Havok is now available for evaluation or non-commercial use. Interestingly if you sell your product for less than 10 US $ to the end-user, you are granted a Havok license free of charge too.

Extract from the "Havok™ Physics / Havok™ Animation Limited No-Charge PC Game License Agreement"

(…)

1. publicly demonstrate, and publicly distribute a Havok-enabled non-commercial end-user compiled, binary executable software application or game for the Windows PC Platform, in which the Software is compiled and distributed within the software application or game in an integral, non-separable way, for no direct or indirect commercial value;
2. publicly demonstrate, and publicly sell a Havok-enabled commercial PC Game only for the Windows PC Platform for a retail value of less than or equal to ten US Dollars (US$10.00) (or equivalent amount in other currencies based on prevailing exchange rates at the time of game launch), and in which the Software is compiled and distributed within the binary executable game in an integral, non-separable way only;
3. publicly demonstrate a Havok-enabled commercial PC Game for the Windows PC Platform, intended for commercial sale above a retail value of ten US Dollars (US$10.00), subject to (aa) in Havok's sole discretion, Havok's prior written approval; and (bb) execution of a separate no-charge PC Game distribution license which must be secured from Havok at www.havok.com/PCgamedistribution; and
4. develop compatibility between the Havok SDK and PC Game tools, PC Game middleware, and PC Game engines, subject to no components of the Software being redistributed in any manner.
5. publicly distribute Havok-compatible commercial and non-commercial demo code and academic research subject to no components of the Software being redistributed in any manner.

(…)

Some time ago I played the demo of Sins of a Solar Empire. It's a space RTS game from Stardocks. It's quite complex and it take a couple of hours until one get enough familiar with everything to be able to play.

To help you, there's a a context info/help panel on the bottom right, that pops-up when the mouse is over an item. On the left side, starting at the top - there is an icon-list of all your assets. At the beginning I was quite often searching for a particular ship (like the 'builder' unit) in the icon-list on the top left while having the ship info, from the icon under my mouse, in the panel on the bottom right.

Now, the thing is, I've a 22" widescreen display and I noticed that it's quite a distance for the eyes to move. Doctors probably will love that as it's like eye-training … hehehehe 

… but doing this often feels annoying. Actually one might even move the head too. Thus when searching for an item it's: move mouse to an icon, move eyes, read text, move eyes back, move mouse to the next item, move eyes back to the info panel … repeat until desired item was found.

In addition to that, typically in RTs games, you have the "build" menu section, usually at the bottom, and the amount of resources in your procession, usually at the top. It's not always like that but quite often and it's the same with 'Sins of a Solar Empire'. And the distance on my screen from bottom to top is also quite large. It's of course less the the diagonal but still significant. Thus when you want to check if you have enough resources to order/build the desired unit/component, you may wind up in the same procedure like described above for the info panel. Fortunately this has been solved quite well in this game. The info panel is right beside the build menu and not only it gives information about the unit but also the numbers of required resources will be displayed in red when the player has not enough of them.

So this is an interesting topic. Today application designers not only need to consider dual-screen setups but also the variety of sizes and aspect ratios.

Maybe you already saw the plenty of ads everywhere about GarageGame's new gaming portal called InstantAction. I think it's very well done. Most of the site is HTML - only some areas do require flash and of course the games are using an extra plugin. Installation of that plugin in firefox was very smooth - very nice with pictures for each step. The website design is trendy and makes it already stand apart, but also the fact that you can quickly play multiplayer 3d games in your browser - after registration and installation of the plug-in.

On the negative side I found, that after downloading a new game, the process does often hang. Leaving and rejoining the game fixes it. I also had to give internet-connection rights to each game separately. In addition to that, in the lobby you don't see ping times thus lag or disconnection might occur often in some matches. If you want to try it yourself, I'll suggest "Marble Blast" or "Think Thanks". The others are less interesting. A Tribes-Like title is announced called: Fallen Empire Legions.

