General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

GDC 2015: Nvidia GameWorks in Far Cry 4, Assassin's Creed Unity, and War Thunder

Posted: 04 Mar 2015 07:08 PM PST

Tools for digital hair, water, light shafts, and shadows

Most of us think of Nvidia as a hardware company. Video cards, tablets, and now a game console. But they've been doing a lot on the software side, working directly with developers in a program called GameWorks. This is a set of graphical tools that a developer can select from like a buffet, to fill in gaps in the game-creation process, or to accelerate it. Today, Ubisoft Kiev, the guys who worked on the PC ports of Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed Unity, gave some real-world examples of different GameWorks elements that they used to improve their visuals. Also along for the ride was free-to-play online shooter Warthunder, who makes liberal use of some interesting water effects.

With ShadowWorks, Ubisoft had tools to smoothly blend together shadows cast by multiple objects, and create better blurring (a shadow can look fake if it's sharp in the wrong places). TXAA is Nvidia's proprietary method of anti-aliasing in a way that causes less "shimmer" than standard MSAA, and without MSAA's performance impact. (Shimmer is a side effect of jagged edges that causes them to kind of ripple as you move your POV around a scene. ) They showed AC Unity running in real-time and compared the different AA methods side-by-side. TXAA definitely caused the least shimmer.

With Far Cry 4, meanwhile, they made liberal use of HairWorks, since the game is full of wild, furry critters. It's similar to AMD's TressFX in that it renders individual hairs and tufts. This doesn't look very good without anti-aliasing, so use can use TXAA once again to sand those rough edges off. They also did anti-aliasing in a separate pass from the AA applied in the rest of the scene. HairWorks provides a real-time viewer so that you can see how the effect looks in-game, and you can tweak different settings and see the effects right away. Integration of HairWorks took them about one month, with two technical artists from Nvidia assisting a software engineer at Ubisoft.

The Far Cry 4 porting team also made use of GodWorks, which is Nvidia's tool for god rays. These are basically light shafts caused by the sun in-game, or another sufficiently bright light source. At first, the team was using gray, smoke-colored rays, but they decided that the aesthetics were much better with yellowish-gold light. They had to be careful not to over-use the effect, though, or things would get too "foggy" to see clearly. They also made the effect evolve over the course of an in-game day, so that it was lightest around noon, and heaviest in the early morning and late afternoon.

The developers of WarThunder took the game next and talked about WaveWorks. WarThunder renders a lot of water in its maps, and the tea wasn't getting the visual effect that it wanted, so it turned to Nvidia for some tools. They needed something that looked dynamic and realistic, didn't have a high performance hit, and could convincingly interact with objects in the game. With WaveWorks, they were able to plug in things like reflection, refraction, dynamic ocean foam, bubbles, light scattering, shadows, atmospherics, and displacement.

They wanted to keep physical interaction the same for all players, so the PhysX part is calculated on the CPU rather than the GPU. This also allows them to more easily deal with the different APIs (DirectX 9, DirectX 11, OpenGL) that GPUs use on different platforms; each API has different limitations and advantages that would be a headache to deal with otherwise. Since the team was developing for Windows, OSX, and PS4, getting everyone's physics on the same page was pretty important. The CPUs in their game servers could also help with physics.

Once they'd figured out how to make shore waves look realistic – by adding noise, using the seabed to push waves up, some under-the-hood math to take energy out of the waves as they came to shore – the last step was integrating everything into an LOD system. They implemented three levels of detail, because you don't need all of the effects going at full blast when the player is flying a thousand feet above the ocean. This helps with performance on both the server and client side. The team said that WaveWorks took one man week to integrate, and the results speak for themselves.

Valve’s VR Experience Is the Closest Thing to the HoloDeck We Have

Posted: 04 Mar 2015 06:43 PM PST

The best VR experience yet

I just walked out of Valve's SteamVR demo and can say that it is the best VR experience I've ever had. And this is coming from a guy who has tried nearly all of the VR headsets out there,  including Oculus VR's newest Crescent Bay prototype. This is the closest thing to a modern-day holodeck we have at the moment.

