Acknowledgments

Writing a book like this is definitely not a journey on which you want to embark alone. Thus, before we begin I'd like to thank everyone who has, in one way or another, contributed to this book.

First of all, I'd like to thank both Stephanie Wall and Chris Zahn at New Riders, who have been with me all through the process, and also John Neidhart at Prentice Hall, who had the initial idea for this book. We've been through a pretty wild ride together, and their effort and dedication have been indispensable.

I'd also like to thank Josep Blat at Universitat Pompeu Fabra for his vision in developing a game-specific curricula, supporting the creation of this book, and creating Europe's first Master's Degree in Video Game Creation.

Then there are lots of people who shared ideas, contributed source code, and generally helped shape the book you are now holding. In no special order, here are the luminaries that lit the way for me:

Dave Pottinger, Ensemble Studios

Don Hopkins, Maxis

Ismael Noche, PyroStudios

Andrew Worsey, Codeplay

Cass Everitt, NVIDIA Corp.

Juan Guardado, NVIDIA Corp.

Alex Dunne, Game Developer/Gamasutra

Aleks Jakulin, University of Ljubljana, AI Lab

Ken Perlin, NYU

Toni Susín, UPC

Anna Puig, UPC

Carla Brossa, La Salle School of Multimedia Engineering

Adam Valdez, WETA Digital

Ernest Adams

Guillaume Werle

Martijn van Welie

Pere Fort, UPF

Hector Geffner, ICREA/ICREA

Finally, I'd like to thank everyone at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, especially my students, my work colleagues, and so on. A complete set of thank-yous must go to the Novarama people, who provided tons of information for this project. I'd also like to thank CIDEM/Generalitat de Catalunya for supporting Novarama's activities as a game studio. Finally, I'd like to thank all my friends and among those, my family, who have supported me through each and every one of these pages, and through my sometimes long absences. Last, I'd like to thank the beautiful Cecilia, whose unconditional support makes all this happen.

Barcelona, March 2002 June 2003