Fly in my eyE

Carmak on the 360: It’s a really sweet development system

Next Gen has this interview up with John Carmack:

On a new rendering engine

"For the last year I’ve been working on new rendering technologies. It comes in fits and starts. Our internal project that’ll incorporate it hasn’t been publicly announced. We’re doing simultaneous development on Xbox 360 and PC, and we intend to release on PlayStation 3 simultaneously as well, but it’s not a mature enough platform right now for us to be doing much work on."

Consoles vs. PC

"The difference between theoretical performance and real-world performance on the CPU level is growing fast. On, say, a regular Xbox, you can get very large fractions of theoretical performance with not a whole lot of effort. The PlayStation 2 was always a mess with the multiple processors on there, but the new generations, with Cell or the Xbox 360, make it much, much worse. They can quote these incredibly high numbers of giga-flops or tera-flops or whatever, but in reality, when you do a straightforward development process on them, they’re significantly slower than a modern high-end PC."

"...The graphics systems are much better than that, though. Graphics have an inherent natural parallelism. The capabilities of the Xbox 360 and PS3 are really good on the graphics side — although, not head or shoulders above any PC stuff that you can buy at a higher price-point."

Xbox 360: 'A really sweet develoment system''

"The Xbox 360 will probably will be id's primary development platform. As it is right now, we would get the game up on the 360. When I would do major hack-and-slash architectural changes it was back on the PC, but it’s looking like the Xbox 360 will be our target. All of our tools are on the PC, and we’re maintaining the game running on the PC, but probably all of our gameplay development and testing will be done on the Xbox 360. It’s a really sweet development system."

posted by Agent 1138 @ 12:38 PM 0 comments

Elroy 1998-2006

We'll miss you buddy.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 11:20 AM 0 comments

My new toy!!

Thoughts and opinions to come...

posted by Agent 1138 @ 1:40 PM 0 comments

Revenge of the law falls on 'Star Wars' film pirates

After going over to the dark side by getting their hands on copies of "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith" before its theatrical release, six men and one woman have pleaded guilty to federal piracy charges, U.S. prosecutors said Wednesday.

Prosecutors believe the seven defendants, all from Los Angeles County, were not part of an organized piracy ring and only used copies of the movie for their own viewing.

But after copies passed among them, the epic film ended up in the hands of an eighth person who put it on the Internet the night before its record-grossing theatrical release.

That person, Marc Hoaglin, 28, of Huntington Beach pleaded guilty in December to a felony count of uploading a pre-release copyrighted work onto the Internet. The seven other defendants - one of them a 27-year-old La Crescenta man - pleaded guilty Tuesday to misdemeanor charges.

"If they'd done it for financial gain or profit, then that could have become a felony, but ... that wasn't the case for these folks," said Brian Hoffstadt, assistant U.S. attorney.

The illegal distribution of "Sith" started during the week before its May 19 release, when Albert Valente, 28, of Lakewood took a DVD copy of the film from a post-production facility where he worked. The firm was hired by the studio for the post-production work, Hoffstadt said.

Valente lent the DVD to his friend Jessie Lumada, 28, of Long Beach, who gave it to another friend, Ramon Valdez, 30, also of Long Beach. Valdez took "Sith" to the cable company where he worked and allowed co-worker Michael Fousse, 42, of Monrovia to upload it onto the company's internal network.

Dwight Wayne Sityar, 27, of La Crescenta, who also worked at the cable company, then burned the movie onto three CDs and gave them to co-worker Stephani Gima, 25, of Los Angeles. Gima gave the movie to her brother-in-law, Joel De Sagun Dimaano, 33, of Los Angeles, who brought it to his work at MGM Studios and lent it to Hoaglin, his co-worker. Hoaglin uploaded the movie onto the Internet the night before it opened.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 1:59 PM 0 comments

Rumble Roses XX screenshots

Worthplaying has some new Rumble Roses XX screenshots, coming soon to a 360 near you.... Next-Gen indeed.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 11:36 AM 0 comments

New Nintendo DS Lite

Straight from Nintendo of Japan:



Details:
Release Date: 2006-03-02
Price: 16800 Yen
Feature: 4 adjustable levels of brightness
Old DS Size: 149 x 85 x 29 = 275g
New DS Size: 133 x 74 x 22 = 218g

posted by Agent 1138 @ 10:48 AM 0 comments

Deadly Driving

From Pulse24:

It appears to be a tragic case of life imitating art – or in this case, a video game.

A cab driver is dead following a horrifying accident that’s believed to have been caused by a street race. Police say the taxi was driving south on Mt. Pleasant Rd., near St. Clair Ave., waiting to make a left turn at about 10:30pm Tuesday. Meanwhile, two Mercedes-Benzes were travelling north, and investigators have suggested they were speeding.

