Vicious Cycle To Donate Middleware For Student Use

Vicious Cycle Software (Dead Head Fred) has agreed to provide students at the Indiana University School of Education hands-on access to its Vicious Engine cross-platform middleware to prototype, develop, and test 'serious games.' Vicious Engine 2 recently announced the addition of support for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with an updated toolset that includes an updated lighting engine, an animation blending component, and pixel shader technology that the company says is optimized for next-gen platforms. The company says its texture and shader production interface is designed to help developers and artists control the visual aspects of in-game objects with a node-based graphical interface. Bob Appelman, associate professor of Instruction Systems Technology in the Indiana University School of Education, commented, "With the flexibility that comes with Vicious Engine, students will be creating ‘serious games’ that are designed to teach various subjects of their choosing. This program will be part of an on-going project on the part of the university to study how people learn through games."