"Release 4.9 of the PathEngine middleware pathfinding library is now available at www.pathengine.com. PathEngine is built around a sophisticated collision model supporting arbitrarily overlapping 3D ground meshes and dynamically placed obstacles. Paths returned take agent shape into account, are free of aliasing and are guaranteed non-colliding under the collision model, making it a lot easier to develop robust movement based AI. Release 4.9 adds significant optimisations for large meshes. A fairly detailed example mesh is included in the SDK (together with benchmarks for query time and memory footprint)."

Scientists Admire Saturn Image

Intel to Release First 'causal' Learning Algorithms

"The sixth pseudoannual text mode demo competition is on. The goal is to make cool audiovisual demos that run in NT console. Deadline for submissions is 12.12.2003. An invitation demo, along with all entries from the past two contests are available."

Congress Poised for Antispam Vote

Nano-transistor Self-assembles Using Biology

Single Speaker Unit Creates Surround Sound

Kasparov 'forced' to draw with X3D Fritz

Why Girls and Games are a Good Mix (Thanks Lionel!)

Red Moon Dives Behind Earth

'Dark Matter' Forms Ghost Universe That Mirrors Our Own

Xbox to Switch to PowerPC

Gold "nano-bullets" Shoot Down Tumours

Brain Maps Perceptions, Not Reality

Kurt3D - An Autonomous Mobile Robot for Modelling the World in 3D (lol, Thanks Morgan!)

Preview: Microsoft's Windows Longhorn (Thanks Malcolm!)

Borland Assembles a Bigger Toolkit

Smart Software Helps Robots Dodge Collisions

Study: Lemmings Not Suicidal

"Delphi3D has been updated with a utility to generate normal maps from high-poly 3D source models. The tool is intended to create textures for flat surfaces like walls and floors -- it does not create simplified versions of the source mesh (à la "appearance-preserving simplification"). There are already several tools that do that very well, but if you just want to create a tilable, reusable texture/bumpmap combo then you really don't need a simplified mesh, so this utility lets you skip that part. It can read .ASE and .OBJ source files and produces a pair of textures (normals and color) in .TGA format."

"Women and girls of today are more tech-savvy than ever before, and research shows that they currently make up over 52% of Internet users and 70% of casual online gamers. Why then, is the game industry still producing computer games that primarily target males ages 13-25? Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market addresses this issue by helping designers and developers understand the real differences between how the genders approach and resolve conflicts, and what their entertainment criteria and responses are. It also explores the differences in reward systems, game play preferences, and avatar selection criteria, and how these issues all apply to game design, regardless of genre."

"Undergrads and Grad students are challenged to build entertaining games that 'secretly' teach middle school subjects. The contest pushes students to create primarily entertaining games that also teach topics such as forces, statistics, or the solar system. Students have complete freedom in their game designs. They can work in teams of up to 8 people, build games on and for any platform, and use existing engines. Games will be judged in May, with 5 finalist teams flying to Austin to present in front of game legends such as Richard Garriott for their final shot at the $25,000 prize. While all submitted games must fulfill teaching requirements to be considered, final judging is based on 70% entertainment and 30% educational value."

"Our first generation Game Engine "FakedReality 1.0" has been fully open sourced and is available from our website ) Highlights include, Fully Modular architecture with "Actors" and DLL plugins, Shader based graphics engine using DirectX9.0 fully portable. using XML and LUA for game logic creation and 3DSMAX plugins for content import. It also features full CG support and FLEXSHADER our shader framework, that allows to combine/use shaders easily by artist and allow more complex shaders than pure vertex/pixel programs."

"The Arkadium Developer Zone was created for game developers and allows them to submit original games for review and possible inclusion in the Arkadium Gamedek system. Games that are accepted are housed within the Gamedek, and any revenue generated through cash-play matches are shared with the developer. The company also announced the launch of its first Developer Zone game, "Four Corners". Scott Kim, a full-time independent designer of visual puzzles and games created the strategy game exclusively for the Arkadium Gamedek."

"I've put a new stencil shadow volume demo up on Delphi3D. It implements a variety of improvements and optimizations to the original stencil shadow approach, and gives you the option to switch all of these extra features on and off to see what their impact is. Implemented features include infinite shadow volumes, zfail shadows (aka. Carmack's reverse), scissor testing, depth bounds testing, two-sided stencil testing and external triangles. The demo should run on pretty much any card that has a stencil buffer. Source code is included as always."