The GDIAC Showcase returns for a special Fall semester event. Typically held in the spring, the annual Cornell computer game showcase has been moved to the fall this school year because of some recent course rescheduling.

Our showcase will display games developed by Cornell students in the courses CIS 3000 (Introduction to Computer Game Design) and CIS 4002 (Advanced Projects in Computer Game Design), as well as other independent student projects. The games this year cover a wide variety of platforms. The students will have games for the PC, games for mobile devices and smartphones, and even social games to play with your friends on Facebook.

The GDIAC showcase is open to the general public. It will be held in Carpenter Hall, in the ACCEL computing labs, so that everyone can play and experience these student projects. Come and meet the game designers and engineers of tomorrow.

Check us out on Facebook!

The talk is open to students currently or previously enrolled in CIS 3000 or CIS 4002. After the talk, a smaller group of interested students will be invited for a small one-on-one session to talk with these veteran designers.

Zynga Information Session
Date/Time: November 18th at 6 pm
Venue: Phillips 203
Description: Come hear about game development from the developer of Farmville. Learn what it is like work at Zynga. Be sure to bring your resume!

]]> Thursday, 5 November 2009 11:50:00 -0400 http://gdiac.cis.cornell.edu/news.php?id=29 Jim Waldo is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he investigates next-generation large-scale distributed systems. He is currently the technical lead of Project Darkstar, a multi-threaded, distributed infrastructure for massive multi-player on-line games and virtual worlds. He is the CS colloquium speaker for November 5th, and he will talk about his work in this area.

Horizontal Scale in Low-Latency Environments
Date/Time: November 5th at 4 pm
Venue: Upson B17
Abstract: Project Darkstar is an infrastructure designed for on-line games and virtual worlds. The infrastructure presents a simple, event-based programming model, and automatically spreads the load generated over all available cores on all available machines without the programmer needing to be aware that their application is running on multiple cores or multiple machines. To obtain the low latencies required, we are attempting to join together a set of novel techniques in the system. We rely in the ability to transparently move tasks generated by events from core to core and machine to machine. We have developed a data cache that is transactional, but trades off durability for low-latency while maintaining consistency. And we are using techniques taken from social network analysis to group players in a way that we believe will be more likely to co-locate interacting players, thus minimizing misses in the data cache.

]]> Wednesday, 4 November 2009 12:50:00 -0400 http://gdiac.cis.cornell.edu/news.php?id=28 As many of you may have noticed, the Spring semester offering of CIS 3000 (Introduction to Game Design) is now completely full. The enrollment cap is set by the physical capacity of CL³, and so there is not much that we can do to increase the size of the class.

If you are still interested in enrolling, Walker White has set-up a waiting list to get into the class. Please contact him to get on the waiting list. Students always drop the first week of class, as they determine whether or not they have the time to devote to such a large project, and so many of the people on the waiting list will actually get into the class. Preference is given to artists, but after that, the waiting list will be consulted on a first-come, first-served basis.

]]> Monday, 2 November 2009 8:50:00 -0400 http://gdiac.cis.cornell.edu/news.php?id=27 Representatives from Electronic Art are coming to Cornell to talk about internships for students, as well as job opportunities for new graduates. An information session is planned for Thursday, October 22nd.

In addition, this information session will feature a keynote by Bill Dalton, Cornell alum and technical director for Bioware Austin. He is the lead engineer for the unreleased MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. Bill will be talking about his experiences in the game industry, the challenges of game development, and what students can do to prepare themselves for the industry.

Electronic Arts Information Session
Date/Time: October 22nd at 6 pm
Venue: Phillips 203
Description: Come hear about game development from developers at EA and Bioware. Learn what it is like work at Electronic Arts. Be sure to bring your resume!

]]> Monday, 19 October 2009 15:50:00 -0400 http://www.cis.cornell.edu/courses/cis3000/2009sp/showcase/participants.php http://gdiac.cis.cornell.edu/news.php?id=26 To recognize the outstanding efforts of our students, this year Showcase decided to give several awards. These awards recognized the best games developed in our various courses over the past year. In addition to recognition, the winners were presented with their choice of games provided to us by Electronic Arts.

The awards were as follows:

Critics Choice Awards

These awards are for games that were best received by the Showcase audience. Showcase attendees voted for their favorite title in each of the eligible categories.

• Winner (CIS 3000): emblem
• Winner (CIS 4002): Shine
• Winner (Independent Projects): TIPOL

Kid's Pick

The GDIAC Showcase always has a number younger visitors. This award is presented the game most popular with children under the age of 10.

• Winner: Ballin' Beavers

Prize for Innovative Gameplay

This award is presented by GDIAC Director Walker White to the game that he feels best represents GDIAC's mission to design games with innovative game play and mechanics.

• Winner: Gamut

The showcase is open to the general public. It will be held in the Cornell Undergraduate Computing Lab, so that everyone can play and experience these student projects. Come and meet the game designers and engineers of tomorrow.

Bungie Studios Information Session
(Hosted by Tau Beta Pi)

Date/Time: March 10th from 5:30 - 7 pm
Venue: Upson B17
Description: Videogames like Halo 3 are more than just fun and games – they involve some tough problems and some hardcore engineering solutions. Bungie Studios of Seattle, WA, will be coming to campus to talk about just how much work gets packed into every frame of every second of play: from the physical models underlying the lighting and illumination of complex scenes, to realistic atmospheric models, to physics simulation, animation and AI. A modern game like Halo 3 is put together by a large and immensely talented team of artists, designers and engineers. Come learn how we did it, and see how you could be a part of that team too.

STUDIO in SPACE and TIME is an art studio course using computer-based and traditional media to create works engaging the themes of space and time. The course combines lecture, readings, studio (lab), and individual research, and draws on ideas of space and time from widely differing sources. Students work independently as well as collaboratively to explore specific areas of interest within these two broad themes. While the course emphasizes the use of new media technologies, it will draw upon media practices from both "hi" and "low" tech sources, encouraging playful thinking and the freedom to move "outside the box." The course was developed with the support of the Faculty Innovation in Teaching Program, and combines resources from the Cornell Theory Center, the Department of Art, and CIT. The course makes use of cutting edge immersive environments supported by the Theory Center, and the Art Department's and CIT's advanced media labs in Tjaden Hall. All content and the final projects are presented in online multi-user virtual worlds that are presented to the public at the end of the semester.

I have added a temporary link to the old gallery pages for fall 2002 / spring 2003 semesters. These will be indexed soon, but the link are there now in case you were wondering what happened to them.