Built in partnership with HTC, and named the "Vive," the head-mounted display (HMD) here uses two 1080x1200-resolution displays, one for each eye. The display uses a low-persistence, global display solution that turns the display on and off at the same time. 

We couldn't take any pictures of our VR experience but here's what the headset looks like.

One Valve rep tells me the FOV is around 100 degrees, while another tells me its 110, I'm more inclined to believe the former. While I could still see pixels and there is, of course, room for improvement, it's hardly distracting and is definitely sharp enough for consumer release and, dare I say, slightly sharper than Oculus's Crescent Bay prototype. 

Like the Oculus Rift HMD, the Vive will be a wired experience, and like Crescent Bay, it supports a 90Hz refresh rate. Beyond that however, there are are some key differences that set the two HMDs apart. Instead of relying on a single external camera for head tracking, Valve set up two "light towers" on two pillars and placed them on opposite ends of the room I was in (the room measured roughly 25x25 feet). The light towers simply need to be powered (they don't need to be plugged into your PC) and they emit red lasers that assist the Vive in mapping out your room so you can get 360-degree room scale tracking, which allows you to map out your walkable space when you're in VR. The light towers also help to identify where Valve's new VR controllers are.

The controllers are very similar to the Razer Hydra controllers, except will be wireless (the prototype unit we tested used a wired solution, but we hear there are working wireless ones out there in the wild). The controllers have sensors that work in conjunction with the light towers to allow the HMD to detect where they are in your virtual reality experience. Assuming you're holding these sticks, this essentially means you can see your hands in the game. The controllers have a circular touchpad on the front that is roughly one inch in diameter,  a trigger button on the back that essentially allows you to grab things (a la crab hands), and long buttons on the side of the stick that you can squeeze (think stress ball). The controls were nearly 1:1 and are definitely the best VR controllers out there, even better than Sixense's similar Stem VR system. There are also a bunch of little cameras on the front of the headset that leverage the position of the light towers to provide positional tracking, which not only lets you lean into objects but to walk around as well. One big problem with VR pertains to response time; I tried shaking my head as fast as I could to see if I could experience any judder and am glad to report that I experienced no such lag. It felt completely smooth and natural.

This is more or less how our VR room was set up.

While the headset that I used didn't have integrated audio, Valve told me that the consumer version will come with an integrated solution that users will be able to detach, if case they want to user their own high-end audio headset. 

Now, on to the really fun part: the demos! I tried roughly half a dozen demos during my session with Valve. The first placed me into a white room with a bunch of virtual posters of the demos I was about to experience. What was immediately pretty weird was that I saw the controllers in VR floating my way. It was the Valve rep handing the controllers to me. As soon as I held both controllers in my hand, I immediately felt at home. I quickly came to the realization that the pinpoint precision and accuracy of being able to move my hands on a 1:1 basis was the big piece of the VR puzzle that I had been missing this whole time. I began the demo by using my left hand to press down on the "play" button in front of me. After I did that, I started to see a bunch of little white pillars appearing all around me. These pillars would shift up and down, and there were hundreds of them surrounding me. While it's a very simple demo, it felt extremely polished and certainly gave me a sense of presence. 

The next demo was called Blue and it took me to the bottom of the ocean atop an old sunken ship. The point of this demo is to show off three-dimensional depth. I should mention that I'm nearsighted and wear glasses, and prior to starting this demo was prepared to take them off, but was advised that the HMD "renders to infinity" (I assume this means it renders as far as the human eye can see) and that I could and should leave them on. With my prescription glasses on underneath the HMD, I looked straight up and it seemed like I was half a mile away from the surface. Faintly in the distance above, I could see the sun's rays piercing the top of the ocean. I really felt submerged (and this is coming from a licensed scuba diver). Another interesting element of this demo is that barriers of my real physical space were taken into account within the game. Essentially, the walkable area on the deck of the ship represented the walkable area of space within the room. Valve says these experiences will dynamically shift depending on one's real space constraints, though our rep didn't elaborate on how. Considering that all the VR experiences I've tried so far have been designed for the seated experience, I still couldn't help but not trust these markers. Valve says some games will draw boundary lines on the ground or even render virtual walls once you get close to the bounds of the walkable area. Even with these walls in place, however, I just felt safer taking a small step here and there. In this demo, I saw a bunch of fish and manta rays swim around me and it felt extremely polished and immersive. This felt much more real than the Ocean Rift demo on the DK2. But the real kicker came when a giant blue whale swam by the ship and looked at me. I felt like I was on an alien planet, and basically just kept on smiling and nodding my head as if to suggest to myself, "Yep, you guys have done it."

