Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

  • More on 3DXplorer

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 1 Comment

    Someone at 3DXplorer left a comment on my earlier post with some additional details. Since they’re posted here already, I figured I’d post it as an actual post since it’s interesting:

    Dear Raph, Let us add a few precisions:

    1) 3DXplorer princing is not going to change. The Studio is free for all. The player is free for low-trafic sites and requires subscription for high-trafic websites.

    2) We agree with some of the challenges you mentioned. We work on them and will most likely show them soon, stay tuned.

    3) We are sure, other online, multi-platform, multi-navigator, free tools, like 3DXplorer will be released in the future. For now, we don’t see that much. If we are not wrong, unlike 3DXplorer, the one mentioned is only running on windows, requires pre-installation, and its not yet live.

    One last precision: 3DXplorer has no specific innovation claim on quality of renderring or such.

    The main claim of innovation is on “3D for everyone” as there is no need to pre-install software, its multi-platform(PC/MAC/LINUX) and Multi-navigator (IE/FF/SAFARI/OPERA/…).

    That maybe considered as not that important for gamers, but makes huge difference for the majority of the Internet visitors who are not familiar with 3D.

    Hope this clarifies a bit.

    Regards

    (I believe the company is French, btw).

  • Updated: Scrabulous & Hasbro & now Mattel

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 10 Comments

    In the midst of an interesting article about article about Zynga, a cross-social-network casual games platform, I see this little paragraph describing an event I missed:

    Last week, the Web site of Fortune magazine reported that the two brothers in India who created the game had received a legal notice from Hasbro, the toy company that owns the Scrabble brand. Hasbro did not return a request for comment, and Rajat Agarwalla, one of the brothers who created Scrabulous, said his lawyer had advised him not to comment on the matter.

    Update: Reuters says that Mattel, which owns rights outside of the US and Canada, has also taken action. 

  • Hiring a Metaplace content developer!

    Hours Categories Gamemaking
    Comments 11 Comments

    This is a fun job, and you don’t often see one posted like this. 🙂 If the below is you, drop us an email at jobs (at) areae.net!

    Areae is on a mission to revolutionize virtual worlds and MMOs. We’re a venture-backed company in beautiful San Diego, and our investors share our passion and vision for the future of online gaming. Our core team includes veteran MMO developers with deep experience from online leaders like EA, Sony Online, and NC Soft, and we have developed and launched some of the world’s most successful online games to date including Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies and EQ2. We are currently looking for a Content Developer to join our team and help develop the next generation of online gaming.

    The successful candidate will assist in the design and development of new content using the Metaplace platform, support of customer technical queries via the forums and direct chat, documentation of the toolset and scripting language on the public Wiki. She or he will also assist developers in the identification and analysis of toolset issues. The position requires 1+ years experience in Lua or object-oriented programming, familiarity with principles of game and user interface design, and the flexibility to adapt to daily changes in the development environment. Prior experience with Game Design or Quality Assurance in a production environment is a plus.

  • Web-based VW news round-up

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 5 Comments

    A lot of stuff has been moving on this front lately, so here’s some recent notable news. I know that some of the gamer typs who read here aren’t that interested, but the crossover is increasing at a rapid rate. 🙂

    • 3dXplorer has been released. It’s a Java-based system for embedding 3d spaces in a window on your webpage. Looks like it is single-player, like many of these solutions, but the 3d scene is hosted on their hardware, so there’s a service model underlying it (get lots of users, start paying). My thoughts: there’s likely a significant market for the embedding of single-user walkthroughs and 3d object representations, and several companies seem to be chasing this market or even already have offerings (such as Media Machines‘ Flux Player). But although the step from there to adding basic multiuser capability isn’t huge, the step of adding interesting multiuser interactivity is quite difficult.

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