One of the cars reportedly then collided with the cab at the intersection of Mt. Pleasant and Whitehall Rd., sending it hurtling into a steel pole. The vehicle was crushed, and the 46-year-old driver, Tahir Khan, was trapped inside. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The car that hit the cab was damaged, while the second car apparently fled the scene. The two 18-year-old drivers were rounded up and arrested, however. One of them was injured, but not seriously. Alexander Ryazanov has been charged with criminal negligence causing death. Wang−Piao Dumani Ross is facing a similar charge, along with allegations he failed to stop after the accident.

The street racing video game Need For Speed was apparently found in one of the luxury cars, which belonged to the teens’ parents.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 6:44 PM 0 comments

Gubernatorial candidate favors 50% tax on 'violent games'

"The Amarillo Globe News is reporting that Republican gubernatorial candidate Star Locke wants to scrap Texas' current property tax system. Instead, Locke would institute new taxes on abortion providers, soft drinks, and violent video games to fund the state's government. Locke, a rancher and builder from Corpus Christi, favors a 50% tax on violent games, as well as a $10,000 tax per abortion and a 10% levy on sweetened soft drinks."

posted by Agent 1138 @ 10:47 AM 0 comments

Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas Released

The MultiTheftAuto team released their popular Grand Theft Auto multiplayer mod, MTA: San Andreas. The initial release includes therace mod which allows up to 32 players to go heads-up in pre-made and custom user-created maps. MTA:SA includes a full-featured in-game map editor allowing users to create exciting new content by altering the GTA:SA world.

MTA:SA downloads here:

MTA:SA Client Release One

MTA:SA Server 1.0 for Windows

MTA:SA Server 1.0 for Linux GCC 3.3

MTA:SA Server 1.0 for Linux GCC 4.0

posted by Agent 1138 @ 1:55 PM 0 comments

Q&A: Reggie Fils-Aime's Revolution resolutions

Gamespot has an interview up with Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime.

Some highlights:

"...I have five resolutions for the industry heading into 2006. The first is keeping our eyes on the prize. This industry is about entertainment, and in the end, he with the best games wins. So at Nintendo, we're focused on putting the most-entertaining products into the marketplace. The second resolution is keeping the "mass" in the mass audience. The world is fragmenting all around us, and many companies are making their products too exclusive and expensive for the general consumer. For example, for American consumers to get into the Xbox 360 franchise, with games and extra controllers, they had to spend more than $700, not including an HDTV, which is really the only way to positively experience 360. We resolve at Nintendo to remain within reach for the vast majority of our consumers."

"...This industry has become more and more focused on the niche, and at Nintendo, we've opened our systems to a wide range of consumers. Whether it's consumers older than 35 or female gamers, we've attracted them with Nintendogs and Animal Crossing, so we've resolved to bring as many new consumers into this industry as possible."

"...It is to turn game development into a democracy of great ideas. Just as the cost of systems seems to be getting out of reach for everyday consumers, the cost of game development is getting out of reach for game publishers. The Revolution will be more affordable for game developers to create for, and that will result in fantastically innovative content."

posted by Agent 1138 @ 11:31 AM 0 comments

Grand Theft Auto 4 in 2006?

While we've had GTS: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas in the past few years, we haven't had a full on sequel yet. That's apparently going to change, according to PSM. In a recent article in their magazine, they state that a Rockstar representative has revealed to them that the next generation of GTA will be unveiled at E3.

Specific details on the game may be slim, but PSM states that the game will be set in Europe with a total of 6 cities. Thats twice the size of GTA: San Andreas. While this is still technically rumor, it could mean we can look forward to a new Grand Theft Auto this year if there is truth to the rumor.

However, if we do see it this year, it probably won't be with the launch of the Playstation 3.

No news on wether or not GTA4 will ever seen itself on the Xbox 360, but if they follow the trends of the last generations of GTA, we will most likely see it.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 10:16 AM 0 comments

China beat Columbus to it

THE brave seamen whose great voyages of exploration opened up the world are iconic figures in European history. Columbus found the New World in 1492; Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; and Magellan set off to circumnavigate the world in 1519. However, there is one difficulty with this confident assertion of European mastery: it may not be true.

It seems more likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called “The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft”.

Next week, in Beijing and London, fresh and dramatic evidence is to be revealed to bolster Zheng He's case. It is a copy, made in 1763, of a map, dated 1418, which contains notes that substantially match the descriptions in the book. “It will revolutionise our thinking about 15th-century world history,” says Gunnar Thompson, a student of ancient maps and early explorers.

