Posts

Posted on

Diablo 3 “Announced!”

Quoted from MaximumPC.com, Jeff, eat your heart out:
diablo 3

“Here we go! The community site Diabloii.net is reporting that Blizzard will be announcing the third game in its epic Diablo series at this week’s Worldwide Invitational in Paris.  That’s right.  Diablo III is on its way!

“With this week’s speculation over the Blizzard teasers, more and more reports in the media, and numerous tips coming direct us at IncGamers from reliable inside industry sources in the past 24 hours, we now have confirmation from inside sources to say that Diablo 3 WILL be announced on Saturday at WWI Paris 2008.”

Blizzard’s Vice President of Design, Rob Pardo, already teased that a new game announcement was on the way in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz this morning.  He’d know–the Blizzard frontman is delivering the keynote address at this year’s big gathering.

Of course, had you a dollar every time a news site swore that Diablo 3 was coming, you could have already hired the producers for Diablo IV and World of Diablo.  Blizzard’s ongoing series of teasing splash images has a few days left before the big reveal.  If this is just another Starcraft 2 race, expect to see a number of demon-killing enthusiast gamers eating hats–the taste certainly wouldn’t be new.”

Posted on

Space Siege

If you liked Knights of the Old Republic, Dungeon Siege, Battlestar Galactica,  or System Shock then I’ve got a game for you! Gas Powered Games (Dungeon Siege, Supreme Commander) is working on a very interesting science fiction RPG coming out later this year called Space Siege.
Back story: Humanity is running from a formidable alien threat on a massive colony ship which has come under attack by said aliens. *gasp* The entire game allegedly takes place on this ship. The key feature of this RPG is how you decide to defeat your opponents. Your character is a talented mechanic who can augment his own body using looted technology OR he can use said technology to upgrade his loving robot companion instead. There are several game endings possible, based on how much humanity you have left over at the end of the game.

I’ve got two videos for you, the first is a classy trailer and the second is mostly gameplay.

Posted on

Flywheels

I often write glowingly about solar panels and how great it would be for me to control a giant laser beam. My plans for a solar powered empire work fine when the solar array is built in space, but odds are any significant solar arrays will be built first on Earth. So, after the sun goes down the power goes out! Our primary means of energy storage, what we need in order to light our nights, are chemical batteries. DeathStar

Batteries have gotten us pretty far, allowing us to carry mobile phones, laptops, flashlights, etc. But all these things work on a small scale. Sure, we have car batteries to jump start our engines, but in the end they aren’t built to do much else on a reliable basis. Chemical batteries are volatile, toxic, and have a short lifespan. They wouldn’t be able to power a solar civilization when the sun goes down, not until we see some chemical battery breakthroughs.

Till then we have the flywheel. Flywheels work like mechanical batteries, storing energy kinetically rather than chemically. They do this using a spinning wheel or disk. When energy is added to the flywheel, the wheel/disk is spun by a motor, when energy needs to be subtracted or utilized, the motor engages the spinning disk, generating electricity. A heavier disk adds a linear amount of potential energy storage. A disk capable of higher speeds, on the other hand, adds a squared amount of potential energy storage. Thus, disks meant to store a large amounts of energy must be able to spin at very high speeds (16,000 RPM, for instance). The trouble is, normal materials spinning at this speed explode due to the extreme forces acting on their surfaces. This is why modern flywheels are built using materials such as carbon fiber.Battery Container

Several companies have started making large scale flywheels, but these days the most common use for a flywheel is power regulation. A large flywheel installation can smooth out bumps in the energy grid caused when power demand and supply fall out of sync. In the worst cases, a desynced power grid will cause a brownout or blackout, shutting down power completely. Residents of New York and more commonly, California, suffer from these disturbances. Unlike a generator, a flywheel can instantly respond to dips and jumps in an energy grid, preventing a frequency shift great enough to shut down the system.

Point is, while smoothing out our grids is a great idea anyway, I think flywheels could also be used to store and generate energy overnight. They aren’t toxic, they recharge very quickly, they last for a long time, etc. Plus, they spin really really really really fast.

