PC Gaming is not dead, as much as it’s debated about…and the best Game of The Year 2010 was not Starcraft II, or Black Ops, or Civ 5. The best Game of the Year was Minecraft, and it’s not even finished yet. It proves that the indie model of small teams, low budgets, cheap prices, word-of-mouth, and startling creativity is once again the true center of PC gaming.

Minecraft is providing bulks of inspiration for Indie developers world wide. It’s simple “dated” graphics, sandbox style game, wide accessibility, has become a global cultural phenomenon in as little as a year.

Yes, it proves, a lot, for game development, we need fresh new creative ideas, and having insane rendering methods like parallex bump mapping or specular models make no impact on the project’s success. “Gaming on the Cloud” is also the next true frontier. Steam is doing it, Facebook social games has it, and mobile gaming from iOS and Android markets. Minecraft is a game on the cloud, all you need is a web connection, a “$100 netbook”, and you can hook up with the millions of players from around the world..or still enjoy it offline.

“why make a game to cater to your target audience? why not make a game that I myself would want to play? and then cross your fingers that everyone else out there wants to play it too?”
- Mojang Specifications

simple but still an interesting game concept…not a mechanic we havn’t seen before though.

ok..wow. its like the only word in my puny vocab that i know to describe how…wow.. i was when i saw their new trailer.

FINally…anything with Gordon Freeman in my book = win. and this short film project, is pushing everything in that sense to the max. I absolutely appreciate all the effort they’re taking in creating this short film.

i only hope, and hoping really hard, it does not end up like the other 250 “half-life 2 Source Mods” which ended production before completion.. (yeah back when Half-life 2 made its debut and with it’s all new Source engine, mod teams were springing up like .. sprouts, promising all sorts of insane, awesome, mods based of City 17, Gordon Freeman, & Half life 2..only to end up with majority of the teams just disbanding their projects half way).

“Beyond Black Mesa” has received superb reception, winning several Indie-film awards and getting into all kinds of magazines and buzz on the web. Definitely well worth the time to check their work out!!

I’m personally a huge, wait no, epic…yeah.. epic(!) … fan of the Half-life series. I feel all our games today, owe it to the original Half-life which debut back in 1998. It was Valve’s Half-life that changed games to what they have evolved into today. And it was Half-life 2 that raised the bar for our industry, yet again… from all standpoints, technical, artistic, storytelling, real time animation, rendering, materials, etc.

Enjoy, Beyond Black Mesa.

but i love it! it’s awesomeeee. so dope!

do u know what this is?
im actually gonna go make a few of my own now too hahas..

according to this humble Appeal from the Wikipedia Founder, Jimmy Wales, a good 380million people use wikipedia in one way or another, every month. Wikipedia is a community driven site, unlike Youtube or Gametrailers.com or Google, which are maintained and managed by corporate folks in offices and such…which is why they are looking for donations!

check out the Wiki Appeal if you havnt done so!

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Appeal22/en

it’s all about epic mountains and waterfalls and hovering sky gardens ^^!

being developed by Wild Games Studios, slated for release only at the end of next year (end 2011).. =l
i wonder how big the team actually is..some pretty sweet environment work..ilikeilike.
gotta keep notes on this title! be sure to give it a look see

preview trailer can be found at the studio’s game site: http://www.dhailasadventures.com/

and it was really emotional(?) and very inspiring to me when i found a couple cs game servers actually running the map at that very moment…5 years later and people were still actually playing on my level! it brought back so many memories and it was very gratifying to watch them play on the level, and seeing how gameplay continued to unfold with the level’s design. i had joined the most packed server, with 11 players on each team for a total of 22, it was a blast to watch them play and comment about their experience!

i wish i could have recorded an in-game video of it in action, but blast my pc having slight issues and very low on disk space..so the next best thing i did was to take some photos!!

it’s little things like this that keeps me motivated to continue pursuing my passion and dream of being involved in game production in one way or another..

