Five percent royalty rate still applies to commercial projects
At last year's Game Developers Conference (GDC), Epic Games made the decision to license its next generation Unreal Engine 4 to anyone and everyone for $19 per month, giving subscribers unfettered access to its complete C++ source code hosted in GitHub. If you sold and/or made money from your creation, you'd end up paying Epic a 5 percent royalty on top of the subscription fee. Nearly a year later, the 5 percent royalty remains in play, but Epic has now removed the $19 per month subscription for Unreal Engine 4.
Future updates will be free as well, though we want to be careful not to haphazardly throw around the F-word. As it stands now, the 5 percent royalty applies to gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. So if you code an awesome game, sell it online, and gross $1 million next quarter, you'd owe Epic $49,850 by our fuzzy math (5 percent of $997,000), leaving you with $950,150.
This is same Unreal Engine 4 the big boys and girls use when developing blockbuster titles; it's not gimped for casual or curious programmers or hobbyists. And beyond the tools, you have access to an entire ecosystem.
"Chat in the forums, add to the wiki, participate in the AnswerHub Q&A, and join collaborative development projects via GitHub. Buy content in the Marketplace, or build your own and sell it there," Epic stated in a blog post.
For current subscribers to the defunct paid plan, Epic will be issuing a pro-rated refund for their most recent month's payment. On top of that, anyone who has ever paid for a UE4 subscription will receive a $30 credit line that can be spent in the UE Marketplace.
We'll have to wait and see if this has any effect on Crytek, which licenses its CryEngine for $9.90 per month with no royalty commitments. The difference there is Crytek doesn't include the full source code -- there's a separate license model for that.
If you can jam an 8-inch tablet in your pocket, then you'll be down with Lenovo's pitch of "pocket-sized productivity" for its newly announced Ideapad Miix 300 Windows tablet. Lenovo made the announcement at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, while also unveiling several other mobile devices, including four Android tablets and smartphones (two each), and a pocket sized projector.
So far it appears the Miix 300 is the only new Windows-based mobile product from Lenovo. It's not a game-changing device, though appears to be a decent value for money.
It has an 8-inch WUXGA (1280x800) In-Plane Switching (IPS) display that's powered by an Intel Atom quad-core processor based on Bay Trail T, though Lenovo didn't provide an exact model. The tablet also sports up to 2GB of DDR3L RAM, up to 64GB of internal storage expandable via microSD, 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, 2-megapixel front-facing camera, a single watt speaker, micro USB 2.0, audio-comb jack, and up to 7 hours of battery life. As for software, it will ship with Windows 8.1 with Bing plus a one-year subscription to Office 365.
Getting back to portability, the Ideapad Miix 300 measures 130mm x 215mm x 9.3mm and weighs 360 grams. Equally light is its price tag -- it will start at $149 and when it becomes available in July.
Benq today announced that its 27-inch RL2755HM "blazing fast professional gaming monitor" is now shipping, meaning you should be able to find it online, if not now then soon. Selected as the official console gaming monitor of both Major League Gaming (MLG) and UMG, they hype machine is in overdrive on this one. We haven't played with this particular model ourselves just yet, though we have glanced the spec sheet.
According to Benq, this monitor rocks an ultra-fast 1ms response time with a 12,000,000:1 high dynamic contrast ratio. It also supposedly features ultra-low input lag to FPS and fighting games like the new Halo and Mortal Kombat.
"By rendering action without ghosting or latency from mouse motion, gamers are able to see more details and spot opponents faster for a more seamless console gaming experience. Using the monitor's new fighting mode, gamers can also access specific color calibration settings to help highlight characters during combat — leading to increased precision and more furtive strikes," Benq said.
It's a Full HD 1080p (1920x1080) monitor, which is really the only display spec that matters. What we mean by that is the lack of industry standards on other specs makes their listed ratings of little value.
In any event, it also comes with dual HDMI ports, visibility enhancing "Black eQualilzer," and "ReveolutionEyes" technology to reduce eye fatigue.
Intel last week had already given the heads up that it was rebranding its Atom processors into three performance tiers -- Atom x3, Atom x5, and Atom x7. The Santa Clara chip maker didn't provide any details at the time, leading us to speculate that the first new Atom parts would be based on the company's upcoming 14nm Cherry Trail architecture. Turns out we were two-thirds correct, as Intel has now formally introduced its next generation Atom parts.
As expected, Intel's Atom x5 and x7 are Cherry Trail parts, but the Atom x3 is a new processor series formerly codenamed SoFIA. It's Intel's first integrated communications System-on-Chip (SoC) and will take aim at the growing value and entry-level smartphone, tablet, and phablet markets.
"Combining 64-bit multi-core Intel Atom processors together with 3G or 4G LTE connectivity, the integrated communications SoC combines the applications processor, image sensor processor, graphics, audio, connectivity and power management components in a single system chipset. This integration allows device manufacturers to deliver full-featured tablets, phablets and smartphones at affordable price points for the rapidly growing entry and value market segments," Intel said.
