Gaming - Page 1182

The developers of the vastly popular Star Wars game Jedi Outcast, have released its source code in the wake of yesterday's closure of LucasArts. The development company has also released the source code to the games sequel, Jedi Academy, as well.

In a statement Raven said:

Around six years ago, a rumored sequel to Doom was talked about, but it didn't excite id and Bethesda envisioned according to Bethesda vice president of marketing and publications, Pete Hines.

Kotaku have reported that the game was then thrown in the bin, with Hines backing up this claim stating that id Software refocused their efforts into a new version of Doom 4 that promises to meet the uber high expectations of the game and the Doom franchise. Hines has said that when they're ready to talk about it, they'll let people know.

The problems reportedly lie within id Software itself, which is described as a company that was once full of the world's best talent, but lacks direction. Politics and mismanagement all played a negative role at the company, with executives more focused on getting Rage shipped in 2011 rather than pay attention to what was happening with Doom 4 - how that happens, I just don't know.

Update:

Mark Rein has talked with Engadget, shedding some light on his comments that Unreal Engine 4 wouldn't be heading to the Nintendo Wii U, where he said:

GDC 2013 - We're still walking the halls of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where we popped by the AMD booth to check out an insane 5-screen EyeFinity setup.

What makes this stand out is that the 5 screens were running from a single Radeon HD 7970, pumping out nothing less than 8200x900. This is a weird resolution, as it means AMD are using five 1640x900 screens. I'm sure they're just using Full HD-capable screens with the resolution notched down to handle their huge pixel count in Tomb Raider using TressFX.

You can see our results with EyeFinity running a single HD 7970 and CF HD 7970s right here.

Mozilla are working toward a goal that could see some high-quality games being played in your web browser, powered by Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3. Ars Technica are reporting that Mozilla "has been working on WebGL, in order to bring 3D graphics to the browser; Emscripten, a tool for compiling C++ applications into JavaScript; and asm.js, a high performance subset of JavaScript."

That might not seem like much on the surface, but Unreal Engine 3 powers some of today's best games, such as BioShock Infinite, Mass Effect 3, Batman: Arkham City and many more. Mozilla's biggest issue right now is getting the load times down within the browser, where right now you might be waiting up to half an hour for your game to stream "a gigabyte of map data and texture from a Web server."

Mozilla currently have no ETA on when we could expect UE3 within Firefox, but at least we know it's on its way.

GDC 2013 - The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is well under way, with some details on Sony's upcoming next-gen console, the PlayStation 4.

Starting with the PS4's Eye motion camera, which comes with a tilt sensor so it can tell when a player is facing in the wrong direction, or if the camera itself has fallen off of your TV stand (or wherever you choose to place it). The PS4's Blu-ray drive is set to be 3x faster than the drive found in the PS3, too.

The Remote Play functionality will be improved between the PS4 and Vita, with Sony senior staff engineer Chris Norden saying it is "much better". This is most liekyl thanks to the PS4's internals, as well as it now being powered by Gaikai. It will display games at the Vita's native resolution of 960x544, which is nice to see.

GDC 2013 - The next stop for Trace at the Game Developers Conference 2013 in San Francisco was NVIDIA. Now that we've made peace with NVIDIA this past week, we no longer need to look over our shoulders at NVIDIA booths at events we attend.

But in all seriousness, Trace got some time look at NVIDIA's Project Shield gaming device which is a game controller and screen in one product. He wasn't too impressed with the controller itself or the small screen, and based on his first impressions he feels the games have been optimized that well at this stage. However, as he well notes, this is still a development unit and things could change in time for the Shield gaming device.

In the same video above you also get a look at some game playback on an unknown device (all we got to see at the NVIDIA booth was a screen and keyboard) from an NVIDIA GRID gaming server. If you remember back to CES 2013, GRID is NVIDIA's attempt at cloud gaming whereby you can play recent games on many different devices around your house, all streamed from a GRID gaming server. Again Trace wasn't terribly impressed with the graphics compared to direct PC graphics, however he was forgiving for the fact that you'll be able to play your game on more than one device.