As we are talking of GarageGames, there is maybe something else interesting especially in regards to the topic of one of my recent postings. They have a 2D-Game Authoring environment called TorqueX Builder. It's layered upon their for their new XNA based engine called TorqueX. They now announced that they added 3D support on the engine level - the editor will be 3D enabled in the future. TorqueX allows deployment on Windows and Xbox360.

Ever heard of HeroEngine? I didn't … until today. If you are like me very interested in workflows and tools for interactive real-time 3d content production - you probably want to take a closer look at it.

The HeroEngine is a commercial MMO game engine with plenty of tools and artist-friendly workflows. Something very interesting is the multi-user world editing in real-time. Multiple designers can work on the same 3d scenario at the same time. You can watch a pretty long demo video of that on their site. 

Although they say it's something "never been seen before", the idea itself is not new. There is a project called VERSE which is a protocol and library for collaborative work in 2D or 3D. There are implementations for 3ds max, blender and gimp. (It also allows to connect different applications like shown here between blender and the funky 'Loq Airou'). Well, back to topic ….

The HeroEngine's World-Building tool comes with a lot of 3d editing gizmos. Many similar to 3d max. In addition to that there are additional 'manipulators' that easily allow to insert new knots in paths and splines or to insert new vertices for altering shapes of regions. For some objects they have additonal handles for volume or orientation - like in splines based extrusions.

Also interesting is the visual slope-filter control for editing/painting terrain:

Because of a discussion in the Virtools forum I revisited the steam hardware statistics page.

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

It's really nice! I am not sure what audience it does represent - more the hardcore gamer? Looking at the stats there are still low-end/cost systems. Aprox 15% are using the pre dx9 path. Now if we look at the dx8 path stats, then there is aprox. 50% of them using a Geforce FX 5200. It's using the NV34 chip - that's a weak (low-cost) processor but it's still a DX9 card with Shader 2.0 support! Question is now why are they using the DX8 path? If some computer would be badly configured ( no DX9 installed) I guess that card would appear multiple times in the stats, but it does not. Well, only 3.5% are using this card - but still interesting to try to understand the meaning behind those stats.

p.s.  Like Godji says on the forum - it's the path choosen by the steam engine. The reason might be thus, that the FX 5200 is simply to weak to run their PS 2.0 path and their fallback is the DX8 rasterizer.

As I mentioned the potential merge of GPU and CPU previously, here's a recently published interview with Jon Carmack who gives his thoughts on the whole subject:

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

Matthew and his team released a new 3d web game made with Unity3D:

Off-Road Velociraptor Safari

Hunt dinos in a car while doing the best stunts you can  ….Very funky game idea !

If you read Beyond3D or Tomf's blog then you probably already heard of INTEL's project 'larrabee'. If not: the basic idea is to mix CPU and GPU functionality into one 'multi mini-core' system. One could call that "CGPU". The target for 2009 is up to 16 cores (maybe less) with each capable of 4 hardware threads.

The source article ends with: 

Now do you understand why AMD had to buy ATI to survive? 

In the context of the mixed architecture that might be more flexible to to program, raytracing (as alternatives to rasterasation) for real-time rendering is discussed. Another citation from the above article is

Now do you see why Nvidia is dead?

Maybe you know about Mental Images, the creator of the famous MentalRay offline renderer that ships with 3dsMax, Maya and XSI … … they have been bought by NVIDIA! Nvidia does provide with Gelato another rendering product for the DCC market but maybe their acquisition was also interesting for them in regards to the Intel's Larrabee project where raytracing for real-time (RTRT) is researched.

So what will the future bring us? Maybe instead of 2 pairs of separate competitors 'AMD<->INTEL and NVIDIA<->ATI' we will have a triangle 'INTEL<->NVIDIA<->AMD/ATI' ?

( P.s. Actually, as I am right now discovering, Larrabeee details are already public since April 2006 )

It's entitled: CryEngine2 - Character  Pipeline Advances for Next Gen

I haven't look at it in depth yet, but it looks very interesting: UnitTestCg by Aurora

UnitTestCg supports both Cg 1.5b2 and DX9 HLSL