Blender 2.50: first alpha

I wasnt planning to talk about this release, as it is just an alpha. I wanted to wait for the final Blender 2.50 release, but I think that it is worth you to know that we are closer to it. If you are an indie developer or artist that wants to have the power of a professional tool without paying thousands of dollars, then Blender is your best choice.
I have been working on a small research about integrating Blender and Ogre in a workflow, although my results arent conclusive yet, I have to say that it can be done. Yes, there are small problems, mostly related to the exporter script, but there are also workarounds.
If your field is modelling/animation applied to films, like movies, publicity, then the same applies. Why to pay for a more complex solution?

Nvidia's Fermi

Tech Report has an interesting, although too technical, article about Nvidia's Fermi architecture. As you surely know, Fermi is the code name for the upcoming and long awaited GT300, a card which not only focuses on graphics, but also tries to provide an incredible processing power aimed to supercomputing tasks. Are we going to see that power in our desktops? It is still too early to say, but probably yes, we are going to taste some when developers find ways to employit for more trivial jobs, like encoding videos.

CryEngine 3 is free for educational purposes

Another big engine goes free, but just for students. Crytek has announced that the recently released CryEngine 3 will offer an Educational SDK, "for educators wanting to ensure that their students gain experience with the state-of-the-art in game development and real-time 3D technology". This is the third engine, besides Epic's Unreal 3 and Unity Technologies Unity Indie, that goes free in less than a month. And expect more to adopt less restrictive licenses, there is war going on and the battle filed is the indie/starter segment, usually the playground of non AAA engines like Torque.

Syntensity 1.1

According to the official site, Syntensity is a world of 3D games that anyone can play in and anyone can help build. Version 1.1 has been released.
Syntensity isn't a single game, but rather a platform that can run all kinds of 3D games. There are already a few games, and you can make your own. The main game is a multiplayer first/third person shooter (sort of like Quake 3 Arena), and there is also a simple drawing game (in which multiple people can draw and see what each other are drawing in realtime).
An interesting project that worth to follow.

EEL 0.1.13

Another release, this time EEL 0.1.13, the Extensible Embeddable Language. >EEL is a scripting and programming language, designed specifically for hard real time applications. The primary target areas of application are control engineering and audio synthesis, but EEL should also be suitable for game scripting and for adding scripting capabilities to real time multimedia applications.

SDL_mixer and SDL_image releases

There is a couple of bugfix releases: SDL_image 1.21.0 and SDL_mixer 1.2.11. SDL_image is an image file loading library, SDL_mixer is a sample multi-channel audio mixer library, both are add-ons to SDL.

Interview with Sam Lantinga

Sam Lantinga, creator of SDL, was interviewed by Game Developer's Radio. The embedded player does not works in my Firefox under Linux, but the interview can be download as mp3 too.

StarCraft AI Competition

I read in Slashdot that the 2010 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2010) will be hosting a StarCraft AI competition. Bots for StarCraft can be developed using the Broodwar API, which provides hooks into StarCraft and enables the development of custom AI for StarCraft. A C++ interface enables developers to query the current state of the game and issue orders to units.
The competition will consists of four tournaments, and also Exhibition matches will also be held between skilled human players and the top-performing bots.

Trying Crystal

No, Im not talking about Krystal Steal (I wish so), but about Crystal Space game engine. After delaying it some time, I decided to give it a try and have my own opinions.
Crystal Space is a full game engine with lots of features like sound, OpenGL based 3d rendering, networking python scripting... A totally self sufficient package, unlike Ogre, which is just a graphic rendering engine. I havent gone too deep on it, but I can confirm a few things I heard about it. First, it is a bit complex. Do not expect to get the basics in a couple of days. But hey, it is a big engine! There is a lot of topics to master.
The manual is very detailed, and seems to contain the best step by step tutorial I have found, more exactly, the only one I have found. I miss a wiki with more choices and more practical applications. So, as average, the documentation is not enough; when you start you need a lot of samples and they should be very accessible.
Do I recommend this engine? Yes, I do, if you have some experience with game programming. If not, go for Irrlicht, it is much easier. CS have CELstart, which is supposed to be a framework that lets you build a game just with xml and python. Sounds easy and nice.
So, after you finish playing with Unreal Engine, give it a try to Crystal.

OpenAL Soft 1.10.622 released

OpenAL Soft is an LGPL-licensed, cross-platform, software implementation of the OpenAL 3D audio API. It's built off of the open-sourced Windows version available originally from the SVN repository at openal.org.

SDL_mixer 1.2.10

SDL_mixer 1.2.10 has been released. SDL_mixer is a sample multi-channel audio mixer library. It supports any number of simultaneously playing channels of 16 bit stereo audio, plus a single channel of music, mixed by the popular MikMod MOD, Timidity MIDI, Ogg Vorbis, and SMPEG MP3 libraries.

Free Unreal Development Kit

Nvidia announces the release of Unreal® Development Kit, the free version of the award-winning Unreal® Engine 3, the software development framework used to create computer and video games, 3D simulations, TV shows, films and more.
Of course, free for non-commercial projects. If you plan to earn money with your project, then check the licensing terms. Expensive, IMHO, but not as the elder brother used in almost every major title released in the last 2 years.

Nebula SDK nov 2009

There is a new SDK release for Nebula 3, an open source multiplatform engine created and maintained by Radon Labs. Nebula was used for Drakensang, a commercial title, and of course it is being used also for Drakensang 2.

OSLASH+3d engine

I had a long chat today with superoptimo (aka projectileman), author of OSLASH. As he told me before, OSLASH is just a base to build a 3D game engine with lots of interesting features, the most important from my point of view is that it is going to give simplicity and power. We mostly talked about the 3d engine features, which is still in very early stages.
Believe me, it is going to be awesome. Based on OpenGL and specifically optimized for it, using advanced rendering algorithms and including its own physics library. Later it is planned to add networking, scripting, sound, until completing a full featured game engine. OSLASH will make a next generation game development framework which aims to leave far behind the currently available choices (Ogre3d, CrystalSpace, Irrlicht).