Blizzard have yet another game that gamers will pour hours into, where during the Penny Arcade Expo, Blizzard announced a free-to-play, collectible card game based on the Warcraft franchise. Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft will see players select one of nine characters as they take turns summoning characters, casting spells and using weapons in a one-versus-one online game.

The company have said that they love collectible card games and have been playing them since their Silicon & Synapse days, adding that creating a digital card game like Hearthstone felt natural, so they constructed a small team of 15 developers to smash out the title. They were reportedly given more creative freedom to experiment, but it looks like it could pay off.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft will be made available for PC and Mac users, with an iPad version arriving at a later date. You can try to apply for beta access through your Battle.net account.

NVIDIA have announced the first ever GeForce eSports World of Tanks Open Tournament, with gamers competing to win NVIDIA GPUs and a shot at the $100,000 total prize pool. Pre-registration is now open, with team and player registration opening up its doors on March 28 for two weeks. Head of Community and Wargaming in North America, Kevin Van Ness, has said:

Five regions are open to enter the World of Tanks tournament, China, APAC, the Americas, Russia and Europe. The five regional finalists will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to the Grand Finals, which will be announced at a later date. All tournament matches are seven-person teams playing the best of three game matches.

Everyone's favorite $99 console might be getting streaming video content, at least if the CEO's hint proves accurate. At a keynote at South By Southwest, CEO Julie Uhrman hinted that the Ouya console would be able to function as a set-top box, meaning that we should expect streaming video.

The PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii have all successfully integrated online video streaming service apps and these have helped the consoles extend their lifespan. Uhrman noted that she "feels pretty confident" that Ouya will feature streaming content via native apps from some of the larger players.

This will probably be a fairly easy task as the console will be running Android. Hulu and Netflix already have streaming video apps available for Android. Uhrman added that if it isn't available directly at launch, it should be available shortly after. "We're talking to everyone."

We're willing to bet that more than a few of our readers have participated in a video game beta test before despite the fact that they are sometimes hard to get into. Up until now, you usually had to rely on being selected to participate in those beta programs, but Valve is looking to change that.

Steam has just released a new service called Early Access that makes participating in beta test easier. Instead of filling out form after form, and email after email, Valve's solution is to let game developers simply charge users to be part of the beta. Developers can chose to offer the beta for free through the service or charge users full price for the game, which rolls over to your steam library when officially launched.

As of this posting, the Early Access program has 12 titles including some heavy hitters like: Arma 3 Aplha, Kerbal Space Program and Star Forge Alpha. It is still up in the air if gamers are willing to buy a game at full price months before release just to get access to the beta program, but something tells me that it will be a success.

Fresh from the rumor mill, we have some new next-generation Xbox news. The latest rumors include some screenshots of a purported Xbox Development Kit (XDK) for the next-gen console from Microsoft.

The leaked documentation, if true, would see the next-gen Xbox feature a large HDD, large enough to "hold a large number of games". All next-gen Xbox games are said to be installable to the drive, and "play from the optical drive will not be supported." It seems as though installation of games will be a requirement, with games not capable of being played off the disc at all. This might be a nice change from Microsoft, being able to install the games to the Xbox and take the disc out - not requiring it again until you re-install it.

What about piracy? Well, Microsoft are reportedly developing an anti-used games system, requiring activation codes for 50GB capacity Blu-ray discs. This would definitely shoot holes in piracy for the next-gen Xbox, but how Microsoft play this out will be very, very important.

DICE have confirmed that the debut trailer for their upcoming Frostbite 2-powered Battlefield 4 will arrive on March 27, taking it a step further by unveiling a very short teaser clip to get those gaming juices flowing.

The announcement came from the official Battlefield Twitter account, which included a sneak peak at the trailer. It looks as though we should 'Prepare 4 Battle' and that we should expect some naval gameplay, too. Once the trailer breaks, we should hopefully hear more on the game in the coming months, which platforms it'll be released on - and when - and which platform was the development platform.

