Game Developer Reveals 9th Front Line Award Finalists

Author: by Staff

The editors of Gamasutra sister print publication Game Developer have named the finalists for the 2006 Front Line Awards, the magazine's ninth annual evaluation of the year's best game-making tools in the categories of programming, art, audio, hardware, game engine, middleware, and books. Products were nominated in all categories by Game Developer magazine's readers and other game professionals; winners will be chosen by a distinguished panel of professional game developers specializing in the fields relevant to each category. Finalists and winners are selected based on utility, innovation, value, and ease of use. The finalists for the 2006 Game Developer Front Line Awards are: ENGINES Torque Game Builder 1.1.1, Garage Games Valve Source Engine, Valve Unreal Engine 3, Epic HeroEngine, Simutronics Corporation Gamebryo 2.2, Emergent BOOKS Better Game Characters By Design, Katherine Isbister, Morgan Kaufmann 3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop, Luke Ahearn, Focal Press ShaderX4, Wolfgang Engel (ed.), Charles River Media Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, Chris Bateman, Charles River Media Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul, The MIT Press HARDWARE FireGL V7300, ATI GEForce 7950GX2, Nvidia PhysX, Ageia and BFG Technologies Alienware Mj12 8550i workstation, Alienware/Dell Xbox 360 XMA Audio Decompression Hardware, Microsoft MIDDLEWARE AI.implant, Engenuity Technologies Inc. SpeedTree 4.0, IDV Havok FX 4.0, Havok Euphoria, NaturalMotion Kynapse SDK 4, Kynogon SA PROGRAMMING XNA Game Studio Express, Microsoft Perforce SCM 2006.1, Perforce Software NVPerfKit2, Nvidia IBM Rational Purify Plus v7.0, IBM DevTrack 6.0, TechExcel ART Modo 202, Luxology Maya 8, Autodesk Corel Painter IX.5, Corel Softimage Face Robot, Softimage MotionBuilder 7.5, Autodesk AUDIO Wwise 2006.2.1, Audiokinetic Miles Sound System v7.q, RAD Game Tools CRI ADX, CRI Middleware Co. Ltd. Vivox Precision Studio and the Vivox Network managed service, Vivo ISACT, Creative Labs The final award winners, plus one inductee to the Front Line Awards Hall of Fame chosen for its outstanding contribution to the game development industry for five years or more, will be announced in the January 2007 issue of Game Developer, available on newsstands beginning January 17, 2007.