Game Developer magazine's 2007 Front Line Awards winners named

CMP's Game Developer magazine have finally decided on the topnotchers for the Front Line Awards of 2007 to honor the industry's most used and most popular game-making tools today. The winners per category have been announced and each one will be featured in the early January 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Autodesk's popular and able 3D model and animation studio, Maya, will finally join the likes of 3D Studio Max and the 3Dfx Voodoo card in the Front Line Awards Hall of Fame. Epic Games' popular Unreal Engine 3 has also won as the Best Engine, with PathEngine's self-named AI pathfinding middleware grabbing top seat in the Middleware category.

Vivox' Precision Audio takes first place in the Audio category, while the visuals arena sees Softimage's XSI v6.01 as king. In quick summary, the winners are:

Hall of Fame:

• Maya (Autodesk)

Art Tool:

• Softimage XSI 6.01 (Softimage)

Engine:

• Unreal Engine 3 (Epic Games)

Programming/Production Tool:

• Perforce 2007.2 (Perforce Software)

Middleware:

• PathEngine SDK (PathEngine)

Audio Tools:

• Vivox Precision Audio (Vivox)

Books:

• GPU Gems 3 (NVIDIA/Addison-Wesley Professional)