What a marvellous plan - release the creature editor now, so that by the time the full version of Spore is released there’s already an enormous library of creatures to populate the worlds with!

And blimey - what a joy the editor is to play with - if only all 3D packages were as effortless and intuitive as this. Draw the shape of the spine, and then tweak by dragging the verterbrae around. Scale various body sections by rolling the mouse wheel on each bone (although this is actually quite cumbersome because of my rubbish sticky mouse wheel).

And after literally minutes of not at all laborious fiddling you end up with something like my amazing Eleplump!

Although there’s not a lot you can do with your creatures once you’ve made them (aside from upload them and make YouTube videos of them dancing), it’s well worth the measly £5 they’re asking for it.

It’s just astounding (or maybe not, I suppose) how many people are making willies with it.

Get it here!

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.