The next demo took me to a virtual kitchen and presented me with some ingredients on a virtual counter top and placed recipe instructions on a wall. It asked me to pick up tomatoes from the table in front of me and then walk over to the right to place them in a pot. I then had to find a mushroom, but didn't see it on the table, so I walked over to the fridge on my left and opened it. The missing mushroom was in there, so I picked it up and walked across the kitchen to place it in the pot. From there, I dinged the bell sitting atop a table to signal that dinner was ready. It was a cartoony demo in the style of Surgeon Simulator and the graphics weren't very intensive, but it just felt like a complete joy. Ringing the bell, picking up the various objects, opening the fridge... it all felt incredibly natural and instinctive. It didn't feel like I was experiencing a demo, but instead accomplishing real work.

The next experience was called Tilt Brush. It leveraged the full range of motion that Valve's VR controller provided and allowed me to use my hands to paint floating 3D art in the air. The way it works is that your right hand presents options for you to change your brush type and brush color. You can then use your left hand to point and select what sort of brush you want. You're not relegated to just paint, but can paint with fire, stars, ice particles, and more. So there I was, painting fiery three-dimensional Christmas trees. From here, I could walk around my floating artwork and admire it from all angles. I suggested that Valve should allow users to 3D print their works of art, similar to what Microsoft is doing with its HoloLens and HoloStudio software suite. 

The next demo I tried was called The Gallery: Six Elements, which is a full-fledged game being designed by Canadian developer CloudHead Games (look forward to an in-depth video interview with them shortly). This demo started me off in an ancient fantasy-style elevator in dark mines, think the Mines of Moria from the Lord of the Rings. I could walk around this elevator and pick up Skyrim-like helmets and nuts and bolts. off in the distance was a giant rock monster, like something you'd see in God of War. The rock monster talked and seemed friendly enough. Me? I was mainly focused on pulling levers, using my hands to swat at dangling cables, and picking up little bolts throughout the room and inspecting them with a childlike wonderment. The rock monster continued rambling on, so I decided to see if I could chuck a bolt at him, and it worked! Throwing objects felt extremely natural. Eventually, the elevator started falling apart, and walls started falling down all around me. The elevator eventually took me to the top, where I could see an expansive fantasy-like vista with a bridge just in front of me. The rock monster asked me to follow him, and that's where the demo ended. I wanted more of it, and suffice it to say, I'm eagerly awaiting the game's release.

Here's a short video snippet of Valve's Portal VR demo.

The last demo was a pleasant surprise and was developed by Valve itself. It took me to a laboratory within Aperture Labs where I was greeted with narration provided by the opening narrator from the original Portal. The narrator asked me to perform various tasks in the lab, which included opening drawers along a wall. I encountered a bug, however, where I couldn't pull out one of the drawers and the demo had to be reset (a downside to showing off pre-release hardware and software, I'm afraid.) Once the demo booted up again, I was able to pull the drawers out. One of the drawers contained a piece of rotted cake (the cake is real and I have seen it!). Another drawer contained a bunch of little cartoon stick figures working inside a tiny office. The narrator said that because I had looked at them, I was now their god. The drawer then closed and the narrator jokingly suggested that the tiny little community inside would be incinerated. It wouldn't be Portal without a little Valve humor. Eventually the narrator asked me to walk to the other end of the lab and hold down a latch. Doing so opened up a garage-like door and out came Atlas, one of the robots from Portal 2. He came stumbling out and looked really sick. The narrator asked me to pull Atlas's face off, and out popped his robotic guts right in front of me. The narrator then said I needed to fix the robot and quickly jabbered a bunch of nonsensical technical instructions and gave me a quick destruction timer. Eventually, Atlas pulled himself together and the walls started collapsing, revealing more of the underbelly of Aperture Labs. Atlas then falls out of the room and after he falls, none other than a giant Glados comes rolling around. She started spouting off about me as she looked at me, and the demo ended. 

