By Tim Richards, from gamenews.com.au.
The Federal Government House of Representatives' Standing Committee on Communications, Information Technology and the Arts will run an "Inquiry into the future opportunities for Australia's film, animation, special effects and electronic games industries". Amongst other things, an Inquiry is a fact finding event aimed at gaining opinion and evidence from people, companies, and stakeholder within and without the relevant industries.
While the inquiry will…
Issue four of the Games Developer Association of Australia (GDAA) newsletter has been released. Included in this issue are details on the upcoming online portfolios for AIE students, Tantalus's Top Gear Rally title for the GameBoy Advance, and also a Q&A with John De Marghereti on BigWorld Technology. It's a great read, so to subscribe to the GDAA newsletter, send an email to Tim Richards, the GDAA Newsletter Editor at tim@ematic.com.au! Tell him Sumea sent ya. ;)
Nocturnal Entertainment Australia has announced the release of Catapult V1.21b.
Catapult is a complete development system for the Game Boy Advance (GBA) -
this version has significant improvements :
- the first fully featured release (all demo restrictions are removed).
- new language commands and editor features.
- new Copter game, with complete source.
- revamped GBA engine (interpreted scripts replaced by compiled scripts) - runs 20x faster!
- new 'Export' system and pricing model.
-…
The first Sumea Programmer Challenge is under way. Here are the rules..
1. Challenge: Water mesh must be created dynamically, if indeed you choose that path. You are allowed models for objects that may interact with the water, etc.
2. Hardware spec: Must be able to run on minimum gf2mx. That means selecting software vertex shaders and disabling pixel shaders when nessisary. (The maximum vertex shader version on pre-DX9 hardware is vs1.1, however higher versions can be run in software.)
3.…
The press release was posted in the forum, and it's definately worth a mention here :)
"?After years of quietly building its game development industry, the Australians are embarking on an aggressive campaign to raise their profile in the global games community as a proven creative and technology force in the industry....
We want the industry to realize on a broader scale that we?ve been competing successfully on the world stage for years. Our companies ?over deliver,? providing a 20-30% better…
There's another review of of Blue Tongue's Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis over at PCGameWorld. It gets a favourable 82% score, and some thumbs up on its good looks and fun/busy gameplay..
"It may appear shallow at first, though once you begin playing Operation Genesis you realize that there is more than meets the eye. With such deep and busy gameplay, and an amazing graphics engine to boot this is a title that offers up more than its fair share of entertainment."
Read it over at PCGameWorld.…
The Sydney Mystery, by once Sydney based Twilight Software, has been released. It's available through web/mail only (at a pretty reasonable price too!) and sales so far have been great! Sydney Mystery contains..
"over 240 scenes, 17 different locations, 11 characters to meet, and lots more exploration, puzzles and clues."
There is a playable demo available as well, which allows you to play Act 1 of the game. You can find all the details at The Sydney Mystery website.
The results have been tallied up for Sumea Modeller Challenge #2, and the placements are thus:
1st - Challenger #1 - DrBadVibes 2nd Challenger #4 - Dan Ward 3rd Challenger #2 - Pantmonger 4th Challenger #5 - Malus 5th Challenger #3 - Idaho 6th Challenger #6 - David Coen
I'm sure you'll all agree that there's some fantastic work there. Check it all out if you haven't already!!
Gamenews.com.au is looking for some comments and opinions, after receiving confirmation from Justin Green, CEO of Evolution Games, that Evolution Games has indeed closed its doors. Jump on over to gamenews.com.au and let Tim know what you think.
The Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE) has updated news on the AIE website to let us know that the Academy has received a grant of $100,000 from the ACT Government (the highest grant from 15 businesses receiving them). Also disclosed is what the AIE intends to do with the extra funds.
"The AIE, through Canberra Technology Park, plans to use the grant funding to build state-of-the-art facilities that will greatly assist the local computer games development and 3D animation industries. ?…