The map (shown above) will be unveiled in Beijing on January 16th and at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich a day later. Six Chinese characters in the upper right-hand corner of the map say this is a “general chart of the integrated world”. In the lower left-hand corner is a note that says the chart was drawn by Mo Yi Tong, imitating a world chart made in 1418 which showed the barbarians paying tribute to the Ming emperor, Zhu Di. The copyist distinguishes what he took from the original from what he added himself.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 10:57 AM 0 comments

Swedish pirates found political party

A new Swedish party has been founded by software pirates with the aim of abolishing copyrights, patens and trademarks. They founders want to be in the next election for the Riksdag (Swedish parliament, ed.) which is scheduled for September 24th and the party is a reaction to the stricter legislation against piracy introduced by the current Swedish government. Fittingly this new party has been christened ‘Piratpartiet’ – the Pirate Party.

Should the Pirate Party gain the majority of votes in the election, its first move will be to remove all copyright according to the Party’s programme. This will be done without any delays or studies. The party also wants Sweden to declare to the UN that the country no longer will accept international treaties on the matter.

The party is currently looking for people who want to run for a parliamentary seat, of course they need to be software pirates.

In order to be able to be listed as a party in the upcoming elections the pirates needed 1.500 signatures. After they opened a website on January 1st they got nearly 5.000 electronic signatures, which now have to be verified. However, in order to gain the first seat in the Riksdag, they need 225.000 votes. But the pirates aren’t worried about that, according to their own estimates, 800.000 Swedes use pirate software/games/media.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 2:03 PM 0 comments

GTA Liberty City Stories for PS2

....and an all-new GTA for the PSP! From Take2's quarterly report:

"...Additional products expected for fiscal 2006 include the newly announced Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories for PlayStation 2, tentatively planned for release in the second quarter, Bully for PlayStation 2 and Xbox, two new titles for the PSP handheld system, including an all-new Grand Theft Auto, a title based on a new brand for the Xbox 360 and a sequel of a Rockstar brand, all from Rockstar Games; The Da Vinci Code, Prey, and 24: The Game from 2K Games; various other sports titles including NBA 2K7 from 2K Sports; and Family Feud for multiple platforms from Global Star."

Awesome! Let's hope the new PSP GTA will feature a new city, and not just a rehash of Vice City as is rumored. Don't get me wrong: I'd be pretty damn happy with Vice on my PSP, but a new city would kick ass.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 4:22 PM 0 comments

Next-gen DVD products shown at tech show

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Warring factions in a battle for control of next-generation DVDs on Wednesday unveiled products at wildly varying prices, reflecting their views on what it takes to jump-start an multibillion dollar industry.

One camp, known as HD DVD and championed by Toshiba Corp holds the view that consumers will buy high-definition DVDs and players, but only at the right price.

In keeping with that position, Toshiba at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday said it would offer the first high-definition players in March, priced at $799 and $499.

Those prices are below what a member of the rival camp, known as Blu-ray and led by Sony Corp., is asking. Blu-ray member Pioneer said it planned to offer a Blu-ray player in May, priced at $1,800.

Failure of the two factions to reach a unified standard has set the stage for a formats war akin to the VCR vs. Betamax battle of the 1980s. Each side hopes to reignite the sagging $24 billion home video market with new players and discs that offer greater capacity and interactive features.

"We have philosophical differences. We think the new products are targeted at early adaptors, focused on performance and not price. This is an elite model," said Andy Parsons, a spokesman for Blu-ray and a senior vice president at Pioneer Electronics, a unit of Pioneer Corp <6.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 10:31 AM 1 comments

Iwata's Nintendo Sells 10M Handheld Systems Worldwide

LONDON - A game of two halves. At Nintendo, the left hand definitely knows what the right hand is doing: Though there's a smattering of analysts queuing up to lay a glove on Nintendo's efforts in the next-generation console war, the Japanese company continues to dominate the handheld gaming market.

It said Tuesday it had sold about 10 million of its DS--an acronym that denotes "dual screen" or "developer's system" if you believe the company's geeky promotional blurb--handheld game systems across the globe, including about four million in North America and over five million in Japan. Perrin Kaplan, vice president for marketing at Nintendo's (other-otc: NTDOY.PK - news - people ) U.S. headquarters, said the company sold about three million of the handheld gaming gadgets--distinguished by its two displays, one of which is a touch screen that users can tap to play with a stylus or their fingers--to North American consumers in 2005. This is in addition to the 1.2 million devices sold to North American gamers in 2004, when the horizontal clamshells were launched in late November. Mark that Satoru Iwata's Nintendo also notched up 4.6 million sales of its Game Boy Advance in North America in 2005, helping to give it 78% of the portable game market, according to the firm.