Compared to other VR solutions, Valve is at the top of the heap. Its headset is sharp, offers a great sense of depth, has excellent tracking, allows you to walk around, didn't make me motion sick, and comes with an excellent VR controller that works well. In addition, all of the demos looked excellent and polished. Valve says a dev kit should be released by the summer, and the consumer release should be coming at the end of the year. If I do have one concern about Valve/HTC's solution, however, it pertains to price. All of this sounds expensive, but I might just sell my own legs for this if it meant I could get virtual ones. 

GDC 2015: John Carmack on the Future of Mobile VR

Posted: 04 Mar 2015 04:24 PM PST

Shooter godfather has advice for developers

The lead designer on some games you might have heard of, like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, has been away from the forefront of first-person shooters for a few years, but he has not been idle. Aside from building rockets that fly into space, John Carmack also been dabbling in virtual reality. In August 2013, he became Chief Technology Officer of Oculus VR, founded by fellow techno-wunderkind Palmer Luckey. Perhaps sensing a kindred spirit, Carmack tackled the technical underpinnings of the company's purely mobile plans, specifically the Samsung Gear VR headset, which uses the company's mobile phones to act as the brains and display of the device. Today, in front of a packed house of hundreds of developers and journalists, Carmack gave a talk on how that process had worked, and what he expects of the platform in the future. There were no revelations about the Oculus Rift, but a lot of the work that he's putting into Gear VR can spill over into that.

Our story begins at a Samsung R&D facility in Dallas, Texas a few years ago, where the company was working on their first Gear VR (they've just released its sequel, the Gear VR 2). Carmack's base of operations has been in Texas since the early days of id Software, so it was a natural geographic fit. Carmack was enthused by the engineering challenges of VR and found the mobile variant especially interesting. In fact, he sees devices like Gear VR as the primary platform. By definition, they are far more portable than a device like the Oculus Rift; even if you can throw the Rift in a carry-on bag, you still need to bring your PC with you too.

Gear VR, meanwhile, needs only a mobile phone slapped into a headset, though it is admittedly currently limited to a small handful of Samsung phones. Carmack mentioned that you can take the device with you on vacation, giving it more visibility in the headset market than a device that's tethered to a PC. He quipped, "The most fun thing to do with Gear VR is to show it to other people," because their reactions are so entertaining. He called this "an infection vector for virtual reality."

But in Carmack's opinion, the content system needed some work. When Facebook bought Oculus VR, they were able to bring some people over from their new owner who could help with the infrastructure behind purchasing and downloading games over the Internet. Carmack sees the GearVR store as a competitor to Steam, in fact.

With that in place, Carmack seems confident that the hardware itself is suitable to act as a commercial development platform, and they would be aggressively promoting Gear VR to create a user base. There are still some technical limitations compared to the Oculus Rift, chiefly positional tracking. The Rift uses a sophisticated motion sensor to synchronize your head movement with camera movement; so in addition to the Gear VR's ability to detect your head turning, the Rift can tell when you lean forward, lean, back, and tilt your head. When this detail is absent, the result can cause nausea. The Rift is also using the power of your PC, so its visual effects can be a lot more complicated.

For the Gear VR, Carmack encouraged developers to aim for a level of complexity on par with that of a GameCube game. He noted that Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were essentially Gauntlet from a first-person perspective, so it wasn't necessary to re-invent the design wheel or blow people away with amazing visuals to make a compelling game. You could just iterate on an idea in a way that took interesting advantage of virtual reality. He added, "We still don't know what the best application will be."

