Village Gamer

Modern Princesses: Bringing Elika to Life in Prince of Persia

Vancouver – ACM SIGGRAPH Vancouver Chapter will be hosting an evening with Ubisoft Producer Ben Mattes and Team Leader Matthew Clark on Wednesday, February 11 at the VanCity Theatre in Vancouver. The evening’s topic will cover the design and development of Elika, the Prince of Persia’s new AI-controlled companion. As stated on the event’s information page, “The science of creating a relationship between the player and the controllable, main character is a well-documented one. (3Cs, etc.) The same can be said about the art of establishing relationships between characters themselves. Therefore, the challenge for Prince of Persia was to create a bond between the player and a character over which he has no control. The presentation will explore and expose the animation and programming techniques used to create such a bond.”

Tickets for this event are now on sale, please check the event site for more details. Admission is $20.00 for non-members, $10.00 for members.

First Annual Game Developers Conference® Canada Announced: May 12-13, 2009, Vancouver, BC

Vancouver – Registration is now open for the Game Developers Conference® Canada (GDC Canada). Building off of the success of the Vancouver International Games Summit (VIGS), GDC Canada will be a forum for Canadian developers to share best practices for fostering ingenuity and quality games. Presented by Think Services Games Group and Reboot Communications, GDC Canada will take place May 12-13, 2009 at the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre (VCEC) in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Conference is offering a special registration period for those who have attended past VIGS events. Paid conference delegates to either the 2007 or 2008 VIGS are entitled to special alumni savings of up to 25% on conference passes. Those who qualify for Alumni Rates will receive an email directly from GDC Canada which will give further registration details.

GDC Canada Conference Tracks

The Game Developers Conference® Canada emphasizes studying the challenges and opportunities of creating games with long production cycles, large development teams, and multi-platform releases. Unique to GDC Canada’s content lineup, is its focus on the production cycle of game development with tracks focused on:

• Concept/Preproduction
• Production
• Finalling
• Post Launch/Analysis

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Astral Media Inc. is proud to announce its support for the Institute of Communication Agencies and Virgin Unite during Canada’s 2009 Advertising Week. In the “A day in the life of an agency” contest targeting young aspiring marketing and advertising students Astral Media will contribute $100 000 in media space on the Company’s out-of-home and radio advertising platforms to the winning student campaign.

The 2009 Advertising Week takes place from January 26 to the 29, a week-long celebration of the business of ideas and communication. As part of “Youth Day,” one of AdWeek’s key events, Astral Media is actively sponsoring the A day in the life of an agency contest, which will involve 150 students working in teams with 15 agencies on a communications brief to promote a benefit concert for Virgin Mobile and Virgin Unite’s RE(*)Generation program. Students will be mentored by various ad agency teams in building a campaign during the course of an intense morning of brainstorming. The winners will have the benefit of seeing their advertising concept developed and publicized on Astral Media’s out-of-home and radio properties in Toronto and Vancouver during the course of the summer.

“This is an exciting opportunity for Astral Media to demonstrate its ongoing investment in developing tomorrow’s creative talent,” said Jacques Parisien, Group President, Astral Media Radio and Astral Media Outdoor. “We are always pleased to be able to showcase the country’s next generation of talent, and we look forward to seeing the creativity they apply to such an exciting project as Virgin Unite’s at-risk and homeless youth program, RE(*)Generation.”

Vancouver – PhotographyBB announced today the release of the twelfth edition of the PhotographyBB Magazine Online. The PhotographyBB Magazine Online is quickly becoming a leading resource in the future of free information distribution, offering our readers: Digital Photography tips and techniques, DSLR camera function training, and image post processing tutorials in Adobe® Photoshop™, and RAW processing in Photoshop Lightroom™.

The January 2009 release features digital photography articles with tutorials to help digital photographers to learn new techniques for achieving both better photographs as well as leaning post processing skills in Adobe’s Photoshop® and Lightroom®.

“This release marks our twelfth issue for our magazine. We’ve come a long way over the past year, and the magazine has grown considerably in popularity and readership.” said Editor in Chief, Dave Seeram. “We are happy to say that we will be continuing our tradition of free monthly releases of the magazine for the coming year, with some pleasant surprises in store for our readers. Our January release features articles lending tips on taking better architecture photography, small set photography, a trip to Las Vegas, the Top Ten Lightroom Library Module tips, and much more. We’ve also got a fascinating look at how photographers are making use of social networking sites to promote themselves and their photography businesses.”

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Vancouver – Over the past two days, we attended some of the many educational sessions offered at this year’s Spark FX festival where we made a few new friends and learned many interesting things about the visual effects industry. It is no longer much of a surprise to me to discover the many outstanding creations which are coming out of Vancouver studios, and Spark FX is most definitely a powerful showcase for the talent and technology in this city. Kudos to all of the ACM SIGGRAPH Vancouver volunteers who put in many hours of hard work to ensure that the rest of us had a great event to attend.

The first session we were able to attend was with matte painter Dylan Cole, who revealed many of the techniques and processes he uses to achieve his outstanding work. For me personally, this session was very inspirational, as Dylan encouraged attendees to think creatively to solve creative challenges. I definitely want to try some of the techniques he used in building ice scenes, vistas and fantasy cityscapes. Most surprising was the use of photographs in the mattes, and how those photographs are meshed into a painting along with hand-drawn work to create a back-scene which is realistic to the movie watcher.

