Unreal contest offers cool million

Beginning September 2, Epic Games and Nvidia will make stops at iGames centers in a 12-city US tour that promises to impart knowledge of game design to potential game developers and 3D artists.

Sessions in the "tips and tricks" educational tour will use the Unreal Tournament 2003 game engine as a basis for teaching the design of levels and environments, the use of the Unreal script programming language and Karma physics engine, and the creation of noninteractive movies.

Using the training, aspiring developers can create mods that can be entered in the $1,000,000 Nvidia Make Something Unreal contest. Jason Busby will lead the seminars, which can be supplemented by the MasteringUnreal.com site, which offers 100-plus hours of free downloadable video training modules based on the UT game engine.

The tour will also feature UT2003 LAN parties, demos of this fall's UT2004, and free food. For more information and tour dates, visit the event's Web site.