Even with more modest performance targets in mind, a technique called Asynchronous Time Warp is necessary for the hardware to keep up with the game engine's demands. ATW injects "filler" frames when the device can't maintain 60 frames per second. This avoids judder, which can cause disorientation. Oculus is also getting the word out about their layering system. In a 3D scene, you designate multiple layers for the engine to see as different distances. Tagging these beforehand means that the GPU doesn't have to figure it out in real time, but it also helps with anti-aliasing, especially with text.

They're also working on multi-view rendering, where the same set of 3D engine instructions are sent to both eyes, which also cuts down on the calculations that the GPU needs to make. This raises the ceiling on the things that the CPU part of the phone or tablet can do, such as animation, AI, and some physics.

At the end of the talk, Carmack had a Q&A session, during which he gave us his opinion on augmented reality. He saw the platform as not competing directly with VR, and that the latter would be where innovations happened first. AR also uses cameras to simulate a set of eyes, but since the cameras can't be where your eyes actually are, this spatial gap can create disorientation. Nevertheless, he expressed enthusiasm for Microsoft's Hololens initiative.

Nvidia Unveils Titan X Graphics Card at GDC

Posted: 04 Mar 2015 11:16 AM PST

Titan XA new top-end GPU

It was speculated that Nvidia might announce a new Titan graphics card during GDC, and that's what the company did—in a somewhat dramatic fashion. It happened at the tail end of an Unreal Engine panel. As Epic founder Tim Sweeny wrapped up his discussion on the state of Unreal, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang surprised attendees by emerging on stage to unveil the company's Titan X.

He called it the "world's most advanced GPU," though was short on details. What he was willing to divulge about the card is that it has 12GB of onboard memory and 8 billion transistors. For the sake of comparison, Titan Black has 7.1 billion transistors and 6GB of GDDR5 memory.

"It's the most advanced GPU the world has ever seen," Jen-Hsun said.

He then presented the company's first production unit to Sweeny, though not before autographing the box in came in.

Nvidia will release more details about the card during the upcoming GTC event that runs from March 17–20.

Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Newegg Daily Deals: WD Black2 Dual Drive 120GB SSD + 1TB HDD, LG 27-inch Monitor, and More!

Posted: 04 Mar 2015 10:43 AM PST

 

WD Black2 Dual Drive

Newegg

Top Deal:

Contemplating a small form factor build where space is at a minimum? The good news is there are plenty of products that take space constraints into account. Even storage. For example, check out today's top deal for a WD Black2 Dual Drive 2.5-inch 120GB + 1TB HDD Kit for $110 with free shipping (normally $140 - use coupon code: [ESCAPAP92]). It's the world's first 2.5-inch dual drive storage solution and it's backed by a 5-year warranty.

Other Deals:

Corsair CX430 430W Power Supply for $40 with free shipping (normally $50; additional $20 Mail-in rebate)

LG 27MP65HQ Black 27-inch 5ms HDMI Widescreen LCD Monitor AH-IPS Panel for $220 with $1 shipping (normally $250 - use coupon code: [EMCAPAP34])

Klipsch KG-200 Pro Audio Wired Gaming Headset for $50 with free shipping (normally $70 - use coupon code: [EMCAPAP89])

SteelSeries Rival 62271 Refurbished Optical Mouse for $30 with free shipping (normally $40 - use coupon code: [EMCAPAP56])

Maingear Unveils Drift Steam Machine, Starts Taking Pre-Orders

Posted: 04 Mar 2015 08:53 AM PST

Maingear DriftDrift PC console moves full Steam ahead

It's taken a lot longer than anticipated, but official Steam Machines are scheduled to release in November of this year, Valve announced at this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC). That means you can expect plenty of Steam Machine announcements, some of which have already started rolling in. One in particular is Maingear's Drift, an ultra-compact Steam Machine and gaming PC that you can pre-order today and have in your hands next month.

How is it possible to own a Steam Machine before November? Well, Steam OS won't arrive until November, but as we've seen, OEMs and boutique builders aren't waiting around—they're shipping systems now that run Windows and have the option of booting directly into Steam's Big Picture mode. So it goes with Maingear's Drift.

It offers full-size desktop performance in a console uni-body constructed from aluminum. There are several color options and, for a fee ($199 to $299), Maingear will happily paint the chassis using Glasurit paint, the same that goes onto the likes of Porcshe and BMW.

