Web3D News Story #3

Rendercore.com Announces Support For New Platforms

A major drawback of 3D artistry is the timely rendering process. It is a very demanding task for the highest of high-end computers. A single scene can take days to complete. Effects studios such as Weta and Industrial Light and Magic use some of the world's largest supercomputers to get their rendering done. The average person can't afford a computer fast enough to mimic these supercomputers. Luckily, alternatives are beginning to surface.

A new service known as RenderCore offers access to such processing power over the internet. Clients upload their projects to RenderCore's servers. RenderCore then processes them with their 3.0 teraHz supercomputer and then uploads the finished product for the client todownload. 3D artists can save valuable time. The price depends on the total amount of GHz-CPU-Hrs the client wishes to use. This number is then multiplied by a rate, such as $0.65 per unit for Maya files. It is confusing at a glance, but a their site provides an price and timeestimation tool.

This month they announced support for 3D Studio Max (Versions 7.5 and 8.0) and LightWave 8.5. Last month Maya 7.0 support was added. RenderCore's remote rendering service is rapidly expanding and gaining popularity. It is a fast, effective way for artists to get their work finished for others to experience and enjoy.

UPaint Introduction

Today in class we were introducted to UPaint, the Unreal character development program. From here we can open any character and alter their texture. Basically this means we could turn our character's skin green, change their hat color or anything similar. I can open the previously constructed characters, but when attempting to open a mesh I received the following error.

unfortunately this error also crashes UPaint. Attempted to reinstall, erase, reboot and so forth with UPaint to no avail. I can however take a finished character and erase the texturing to create my own mesh, but there should be a better way. I will have to search the web for a solution to this difficulty as the workaround is a more time consuming process.

Animation

Playing with the animation utility in Maya was rather interesting. It shows how something as simple as a sphere can have a complex animation sequence. Below you can see the short sequence for the ping pong game (minus paddles).

The sequence is short but shows how much work goes into such a simple motion. I can just image what we'd have to do to animate something, such as the hammer we built earlier in the year. This animation sequence can be found here.

Web3D News Story #2

Blizzard wins lawsuit on video game hacking
Recently the computer developer Blizzard Entertainment was the winning party of a court case involving their online website Battle.net. The dispute centered around two outside software engineers, Ross Combs and Rob Crittenden, who reverse-engineered the Battle.net software and then provided their own version of the game server, called BnetD, to the public free of charge. By purchasing and installing the software the defendants had to agree to both the End User’s License Agreement for the software and Terms of Usage for the Battle.net server. Language within these agreements states that any owner of the software is simply licensing the software and not officially the owner of the software, therefore not able to distribute the software in question. The defendants on the other hand claim that by purchasing the software they became the rightful owners of the content contained in the software, and therefore able to alter and modify these games as they desired. Obviously the outcome of this court case will have widespread consequences for not only Blizzard, but the gaming industry in general.

While there is no official comparison, according to gamers who utilized the BnetD software a byproduct of the unofficial game servers were a faster response time and a decrease in amount of bugs present, two common complaints about the Blizzard game servers. The outside engineers were intent on providing a service to anyone in possession of the game software, by improving on the currently available setup. However Blizzard Entertainment was not in agreement, contending that the defendants were circumventing their anti-piracy regulations and encouraging the proliferation of pirated copies of their software. From the Battle.net site individuals around the world can compete with each other in various Blizzard produced games; such as Diablo II, Starcraft and Warcraft. The only requirements are an internet connection and a valid copy of the software game. The price for the software is $50 when released, however access to Battle.net is free of charge. At any given time over 200,000 individuals may be found on the Blizzard game servers, and over 12 million active users overall. Each individual must have purchased a legitimate copy of software in order to participate in access the server. The unofficial servers did not validate if the copy of game software used was legitimate, therefore this would cut into Blizzard’s profits and encourage others to further manipulate the game software.

Blizzard Entertainment won the case and the unofficial game servers were deactivated. While this is a deterrent to any would-be game hacker, it also has implications to the game industry in general. While massive multiplayer games are not uncommon, Battle.net is considered one of the more successful servers available. With Blizzard protecting their intellectual property so strictly this will hamper other game designers from developing similar comparable server software. This will slow down the development and distribution of available multiplayer servers, and will limit the number of games available in such an environment.