GamerWithin talks with John Carmack about the new technology Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is using, called Megatextures.
Q1: What is MegaTexturing technology?
Answer: MegaTexture technology is something that addresses resource limitations in one particular aspect of graphics. The core idea of it is that when you start looking at outdoor rendering and how you want to do terrain and things in general, people almost always wind up with some kind of cross-fade blended approach where you tile your textures over and blend between them and add little bits of detail here and there. A really important thing to realize about just generally tiling textures, that we’re so used to accepting it in games, is that when you have one repeated pattern over a bunch of geometry, the texture tiling and repeating is really just a very, very specialized form of data compression where it’s allowing you to take a smaller amount of data and have it replicated over multiple surfaces, or multiple parts of the same surface in a game since you generally don’t have enough memory to be able to have the exact texture that you’d like everywhere.
In other words, it makes games look better without compromising performance. That’s a good thing.
Long ago I played Shadowrun on the Sega Genesis. It was revolutionary at the time; it was a complex, rich game world that had a story and it was fun to boot. Now over 10 years later, they resurrect the Shadowrun name with a new game, a first-person shooter that bears very little similarities to the original game. It has fans of the original game worried and annoyed.
GamesFirst talks with the developers of the new upcoming Shadowrun FPS to see how they feel about the backlash by fans of the original game.
Fulton’s answer to my question of Shadowrun’s graphics was met with a mixed answer. “I think that you’re reacting to the artistic design,” he said when I asked if the graphics were going to be improved before release. I pointed to the large, blurry Trees of Life and compared them unfavorably to the foliage in Perfect Dark Zero, hardly the best looking game on the Xbox 360. I walked my character close to the wall for a better look at the textures. Objects in the levels they showed at E3 looked jagged and featureless. Artistic differences or not, I can’t help but hope they make improvements to the levels before the title ships; at the moment the walls look flat and unimpressive, and climbing up and down ladders is a matter of watching your teammates float vertically into the air in the vicinity of a wooden splotch on the wall.
Scott Miller talks with Hollywood Reporter about original content in video games and why they are the bee’s knees. Scott Miller works for 3DRealms, the development studio working on the much delayed Duke Nukem Forever, and producers of the upcoming Prey. Miller is pretty confident they will make back the money they’ve invested in DNF within a day or two after the release of the game:
THR: What about the latest “Duke” game … the one that seems to be taking forever to build?
Miller: We’ve put about $7.5 million into that and we’ve been working on it since late 1998. So it really hasn’t been that much of an investment. And once it comes out, if it’s as successful as we think it’ll be, we’ll make that money back in the first day or two of sales.
This article also prompted DailyTech to claim Scott Miller said that Duke Nukem Forever is almost done. However, GeorgeB of 3DRealms says it was irresponsible journalism on DailyTech’s part. They’ve since changed the original article multiple times to cover their tracks. So if you hear rumors that the game is almost done, you’ll know why.
BF2S has a new in-game video and some screenshots along with their impressions of the game from a playtest at E3.
Matt Brett takes a break from console gaming and digs into some good old fashioned PC FPS action as he provides his thoughts on SiN Episodes: Emergence.
If you played and loved Half-Life 2 and are in need of something to play, you should shell out the 20 bones and get SiN Episodes. It looks and feels very familiar. Pretty much everything is done the same as it is in Half-Life 2. There’s health dispensers on walls, crates you can destroy that are housing ammo and other goodies, great AI that takes cover when you shoot in their direction and awesome physics that helped make Half-Life 2 a truly unique experience.
Just a little video I recorded of SiN Episodes: Emergence in action. After fixing the stuttering issue, I’m really enjoying this game. Expect a full review soon as I finish it a couple of times or so.
Ubisoft released a patch for Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter that fixes AI issues, map glitches, and a memory leak in Domination mode.
A developer for the game SiN Episodes: Emergence has posted a tip that may fix any stuttering issues you may have in the game. It involves PCI Latency adjustment.
Joystiq has posted a quick impression after some hands-on time with Huxley, the massively multiplayer online first person shooter from Webzen.
The game felt more like a standard FPS multiplayer match with a larger number of players than usual than an MMO. It plays like a FPS — no skill buttons or floating exclamation marks. The game’s setting is a fairly standard post-apocalyptic nuclear-mutation scenario. The 360 version will feature a single-player component as well as the massively-multiplayer part, though Webzen are working on the inevitable issue of keyboard-and-mouse versus controller balancing.
One of the many interesting and new titles at Microsoft’s press conference today was Shadowrun, a game which many of us recall fondly as an RPG on the Genesis. While they only showed a pre-rendered trailer during the conference, we were able to get a closer look at it shortly after, at a post-event event across the street at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. Shadowrun is slated for release in January alongside Windows Vista, and it will be one of the titles you can use with Live Anywhere to play against gamers who bought the 360 version.
Shadowrun was one of my favorite games on the Sega Genesis and so far this PC and 360 update looks like a winner. You can read more at IGN and view some screenshots and videos of it here.
Just a reminder that if you ordered Sin Episodes: Emergence over Steam, that it will unlock and be available for play at 10 a.m. PST/1 p.m. EST. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you can see the official E3 Trailer showing off the game in high definition. The trailer shows off the hot models, Bianca Beauchamp and Cindy Synnett representing Alexis Sinclair and Jessica Cannon respectively. Also a new game mode called Arena.
IGN sits down with the developers of Unreal Tournament 2007 and throws some questions at them. They ask what differences the PC and PS3 versions will have, game speed, what we can expect that is new in the series, and more.
IGN: The best place to start is probably to point out what some of the differences will be between the PC and PS3 version of the game? Will there be different modes or maps?
Mark Rein: I don’t think we’ve exactly squared down what all of the differences are going to be yet on the PS3. Sony’s made some very introductory statements about what they’re going to be doing with the online space. So we’re not 100% sure how the kind of stuff we do with mods and downloadable content fits in visa vi it’s on a console and usually when it’s on a console it has to be tested by the manufacturer so we’re probably going to be pretty guarded about what we can and can’t do on the PS3 right now, but we’re pretty optimistic that we’re going to be able to do a lot of the cool stuff that we’re able to do on PC.
For those of you who are early adopters and bought the Ageia PhysX addon card, you’ll want to grab the newly available Cellfactor demo, which allows you to try out your new hardware in a game built from the ground up to showcase the PhysX chip. No word on whether or not those who don’t have the PhysX card can play this demo.
PhysX Owners can now get in on the action with the hot new hardware physics accelerated title: CellFactor: Combat Training from Artificial Studios and Immersion Games. All you need is a PhysX accelerator and a decent gaming rig, and you’re ready to get fragging. This demo is multiplayer-enabled and playable offline with customizable bots.
FileShack has a new trailer for SiN Episodes: Emergence with 1:30 of in-game footage shown.
Erik Johnson of Valve Software posted at Shacknews that Half-Life 2: Episode One is now available for preload on Steam. Preordering now earns you a discount off the retail price, and the deal lasts up until May 31st.
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