There are two main (and customizable) configurations to choose from. The first is the Drift with an Intel Pentium Anniversary Edition G3258 processor slipped into an MSI H81-I motherboard, 8GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics card, 500GB Seagate Barracuda HDD (7,200rpm), 8X DVD burner, 450W Silverstone PSU, and Windows 8.1 64-bit. This configuration starts at $949.

The second starting point is the Drift SS beginning at $1,949. For that, you get bumped up to an Intel Core i5 4590 CPU, Gigabyte GA-Z97N-WIFI motherboard, Maingear Epic 120 Supercooler, Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 graphics card, and a 250GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD to go along with the 500GB HDD.

If you're interested, you can head over to the Drift's product page and customize your build right now.

Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

MSI Announces First USB 3.1 Type-C Motherboard, All-in-One PCs, and More

Posted: 04 Mar 2015 06:06 AM PST

MSI Z97A Gaming 6 MotherboardReady, set, blitz!

Once the Game Developers Conference (GDC) comes to an end, attention will turn to PAX East, which takes place in Boston from March 6–8. That means even more product announcements, though some companies are too excited to wait. One of them is MSI, which is bringing an "arsenal of new gaming products" to PAX East, including its Z97A Gaming 6 motherboard and a pair of all-in-one PCs.

MSI is pitching the Z97A Gaming 6 as the world's first mobo to feature onboard USB 3.1 and Type-C connectivity, the latter of which is a reversible connector—no more plugging in USB devices the wrong way! It has two USB 3.1 ports, and yes, they're fully backwards compatible with USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 devices.

Not much else was said about the motherboard, though from the picture, we can see side-mounted SATA ports, three PCI-E x16 slots, and MSI's Audio Boost technology.

MSI is also unveiling a premium SLI bridge. It supports a two-way spaced SLI setup with single slot spacing between a pair of MSI TwinFrozr V cards. There's also an LED-backlit gaming sheild that can be controlled by the MSI Gaming App.

Finally, MSI will introduce a pair of all-in-one PCs. One is the AG270 2QC with a 27-inch WQHD IPS panel with a 2560x1440 (3K) resolution. It will have an unspecified Intel Core i7 processor, Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M graphics, and speakers developed by Yamaha.

The other AIO is MSI's Gaming 24GE. This one has a 4K display powered by an Intel Core i7 4720HQ CPU and GTX 900 Series mobile graphics.

More details will be made available later this week.

Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

GDC 2015 Day 0: MindMaze Demos Brain-Powered VR Headset [Video]

Posted: 04 Mar 2015 06:02 AM PST

MindMazeBringing medical-grade technology to the consumer space

One of the running themes at the 2015 Game Developer Conference (GDC) is virtual reality, a space that's attracting an increasing number of players as the technology inches closer to becoming mainstream. One company to keep an eye on is MindMaze, makers of a prototype "neuro-goggle" headset that combines a potpourri of technologies, including augmented reality, virtual reality, motion capture, and even neurosensing.

It's part of a platform called MindLeap, and among other things, this multifaceted headset can read your brain waves, according to MindMaze CEO and founder Tej Tadi. It's a fantastic claim that is anything but new at GDC and other similar events, but Tadi isn't a Johnny-come-lately that's trying to hop on a bandwagon here. He's a neuroscientist who's been using virtuall reality technology in the medical field for about a decade, helping patients overcome neurological deficits.

MindMaze Headset

To those who are skeptical of a brain-powered headset, Tadi points out that the technology already exists in the medical field, where neuroscience has helped patients control robotic arms. There's also clinical data available. MindPlay is partially an attempt to take the same technology and port it over to the consumer space.

Before we go on, have a look at the headset in action:

What you see in the video above is a short demo of the different technologies. By looking left, the headset presents a virtual reality landscape, and when you turn to the right, it switches into augmented reality. As we saw with Microsoft's HoloLens, the AR mode allows you to interact with the real world, depending on the available content. In the demo, you see the user's hands on fire, and he's able to touch another person in the room, setting them ablaze in the process.