Remember last time, we were told it was the PC, but then switched to the consoles to get it out on time. Hopefully this time, DICE aren't messing around and have developed on the PC first and foremost, especially considering that next-gen consoles are powered by x86-based, PC architecture - like the PlayStation 4 from Sony.

March has been a roller coaster ride for gaming companies, with major games like Sim City and Tomb Raider experiencing major issues on launch. Tomb Raider was all but playable on NVIDIA GPUs up until now. The GPU architecture giant has finally been able to release an official driver update that fixes most issues with the latest installment from Crystal Dynamics.

On the company's official blog, they stated:

Battlefield 4 will be officially announced later this month, on March 26 at the Games Development Conference 2013 (GDC), but for now we have the first image of the game. The image, below, confirms that the next-gen, first-person shooter will take place in the present day.

As you can see, the image shows off a soldier and various vehicles pushing through a city, which is in the background. Battlefield 4 continues on its predecessor's color scheme, of orange, black and blue - which is definitely not a bad thing. DICE's Karl Magnus Troedsson said last summer: "We still want to stay in this genre, the modern day as it is. We feel this is a place we can be and continue with the series. Battlefield 4 can live in this space and be very successful."

Something I'm looking forward to seeing is the unlocking of the potential of the graphics engine to be used, Frostbite 2. Frostbite 2's engine in Battlefield 3 was only utilized to a reported 30%, with Battlefield 4 pushing that right up to 80% with improved dynamic lighting and tessellation, among other goodies.

Well, well, well, here we are; Maxis' chief, Lucy Bradshaw, has come out and admitted what we all thought - SimCity was capable of an offline mode, but it conflicted with the vision that the developer had for the game. Bradshaw said Maxis had:

Bradshaw also added:

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has quite the exclusive today, reporting from a SimCity developer who reached out to them that Maxis don't actually offload a large portion of their game's calculations to their servers. The Maxis insider has said that the server isn't actually handling these calculations for non-social aspects of the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would not require that much effort.

RPS have verified that the Maxis insider works on the game, and has first-hand knowledge of how SimCity works. This insider has also made is clear that his repeated claims of server-side calculations is at odds with the reality of the project he worked on, where he explains:

Activision has finally jumped on the microtransactions train by way of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Call of Duty games have traditionally earned money after launch by selling DLC content packs, normally consisting of new multiplayer and new Zombie maps. Black Ops 2 broke away from this by offering the Peacekeeper SMG in the first DLC pack.

Starting Wednesday, Black Ops 2 players on the Xbox 360 console will be able to change cosmetic features of their gaming experience. By purchasing "Personalization Paks" for 160 Microsoft Points, players will be able to change the look of their guns and gain access to new "Calling Cards."

Also available are World Calling Card Packs, $1, and Extra Slot Packs, $2. For the time being, Activision will likely stay with cosmetic microtransactions only. If they were to introduce microtransactions that changed the way multiplayer worked, Digital Trends notes that they would likely have player riots.

Ben Heck of Xbox 360 Laptop, 3D Printing, and other Maker fame has just released the latest installment of his popular web show. Normally I would not consider this news, but the topic of this week's Ben Heck Show was just too cool to not cover.

This week's episode is part 1 of a 3 part series in which Ben manages to stuff a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and a Wii U into a beautiful yet small laser cut enclosure. He is calling the creation the "Ultimate Combo Gaming System". In this first installment, we see a mild mannered Ben Heck tear everything apart in preparation for the build.

The mashup of gaming consoles should give everyone some ideas on what to do with their current consoles to make room for the next-gen devices coming out later this year. You can check out the full episode at source #3 below. Would you like to see more Maker / Hardware hacking content here at TweakTown? Let us know in the comments below.

Steam posted an announcement that Tomb Raider has been updated. While the update should be automatically applied when the game is next started, you may have to restart the Steam client. This update brings with it fixes for some of the problems that were discovered shortly before launch and immediately after.

This means that users with NVIDIA cards should have fewer issues relating to the game. NVIDIA was forced to make a statement last week after many users experienced less-than-optimal gameplay. The update includes the following fixes: