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SIGGRAPH 2009 New Written
by Tng Tai Hou Monday, 24 August 2009 SIGGRAPH 2009 in Sandbox hosted an IndieCade
(www.indiecade.com) showcase of independent games. IndieCade bills itself as
the only stand-alone independent Games Festival in the “Zephyr: Tides of War” has
a voice-driven interface, enabling the player to navigate a ship by shouting commands
such as “Dive” or “U-Turn”. I tried it and, in many cases, it worked for my
Singaporean-accented English, with little need for repetition. This
speaker-dependent design is great. Many voice-driven systems tend to achieve
higher accuracies if the user “trains” the system to recognize voice patterns
over a few hours of recording; “Zephyrr” requires no training. The voice
input is via a conventional webcam with a built-in microphone. Despite the
noisy environment, the simple voice commands were recognised and executed
responsively. This interface was quite enjoyable and brought playability to a
more engaging level. “Papermint” is an appealing
flat-3D style social networking environment. It is an MMO with paper dolls as
characters. The developer incorporated
emotive states into the paper dolls: if the “sad” state is chosen, the paper
doll will be droopy-looking, choosing “happy” may cause the doll avatar to
strut her stuff. The currency of the game is mint. There are opportunities
for the avatar to earn some mint, but most of the mint can be found on the
virtual ground. “Path” is an interactive
Red Riding Hood story with custom characters. Depending on how the player
reacts and avoids the wolf determines which ending occurs. The gothic visual
style of the game evoked comments such as “graphically wow”, from some of the
attendees. This is a horror-themed game. Where I grew up ( “Mightier” requires the
user to draw (onto a paper within a registration box) an outline of a
character and a number of plateaus. Using a webcam, the outline and plateaus
are digitized and extruded into 3D. The user can then have his or her
character jump onto the plateaus in order to capture power pods and move onto
subsequent levels. The character in the game is flat and paper-thin. This
game may encourage more children to use the pen to see how their drawings can
be made interactive. The webcam digitization was fast and accurate - this was
probably due to the registration boxes being within the supplied drawing
material, which helped the software determine where the drawings should be
recognised by the game.
Sam Roberts, IndieCade
Festival Director, hopes that SIGGRAPH attendees will use IndieCade as a
platform to showcase new and innovative graphical games. This year he
targeted IndieCade games at North American and Within Sandbox were
showcases of real-time rendering projects. One of the projects was “Flower”
from That Game Company (www.thatgamecompany.com), which was originally an
IndieCade project before it found a commercial path. In “Flower”, the player
navigates flower petals through a beautifully vivid and flowing grass
landscape that is rendered in real-time.
ATI and nVidia both had
real-time rendering demos running off their respective GPUs. nVidia’s demo
was a real-time 6 million triangle story about Medusa (who turned a lusty
warrior into stone before then smashing him into pieces). Frame-rates ranged
from 30 to 80 depending on scenes. Medusa first appeared rendered as an
attractive character before morphing into a nightmare with a snake-like
slithering hair-do. The Froblins demo from AMD
has 3000 highly detailed whimsical characters running around a landscape
searching for gold, depositing it at temples, finding and consuming
mushrooms, making their way back to camp and sleeping. Each Froblin could be
rendered in as many as 1.6 million triangles depending on screen proximity.
The GPU was not only used for rendering, but was also used for the
computation of the behaviour of every single Froblin. The Computer Animation
Festival also previewed some of the real-time projects in (duh) real-time.
The crowd in the Lousiana Theatre loved it. They were further impressed when
EA’s Fight Night 4 was shown, complete with visibly detailed renderings of
Mike Tyson and Will Wright (of Simcity, The Sims, and Spore repute) having a
go at each other. Will Wright also gave a
keynote on “Playing with Perceptions”. He was one of the more entertaining
speakers and knew his slides so well that he zipped right through over 240 of
them, without a pause! After the first few minutes, one could argue that the
content was not as important as the lesson in presentation skills. Here was a
major figure in the games industry walking us through history lessons;
showing images of convergence and evolution of the digital electronics,
computer, and media worlds. It definitely helped that Will is clear in his
articulation. A main point of his presentation was that game developers
should take to the notion of an Entertainment Designer overseeing the entire
game. The whole team of artists, programmers, 3D artists, developers,
marketers, producers, funders, and management should look at the game as a
whole and not in parts, a process to be galvanised into action by an overall
Entertainment Designer. Now we just have to
persuade the industry to pay heed to the role of an “Entertainment Designer”. Tai Hou Tng Writing on behalf of the ACM SIGGRAPH Singapore Chapter taihou@gmail.com |
© 2009 SIGGRAPH Singapore