Germany, 2003...

These are the voyages of five young men, who are asked to develop some kind of game using Linux on a Playstation 2.

From then on it is their task to explore strange new hardware, to seek out new APIs and new unknown programming languages.

To boldly go where no student has gone before.

Magnetic Masters at the GCDC

We'd like to announce (and not without a certain feeling of joy), that our game/project will have the honor to be presented at this year's Games Convention Developers Conference. The Lecture called "PS2 Game Development under Linux" will take place on 17.08.2005 between14:15 and 14:45 in room 3.

What is "Magnetic Masters"?

Well, in short "Magnetic Masters" is a game that was made during a practical training which took place as part of the computer science and computational visualistics studies at the university of Magdeburg. The resulting game, which derives from a classic game called "Space Wars" (1987), puts the player in the role of a racing pilot, where he is going to take control of his magnetic hovercraft racing through futuristic arenas and courses. He also can engage his countless enemies with missiles and energy weapons. As an additional threat the racers are attracted by magnets placed on the courses and are therefore in ongoing danger to crash into the environment.
The game was developed for Playstation2 to run with the Linux Kit offered by Sony. (www.playstation2-linux.com)

On the following pages we try to give some deeper insight into this unique project.

the paper

This is a complete description of the project in the shape of a handy pdf-file.

The video

We are now able to offer you a video, that shows some scenes from "Magnetic Masters" and may give you a little impression what this is all about. The video is in MPEG format and the file is about 25 MB large. We have another version encoded with DivX which is about 21 MB large at doubled resolution.

download the video (MPEG)... download the video (AVI)