Cry Engine 3 Destruction
We have been blasting you guys with tech demos lately and you seem to be loving it, well, here's something new from Crytek, the guys behind the original Far Cry and Crysis games. Cry Engine 3.
Cry Engine 3 allows game designers to control pretty much everything and distribute it to all first-tier platforms at once (360, PS3 and PC). The biggest thing here for me is what they call "procedural damage" in that you can actually deform the shape of metal objects like cars.
On top of all that is real-time destruction, incredible ai and facial animation as well as the other boons of colour grading etc. But this is really about the destruction for us.
Deforming Environments
Continuing the trend of technology based gaming advances, an engine called Atomontage uses what's known as voxels to display graphics. Voxels are essentially vectors instead of polygons, I know this might confuse most of you so I thought it's just better to show a video and link to the appropriate Wikipedia articles.
In this video you can see the tyre tracks are actually pushing the sand around rather than just drawing a graphic or shader on top of it. There are some games that have done this using polygons and displacement maps or some other method but this is effectively altering the surface of the ground permanently and it doesn't affect things like the rocks.
Unlike the Unlimited Detail, this would require a monster graphics card.
Unlimited Detail in games
Came across this new computer graphics rendering technique yesterday called Unlimited Detail. Since then I have been thinking of various possible uses. I hope it takes off in some form, so much potential - fully destructive environments with unlimited graphics detail, real materials, carving 3d models like an evolved Zbrush etc
Looking forward to finding out more and seeing where this goes, just wonder why I have only just heard of it. Watch the video to see what im talking about.
GPU giants have been trying to block this technology advance because it's diffuses the aggressive research and funding behind traditional polygon developments rendering their research pointless.
If you're a game developer, industry giant or investors then please look at Unlimited detail at their website and get in contact with them.
Source Unlimited Detail Technology via Game Trailers
Addy Van Der Borgh & JTS
Addy Van Der Borgh played tonight at The Good Ship in Kilburn. We caught him before the show and he was a true gent and recommended you catch him at The Good Ship for his warm-up shows before Edinburgh fringe festival (July 26th) or see his full line-up across the globe on his website. In return he said he'd mention us at these shows and he wore the spaceman for his act too!
Bad ass. Check out a YouTube video of him performing below.
New Stuff Sunday 2
Maybe this will be a long running thing, here we are on Sunday again and I'm giving forum goers a new feature. I've removed the advert on the main forum page and replaced it with a list of the latest ratings from across the forum.
It's called Rating History and it's live right now!
Wild Beasts: Hooting and Howling
This is a great track by a great band called Wild Beasts, they're currently touring so check tickets for your local area. Personally I'll be at the 22nd March gig at Koko, let me know if you'll be there.
Notes, now with live notifications!
Notes were introduced around New Years, they have been subject to an overhaul recently and now all registered players have been included in this open beta testing the new features such as live notifications, hiding and basic sorting.
How do I send a note?
If you already have friends, it's bleeding easy. Just press your name in the navigation bar, mine looks like this:
Once your panel has loaded, just press notes
Who is the note for? Start typing one of your friends, we'll fill in the rest. Pressing enter adds them to the list, keep typing, you can send a note to as many friends as you want (if you're sending spam, you might find you suddenly have no friends, just a warning to those would-be spammers out there)
Fill in your message and press "Send." Notes are a great way to extend your friendships with players to xbox or instant messaging with information you don't want to share with everyone on the forums. It's advisable not to share passwords or stuff like that, because it's still the internet and not everyone is who they say they are.
When you receive a note you will see a notification in the navigation bar, it will look like this. Just press it and you will see a list of all your new notes!
Flash 10.1 Beta 3 Available!
If you're running a netbook, you should get this version of the new 10.1 flash player because it enables hardware acceleration on the piddly gpu's that ship with most netbooks.
It means, 1080p flash video and ... playing games at a higher frame-rate.
Bill Gates on Climate Change
Bill Gates talks about climate change and how we can use Terra Power to potentially solve the worlds energy needs and use nuclear waste as fuel for creating new energy.
Alan Wake X10 Trailer
Alan Wake is an incredible thriller game due for release soon on the XBOX 360. Developed by Remedy, the guys that originally brought us the Max Payne series it's looking like an incredible game.
A lot of people don't know exactly what the game is about or where the game is getting released because of the games long development cycle and buyout by Microsoft. I can tell you that it's a 360 exclusive and the PC version has been canned as far as we know.
What that means is Remedy have been able to focus on pushing the 360 to its absolute limits, the results are absolutely tremendous. 2010 is certainly a year for gamers and this is just one of the top titles you can expect to see released. Due to hit the shelves in May, Alan Wake is one thriller game we won't be missing out on.
Check out the latest trailer from Microsoft at the X10 event, kudos to Remedy for having the staying power on getting this game complete. I can understand that this must have been hard to accomplish since Alan Wake was announced around the time of the 360 launch, almost 5 years ago.