Tag Archives: Computing

Staff profiles and activity

Game engines, Indie development and BSc Games Programming

As we are having two exciting new degrees starting next year (Games Programming and Business Computing) I will blog about the work we are doing to develop them, so that you can keep updated about them.

At the moment I am working on deciding what development environments will work for BSc Games Programming. The rise, in the last few years, of indie game development has been fantastic for students. It means that professional game engines aren’t just targeted at high end studios any more, they can be used by anyone. That means that you, as students, can use the same development environments as the pros, and who knows, you could be releasing your first indie game before you graduate (maybe even that is a bit late, we’ve had students release mobile games in their first year).

I’ll talk about some of the game engines we are thinking of using.

Unity3D

Unity is the hot game engine for indies at the moment. It is easy to use, with built in 3D modelling tools that integrate very easily with the scripting engine. The free version has plenty of features (physics, terrain engine, lightmapping, custom shaders) that make it possible to develop professional looking game for PCs, macs, consoles and web browsers (you have to pay a one off fee of $400 for iphone and android development).

Unity is a great engine for beginners. The only drawback as a teaching tool is that you can’t directly write code in C++ the hardcore programming language that the real pros use.

Unreal Engine

Unreal has been one of the most important engines for a long time, but it doesn’t shine for me as a student development environment. The learning curve is much steeper than Unity but the free version doesn’t let you access the hard core details of the C++ SDK so you won’t really be using the version the pros use (and the full version is only licenced to high end studios for lots of money).

Cryengine 3

Cryengine is my current favourite for 2nd and 3rd year students. It is a very powerful, cutting edge engine but the full version is free for students and indie developers, who only pay when their game starts making money. That means you will be working with exactly the same version as the pros using all the same C++ development tools.

HTML5

Finally, there is something that may be the future of casual and possibly even hardcore games. The new HTML5 standard has massively improved the 2D graphics capabilities of everyday web technologies and the 3D capabilities are developing fast. HTML5 is easy to develop and very easy to deploy as it can run in any browser including mobile browsers (you can even bundle HTML5 games as phone apps for the app store/android market). It may not be up to the pro engines quite yet, but it is one to watch. All our students learn HTML5 in the first term, so you will definitely have some experience developing on this platform.

Hope this is useful/interesting to some of you,

Marco

Marco Gillies, Director of Studies

Events

Nov 7th Open Day: a message from the Director of Studies

Dear all,

Thanks to everyone who attended Wednesday’s open day (photos below). It was great to meet so many interesting and engaged people wanting to study computing at Goldsmiths. Choosing a university is a very important decision and I wouldn’t want you to do so based just on one day’s visit, you need a real feel for what university life is like. That is why we are running this blog, to give you an insight to what our current students are doing and help you feel part of Goldsmiths before you arrive.

I will be posting about what is happening in the department and college, but I know that you don’t just want to hear from us lecturers, you want to know what students are thinking and doing. That is why we will be inviting students to be guest bloggers throughout the year and we’ll also be show casing student work and events from the department.

I look forward to seeing you all again, but if you have any questions in the mean time just email me on m.gillies(at)gold.ac.uk.

Marco

(Director of Studies in Computing)

 

Events

Happy Open Day, Goldsmiths (and processing videos!)

Thank you to all of you who visited Goldsmiths today to attend our open day. Prof. Zimmer (Head of Department) and the team have really enjoyed chatting to you all about our programmes and the department here at Goldsmiths.

I know we spoke to one or two of you about Joe Boston’s Processing tutorial videos. You can see more of Joe’s videos here but here’s one to be going on with 🙂

Staff profiles and activity

Gold + Goldsmiths = BRONZE: Mick Grierson explains the Bronze project…

Look at this piece in MusicWeek about ‘bronze format’, a new music format aimed at composers and producers and devised by a research team led by Computing’s Mick Grierson in collaboration with musician Gwilym Gold.

I asked Mick to tell us a bit more about BRONZE and how the project came into being:

“In Goldsmiths Computing Department, our Embodied Audiovisual Interaction Group (EAVI) features a number of staff and students with backgrounds in professional electronic and computer music. As a result of my work in these areas, I was approached by Gwilym Gold and Lexx to develop an idea called ‘bronze format’. It’s not really similar to generative music approaches that have been tried before by the likes of Brian Eno, and other computer music researchers. Instead, it’s been designed as a commercial music format, and so can’t be a software program that creates random mixes songs – it’s not at all random, as this isn’t really what the musicians and producers we work with want.

“It’s aimed at producers and composers who want to make any kind of music, including very organised, highly structured music, that is at a professional level equal to that which you can achieve with professional authoring tools,  but that is capable of being different each time, whilst still sounding like the same track – retaining the quality and balance of the original mixes, and the words / music in all the right places. These were the challenges we faced. I led the team from Goldsmiths as part of my Sound, Image and Brain project (funded by the AHRC). Chris Kiefer, my research assistant, and Parag Mital, a PhD student in Arts and Computational technology worked on the generative audio engine. In addition, Dan Jones, a PhD student in Computing worked on some of the iPhone audio elements.”

If you haven’t already read it, take a look at the MusicWeek article here.