Deforming Environments
Continuing the trend of technology based gaming advances, an engine called Atomontage uses what's known as voxels to display graphics. Voxels are essentially vectors instead of polygons, I know this might confuse most of you so I thought it's just better to show a video and link to the appropriate Wikipedia articles.
In this video you can see the tyre tracks are actually pushing the sand around rather than just drawing a graphic or shader on top of it. There are some games that have done this using polygons and displacement maps or some other method but this is effectively altering the surface of the ground permanently and it doesn't affect things like the rocks.
Unlike the Unlimited Detail, this would require a monster graphics card.
Unlimited Detail in games
Came across this new computer graphics rendering technique yesterday called Unlimited Detail. Since then I have been thinking of various possible uses. I hope it takes off in some form, so much potential - fully destructive environments with unlimited graphics detail, real materials, carving 3d models like an evolved Zbrush etc
Looking forward to finding out more and seeing where this goes, just wonder why I have only just heard of it. Watch the video to see what im talking about.
GPU giants have been trying to block this technology advance because it's diffuses the aggressive research and funding behind traditional polygon developments rendering their research pointless.
If you're a game developer, industry giant or investors then please look at Unlimited detail at their website and get in contact with them.
Source Unlimited Detail Technology via Game Trailers
Windows Mobile 7 for gaming!
So here you can see that Microsoft has unveiled the new mobile phone OS that Windows Mobile users have been speculating on for years.
It's evident that Microsoft have taken a fresh approach to this iPhone copy-cat market and like Palm they seem to have come out with the support of the overwhelming public.
What does it mean? It means that Microsoft are in-line with Apple, Palm and Google with their mobile software at long last and with the inclusion of XBOX Live gaming ability it means you will get some beefed up games running on mobile hardware.
For us that's exciting we're big fans of mobile gaming and this shows that Microsoft is as serious about it as the rest of the industry — I'm glad they took the time to do it right and differentiate themselves.
Apple's Latest Creation
Is this the event to unveil the oft-rumoured Apple tablet? We think it is, January 27th — that's this month people, Apple could be unveiling their tablet (rumoured to be called iSlate). We shall see!
Is Flash Good For iPhone?
Jon Jordan, writing for Edge asked us what we thought about Flash for iPhone. You can read the article Is Flash Good For iPhone? on the Edge website and find the full transcript from Johnny Two Shoes below.
How useful will it be for you as a game developer to now be able to make native Flash apps for iPhone?
It sounds great, being able to develop in action-script and have it run on the iPhone like a native app. The only problem is it's very slow on the device, performance is pretty terrible. We've already developed High Speed Chase natively on the iPhone platform, so there's no incentive for us to start using action-script to make lower performance games now we can code natively.
Do you have any plans to do so?
We plan to experiment with the new tools, but the amount of development time we'd save probably isn't worth the performance hit on the device. It's not at a stage for us where it's a viable alternative to native iPhone development.
Would you prefer Apple to open up iPhone so it would be able to do in-browser Flash games as is now happening with every other smartphone and Flash 10.1?
The games JohnnyTwoShoes make for the web browser rely on keyboard/mouse input, the idea of flash running inside mobile safari would make our games un-playable. Portable browsing is about being lean and the flash player is an unnecessary layer of fat the iPhone can do without. Native apps can be manually optimised for performance as well as originally designed around the iPhone input methods (touch, tilt etc) which make them a much better choice for pocket gamers.
What limitations will this system have compared to building native iPhone apps from scratch?
Regardless of API's, it's got to be performance. In reality the PS3 has trouble running flash intensive applications such as games, it can just about handle video. On top of that, Mac has performance problems inside Safari. These kinds of problems seem more pressing to us over whether Flash can run on every mobile device out there.
What effect do you think this will have in terms of the number of Flash games that will be released onto the App Store?
Opening the appstore up to flash developers is likely to open the floodgates on mad content. This could be good for a small percentage of games, but mostly I feel like it will further cheapen the quality of the appstore.
full article on Edge
Microsoft has the answer to the tablet?
I saw this video a moment ago and I thought "Whhaaaattt?". This is incredible, it looks and feels like an Apple product but it's not, it's a concept product from none other than Microsoft.
The whole cutting out, tearing, writing and dragging stuff seems pretty intuitive and gives you an awesome look and feel to the way the person is working on-screen.
Anyway, check out the vid.
via TheNextWeb
Next Generation Graphics
I've been following the developments of the next generation of Direct X, with Windows 7 Microsoft is pushing version 11 as part of the package. What does this mean? Well, it's hard to explain (and pretty boring to read) so I thought I'd show you a video of some rolling ocean.
If you want to be one of the first people to own Direct X 11 hardware, then you'll have to look in the direction of ATi. They've been seriously quick off the starting line in developing next-generation hardware to get an edge over Nvidia with the ATi 5870. You can read more about the hardware and what it all means over at HardOCP.