The semester is finally over and as usual, USC hosted the event called Demo Day. Demo Day for the USC GamePipe Laboratory is when the students show off their games to the industry.
In my case, I was part of the team behind “Us Versus Them”, an online game experience straight out of the 1950. As a lead network engineer my work was to manage a team of network engineers in order to deliver the game on time. The experience was great, the whole team learnt a lot, and we can not wait to see the public beta of “Us Versus Them” soon.
All told, I want to thanks the whole team for their huge effort, congratulations and, once again, thanks!
Video soon.
-
-
Part of the team the night before Demo Day
-
-
In-game screenshot
-
-
Poster
-
-
"Us" or maybe "them"
-
-
Win camera
New material developed at USC! These are some screenshots from our finale project for the Game Engine Development class.
The idea for this project was simple, build an editor (GGE Live Editor) for an existing engine written in C++. As it is well known, the user interface written for this language is not the best one. After testing some open source frameworks such as wxWidgets or QT we quickly decided that C# and the windows framework was the perfect choice. This decision brought us a new challenge, how do we communicate both applications. One option was to write a wrapper around the engine in C++ so that we could fully access the engine’s features from C#. The second approach was to embed the C++ application into a C# control and communicate both applications using sockets. Since we just had around 12 weeks to develop, test and publish the editor, we decided that the second technique was more suitable for our requirements.
The approach worked really well and we had the first prototype working in just one week, it is quite straightforward to implement and the results are impressive. Of course, we had some problems, basically related with the synchronization but nothing important.
This is the list of basic features implemented in the editor:
- Create, edit, and delete entities, scene nodes, lights…
- Viewer: static meshes, animated meshes, particle systems
- Edit and save scenes with different screens
- Different cameras (top, side, front, perspective)
- Grids, picking, maya controls…
- Scene manager and properties editor.
- Edit and execute the game inside the editor with different controls (edit or game controls)
- And much more!
The following gallery shows the final aspect of the editor:
Finally, this week I have got a license to develop applications for the iPhone. So far I have not been able to create a lot of stuff but it is very interesting to see applications not just running in the simulator but also in the iPhone.
On January we will start the development of a new game that should be available by May’09.
Stay tunned!
The IGDA Leadership forum was excellent, great speakers and even better environment. Totally recommendable for anybody in the industry interested in management, production or project management. I feel like I learnt more in two days there than in college. The experience of the speakers is invaluable and the casual environment is perfect to meet new people in the industry.
I have attached some pictures I took with my cell phone.
-
-
Marriot
-
-
Conference
-
-
Conference
By the way, happy thanksgiving to everyone !
Lately school is keeping me very busy (that is why I can not update as much as I would like) however, this week I am taking some days off to go to the IGDA Leadership Forum 2009 in San Francisco, CA.
If everything goes as expected I will be able to update this blog with information and even photos, so stay tuned.
And, if you are also going to the IGDA Leadership Forum, I will see you there!
Finally, I would like to thank all the organization, and specially Jason from IGDA for all his help these lasts weeks.
PD : Next projects, I am planning to write a couple tutorials that should be ready on December. One about communication between C++ / C# and, the second one about object replication with RakNet.