Posted on

Far Cry 2

I liked the original Far Cry! Released in 2004 by German developer Crytek Studios, nobody had any idea what to expect. Far Cry offered some of the most amazing tropical visuals to ever grace my monitor. It also happened to be pretty darn fun running/swimming/driving/asploding my way around tropical islands and camps of evil mercenaries and science experiments gone wrong.

Far Cry

FAR CRY

Crysis, released last year by Crytek, was supposed to be the Far Cry’s successor, and while it did raise the graphical bar into the stratosphere, gameplay wasn’t spectacularly innovated over Far Cry’s. Crysis is one of those games that will be around forever, considering even the mighty GTX280 can just barely run it at an acceptable framerate while at high resolutions.

CRYSIS

Strangely enough, none of them share ANY storyline whatsoever. Far Cry 2 is being developed by Ubisoft, not Crytek. Far Cry 2 isn’t even using the same graphical engine! Also, unlike to the first two, Far Cry 2 should be completely open-world, a feature usually relegated to RPGs and Grand Theft Auto.

FAR CRY 2

Posted on

AMD’s 4850

Recently I wrote about Nvidia’s new GPU series, the GTX 260/280 cards. These beasts cut a swath through the current video cards, handily stomping anything that had come before, but they did so at a high price, $400 and $650, respectively. Gamers appreciate these cards, but often it is hard for anyone to justify so much money on a single component when an entire computer can be purchased for the same amount.
Radeon HD 4850

Now, various sites have released benchmarks of the AMD 4850, and it has me happily surprised.

I spent a large enough word count getting into GPU specifics last time, so I’ll just outline the major points of this card. First, it performs very much like an Nvidia 9800GTX, which (before today) ran a hefty $300. That should stop most people right there, a 200 dollar card offering the same (or better) performance as a 300 dollar card. Well, in an attempt to rain on AMD’s parade, Nvidia has drastically cut the price of the 9800GTX down to $200! So really, considering the prices, the real fight is between the AMD 4850 and the Nvidia 9800GTX. They trade blows in most benchmarks, in some Nvidia pulls ahead and in others AMD is the champ, but in most cases performance differs by a small margin (10% or less). That said, the 4850 runs slightly cooler and requires slightly less wattage than the 9800GTX. It also only requires 1 six pin power supply connector, while the 9800GTX requires 2.

Crysis DX10To the right, you can get a taste of how well the 4850 performs on the GPU-eating game we call Crysis (at various resolutions). Take a look at how well the 4850 performs not only against the 9800GTX but also against its fairly successful predecessor, the 3870.

Soon the 4870 will be released, offering MUCH faster memory and higher clock speeds. Some (highly excitable) reviewers have estimated as much as a 40% performance increase compared to the 4850. Soon after that will come the 4870X2, fusing two 4850 cores into a single piece of PCB board, and possibly beating the GTX280 to a pulp. Still, the price wont be quite as sweet, most estimations of the 4870 price range between $250 and $300. This will make for an interesting show in the coming months.

AMD/ATI has really blown the lid off this generation’s GPU battle. They have a competitive GPU at a competitive price with competitive features, and it is smaller, cooler, and slightly quieter and more power efficient than the 9800GTX. We haven’t seen this level of competition for almost 2 years now, and I’m glad it has returned.

Posted on

Water on Mars!

NASA has just confirmed the existence of water on Mars. After staring at a pair of before and after shots, from the newly landed Mars Pheonix Lander, scientists concluded that the white powdery-looking substance in the images was water! Their evidence, the powdery substance, seems to have sublimated (turned from solid to gas) in the Martian Atmosphere. In other words… MELTING/EVAPORATING ICE! *cue Martian music* Don’t believe me? Here is their evidence.

