AAA Game Company Twilight 22 To Develop BGE Into A Full Production Game Engine

[MatrixNAN]

Entertainment Arts Research Using Blender Game Engine for Production

April 6, 2009- Atlanta, Georgia--Entertainment Arts Research Inc. and it’s subsidiary Twilight 22 Studio both based in Atlanta, Georgia USA are in pre production on an original third person action thriller IP called Fire Wire District 22 driven by artistic creativity and advanced technology.

Fire Wire District 22® is using the Blender Game Engine. EARI is using the Blender Game Engine by adding additional real time shaders, as well as for scène graph and culling. “Benoit Bolsee, one of our programmers, has been able to speed up the scenegraph and culling in the game engine 5 times in just the very first optimization that was done,” stated Nate Nesler. Nesler is the Artistic Technical Director for Fire Wire District 22®.

Twilight 22 has released screen space ambient occlusion, light scattering, improved depth of field, chromatic aberration, and cross shaped bloom to the community for the Blender Game Engine based on the work done by the artist Martinsh Upitis, Mike Pan, and Dalai Felinto for Twilight 22. Future releases to the community will also include subsurface scattering skin shaders, advanced water shaders and effects, level of detail with background loading, and multi-threading for multi-core systems with better over all acceleration of the Blender Game Engine.

Professor Joseph Saulter, CEO and Chairman of Entertainment Arts Research Inc., commented, “We look forward to forming strong partnerships with the Blender community.” Saulter continued, “We are also open to creating alliances with other gaming companies to create open source game development tools.”

Development Team:
Joseph Saulter
Johathan Eubanks
John Walker
Nate Nesler
Harsh Borah
Chris Saunders
Dalai Felinto
Benoit Bolsee
Mike Pan
Martinsh Upitis
Campbell Barton
Ricky Arguilla
Rashad Foux

About Blender. Blender is the open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for all major operating systems under the GNU Public License.

About Entertainment Arts Research Inc. EARI an Atlanta-based video game publisher and interactive entertainment virtual world developer founded in 2000 by Professor Joseph Saulter. Under the leadership of CEO Professor Joseph Saulter, Entertainment Arts Research Inc. is the only African American founded, authentic creator of urban lifestyle gaming entertainment content traded publicly. Board Member Jonathan Eubanks has over 60 video games produced on the open game market, and is the Executive Producer for Fire Wire District 22®. Entertainment Arts Research Inc is traded on the OTC under the ticker EARI.

This summary of Entertainment Arts Research Inc. (“Entertainment Arts Research Inc” or the “Company”) in its entirety and all attachments hereto are confidential. Neither the document nor the information contained in the document may be reproduced or disclosed to any person under any circumstances without express, written permission of Entertainment Arts Research Inc. By reading the enclosed documents you agree to be bound by the conditions of the Entertainment Arts Research Inc Non-Disclosure Agreement. Forward Looking Statements: This document contains or may contain forward-looking statements. These statements include, among others, statements of Entertainment Arts Research’s plans, objectives, expectations, and intentions, including forward looking revenue and income projections. These statements involve uncertainty and uncertainties. Actual results may differ significantly from those projected or suggested in this document. Assumptions are made about the market, the competitive environment, and other factors that may impact the outcome of these forward looking statements. Other risks include the ability of Entertainment Arts Research Inc to obtain adequate financing, and assumptions about the U.S. Federal, The Uninet Kingdom FSA regulations and other International regulatory processes. Entertainment Arts Research Inc does not undertake any obligation to release publicly, any revisions to these forward looking statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

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SSAO, Light Scattering, DOF, and more

[Felix_Kütt]

I'm sorry to say the 1-st day o' this 'ere month has already come to pass.

ok, Benoit rules, yes? *waves of agreement in background* yes!

edit: that is 5 times! 5 times! aargh! :3

edit: no, no I'm pretty sure you must be pulling my strings, right?

[Uncle Entity]

I don't know, most of the commit logs going into trunk have been in the game engine lately.

Be nice to have a link to the source though.

[tb1alexc]

You're having us on right?

[psychotron]

that's great news

[Teo_GreenGage]

link?????????????????????? this is history if it's real

what i've found

It was about four years ago that Joseph Saulter launched his company Entertainment Arts Research (EAR, Atlanta, GA). EAR is one of the first African American owned and operated 3D video game development companies.

Right now Saulter is working with his team of ten to fifteen people on two major video game titles: Firewire District 22, a futuristic urban third-person stealth game, and Seventh Day, a Christian gospel-based 3D game. Both games are being created for Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii. As CEO of the company Saulter oversees all aspects of game development and production. He manages a team of software developers, artists, musicians, business development associates and programmers.