MindMaze Headset View

This is a complex headset that combines VR technologies like the ones Oculus and Valve are using, with AR technology like HoloLens, and then adding other elements into the mix, the biggest being neurosensing. The demo of the user's hands on fire helps visualize all three main traits -- you see the hands on fire (AR) and you can either enter a virtual world to get rid of the fire (VR), or turn the fire into snow by calming down and relaxing (neurosensing).

Here's a more in-depth explanation by Tadi himself:

MindMaze is currently in talks with hardware and content makers about licensing the technology in MindPlay. The company may also offer its own hardware. If all goes to plan, a developers kit should be available by the end of the year or early 2016.

GDC 2015 Day 0: Opaque Details Kinect-Enabled ISS Virtual Reality Demo [Video]

Posted: 03 Mar 2015 10:18 PM PST

Opaque

What it feels like to be Sandra Bullock in Gravity

If you've seen the movie Gravity, you may have found yourself wishing that you, too, could have a chance to explore a space station, if for nothing else than simply the view from so far up above. Or the thought of doing so might now make you soil your underpants after watching the flick. Not to worry because Opaque Multimedia's Earthlight demo lets you virtually explore the International Space Station through an Oculus Rift headset with motion-tracking technology from Microsoft's second-generation Kinect.

It also uses a proprietary Kinect 4 Unreal plugin to combine the technologies with Unreal Engine 4. The result is a realistic experience of what it would be like to actually visit the ISS, but without the fear of floating helplessly into space or having to go through all the training that real astronauts have to.

Where the Kinect comes into play is to go beyond the capabilties of the Oculus Rift. The Kinect allows users to see their limbs and combine it with the Oculus, and the way you move around Earthlight is by using your hands.

We sat down with Opaque for an in-depth discussion on the topic and the technological challenges they faced in the gaming space. Check it out:

And if you haven't seen the Earthlight demo, here's a look at that:

Nvidia Reveals Game-Streaming Grid Service Will Have Free and Premium Tier

Posted: 03 Mar 2015 09:43 PM PST

Nvidia Logo

Game-streaming service officially coming in May

For the past three weeks, Nvidia has been teasing a new gaming product that it would unveil at GDC. Now, while the company's new Shield Gaming console is an intriguing device, we were also interested in something else the company talked about. Along with the new console, Nvidia also officially revealed its plans for its Grid subscription-based streaming service.

According to Nvidia's live presentation at GDC, the Grid streaming service will be backed by Nvidia Grid supercomputers all around the world. Set to launch in May, the service will have two tiers. Grid will allow consumers to stream games at 720p at 30 FPS for free while Grid Plus will offer games at up to 1080p and 60 FPS, both with a latency of 150 milliseconds. Sadly, we don't know how much the premium service will cost as of yet. 

But for those of you who are not keen on paying to stream a game, you will be able to purchase AAA games from the Grid store, which, at the moment, will offer 50 titles, though Nvidia says that more games will be added each week. 

Do you think Internet bandwidth is going to be an issue? Sound off in the comments below!

Follow Sean on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook
Posted by Shri Krishna

MMORPG News

MMORPG News

General: The Pros & Cons of Free-to-Play

Posted: 03 Mar 2015 10:24 AM PST

The Pros & Cons of Free-to-Play

The traditional "pay wall" (pay a single price and play forever) or subscription (pay an up-front cost plus a monthly maintenance fee) models are every bit as valid and stable as free-to-play, but there are plusses and minuses to each of the models. To compare them, let's outline the pros and cons for free-to-play and discuss the others as we go.

General: Windwalkers: A Transmedia Project Updates

Posted: 04 Mar 2015 03:39 AM PST

Windwalkers: A Transmedia Project Updates

The Windwalkers Kickstarter page has been updated with a pair of features designed to familiarize fans with the game based on the French post-apocalyptic novel "The Horde of the Counterwind" by Alain Damasio. The first is a video showing the team creating the game. In addition, the first chapter of "The Horde of the Counterwind" has been translated to English for the first time and is available for interested readers to check out.

