Steamworks Developmental Kit Now Available

The Steamworks SDK is now available to game developers and publishers worldwide. Press release below:

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Half-Life and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source),
today announced the release of the Steamworks Software Development Kit (SDK).

Steamworks is a complete suite of publishing and development tools that offers PC game developers and publishers access to the game features and services available through Steam. These include product key authentication, copy protection, auto-updating, social networking, matchmaking, anti-cheat technology, and more. The features and services available in Steamworks are offered free of charge and may be used for both electronic and tangible versions of games. Read more

Crytek going multi-platform due to rampant Piracy

In an interview with PCPlay Magazine, CEO of Crytek; Cevat Yerli has revealed that they longer will remain PC exclusive. The rampant piracy of Crysis and the high-development costs have forced the german developer to this decision. Full quote below:

Cevat Yerli: We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy.  To the degree PC Gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we wont have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.

John Carmack on id Tech 6, Ray Tracing, Consoles, Physics and more

The 3D programming guru John Carmack sat down with PC Perspective to discuss games programming related matters. Carmack shared his opinions on Ray Tracing, Multi-GPU systems as well as upcoming sparse voxel octree technology and id Software’s very own Tech 6 engine. here’s a snip:

PC Perspective: Let’s just jump right into the issue at hand. What is your take on current ray tracing arguments floating around such as those featured in a couple of different articles here at PC Perspective? Have you been doing any work on ray tracing yourself?

John Carmack: I have my own personal hobby horse in this race and have some fairly firm opinions on the way things are going right now. I think that ray tracing in the classical sense, of analytically intersecting rays with conventionally defined geometry, whether they be triangle meshes or higher order primitives, I’m not really bullish on that taking over for primary rendering tasks which is essentially what Intel is pushing. (Ed: information about Intel’s research is here.) There are large advantages to rasterization from a performance standpoint and many of the things that they argue as far as using efficient culling technologies to be able to avoid referencing a lot of geometry, those are really bogus arguments because you could do similar things with occlusion queries and conditional renders with rasterization. Head to head rasterization is just a vastly more efficient use of whatever transistors you have available.

Full interview after the jump. Read more

Tim Sweeney Talks PC Gaming - Part 2

Continuing the Tim Sweeny Talks PC Gaming Interview, TGDaily inquires about Unreal Engine 4.0. Here’s a snippet:

TG Daily: Let’s talk about your game visions for the future and the next Unreal Engine? Where is EPIC going with the Unreal Engine 3.5 and 4.0?

Sweeney: The Unreal engine is really tied to a console cycle. We will continue to improve Unreal Engine 3 and add significant new features through the end of this console cycle. So, it is normal to expect that we will add new stuff in 2011 and 2012. We’re shipping Gears of War now; we’re just showing the next bunch of major tech upgrades such as soft-body physics, destructible environments and crowds. There is a long life ahead for Unreal Engine 3. Version 4 will exclusively target the next console generation, Microsoft’s successor for the Xbox 360, Sony’s successor for the Playstation 3 - and if Nintendo ships a machine with similar hardware specs, then that also. PCs will follow after that.

Full Interview after the jump.
Read more

BioWare Talks Sex, Games and Piracy

BioWare corp, the developer behind great RPGs such as Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights, sat down with Rob Wright of Tom’s Games to discuss their upcoming PC port of Mass Effect, the FOX news lesbian scene controversry, as well as what they think about the PC platform in general. Here’s a snip:

TG: So what’s going to happen with Mass Effect 2? Are we going to see the next title anytime soon, and will the trilogy be for the Xbox 360 life cycle?

Greg Zeschuk: That’s certainly the hope. Of course part of that is dependent on Microsoft and what their timing is for that lifecycle.

Ray Muzyka: I think it’s good if the console life cycles increase because it allows the artist to really craft the game and use the technology they’ve to its potential, instead of having to rebuild a movie camera every time you shoot a movie. It’s a lot of work to make a new engine every time a new platform comes along.

Full interview after the break. Read more

Stardock’s Take on Piracy

With everyone throwing their two cents about piracy nowadays, it was just a matter before Stardock said it’s fair share too. One of Stardock employees made a post regarding Piracy and their recent RTS Sins of a Solar Empire:

Recently there has been a lot of talk about how piracy affects PC gaming. And if you listen to game developers, it apparently is a foregone conclusion - if a high quality PC game doesn’t sell as many copies as it should, it must be because of piracy.

Now, I don’t like piracy at all. It really bugs me when I see my game up on some torrent site just on the principle of the matter. And piracy certainly does cost sales. But arguing that piracy is the primary factor in lower sales of well made games? I don’t think so.

Full post after the break. Read more

Tim Sweeney Talks PC Gaming

Recently, Epic Games has a lot to say regarding PC gaming, but in doing so, epic always went the wrong way. We either got dimwitt console producers with stupid haircuts bad mouthing PCs or clueless and sub-par console ports . Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, creator of Unreal engine and arguably one of the most respected and admired developers around, sat down with TGDaily to discuss the current stature of PC gaming. Here’s a snip:

TG Daily: What are your thoughts on the future of the PC as a gaming platform? Is scalability the future – we hear AMD talking about Spider and Nvidia is selling Triple SLI that will keep us upgrading over the next several years. Or did the industry lose its focus?

Sweeney: PC gaming is in a weird position right now. Now, 60% of PCs on the market don’t have a workable graphics processor at all. All the Intel integrated graphics are still incapable of running any modern games. So you really have to buy a PC knowing that you’re going to play games in order to avoid being stuck with integrated graphics. This is unfortunate, and this is one of main reasons behind the decline of the PC as a gaming platform. That really has endangered high-end PC game sales. In the past, if you bought a game, it would at least work. It might not have been a great experience, but it would always work.

Full Interview after the break. Read more

THQ Creative Director: “Trying to make a game for PC is a freaking nightmare”

After the closing of Iron Lore Studios to due financial burden, THQ’s creative director Michael Fitch had a few things to say about PC game piracy. Fitch made a post at Quarter to Three Forums regarding Piracy and how it has made developing PC games a “freaking nightmare”, Fitch also shoots at all the ignorant pc gamers, saying: “But god forbid something that they’ve done - or failed to do - creates a problem with your game. There are few better examples of the “it can’t possibly be my fault” culture in the west than gaming forums.” Read more

Assassin’s Creed Leaks to BitTorrent, gets Nuked

As we reported earlier, Ubisoft’s upcoming PC port of (produced & pimped by Jade Raymond) Assassin’s Creed was leaked to Internet a FULL month earlier from it’s original release date. However, it seems that both releases have been nuked and the “early adopters” are unable to progress beyond level 1. Apparently, the game is missing some critical level files that cannot be fixed by a cracked exe.

serves them right, we say.

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