noteworthy research project papers posted so far for the coming SIGGRAPH 2008 conference, picking out papers most relevant for creating artificial intelligent characters, including the two summarized below.

In Group Motion Editing, a paper and demo put together by Taesoo Kwon, Kang Hoon Lee, Jehee Lee, Shigeo Takahashi, the project presents an approach to "editing group motion as a whole while maintaining its neighborhood formation and individual moving trajectories in the original animation as much as possible."

As explained in the abstract: "The user can deform a group motion by pinning or dragging individuals. Multiple group motions can be stitched or merged to form a longer or larger group motion while avoiding collisions... The usefulness and flexibility of our approach is demonstrated through examples in which the user creates and edits complex crowd animations interactively using a collection of group motion clips."

In Real-time Motion Retargeting to Highly Varied User-Created Morphologies, a technical paper on Spore's procedural animation system, the project covers "a novel system for animating characters whose morphologies are unknown at the time the animation is created."

According to the abstract: "Our authoring tool allows animators to describe motion using familiar posing and key-framing methods. The system records the data in a morphology-independent form, preserving both the animation's structural relationships and its stylistic information. At runtime, the generalized data are applied to specific characters to yield pose goals that are supplied to a robust and efficient inverse kinematics solver."

With this system, characters with highly varying skeleton morphologies can be animated despite those morphologies not existing when the animation was authored. As a result, the character's animation can turn out to be "radically different" than what the original animator envisioned.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)