“photos” from today’s trip: ^_^

just what about this 1-man-developed “game” is so intriguing that has millions worldwide addicted?

i decided to give the game a whirl on my own finally, the free version “Classic” is readily available for play in any web browser. In this free version, players simply join a multiplayer game with other people, and build anything they can conjure up in their imaginations, with 1×1 cubes. It’s like Kindergarten and Building Blocks all over again. And that’s it.

the world loves that.

apparently as you can see from this Statistics chart available at the main website.

Last 24 Hours: 7280 Sales.

at €9.95 a piece, or about $16USD a piece, thats already $116,480USD. For just the past 24hours. And because it’s managed, updated, monitored, developed, debugged, all by 1 person, all that money goes straight to him. No publisher to split it with.

what gives? @___@
share your thoughts, why do you play it?

guess which part is real, and what is digital

watch first, then check out the “making of” after…

found this the other day, thought i put it here for “safe keeping” and my own reference..
i’m guessing this is somewhat the average poly budget we get when we work on any next-gen game..
key to note is that part about it being mostly dictated by what the game is planning to have on-screen at any one time.

below discusses tri-count:

From UDN: ______________________________________________

Typical Content Specifications

Here are the guidelines we’re using in building content for our next Unreal Engine 3 based game.

Characters

For every major character and static mesh asset, we build two versions of the geometry: a renderable mesh with unique UV coordinates, and a detail mesh containing only geometry. We run the two meshes through the Unreal Engine 3 preprocessing tool and generate a high-res normal map for the renderable mesh, based on analyzing all of the geometry in the detail mesh.

* Renderable Mesh: We build renderable meshes with 3,000-12,000 triangles, based on the expectation of 5-20 visible characters in a game scene.
* Detail Mesh: We build 1-8 million triangle detail meshes for typical characters. This is quite sufficient for generating 1-2 normal maps of resolution 2048×2048 per character.
* Bones: The highest LOD version of our characters typically have 100-200 bones, and include articulated faces, hands, and fingers.

Normal Maps & Texture maps

We are authoring most character and world normal maps and texture maps at 2048×2048 resolution. We feel this is a good target for games running on mid-range PC’s in the 2006 timeframe. Next-generation consoles may require reducing texture resolution by 2X, and low-end PC’s up to 4X, depending on texture count and scene complexity. Environments
Typical environments contain 1000-5000 total renderable objects, including static meshes and skeletal meshes. For reasonable performance on current 3D cards, we aim to keep the number of visible objects in any given scene to 300-1000 visible objects. Our larger scenes typically peak at 500,000 to 1,500,000 rendered triangles. Lights

There are no hardcoded limits on light counts, but for performance we try to limit the number of large-radius lights affecting large scenes to 2-5, as each light/object interaction pair is costly due to the engine’s high-precision per-pixel lighting and shadowing pipeline. Low-radius lights used for highlights and detail lighting on specific objects are significantly less costly than lights affecting the full scene.

and below here i believe they’re talking in polys:

Polygons counts for some of the Half-Life 2 characters:

* Soldiers: 4682
* Police: 3852
* Resistance: 4976
* Zombie: 4290
* Helicopter: 6415
* Strider: 6444
* Alyx: 8323

There are no fixed rules in determining how many polygons you use in your model, or how much texture resolution you’ll use in your materials. There are upper limits of engine capability, (10,000 polygons/model, 17,433 vertices and 2048 texture size) but these aren’t usually going to be what you’re shooting for. You’ll need to consider how many of the character, vehicle, or prop you’re making will be on screen. If you’d like dozens of them on screen at any given time, you’ll have a different budget than if you’d only like to see one of them ever on screen at a time. With humanoid characters, especially for multiplayer use, you shouldn’t need to go over 4000 polygons to get a character that has enough detail to accurately describe the form, bend properly at the joints, and have enough edges to light properly. Of course you can have more than that, but with normal mapping, and high res textures, you shouldn’t really need to.

read on for more over at CGTalk.com =)