201w ago - SCEA Producer Daimion Pinnock is back with number two in a small series of developer diaries featuring the upcoming WipEout HD Fury add-on pack.

This week, he introduces Marcus Tanner, WipEout Fury Art Director from the WipEout HD development team, as follows:

I'm here today to give you a brief insight into how a WipEout environment evolves from concept art to production geometry.

A WipEout track is set in a Utopian environment populated by stunning, cutting-edge architecture enhanced by contemporary graphic design. This aesthetic is created by designing architectural forms that are influenced by abstract sculpture, structure in art and science, futuristic architecture, mecha detailing and contemporary product design.

To create the WipEout aesthetic, our concept artists use a fluid design process that involves creating abstract shapes in 3D and bouncing work around the team from artist to artist to evolve and clarify the designs. This results in bold, abstract 3D structures, which are rendered and painted over with architectural detailing and placed into the context of a WipEout environment.

These concept images (below) use the structures as set pieces, trackside furniture, tunnels etc, and give the production team an idea of how they would look in game.

239w ago - Today Travis Williams (Sr. Producer, SCEA) revealed that November will an exciting month for PAIN fans as the the next environment, dubbed Movie Studio, is on the way. Basically it's their take on the wackiness of movie making, as the video below points out.

To quote: So to directly contradict my earlier statement ... PAIN development is (at least somewhat) a democracy. We have listened to what you wanted and tried our best to make sure all the things that you wanted are in this area.

That includes (but isn't limited to):





• More than one launcher location (There are three that you can dynamically switch to)
• Single Player Fun with Explosives
• New Cratetastic Mode
• Unlockable FREE Character
• HORSE Mode
• Bowling Mode (With all new distractions)

Movie Studio is the first area that we created after hearing all your input (democracy again). Amusement Park was started before PAIN was released (and took quite a while to make). Movie Studio was made in a third of that time, and I think it shows how much better we as a team have gotten at this since the original PAIN area.

We also have a new single player mode in the Lot called CRATETASTIC. I think you will love the mode...

248w ago - Codemasters has today officially announced FUEL. Set to revolutionise multi-terrain racing with the largest environment ever created in race gaming, FUEL will present players with an astonishing no-boundaries playfield that's over 5,000 square miles (14,000+ km²) in size.

Creating the ultimate competitive go-anywhere racing experience, FUEL will have players competing across wildly different terrain and executing spectacular death-defying stunts as they race dozens of varied two and four-wheeled rides and explore this epic world on an unprecedented scale.





FUEL is set in an alternate present in which whole swathes of the globe have been ravaged by the effects of climate change brought on by decades of environmental abuse. Here oil prices have rocketed and yet a new breed of racing junkie takes to the wastelands, pitting their grungy home-tuned vehicles against each other in an all-new extreme sport as they compete to win fuel supplies.

To triumph means travelling the wastelands to challenge the best; from the tsunami-wrecked pacific coast through the Nevada wastelands, including the Grand Canyon, up treacherous snow-capped mountains, thick forests, arid deserts, abandoned lakeside resorts and much more.

Bringing this vast, open ended...

299w ago - A quarter-degree Fahrenheit is roughly the downward adjustment NASA scientists made earlier this month in their annual estimates of the average temperature in the contiguous 48 states since 2000. They corrected the numbers after an error in meshing two sets of temperature data was discovered.