Live streaming is expensive, notch pulls the plug at 17000 viewer hours

Posted on August 20, 2011 7:17 pm by lartens

Its been an interesting afternoon, i spent some time animating an awesome tornado in flash (i joke). While half watching (sorry notch) the live stream video feed of Markus Persson as he writes a dungeon explorer style game for the Ludum Dare competition. A few a hours in notch checks his livestream.com account to see it at 17,000 viewer hours, one of the account packages for the $350 a month has it at 3000 inclusive viewer hours and £0.27 per extra viewer hour, i make that $3780 of incurred costs, which notch has just said on the new justin tv stream that it was like $4000, so i’m not far off. Its billed like 1 user for an hour is a viewer hour, 2 at half an hour each is a viewer hour etc. And as the stream was going since about 11 with nothing happening for a couple of hours, there’s been some wastage.

I’ve gotta say though, that notch can type fast, and that code he’s typing, what this guy can do in a few hours is amazing. It makes me even more excited as to what features are going to be in the next update to minecraft 🙂

So check out notch now at http://wwww.justin.tv/realnotch and also see the updates of everybodys progress in the blog posts of http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/.

Mine is still in the early stages, here’s a screenshot of my excellent tornado, remember the theme is escape.
game screenshot

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Ludum Dare challenge is on, let’s get our code face on

Posted on August 20, 2011 12:57 pm by lartens

This weekend 20/08/11 or maybe 19th depending on your time zone, is the Ludum Dare game challenge thing. It happens every 4 months, April, August, and December. Those registered at http://www.ludumdare.com can submit a game to the competition. The rules are that you have to write the code and create the assets yourself, just one of you, and only in the 48 hours of the competition. You can use libraries you’ve created so long as you submit them before the competition. which is too late if you’re reading this now. This is my first time entering the comp, i’ll be using them actionscript skills i picked up at uni for my game, just installing flash develop again now, i believe you can use a number of languages, but i’m led to believe that as the people who submit games are the only ones who can judge and rate them, that the best idea is to make it web based as more people can try the game out that way, the next popular is windows, but its also best to avoid installers, so maybe xna could be done, as it only needs the xna redistributable installed and the actual game can run without installing if you submit the debug folder.

The theme of this round of Ludum Dare is escape. Now with my wicked drawing skills, i’m thinking its going to be a rather rectangular car escaping a bigger rectangular something, you speed up you slow down jumping obstacles, while staying ahead of what’s chasing you. Obviously i would want to do something cool like a tornado, but i can’t draw that.

Notch aka Markus Persson from Mojang is also entering, and he is livestreaming his desktop over at http://www.livestream.com/mojang. THough at the time of writing he’s left a little note saying he’ll start in a couple of hours.

Its also worth noting that there is also a 72 hour team Ludum Dare competition too, though i believe this is relatively new.

The competition has no monetary prize, its just the fun and spirit of the community. People from all walks of programming join in, hobbyists, students, professional game designers, sometimes life gets in the way of succeeding, but its sure is worth a crack at it. 1 day 14 hours 6 minutes remaining, here goes…..

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Driver San Francisco Demo is live and kicking

Posted on August 18, 2011 1:32 am by lartens

Driver San Francisco screenshotCheck out that jackass, that’s what they say, classic stuff. They said the new Driver handles like the old driver, with the big heavy American muscle cars, and it does, i’m impressed, i’m thinking the single player is going to be as fun as the original, and more so, the whole shifting from one car to another has been implemented extremely well. At first you’re like what the! then once you get the hang of it, especially in multiplayer you’d wish all other games had it. It really is like a Mr Smith in the Matrix, downloading to another body and taking over right there and then, except in this case its the car. Sweet, now just incase you don’t currently have the perks of gold membership to get the demo, i think you still have to wait a week don’t you? anyway, I’ve put up a video of my second or third game to show what its like.

There are two demos, one single player and one multiplayer. I’ll do the multiplayer first, the category available in the demo is free for all, and it has two games, Tag, and Trail Blazer, Tag you try to be the tagged car as long as possible, first to 100 points, Trail Blazer you follow the target cars trail, first to 100 on that too. In-between each main game is 1 of 3 50 seconds qualifiers, the qualifiers sets the positions for the cars each game and sets up the awards like a full bar of boost or something. Qualifiers include Jump, Speed, and Overtake games. These games are 2-6 player.

Listed ready for the full release of the game are:
Free for all: Players 2-6
Face off against up to five opponents in quick, straight forward games.
Tag
Trail Blazer

Racing: Players 2-8
All cars, no shift, pure racing with varied vehicles and tracks to test your driving skill.
Classic Race
Sprint GP

Takedown: Player 2-6
a classic battle between a getaway driver and the cops.
Takedown

Team: Players 4-8
Action-packed team games of strategy, attack and defense 4-8
Capture the flag
Blitz

Shift Racing: Players 2-8
Full contact racing where changing cars can make the difference 2-8
Shift race
Checkpoint Rush

Team Racing: Players 4-8
fast-paced team races putting a premium on coordination and driving skill 4-8
Relay race
Team Rush

So far its been awesome fun.

The single player game had a couple of easy missions mostly to get you used to how the shift function works, and the classic lose the police by keeping out of their red zone by looking on the map, except this time obviously you can drive other cars to ram and block the police, though the AI driving your main car in the mean time is a little bit annoying driving down places you didn’t want.

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Less is more, right?