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Experience the business behind the magic as The Disney Institute and Mount Royal Continuing Education offer a one-day seminar highlighting the importance of innovation and creativity in the workplace

Calgary – Mount Royal College Continuing Education invites you to discover for yourself how organizational creativity can give you the competitive edge in today’s changing business world. As The Disney Institute brings its world-renowned brand of professional development to the Faculty of Continuing Education & Extension. Learn how to create a climate of creativity and everyday innovation through Team Creativity – Disney Style. This one-day, 6-hour programme takes place on Feb. 18, 2009 with a registration fee of $399.00 +GST. Visit the Mount Royal site to register for this programme.

Through Disney Institute you will discover how to:

* Foster a collaborative environment that draws on the creative resources of your entire organization

* Establish systems that help your leaders make decisions about new ideas

* Focus your employees’ creativity on the goals of your organization

* Improve productivity by implementing new ideas generated in the creative process

Canadian software publisher ParetoLogic is pleased to announce newest utility software, ParetoLogic DriverCure. This is the 11th product in the ParetoLogic product lineup which includes popular applications such as RegCure Registry Cleaner, XoftSpySE Anti-Spyware, and the award winning free PGsurfer parental controls program

Victoria BC – Recently named one of Profit Magazine’s “Hot 50”, Canadian software publisher, ParetoLogic, is the creator of the ever-popular registry cleaner RegCure and anticipates a similar level of success with its newest product, ParetoLogic DriverCure. Designed to alleviate the common problem of diagnosing outdated hardware drivers and software applications, DriverCure promises to quickly identify all the drivers and software programs on board a given computer system, indicating available updates and facilitating the download of said updates. The software features an impressive database of vendors, ensuring that even the lesser known brands of hardware (bios/motherboard, hard disk controller, network devices, CD/DVD/, ), input devices (keyboard, mouse) , and peripherals (digital camera, printer/plotter/multi-office, scanner, game controller) can be detected and updated. Read the rest of this entry »

Community feedback reflected in latest enhancements to award-winning graphics suite

Corel Corporation today released a new service pack for the award-winning CorelDRAW® Graphics Suite X4. Reflecting the top requests from the CorelDRAW user community, the service pack includes expanded RAW camera support capabilities (including support for Nikon D90 and Canon EOS 1000D/50D), improved Drop Shadows functionality, and enhanced visual feedback for specific suite functions.

“Our CorelDRAW user community is a highly valued source of ongoing feedback and inspiration and we are pleased to deliver an update that addresses their top requests,” said Gerard Metrailler, Senior Director of Product Management, Graphics for Corel. “Our community site, CorelDRAW.com, is a meeting place where CorelDRAW users from around the world can interact together, exchange ideas, and communicate directly with Corel’s development and product management teams, and continues to experience steady growth, month after month.”
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Corel Digital Media products include the latest in photo and video editing, disc authoring and video and disc playback with the latest Blu-ray support

Ottawa – Corel Corporation today announced that key partners will exhibit its high-definition playback and authoring software at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) from January 8-11, 2009 at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. Corel products to be demonstrated at CES include Corel® WinDVD®, Corel® LinDVD® and Corel® DVD MovieFactory®. Corel will also demonstrate its complete line of Digital Media products in private meeting rooms 6221mp and 6222mp, located in the North Hall. Current and potential OEM clients may contact Corel to schedule a meeting at corel.oem -at- corel -dot- com.

Corel at CES

The following Corel partners will exhibit Corel products at CES:

Intel (Corel WinDVD)
Central Hall, Booth 7153

Dolby (Corel WinDVD and Corel DVD MovieFactory)
Lower South 1 LVCC, Booth 20901

Phoenix Technologies (Corel LinDVD)
Central Hall, Booth 9014

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Three B.C. and two California companies honored for their innovation

Richmond BC – Sierra Wireless and Wavefront, the community-based commercialization center for B.C.’s 1,000 wireless and new media development companies, announce the winners of the Sierra Wireless – Wavefront Developer Programme.

The Sierra Wireless – Wavefront Developer Programme was established to find best-in-class enterprise or consumer applications that take advantage of the mobile broadband and GPS capabilities built into Sierra Wireless PC cards, ExpressCards, and USB modems. Finalists created working prototypes and a team of six judges, including Parm Sandhu, TELUS; James Maynard, Wavefront; David Sonnen, Integrated Spatial Solutions, Inc (ISSI); Ed Schmit, AT&T; Steve Blaine, Sierra Wireless; and Trent Punnett, Sierra Wireless, chose the best-in-class winners.

Apisphere, Inc of Berkeley, CA – Apisphere for Outlook is a location-aware plug-in that enables Sierra Wireless users to automatically send and receive location-smart messages to their mobile devices and laptops based on their Outlook calendar and location.

Clevest Solutions Inc. of Richmond, BC – Clevest Solutions Inc, the world’s fastest growing mobile solutions provider for utilities, has developed a new breed of Mobile Field Force Optimization Solution for mobile workforces by integrating and leveraging the power of GPS/Automatic Vehicle Location, GIS Maps, Scheduling, Dispatch, patented and configurable forms, validations, and workflows.
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