Finally! I knew those 360 Connect guys would come through.

HD video streaming
Connect360 now supports WMV+WMA video sharing, allowing you to stream HD quality video right to your living room!

Yup! just dump you WMV format movies in your Movie folder - job done.

Caveats as always - you need the free Flip4Mac installed (which I described can be used to convert to WMV files (you can’t convert with the free version), and the WMV files need to be in a format the 360 can read.

This took them about 4 weeks to integrate - good going! Buy this product folks - $20 (about £12) well spent.

• LipService (aka lBrush) 3ds max facial animation
  LipService (aka lBrush)
  (tags: LipService (aka lBrush) 3ds max facial animation)

A typical question that has been around for as long as I can remember is “How many polygons should I be using in a character/vehicle/environment?” Another common one is “How big should my textures be?”

There is only one answer that I can think of - “It depends.”

The reason for that answer is that the question is too vague - it’s like the old question “How long is a piece of string?”.

It depends. It depends on myriad things, such as the visual style of the game, the type of game, the capabilities of the engine and the target hardware. Some consoles can push vast numbers of polygons, and others can’t.

For example, a character for a 3rd person shooter like Gears of War on the Xbox 360 where you usually have a dozen models on the screen at once, in a small compact area of map would have a totally different target for polygons and textures sizes than you would if you were creating a character for a GTA game for the PSP.

The PSP simply doesnt have the processing power of the 360 to push around large numbers of polygons and it doesn’t have the memory to store large textures. The style of game is different too - GoW has smaller enclosed environments, whilst GTA is much more open. Compare both of those games to Fight Night Round 3 (on the 360 or PS3) where effectively all you have are 2 boxers moving around a small boxing ring. With these restrictions on the focus you end up with incredibly detailed boxers with muscles, tendons and sweat.

Finally, compare everything to Mario Kart on the Nintendo DS - there aren’t that many textures and lots of use of shaded flat colours. The hardware is less powerful, and the art is stylised.

So for those reasons, it’s impossible to answer a question as vague as “How many polygons do I use?”, which isn’t exactly much use to you.

So how do you figure it out? For one, you play games and have a look. Look at what details are modelled, and which ones are textured. Have a look at screenshots to see if you can spot repeating textures (remembering that most screenshots are ‘tweaked’). Have a look at game art forums where people not only display their work but usually an overview of it - and on those forums don’t be afraid to ask questions about the art.

An important thing to remember is that the polycount and texture sizes will fluctuate continuously through the project (usually getting smaller). Sometimes the programmers will come up with new compression techniques to allow more textures in memory, and all too often you’ll have to shrink or reuse textures to get them to fit.

We can encourage questions like “How many polygons should I use for the lead character in 3rd person hack and slash gladiator game for the PSP where I have wide open arenas and normally 2 other fighters on screen at once?” - but I think the answer would still be “It depends.”

As a game player, or an artist who modifies games, you will no doubt have heard of an engine in relation to games. However, many people are unaware what an engine actually is, what is does, and how it affects them as an artist. Many people confuse a game engine with the game itself. This is an attempt to explain what a game engine does and why they are used - but to stop this being a novel I’ll approach from the point of view of an artist.

Essentially, an engine is device for collecting, managing and using assets. You put art and sound and logic in one end, and a game comes out the other end.

There you go, that’s that cleared up.

More details?

As I mentioned, many people confuse the engine with the entire game - an engine is not a game, but the core around which a game is written. An engine contains no game, its a layer of abstraction, a layer of processing that sits between the game (fun, story, art, sound, controls) and the hardware.

In the old days games were essentially written for specific hardware. They were one off chunks of code - you came to your next game and you rewrote it from scratch. Quickly programmers built up a library of reusable code, so that, for example, once they written had a good system for handling sprites they could simply copy that code into their next game - perhaps verbatim, perhaps making minor or even major improvements.

Reusing code is a great idea - rather than starting everything from scratch each time, you get a major head start. Soon these little snippets of code build up, and then you realise that playing sound in your last game and playing sound in your next game is the same, it’s only the sounds that are different. Just record the new sounds, bung them in and hey-ho, away we go.

So, rather than writing a game from the ground up each time, an engine provides a core to work around. When developing a game, the artists export their models and textures and animations into a format that the engine can read, as do the sound engineers. The game programmers write a control system that maps buttons presses on a joypad or a keyboard to actions in the game, but the engine does the work of translating the signals from the joypad into something we understand, like ‘Up’ or ‘X Button’.

But what will all those programmers do now that we have engines? Lots of things - they’ll find and fix bugs in the engine. They’ll make the engine run faster. They’ll add new features (and then fix them. And then make them faster). And they’ll even write nice tools for us artists to make it easier to get our artwork out of our heads and into the game.

Hurray for engines!

Robert Headley has just started a blog, Game by Design. So pop over and say hullo.

Now, it got me wondering - how many other game artists out there are blogging? If you know any, then let me know.

Edit: I’ve had one so far, Adam Bromell

Edit 2: Pete joins the fray - Stray Neutrino

A few days ago the Xbox 360 had a firmware upgrade to allow it to play WMV files from CD,s DVDs, USB devices (but not my iPod), and streaming over a network. Yes, it’s WMV, not DivX, but it’s a start.

Now, the problem for Mac users is that WMV is a bugger to encode. I bought VisualHub, but OOTB it doesn’t encode WMV that the 360 can read. So, after some experimenting and use of an AV Mac at work, I’ve got a solution that is simple (but possibly not cheap).

You need 2 things -an exporter and a WMV codec.

• Get Quicktime Pro - it lets you save and export movies to many formats (but NOT WMV by defaut)
• Get Flip4MacStudio, which has a WMV codec

With those 2 installed, it’s a doddle -open the video clip you want, then it is a simple matter of Export, pick WMV and press Save.

Hopefully those nice people at Flip4Mac will give me a license for advertising this feature. You will. Won’t you?