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First Person Shooters (Games)

Open Source FPS Blood Frontier Releases Beta 2 113

Posted by Soulskill from the now-with-bloodier-frontiers dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The open source FPS Blood Frontier has now made their beta2 release. From the article: 'After many months of development, and massive amounts of input from the public, we are proud to present you with the new release of Blood Frontier, v0.85 (Beta 2). This new version totally redefines and improves the game in many ways, creating a whole new style that makes it almost nothing like its predecessor.'"
Input Devices

Brain-Control Gaming Headset Launching Dec. 21 112

Posted by Soulskill from the oh-hey-it's-real dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Controlling computers with our minds may sound like science fiction, but one Australian company claims to be able to let you do just that. The Emotiv device has been garnering attention at trade shows and conferences for several years, and now the company says it is set to launch the Emotiv EPOC headset on December 21. PC Authority spoke to co-founder Nam Do about the Emotiv technology and its potential as a mainstream gaming interface." One wonders what kind of adoption they expect with a $299 price tag.
Education

Computer Games and Traditional CS Courses 173

Posted by Soulskill from the terrible-terrible-games dept.
drroman22 writes "Schools are working to put real-world relevance into computer science education by integrating video game development into traditional CS courses. Quoting: 'Many CS educators recognized and took advantage of younger generations' familiarity and interests for computer video games and integrate related contents into their introductory programming courses. Because these are the first courses students encounter, they build excitement and enthusiasm for our discipline. ... Much of this work reported resounding successes with drastically increased enrollments and student successes. Based on these results, it is well recognized that integrating computer gaming into CS1 and CS2 (CS1/2) courses, the first programming courses students encounter, is a promising strategy for recruiting and retaining potential students." While a focus on games may help stir interest, it seems as though game development studios are as yet unimpressed by most game-related college courses. To those who have taken such courses or considered hiring those who have: what has your experience been?

Comment Hardware specifications (Score 1) 412

by Squant (#29741965) Attached to: Wikipedia In Your Pocket, $99

Seems that the hardware specs are online:

http://code.google.com/p/wikipediardware/

---

This project is based on Epson's S1C33E07 processor with SDRAM, a serial EEPROM and a SD card slot attached. Along with UI input/output devices, of course.

The project's goal is to provide a bunch of software:

        * a set of bootloaders which load a small kernel image from SD card and execute it.
        * wiki-lib, a library which contains all the application's logic
        * gui-lib, a very thin layer to provide glyph rendering and font file parsing
        * some simulators (Qt/Cocoa/ncurses) which emulate the hardware to make development easy
        * the 'kernel' code which is only a small wrapper around the hardware and uses wiki-lib and gui-lib
        * host based tools to generate the content from Wikipedia sources (indexing, font file generation, ...)

Toppers/JSP is included as source tree in a configuration that boots on the hardware. However, it is not currently used as base of our software stack.

---

So this is an ARM device with some SDRAM, pretty curious on how much RAM there is. Hope that some additions will be made like formula rendering for the scientific articles. This seems like a device with a lot of hacking potential. It reminds me of the Texas instruments calculators hardware wise with it B&W LCD. Too bad it has so little buttons for additional functions. The price seems okay if a real community springs up around it with some nice development tools.
Spam

Opting Out Increases Spam? 481

Posted by timothy from the damned-either-way dept.
J. L. Tympanum writes "I used to ignore spam but recently I have been using the opt-out feature. Now I get more spam than ever, especially of the Nigerian scam (and related) types. The latter has gone from almost none to several a day. Was I a fool for opting out? Is my email address being harvested when I opt out? Has anybody had similar experience?"
Programming

Submission + - Worst working conditions you had to write code in?

Submitted by
sausaw
sausaw writes: "I recently had to write code in a hot dusty room for 20 days with temperatures near 107F (~41C); having nothing to sit on; a 64 Kbps inconsistent internet connection; warm water for drinking and a lot of distractions and interruptions. I am sure many people have been in similar situations and would like to know your experiences."
Editorial

Submission + - ISP Capping is Becoming the New DRM

Submitted by
Crazzaper
Crazzaper writes: "There's a lot of controversy over ISP capping with Time Warner leading the charge. Tom's Hardware has an interesting article about how capping is the new form of DRM at the ISP level. The author draws some comparison to business practices by large cable operators and their efforts to protect cable TV programming. While this is understandable from the cable operator's perspective, the article points out how capping will affect popular services such as Steam for game content publishing and distribution, cloud-computing and online media services. Apparently this is also an effective way of going after casual piracy."
Games

The Perils of Pointless Innovation In Games 260

Posted by Soulskill from the why-does-my-rocket-launcher-have-reloading-minigame dept.
Negative Gamer is running a story discussing the need felt by the major game developers to create the next huge blockbuster, which often leads to innovation and change for their own sake rather than simply focusing on what makes a game fun. Quoting: "There seems to be this invisible pressure to create something that is highly 'intuitive' and incorporates the highest level of innovation that we have ever seen. The problem is that the newest ideas put into games are either gimmicky, terrible in execution, or blatantly ripping off another title. On the other hand there are series that feel the need to completely revamp a game that played perfectly fine before into something completely new that falls flat on its face. ... There's a critical problem with popular, mainstream video games that isn't as large with other mediums; they are expensive to make and require a lot of time and effort put in to create something masterful. With that, games must take cautious paths. I fully understand the risks, but adding unneeded material to certain games is not justifiable."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Self Replicating Machines In Your Home - Seriously (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by
Singularity Hub
Singularity Hub writes: "Did you know that for about $500 you can have a machine in your living room that can print out a 3D replica of any object from a CAD drawing on your computer? You can use this machine to make door handles, dolls, cars, hooks...anything! This machine is called a reprap, and amazingly the specifications for the machine are completely open source, completely shareable and modifiable by anyone in the world. There is a worldwide community of volunteers working feverishly to support you and anyone else to troubleshoot and improve the machine. Most interesting of all, the reprap is ultimately designed to self replicate all of its parts, bringing us within tantalizing reach of a long envisioned era of self replicating machines."

Comment JGE looks a lot like Vendetta online (Score 1) 15

by Squant (#26940095) Attached to: <em>Champions Online</em>, <em>Jumpgate: Evolution</em> Both Due In June
JGE looks a lot like Vendetta online, but way more expanded. I shifted from EVE-online to another space based MMORPG and played vendetta for a while. The combat system with licenses was fun to do and it removed lot of the grind.

Quite curious how they will do in the market place. A real skill based MMORPG instead of grind X amount of spiders/gurista cruisers for XP/monies. Looking forward to that.
Movies

Submission + - MediaDefender (MiiVi) Emails Leaked (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
redct
redct writes: "TorrentLeak has acquired near 700MB of internal emails from MediaDefender. When TorrentFreak reported that MediaDefender was running the video site MiiVi.com (site dead), MediaDefender said otherwise. But now, take this email gem: "From: Ben Grodsky Looks like the domain transfer has screwed us over: http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-gang-launches-their-own-video-download-site-to-trap-people/ http://digg.com/users/AcePup/news/dugg " Reply? "This is really f*cked. Let's pull miivi offline.""

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