Intel has released the results of its 2008 Game Demo Contest, with winners in four categories receiving cash prizes of $12,500 as well as passes to Game Developers Conference 2009. Runners up received smaller cash prizes. All finalists were helpfully given a suite of developer tools as well as International Game Developers Association memberships.

Top honors for best overall threaded game went to Tommy Refenes of PillowFort for his Goo! demo, which also placed in the graphics category. You can see some of the evolution of Refenes' multithreading techniques in his recent feature article.

Other top honorees include Добряк's Magic Worlds, Tandem Games' Pixel & Vega in: Crunch Time, and Яков Сумыгин's Deadly Light. The winners were narrowed down from 329 entries. All demos that placed up to fifth in their categories are available for download from Intel's site.

Posted by Chris Remo at 01:26 PM | Permalink

In the latest in-depth Gamasutra technical feature, Neversoft co-founder Mick West examines how procedural generated content and compression can lead to expanding vistas for your open-world games.

Open-world game environments and objects are typically spooled from the disc as players move through an area, with scene complexity often determined by the data transfer rate of spooling and the virtual speed of the player within the world.

If a world has too much complexity, then new glitches may result when data cannot be spooled fast enough as players move from one region to another. To prevent these problems, developers can restrict players' maximum speed so there is sufficient time for the world to load, and they can place limits on scene complexity and allowable variation between regions.

To allow for more complex environments, West suggest that developers take advantage of procedural content -- content generated from mathematical descriptions of underlying forms and parameters describing the specific instance of that content -- and procedural compression:

"Procedural compression is simply storing a piece of geometry as a set of procedural parameters rather than as the final model. While this is not compression in the normal sense of the word, the effects are essentially the same, only with a vastly increased (even arbitrarily large) compression ratio.

"We also trade some CPU resources, since the generation of geometry may require more CPU time than the standard spooling and decompressing of the raw data."

You can read the full technical article, which includes more information on procedural compression and solutions to the resource problems that come with the technique (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).

Posted by Chris Remo at 01:00 AM | Permalink