The Edinburgh Interactive Festival showcases the continued popularity, growth and influence of video games and brings together the games industry’s key decision makers.

Games publishing, hardware and development alongside Government, TV, film, press and other entertainment industries as well as students seeking to work within the creative industries are all represented.

David Yarnton, Managing Director/General Manager of Nintendo UK, said: “We’re very proud to continue our support of EIF for the third year running. Edinburgh Interactive Festival raises our industry’s profile into the wider cultural arena and celebrates the input, talent and creativity from all with a common interest in video games.”

The Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2008 will take place from Sunday 10th to Tuesday 12th August in the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

Registrations are open at the EIF2008 Website.

Register before Tuesday 1st July 2008 - £120 (ex VAT)
Register on or after Tuesday 1st July 2008 - £149 (ex VAT)
Scottish based developers and companies - £99 (ex VAT)
Students - £75 (ex VAT)

Fair enough, 3DStudio Max 2009 has been out for a little while, but today was the first time that I’ve opened a little MaxScript in order to do some scripting. Imagine my surprise when I discover that somebody at Autodesk has actually invested some time in making the MaxScript IDE whizzy!

Bless that programmer! For feast your eyes at what he has done:

1. Handy tab bar for handling multiple documents. Woo!
2. Pointless grey vertical line to show you where your tab indents are. Wow!
3. Syntax highlighting that actually works without you having to refresh all the time. Whee!
4. A status bar with stuff you probably never need to worry about on it. Gosh!
5. Those collapsable between-the-bracey buttons that you have in Visual Studio to make really long code, shorter. Neat!
6. Line numbers to make you feel a bit more like a programmer. Yay!

So there we have it! A comprehensive list of all the reasons why you should upgrade to Max2009 immediately!*

*note: it’s entirely possible that some of these features were in Max2008.

Shocking news everybody! According to some guy called John Mayer who, according to Wikipedia, is some sort of American rock musician (yep, we’re in touch and up-to-date here at CGEmpire), pushing plastic buttons and waggling your arms around in Guitar Hero is not really very similar to playing an actual guitar.

Lies. Real guitars don’t have coloured buttons, apparently

Amazing. Congratulations John Mayer for that astounding insight.

Source: Rolling Stone

Round #17 of our pixel challenge, ColourThis, kicks off today. The rules are simple - you are provided with an outline and all you have to do is colour it, making anything you like out of it. The more creative and original the design the better, and the winner is chosen for the creativity of their entry rather than their pixel skills.

The winner of the last round provides the outline and chooses the winner of the next.

This round’s outline is…

So download this image, rotate it, flip it, colour it in, and then submit it in this thread!

Last round was won by, er, me with this mousey/hamstery thing:

Check out previous winners here!

Aside from having an utterly specacular intro (produced by the awesome Blur Studios), Dawn of War was a pretty fabby RTS.

Now, four years on, Relic Entertainment have announced the sequel set for release in 2009 featuring, amongst other things, a rather nifty sounding co-operative multi-player campaign. Wooo, indeed! And quite frankly, when the screenshots look like this:

…it all looks set to be rather special.

Check out the latest screenshots on Eurogamer.

On tuesday 17th June 2008, NMK are running a Writing for Games event in central London (exact venue to be confirmed).

As NMK say on their site, “Writing for games is an often-overlooked career path, but it’s a great opportunity for writers who want to flex their creative muscles. It can involve plot development, script-writing, copywriting, dialogue creation, project documentation, humour writing, characterisation and character development and a load of other elements that exercise a writer’s abilities.”

Featuring a line up of impressive speakers including Steve Ince of Broken Sword fame, the event should be fascinating for anyone interested in pursuing a career in games writing.

Tickets are currently priced at £25, although a discounted price of £15 is available to freelancers, students, unemployed, companies with fewer than 10 employees and not-for-profit organisations.

More information can be found at NMK’s website.

The 16th CGEmpire Music Competition is kindly sponsored by Peter and Giorgio, the creators and owners of SampleModeling.

The winner will receive a copy of The Trumpet (which retails for $240), a VSTi of unparalleled realism and usability!

The challenge this time is to compose The Darklord theme, and the deadline for entries is Sunday 22nd of June 23:59 London time.

For more information, please visit the Competition Thread.

Uh oh.

The BBC is reporting that there’s talks of making downloadable video and videogames need a full-on BBFC rating too.

While that’s probably actually fair enough, it raises some concerns for those of us who make downloadable content for the web.

From The BBC Website:

Age ratings for downloaded video content and video games are to be introduced in the UK.

Overseen by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), the scheme will see certificates appear on websites, via set-top boxes and portable players.

Mr Johnson said the scheme, called BBFC.online, was not an attempt to censor the internet, nor to regulated online video gaming.

Mr Cooke said the BBFC continued to work with the games industry’s self-regulatory body Pegi to find solutions to classifying the burgeoning range of online gaming.

“We don’t need to set up in rivalry with Pegi online. We can work cooperatively,” he said.

Without providing specifics, Mr Johnson said the BBFC expected all the leading content providers and aggregators to sign up to the scheme in the coming weeks and months.

Quite how it’s all going to work is anyone’s guess, but paying to have your game rated seems a tad too likely, even if it is currently ‘voluntary’. It’s possibly a problem on the horizon for Indie Developers who typically can’t even afford new shoelaces.

Uh oh. Watch this space.

Round #16 of our pixel challenge, ColourThis, kicks off today. The rules are simple - you are provided with an outline and all you have to do is colour it, making anything you like out of it. The more creative and original the design the better, and the winner is chosen for the creativity of their entry rather than their pixel skills.

The winner of the last round provides the outline and chooses the winner of the next.

The challenge this time is…

…can you make this outline into anything other than a turtle? So download this image, rotate it, flip it, colour it in, and then submit it in this thread!

Congratulations to MashPotato for winning the last ColourThis round with her excellent “Large Lady doing Aerobics” entry:

Check out previous winners here!

Hearty congratulations go to mirrored for winning the 15th CGEmpire Music Competition with his entry ‘The Long Way Home‘.

For his troubles, mirrored takes home a copy of Stormdrum 2 which retails at $495, courtesy of Eastwest/Quantum Leap.

The challenge for this month’s competition was to compose a theme to accompany the following premise:

…The heroes kept on walking, the wind blowing restless. Soon the terrain changed. The sparse trees, which until then provided some kind of shelter, gave place to rocks. As they climbed the mountain the sun got hidden by deep clouds, and the wind changed to rain first and then to snow. The slowed down but never stopped. Every obstacle they overcame, they were not short of courage. Finally they reached the top of the mountains, stood there for only a brief moment, to catch their breathes and then took the path down, to the other side. At the bottom, the snow gave way to the everlasting greens and the familiar smell was reassuring enough. They were home!

Congratulations to all who took part for all-round excellent entries! You can listen to all the music competition entries here!