News

Dedicated servers but not as we know it.

Unreal Engine developer Epic has been pretty down on the PC in recent years. But a new interview indicates a change in attitude, and a renewed commitment to the platform.

PC gaming has sunk from its once mighty heights, thanks to a combination of factors like console penetration, piracy and the huge inherent variability in PC hardware setups. These have interacted in various ways to push the PC to third class citizen for many gaming genres, especially the kind of high adrenaline action games that were once the PC's bread and butter.

This has led to the situation where once proud PC developers have wholeheartedly adopted console development. We've seen PC centric studios like Crytek (Crysis), id Software (Doom, Quake etc)  and Epic (Unreal series) effectively abandon the PC platform in favor of consoles. Several of these have dropped comments in the aftermath blaming piracy as the reason behind the exodus to consoles.

Team Dignitas have joined Team Rush in the Grand Final at i40 in Bad Company 2 after comfortably beating FtD to advance from the losers bracket.

Rahul Sood, Voodoo PC founder and current CTO of gaming at HP, spins an interesting yarnabout an aborted Microsoft project that would've let PC and Xbox gamers face-off. The only problem? During testing, the PC gamers cleaned Xboxers' clocks.

In the middle of a rumination on the lukewarm state of PC gaming, Sood divulges some details of a project Microsoft was working on "many many months ago" to let PC and Xbox users face off in games like Gears of War and Unreal Tournament, an effort that would've effectively bridged the gap between Xbox Live and Windows Live.

Remember Alien Swarm? A total conversion mod for UT 2004, with four-player co-op top-down action.

Just when you think you've grasped all the jargon surrounding 3D graphics, new terms and technologies flood onto the market.

AMD has been aggressively shipping DirectX 11 GPUs in almost every price category, while cards based on Nvidia's new GTX 470 and GTX 480 DX11 parts are finally becoming available. Meanwhile, Windows 7's sales ramp has been extraordinary-the fastest-selling Microsoft OS in history. Given that Windows 7 is what Vista should have been, it's also arguable that DirectX 11 is what DX10 should have been.

When DirectX 10 games hit the streets, the new API gave users marginal improvements in image quality alongside huge performance decreases. The tiny gain in visual fidelity didn't really make up for the performance hit. On the other hand, DirectX 11 brings users some very cool potential eye-candy improvements, but also promises better performance-even if you don't have a DirectX 11 GPU.

Along with new graphics, APIs come with new buzzwords: tessellation, SSAO, HDAO, and postprocessing. That last buzzword being a catchphrase for many small but cool effects made possible with today's programmable graphics chips.

We'll take a closer look at these buzzwords to dissect what they actually deliver, plus discuss the performance impact of using high-end AMD and Nvidia GPUs.

It's been well known for some time now that Bad Company 2 came out of the box with a number of problems client-side and server-side, and after some investigation it was quickly realised that the game is not suitable for competitive gameplay. Many standardized features such as demo recording and spectator mode have been removed from the feature-set which appeared in previous Battlefield titles, as well as other gameplay related issues which made balanced competitive gameplay impossible.

However, with a number of patches released over the last few months, many competitive BC2 player felt it was high time they knew whether it was worth supporting and playing the game any longer in the hope for competitive support. Partly through a sense of urgency, I went looking for answers.

More bad news for the dispirited Battlefield community was delivered today, as ESL confirmed they have rejected Bad Company 2 for ESL Major Series 7 next season.

it has been known for some time that ESL was looking to give Bad Company 2 the chance to develop alongside other EMS titles such as Call Of Duty 4, however after careful consideration, it's been decided that the games lack of competitive support from DICE has made it impossible for ESL to help the community.

Our friends over at Pixel Prospector have compiled a video of 235 Free Indie Games,

Some of which look kinda cool, if you hover your mouse over the bottom of the player you will see the name of the game and a link to more footage,

There are some very intresting remakes of classic games in there and some new stuff thats totally insane, And they are all free, highlights for me so far have been, Crystal Cubes a very nice tetris clone and a very psychedelic remix of TrailBlazer called Igneous,

I am sure there are  many more gems in the pack so please post a comment if you find anything really special. So check out the video and enjoy the 8bit music to..