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The Archives
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10.09.10Gaikai Cloud Service for Games: Bringing Virtual Worlds to a Site Near You?While OnLive and Otoy are the tip-of-the tongue names when it comes to server-side rendering approaches to delivering games, Gaikai promises something else: a business model in which affiliate Web sites can host games (or virtual worlds) and earn money by doing so. Develop a Steampunk game, embed it in your Steampunk site, and make money from the users who access it. Now, I've been thinking about this because I've been thinking about Second Life in the browser, about whether Linden Lab is truly for sale, and all the rest of the speculation from the past few weeks. I set myself ...
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09.09.08The Virtual Keeps Getting More Real: Raytracing, Mars and Shiny ThingsI've long been an advocate that what drives a virtual world isn't how real it looks - it's what you can do, who you meet, and how robust the tools are for collaboration and generating content. Real is for games - you know, the code heads who drool over how brilliant the water is, say, but neglect to mention that the game mechanics leave you, well, wanting more. But it's hard to ignore that that the way chips are headed (you've heard of the Singularity, right?) and continual improvements in how stuff is moved around networks mean that virtual worlds are ...
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08.26.08A Mesh of Chips: Rendering Virtual Worlds and Saying Goodbye to the Second Life Prim?I've been gorging on chips lately, and it feels like the time I went to the UK and discovered that the 'crisp' can be a meal - where I'm from you have sour cream and onion and BBQ and a few others, but over in England they pack a feast into your typical bag of crisps - think roasted chicken flavour, think beef with horseradish, or for all I know think curried goat with a side of rice and peas. So when I got a taste of AMD's new Radeon card, it was like getting a taste of a bigger buffet ...
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08.22.08It It It’s Aliiiiive (evil cackle): Rendering Reality in Games and Virtual WorldsReal-time rendering of the realistic, the promise of graphics so stunningly real that you'll really....OK, well you get the idea, although the use of realism in virtual worlds and games cycles us back to that odd difficulty: when it seems really real, the imperfections make it feel fake. Make sense? Well...let's just say that the promise of the highly rendered virtual world may be just around the corner, and Blue Mars may be just a taste of things to come. But first, not even knowing where to FIND the type of graphics chip I have, I can't pass judgment on chip ...
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08.22.08Render Shadows in Second Life: Compiled ViewerSome time ago Torley posted breathlessly about the ability to render shadows in Second Life, which fed a broad discussion about the computing power needed to do this and whether its inclusion in the SL viewer would cut off those whose machines couldn't handle it. Regardless, I could never find a compiled viewer - I found the instructions for how to compile one but that's beyond my pay grade. But I stumbled across a blog with some pretty sharp looking photos showing rendered shadows, and a link to a compiled viewer. Continue Reading...
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05.14.08Autodesk, MegaPrims, and the 3D Pipeline Puzzles ContinueSecond Life set out on its own, carving a path outside of the usual frontiers of game development and virtual reality headsets and imagined a virtual world where the tools for building 3D objects were accessible to all. Remember, this was back in the day before Google Sketch-Up, before Content Paradise and 3Daz and Poser....or at least the days before anyone could download them and order up some books from Amazon or watch tutorials on youTube. And the power of those tools created what Hamlet Au called a Be Bop reality. Meanwhile, over in the other 3D silos games were still big ...
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05.12.08Ambient Occlusion – Shadows in Second LifeOn a platform where every object needs to be rezzed from the point of viewing, Second Life has had to make trade-offs to the appearance of the world. On gaming platforms, these trade-offs are handled through things like texture baking, polygon counts, and distribution of content on CD. Platforms like Blue Mars are throwing caution to the wind and assuming that computer power will continue to grow exponentially, to the point where the world will catch up to THEM rather than them catch up to the world. The difference in the visual appearance can be astonishing. Blue Mars will run ...
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