Meanwhile, the Atom x5 and X7 are more traditional Atom parts and represents Intel's first 14nm Atom SoC (Cherry Trail, as previously mentioned). They'll power next-generation tablets and small-screen 2-in-1 devices while bringing 64-bit support for both Windows and Android. Several hardware partners have already committed to using the new Atom parts, including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Toshiba. Each of them are expected to release devices in the first half of the year.
Atom x3 based devices will start at around $75; Atom x5 and x7 devices will enter the market place at $250 to $349 for mid-range options, and $350 on up for performance products.
There are several new phones and tablets being introduced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but on the storage side of things, SanDisk on Sunday introduced its 200GB Ultra microSDXC UHS-I card, Premium Edition. That's not just a massive amount of storage for a device that's about the size of your fingernail, it's the highest capacity microSD card in the world, according to SanDisk.
The 200GB card offers 56 percent more storage space than the record-breaking 128GB SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card the company introduced a year ago. Both were made possible by leveraging a proprietary technology the company designed last year that allows for a new design and production process with more bits per die.
"We continue to push technology boundaries to deliver record-breaking solutions that transform the way consumers use their mobile devices," said Dinesh Bahal, vice president, product marketing, SanDisk. "By focusing on achieving new capacity and speed milestones, we are able to deliver trusted mobile memory solutions that give consumers the freedom to never stop capturing, saving, or sharing – with the benefit of fast speeds to transfer it all quickly."
SanDisk says the card supports data transfers at up to 90MB per second, enough to push 1,200 photos every second. That combination of speed and capacity is certainly enticing. And expensive -- it will carry an MSRP of $400 when it becomes available in the second quarter.
Jimmy down the street just picked himself up a 16GB kit of RAM and won't shut his trap about it. That leaves just one option. No, not burn his house down -- he'll eventually do that on his own by adding more and more Christmast lights each year in an attempt to have the brightest home on the block. The better option is to check out today's top deal for a 32GB kit of G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 32GB (4x8GB) DDR3-1600 RAM for $234 with free shipping (normally $260 - use coupon code: [EMCANNV33]). That'll put Jimmy in his place, along with CAD work, Photoshop, Google's RAM hungry Chrome browser, content creation chores, and so forth.
Cherry Trail shows only marginal improvement over predecessor in leaked benchmarks
Intel began shipping its new Cherry Trail Atom chips to its partners in the first week of January and now we have got our first benchmark scores. If you were expecting the 5th generation Atom chips to be a huge improvement over current-generation tablet SoCs (systems on chip), you are in for a bit of a shock.
With Cherry Trail being the "tick" to Bay Trail's "tock" — or, for those of you don't speak Intel, the 14nm die shrink of Bay Trail — a huge leap in CPU performance was never on the cards to begin with, but an improvement of around eight percent is unimpressive no matter how you look at it.
Hopefully, the other chips will fare a lot better. And let's hope there are substantial improvements when it comes to power consumption and graphics.
The new Samsung ATIV Book 9 laptop we told you about late last year is now available. The aluminum-clad device, which measures all of 11.19" x 8.37" x 0.46" and weighs 2.09 pounds, is the thinnest and lightest device yet in the company's four-year-old Book 9 range.
Let's talk specs and pricing, shall we? Powered by a dual-core Intel Core M 5Y31 processor (900MHz-2.00GHz) and sporting a 12.2-inch WQXGA (2560x1600) display, the 2015 ATIV Book 9 is available in two flavors: one with 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, and another with twice as much memory and storage. The former sports a $1,199.99 price tag, whereas the 256GB is dearer at $1,399.99.
As of press time, only two online retailers appear to have the two models in stock. You can find an updated list here.
Valve just made good on its promise of unveiling a SteamVR hardware system at the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Meet Vive, a virtual reality headset powered by Valve's SteamVR platform and manufactured by Taiwanese company HTC.
Born out of what HTC says is a "strategic partnership with Valve", the Vive in its current form has two 1200-by-1080-pixel displays—one for each eye—and a 90Hz refresh rate. In a press release it sent out Sunday, the company promised "a full room scale 360 degree solution" when the Vive is combined with a pair of ergonomic wireless controllers — one for each hand — designed specially for it. Each Vive will come standard with a pair of these. The official product page also mentions something called the Steam VR base station, which can track your position in a 15 feet by 15 feet area.
"A gyrosensor, accelerometer, and laser position sensor combine to precisely track the rotation of your head on both axes to an accuracy of 1/10th of a degree, allowing you to look around the virtual environment naturally," reads Vive's official product page.
The Developer Edition will be available this spring, while consumers will have to wait until the end of 2015 for the final product. According to the company, the beta versions of the Developer edition have already led to some stellar content from top game developers and as a result gamers can look forward to seeing a large number of Vive-compatible games on Steam.
Five percent royalty rate still applies to commercial projects
Big things come in small packages
Hype is high
Making a move for mobile
Big storage in a little card
Cherry Trail shows only marginal improvement over predecessor in leaked benchmarks
The lightest Book 9 ever
Finished product to debut by year-end
