Company

We're busy packing for our annual trip to the GDC. We'll be in San Francisco from March 5-15. In the suitcase:

• Ürban PAD 2.5
• Mini-workshops
• Our appetites

Get all the details in this month's newsletter.

We'll release Ürban PAD 2.5 within the next few weeks. Request a trial version now, and we'll notify you when the new version is ready. Spending some time with Ürban PAD 2.0 now will make mastering 2.5 a snap.

Our documentation has been hiding out on the site for a while (it's shy, what can we say?). No longer - get access to existing tutorials here.

We're currently updating everything and expect a complete rollout to take place progressively between now and February 15, 2010.

Sign up for the Forum or contact us to let us know what's clear, what's not, and what you'd like to see more of.

See Unconnected Roads in action in this short video.

Use the Unconnected Roads feature in City Designer to draw unconnected roads freehand - on the ground or in the sky!

Get the latest build, including this feature, by logging on to the Forum or creating a user account.

Gamr7 will hold a free workshop for aspiring and professional graphic and level designers on December 7, 2009, at the Gamagora headquarters in Lyon.

The workshop, entitled Ürban PAD School, will take place from 2-5 p.m. on the eve of this year’s Game Connection.

During the workshop, participants will create a 3D city model using Ürban PAD. Participants will complete the workshop in teams.

Gamagora is a division of the University of Lyon, specializing in game design education.

For more information or to sign up, please contact Claudia Vance at claudia@gamr7.com or at (+33) 06 03 59 28 22. (Space is limited.)

After months of testing, tuning, and feature enhancement, Ürban PAD 2.0 is ready for release. Here's a look at some of what we're bringing you with this version:

• Enhanced performance – 10x time increases for some features
• Sturdier architecture – ready for integration into your pipeline at any step of your process
• City Project management – new project format keeps all project elements in one place and allows shared access within your team

read more...

This past summer, we made a series of quick videos about Ürban PAD. They're in the Gallery, and now on YouTube. Watch, rate, and stay on the lookout for others.

Unearthly Challenge opened today. As part of the Dominance War series, Unearthly Challenge encourages environment artists to create their best environment art using new tools.

Gamr7 is pleased to be a sponsor of this year’s contest, and we're looking forward to seeing the skills and imagination on display. As a sponsor, we'll be providing free trial versions of Ürban PAD 2.0 for contest use.

Get access to the latest builds, documentation, and the forums by heading over and creating a free user account.

We recently welcomed David to the Gamr7 team in July. David is part of the Development team and comes to us from Autodesk. We're happy to have him working with us on some top-secret projects, and apparently he plays a pretty mean Guitar Hero.

We put two developers, a General Director, and two servers in a hatchback for a Gamr7 road trip.

Get the details on the blog.

Find the text of Lionel Barret's FMX conference presentation at the Gamr7 blog. Lionel talks about declarative technology, content creation, and Ürban PAD. Think it sounds neat? It is. Get your trial version of Ürban PAD here.

Atari's Lyon-based internal studio Eden Games has integrated Gamr7's procedural city generator, Urban PAD, into its Eden's Garden development pipeline, the two companies announced today.

Garden is a production pipeline intended for use with MMOs on current and upcoming consoles, and the company says such games rely heavily on the sort of auto-generated content that Urban PAD provides.

Eden and Gamr7 are working together as co-developers on the integration. Urban PAD promises editable procedural creation through automatic placement, real-time manual editing, and contextual adaptation, and is designed so that production teams can work in parallel from prototyping to production.

"Eden Games is very highly regarded for their technological expertise," says Gamr7 business developer and general manager Bernard Legaut. "Urban PAD is a logical evolution in their production process as they are preparing for the upcoming console generation. We are very proud that they have selected our technology for their next pipeline."

As a continuing effort to ease the integration of UrbanPAD into any pipeline, the Gamr7 team went to Collada PlugFest in Paris (Imaginove and Cap Digital were organizers).

Direct contact with Netallied (makers of the next gen Collada importer/exporter) and Autodesk (thank you for your time, Luc) was really helpful in pushing forward with Collada integration.

Currently, Collada meshes are already imported/exported into/from ÜrbanPAD but we are looking for better performance and better error-reporting in the next coming months.

Stay tuned.

The talk will focus on the problem of high-content, contextually detailed city creation and the declarative approach to solving it.

Lionel Barret de Nazaris' presentation: "Declarative Cities: Creativity, Productivity and Automation." Wednesday May 06, 11:00 - 12:00, List-Saal: Turm B

We have a booth at the GDC, North Hall. Stop by for a demo; stick around for the red punch. To set up a meeting, just get in touch

After streamlining the interfaces and spiffing up City Designer, we put the finishing touches on our flagship release, Ürban PAD, and sent it out into the world. Our users are excited about it and gave us some great feedback.

Join them by getting your Trial version <a href="/urban_pad/evaluation">here</a>