"At a time when some sectors of the video game industry are softening, Nintendo DS and the Game Boy Advance line remain shining stars because of their fun experiences and innovative game play," said Nintendo's Vice President of sales Reggie Fils-Aime.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 4:19 PM 0 comments

Revenge of the Sith Tops 2005 Movie Internationally

HOLLYWOOD - Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith was the most successful movie of 2005 across the globe, beating out competition from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. According to UK trade publication Screen International, the final Star Wars movie took a total of $848.5 million.

However, international box office figures which exclude the North American marketplace have the fourth Harry Potter installment as the top grossing film.

Across the world both movies took more than $800 million, while no other single film took more than $600 million.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 4:07 PM 0 comments

Makers of South Park turn to Apple for new storage setup

JANUARY 02, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - While South Park may appear technologically amateurish with its character cutouts, over the past nine seasons the cartoon series has added a great deal of storage-consuming detail, including backgrounds and crowd shots that can take up to 100MB of memory each. And that’s on top of a show that still produces all of its content in-house, where more than 30 artists work right up until deadline, making frequent changes to each episode of the weekly TV series.

To handle its growing storage needs, the makers of South Park this past season began moving away from a direct-attached disk backup and tape library that often took more than a day to back up data. Instead, the show’s producers are changing over to a faster tape library system and disk systems that later this month will blossom into a full storage-area network (SAN).

J.J. Franzen, technology supervisor at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, said the show was simply running out of storage space on its digital linear tape (DLT) library and direct-attached disk storage from Plymouth, Minn.-based Ciprico Inc. So in May, a new linear tape open (LTO)-2 tape library from Exabyte Corp. in Boulder, Colo., and three Xserve RAID disk arrays from Apple Computer Inc. were installed.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 11:27 AM 0 comments

Will Microsoft Announce a HD DVD Xbox 360 at CES?

Richard Doherty, an analyst from research firm Envisioneering Group, predicts that tomorrow Bill Gates’ main message at his CES keynote will focus Windows Vista, the next-generation Windows, but Doherty also thinks Gates will talk about HD DVD as part of the Xbox 360.

Microsoft has denied in several opportunities that it is planning a HD DVD upgrade for the Xbox 360, but last year Bill Gates said that the Xbox 360 video may incorporate in the future the next-generation DVD format developed by Toshiba.

“The initial shipments of Xbox 360 will be based on today's DVD format,” Gates said at a joint news conference with Toshiba. “We are looking at whether future versions of Xbox 360 will incorporate an additional capability of an HD DVD player or something else.”

Bill Gates’ CES keynote is only 24 hours away so tomorrow we’ll know if the analyst was right or if it was pure speculation based on the recent HD DVD, Blu-ray Disc war hype.

We’ll have more on HD DVD for the Xbox 360 as it develops.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 8:13 AM 0 comments

Is Google Prepping a Low-Cost PC?

Google and Wal-Mart Stores may be preparing a low-cost PC that runs an operating system created by Google and could be announced as early as Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

The newspaper, citing unnamed analyst sources, reported Sunday that such a Google PC could cost as little as a couple of hundred dollars, or less than the $430 a single share of Google stock is worth today--because it would avoid the need to install Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Larry Page, Google's cofounder and president of products, will give a keynote address on Friday at the annual CES, where many consumer products for the year ahead are introduced. The newspaper said that analysts "suspect" Page will use the high-profile forum to "show off a Google computing device or announce a partnership with a big retailer to sell such a machine."

posted by Agent 1138 @ 8:08 AM 0 comments

iTradeVideoGames.com

iTradevideogames keeps the playing field level by allowing you to trade your video games at a fair market value. Therefore, if you pick up a newly released game and want to try something new a week later, you don't lose all the hard earned equity in the game by trading it in to one of the major retailers; you trade it along to another gamer, just like yourself, who is looking for the exact game you have.

iTradevideogames uses an internal currency called the iBuck to process trades between all of its members. The price for each game is based on the current market value (based on sophisticated reporting methods) and is geared to give a fair trading advantage for your hard earned dollars.

The concept itself is based off of an easy to use message system, not unlike email, that allows you to communicate with your fellow gamers, become friends with them and ultimately develop a trading community of like-minded gamers who you can continuously perform trades with, all for the low cost of one dollar per trade.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 9:31 AM 0 comments

Nintendo confirms Revolution will debut for less than $300

From Engadget:

In the shocker of the year, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata decided to let us all know that they are indeed planning on dropping the Revolution for less than the Xbox Core system, no word yet on the rumors of Mario being a plumber. This just confirms the low-cost vibe we've been getting all along from the big N, and seems reasonable given the relative specs they're debuting with, so the main impact of this news is that Nintendo fanboys can officially break out those "our console will cost less than yours" party hats.

posted by Agent 1138 @ 8:53 AM 0 comments