He also chairs the game design and development department at American Intercontinental University (Atlanta, GA). “The students are great,” he says. “The joy for me is teaching and inspiring new developers to join the gaming business.”

Saulter is the co-founder of the Urban Video Game Academy, an educational program for at-risk high-school students. The program has been a Harvard University case study.

Originally from Long Island, New York, Saulter has degrees in digital entertainment, performing arts management and visual technology.

The future looks bright for EAR. The company has been given the opportunity to partner on initiatives with the NASA-sponsored Classroom of the Future, a program started in 1990 and housed at Wheeling (WV) Jesuit University’s Center for Educational Technologies. Saulter explains, “EAR will provide consultation and direction that will result in educational change throughout the country.”

[MatrixNAN]

Hey Everyone,

No its no joke. You can check us out on the stock exchange if you like. We are a publicly traded company. You will get the code pretty soon Benoit had a working version around Monday of this week. Benoit has his own branch so it will go into his branch on the Blender SVN server. Campbell just added the Joystick Support for XBox 360 and PS3 Controllers so that we can use the most popular type of game pads on our computer games. These guys are just incredible I love having everyone of them on the team. We are going to be developing all of the BGE enhancements directly into the Blender SVN. We are also releasing the python script enhancements to the community as you have already seen. We are going to setup something on our website for the Blender community. Its one of the topics we will be discussing at our meeting Tuesday night.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler
Artistic Technical Director
Twilight 22

[Teo_GreenGage]

OMG legend. good luck, guys!

[andrew-101]

So Fire Wire District 22 is being made in the BGE and is targeted at xbox 360 and the wii? Kudos to the BGE.

[Felix_Kütt]

OK, I can finaly do the happy dance with a reason now.

[tb1alexc]

Wow... No offence but I'm still a little skeptical, but that's just me. This is great, keep it up guys!

[pildanovak]

Well first I thought it's too unbelievable too, but now I just can say Thank You!

[fobsta]

'level of detail with background loading, and multi-threading for multi-core systems '

wow thank you very much

[AD-Edge]

Wow, I dont know what to say to be honest?

This sounds like just what the BGE needs to get it off the ground (although it was already getting there, somewhat slowly tho) this is like a major shot of adrenalin.

Its something many Blender users, including me, can only dream of so I hope this all works out well for Blender.
I'll be following this thread, I have a bunch of questions but should probubly research and follow this for a bit and learn more about it all before asking anything.


Amazing,
-Alex

[SamCameron]

just a question... how are you going to improve 5x times the BGE speed if the last project where the main developers being work on it (Apricot) was already push it to the limit? I mean... I thought is not much more possible to increase the speed with this core, at least they already tried that, maybe you can speed it a little bit... but 5 times? you must be joking, hope you're not but it's hard to believe, anyway this would be the dream of very much people arround here (included me), my computer is used to run slowly with BGE but not with other engines having the same polygon scenes/fxs so should run at least at the same speed as others engines.

[ideasman42]

Hey there, happy to be on-board with this project - Lots of low hanging fruit with the BGE, so can keep me busy for a while Im sure.

@SamCameron, Apricot nowhere near pushed the BGE to the limit, there is still a huge room for improvement. 5x faster for scene-graph optimizations does not surprise me. since we have known for a long time this is a weak point with the BGE.

@tb1alexc, Id be interested to know why your skeptical? - Since all the blender development is done open-source it seems blender users can only gain from these improvements. - In a similar way to BigBuckBunney and Apricot.

[andronicus]

Now it begins - the creative momentum of pro studios waking up to the extraordinary potential of Blender.

I expect to hear more of these announcements in the future. Especially after 2.50.

[brecht]

Originally Posted by SamCameron just a question... how are you going to improve 5x times the BGE speed if the last project where the main developers being work on it (Apricot) was already push it to the limit? I mean... I thought is not much more possible to increase the speed with this core, at least they already tried that, maybe you can speed it a little bit... but 5 times? you must be joking, hope you're not but it's hard to believe, anyway this would be the dream of very much people arround here (included me), my computer is used to run slowly with BGE but not with other engines having the same polygon scenes/fxs so should run at least at the same speed as others engines.

One part, the scenegraph of the BGE, was made 5x faster in certain test cases. The scenegraph is not the bottleneck in Apricot, so it will not give a 5x speedup overall, more like 1.something, the press release could be more clear on this distinction.

[spacestrudel]

All this sounds like we're going into a whole new era with GE... I've seen Martinsh's work and it was preety amazing and with improvements you've said sounds absolutely great!!
Can't wait to see how it developes!

[malCanDo]

This is equally as exciting for me as the "Yo Frankie using the GE" news! Hopefully this will encourage more GE developers to integrate Blender into their pipeline.
Mal