General: Nvidia Announces "Shield" Console

Posted: 04 Mar 2015 03:26 AM PST

Nvidia Announces "Shield" Console

Nvidia has announced the "Shield" console during this week's Game Developer's Conference. Shield will feature a "super computer" streaming cloud system called "Grid" that will constantly be updated with the latest games and PC quality gaming in the living room.

General: Virtual Reality Making a Splash at GDC

Posted: 02 Mar 2015 04:11 PM PST

Virtual Reality Making a Splash at GDC

Virtual Reality is making itself felt at this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. During today's events, both Sony and Valve made major announcements about VR technology.

Elder Scrolls Online: v1.6 Goes Live, Paves Way for March 17th B2P Iteration

Posted: 03 Mar 2015 03:59 PM PST

v1.6 Goes Live, Paves Way for March 17th B2P Iteration

The massive 1.6.5 update has been applied to the Elder Scrolls Online servers and the game is back up and running. The patch brings several updated features and systems online as well as lays the groundwork for the March 17th update that will bring Tamriel Unlimited, the buy-to-play version of ESO, online. Tamriel Unlimited is slated for a March 17th deployment.

Dragon Age: Inquisition: David Gaider Moves on to Unnamed Bioware Project

Posted: 03 Mar 2015 03:02 PM PST

David Gaider Moves on to Unnamed Bioware Project

Lead Writer of the Dragon Age series, David Gaider, has announced via Twitter that he is leaving the DA team and moving to the as-yet-unnamed Bioware project. Patrick Weekes, author of The Masked Empire and also a DAI team member, will take over the lead on the series from now on.

General: Storybricks Closing Down

Posted: 03 Mar 2015 02:57 PM PST

Storybricks Closing Down

A Tweet from the Storybricks team just cropped up on Twitter that indicates that the company is closing its doors. This comes quickly after last week's announcement by Daybreak Game Studio that it had severed ties with Storybricks for EverQuest Next.

General: PC Gaming to Dominate to the Tune of $35B by 2018

Posted: 03 Mar 2015 09:36 AM PST

PC Gaming to Dominate to the Tune of $35B by 2018

Those proclaiming the death of the PC may want to consider a new report that shows steady and dominating growth in PC gaming over the next three years. Open Gaming Alliance has released a detailed graph showing the growth of PC gaming from its current $26B to $35B by 2018. The growth is attributed heavily to the eSports movement popularized by games like League of Legends and Hearthstone, among many others.

Skyforge: Ultimate Founder's Pack Giveaway #5

Posted: 03 Mar 2015 09:05 AM PST

Ultimate Founder

MMORPG.com has partnered with My.com to give away five of their recently announced Skyforge Founder's Packs. These aren't the entry level packs, either! We've got five of the Wrath of the Gods Ultimate Edition packs today. Read on to learn how to enter for your chance to snag one!

Marvel Heroes 2015: David Hayter Chills with Us About Winter Soldier

Posted: 01 Mar 2015 06:07 PM PST

David Hayter Chills with Us About Winter Soldier

Winter Soldier recently was added to Marvel Heroes 2015. We had the opportunity to talk to WS's voice actor David Hayter, best known as Solid Snake, to find out more about Winter Soldier. Check out what he had to say in our exclusive mini-interview.

Crowfall: The Embargo Vault & Account Bank Explained

Posted: 03 Mar 2015 08:17 AM PST

The Embargo Vault & Account Bank Explained

The Crowfall KickStarter page has been updated with an FAQ that goes into some detail about the two main types of storage to which players will have access.

General: The Daily Quest: Incremental Info or One Big Announcement?

Posted: 03 Mar 2015 08:04 AM PST

The Daily Quest: Incremental Info or One Big Announcement?

A trend that seems to be gaining a lot of ground in games development these days comes in the way that information is released to the public. In days past, new information about an upcoming title was teased out in a series of big announcements over time. Such a way of releasing news about anticipated games was both frustrating and exciting. Frustration set in when we wanted to know more, more, more. Excitement set in after a big revelation that gave us tons to discuss and analyze.
Posted by Shri Krishna
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

Total Pageviews

statcounter

View My Stats