Ice on Mars

Posted on

Remote Gaming

A new service from a website called SteamMyGame.com has me impressed! Using their system, you can stream games from one computer in your house (say, your mega-awesome gaming desktop) to any other platform in your house (say, your 5 year old laptop, a tablet, or an Eee PC).
The service starts the game on your desktop or other powerful computer and streams the video over to your underpowered laptop/ultramobile pc/console. You get to play the game with all of the settings maxxed out at very high framerates on a system that normally wouldn’t even start the game. The streaming service takes the input from your mobile system (keyboard and mouse) and streams it back to the desktop (or other powerful computer). Right now this seems like it is restricted to local networks only, because the data throughput required to do this is more than most internet connections can handle. For a 720p connection (1280 x 720 resolution) you need to be transfering between 1 megabyte and 8 megabytes per second to maintain a healthy framerate.

Either way, until integrated graphics catch up on mobile systems, this provides an interesting alternative for those with powerful desktops and underpowered laptops. If internet connections ramp up, we might start seeing “Remote Gaming Services” where a powerful server runs the game at very high settings and streams it to any computer anywhere with any hardware for a fee.

Here is someone demonstrating the technology:

Posted on

Spore Creature Creator

static.squarespaceSpore is coming sometime in September, but EA/MAXIS have released the creature creator inside the game ahead of schedule for us to goof around with. There is a free version and also a paid version ($9.99). The free version has about 1/4 of the available pieces to add to your creature, but otherwise it is the same thing.

In Spore, you will take a creature from single celled organism all the way to galaxy spanning civilization over the course of many generations and many different sub-games.

Here is a link to the Spore site.

Download the free version of the Creature Creator here.

Posted on

Firefox 3

Incoming Firefox 3! Everyone go download it! Make sure to refresh the page, in case it is still displaying the old version. In other words, press F5 once you get there. This will be the first Guiness World Record for most downloads in one day, be a part of it!

Firefox Wordmark Horzontal - newlockup

Posted on

Nvidia GTX 280/260 Benchmarks Released!

In advance of the launch tomorrow, any tech site worth its salt has released a hands-on review of Nvidia’s next line of GPUs. So far the nomenclature of the new series completely resets Nvidia’s old system. Previously, the last Nvidia line of GPUs ended (presumably) at the 9800GX2. Now they are back in the hundreds and have placed a GTX prefix in front of the entire line (so far).
Ok, on to the random bits of information. This beast has 1.4 BILLION transistors. Nvidia’s last high-end card had only 754 million transistors, so we are seeing almost double the brute force capability. Let’s show you a little comparison between a Geforce GTX280 and a top of the line dual core Penryn CPU from Intel:

GTX 280 Die Size

Now technically, in a simplified sense, the older generation of Nvidia GPUs had 128 cores. Consumer CPUs, at most, have 4 cores. The new generation of Nvidia GPUs has 240 cores. That is an INSANE number of cores compared to a Central Processing Unit. Maybe that’s why the GTX 280 can suck 236 Watts at full bore. Now you might wonder, why not replace or augment your CPU with all of that crazy power in your GPU? Well, the industry is actually moving in that direction. The primary roadblock is the fact that GPUs process data in a very specific, specialized way and CPUs are built to process data in a very general way. GPUs are generally built to work with pixels, while CPUs are built to work with ANY data. We’ve already seen GPUs used by scientists to do brute force calculations much faster than CPUs, and we’ll see a more mainstream/consumer fusion of the two components in late 2009.

So how much faster is it?! Compared to the previous single-card solution from Nvidia, the 9800GTX, it is roughly 50% faster in most games. Running the game Oblivion, here is a benchmark graph stolen from AnandTech.com comparing the top performing GPUs at maximum resolution and maximum detail. This resolution is so high that it is confined to 30 inch monitors, most users will not be pushing their GPU nearly this hard. Score is presented as number of rendered ‘frames’ per second.

GTX 280 Benchmarks

The GTX280 will cost $650 and the GTX260 will cost $400.

GTX 280

Nvidia has done it again, the fastest single GPU in existence. AMD/ATI have their work cut out for them, we already know their 4870 wont be as fast as the GTX280, but theoretically the pricing should be MUCH lower and multi-GPU solutions could end up giving them a competitive advantage performance-wise. We’re in the midst of another GPU war! It’ll be a few more days till we get to see direct comparisons between the best from AMD and the best from Nvidia.

I. Can’t. Wait.