Game Developer Announces 2005 Front Line Award Finalists

The editors of Game Developer magazine have announced the 2005 finalists in the Front Line Awards, an annual evaluation of the best tools used for video game development, judged over seven separate categories. The winners of the awards will be announced in the January 2006 issue of Game Developer,and the finalists honor the year's best development hardware and software for programming, art, audio, hardware, game engines, middleware, and books. Products are nominated in all categories by Game Developer magazine's readers and other game professionals, and a distinguished panel of industry-leading professional game developers specializing in the fields relevant to each product category selects finalists and winners based on criteria such as utility, innovation, value, and ease of use. The full list of nominated products is as follows: Art Zbrush 2, Pixologic FX Composer, NVIDIA ClayTools system for 3DS Max (v.1.1) and Maya (v1.0), SensAble Technologies, Inc. Modo 102, Luxology Maya 7, Alias 3D Studio Max 8, Autodesk Audio ISACT ver 1.60, Creative Labs Miles Sound System, Rad Game Tools Lipsync SDK 3.0, Annosoft Harmony Hard drive, DeWolfe Music CRI ADX, CRI Middleware Co. Books GPU Gems 2, Matt Pharr (ed.), Addison-Wesley A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster, Paraglyph Press Audio for Games: Planning, Process, and Production, by Alexander Brandon, New Rider Press The Game Localization Handbook: Localization Production Pitfalls, by Heather Maxwell Chandler, Charles River Media Introduction to Game Development, Steven Rabin (ed.), Charles River Media Engines Virtools Dev 3.0, Virtools Source, Valve Unreal Engine 3, Epic Games Inc. BigWorld MMO Technology Suite V1.6, BigWorld Pty Ltd Gamebryo 2, Emergent Technologies Hardware Razer Copperhead, Razer Quadro FX 4500, Nvidia SpacePilot, 3Dconnexion MX40 Motion Capture System, Vicon DX1 Input System, Ergodex Middleware SpeedTreeRT/v1.7, Interactive Data Visualization, Inc. (IDV) Gameface, Anark Corporation AGEIA PhysX SDK, AGEIA Technologies, Inc. Tira Jump Product Suite, Tira Wireless DemonWare Netcode, DemonWare Programming Intel VTune Performance Analyzer, Intel Corporation ReplayDIRECTOR v2.0, Replay Solutions, LLC Perforce SCM 2005, Perforce Software ProDG for PSP, SN Systems Ltd SlickEdit 10, SlickEdit More information on Game Developer magazine, including both physical and digital subscription information, is available on the magazine's official web site.