Posted on August 17, 2011 4:41 pm by lartens

Both Sony and Nintendo have announced new models of their old consoles, that come with less stuff, and for more that what you would pay on ebay. The new PSP will have no wifi, but looks to be a lot like the original phat or light, so will play the umd’s, and will go for around 99 Euros. And the new WII will have no gamecube disc support. No price point on that one yet though. Both pieces of news is for Europe at this point.

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Notch challenges Bethesda to a quake 3 match

Posted on August 17, 2011 4:34 pm by lartens

Notch of Minecraft fame has challenged Bethesda to a duel, two 20 minute matches on quake 3, Mojang’s best 3 players vs Bethesda’s best 3, each select a map, total frags over both wins. This i’ve got to see, i hope they accept, at least the challenge if not the stakes, which is the whole serious issue of the trademark of the word Scrolls. We’ll let you know when there’s more.

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Woah, this KinectFusion vid is Amazing!

Posted on August 16, 2011 11:25 am by lartens

This truely is incradible, they’re taking the 3d depth feed and converting it to model, the camera pans round and a model is created, they’ve evem got some cool multi touch drawing and interactions happening, check it out.

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lartens favourite news bits 15/08/11

Posted on August 16, 2011 12:46 am by lartens

Heres just a few things that have cropped up in the feeds i follow etc, as this is what the initial intention of grigorig was, that is to share what i find interesting with my friends, here it is, it also helps fill the voids of lack of posts. so:

Swedish developer Fractional Games were pleased with their initial sales for Amnesia the dark Descent, they were thrilled when it hit 100,00 sold, apparently they needed 24k to keep operating last year, and now they have sold over 400,00. The good reviews that critics gave it must of helped, i haven’t finished it myself yet, but i will say it is really good at making me jump late at night with the lights out and playing the game with headphones on, it’s the immersive experience that makes this game great at what it does.

Onlive goes live in the uk on the 22nd of september, prices to be announced. What is onlive? well its cloud gaming, they have their server run the game, poll you for your controller input and essentially give u the video back, this means you can play even some tripple A titles on you not so great pc or mac, or even your tv with the help of a special device. There are several rates or tiers for the games, either a 3 day, 5 day or complete pass for a game, or theres the flat rate pass with over 70 titles to choose, the add includes prince of persia as one of the titles so don;t get your hopes up too much about that one, the important thing here is that it aslo has demos for free. So if you just want to check out a game, this is way, less hassle. Or if you have a mac book air that might struggle with a big title like arkham asylum, then maybe this way will work better for you. The prices so far are for the US, the tv device is $99 and has a controller, the flat month rate is $10, and the example of the day passes were like $8 for the 5 days and $30 for the full pass but couldn’t tell you what game that was with.

Batman Arkham city has released a sneak vid with Dr Freeze, who looks a little bit arnie esk, but is bound to be better than that movie, u know, that one you’ve tried to forget about, the live action one, not the animated ones that are actually pretty good. The last animated one i watched was called Batman and the red hood, which wasn’t shy of beating the crap out of somebody.

Theres news afoot that Gears of War 3 will have a stereoscopic 3D mode, though this is not going to be HD, aparently its not even 720p, which is a little unbelievable from Epic. But there you go, the story of gears 3 will be set a little later than the last, a bunch of stuff has happened, in between and this is the best part to be rejoining the action.

I’ve yet to meet anybody who owns Zumba Fitness for any console, so i am wondering why its top of the pops once again (9 consecutive weeks) for the multiplatform game charts.

Here in the UK we have a games con type shindig in Birmingham, its the GAME retailer GAMEFest and is on from the 16th to the 18th September, and as well as the er released games like driver (september 2nd), it will have a playable version of Modern Warfare 3 for UK gamers to get some hands on action. Game Conventions are somewhat lacking here in Blighty, but why did it have to be all the way in Birmingham. My car won’t make that, i really should look at that oil leak I’ve had for 3 years now. meh. For the list of exhibiters check out http://events.game.co.uk/gamefest/exhibitors/. There are a lot of 3’s, farcry, uncharted, mass effect, gears, errr just dance, yeah we don’t care for that one either, dance central on the other hand is a good laugh, with friends obviously. I’m only really interested in the sonic generations that is listed. Though i don’t want to play green hill again.

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Minecraft, buy one, get one free this weekend

Posted on August 12, 2011 8:29 pm by lartens

Minecraft wedding weekend poster
In celebration of @notch’s wedding to Ez this weekend, Mojang is giving away one free gift code of minecraft if you buy the game(not a gift code), now just to be clear, it states buying the game and not buying a gift code to get the free gift code, so if you already own it, you would have to buy it with another username and email address i would imagine. So the deal is buy the game for €14.95! now, get a free gift code added to your account, and you’re buying the game in the state that it is in now, and you will also own the game when it is released, which is around the 18th of Novemeber. @notch will be pushing some kind of upload button at the MineCon party thing in Vagas. From then on its apparently going to cost €20.00. Thats Euros if the charset is playing up. Remember Minecraft is pretty process heavy, if you need to try, check out the pcgamer minecraft 90 minute demo as mentioned in a previous post here https://www.grigorig.com/what-a-free-90-minute-demo-of-minecraft-from-pc-gamer-thats-freaking-awesome/. The demo is for windows only though :(. The actual game is for OSX, Linux, and Windows.

So, get your friends or loved one to buy the game, and let them share a freebie with another, simples. We love you @notch.

We at grigorig wish notch and Ez an amazing wedding, and hope they will be very happy together forevers ^_^
P.s Be excellent to each other.

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Goooooooo! 3DS for £115, i don’t think the ambassador program makes up for that

Posted on August 12, 2011 6:29 pm by lartens

3DS amazon.co.uk pricesWe’ve seen the news that Nintendo were slashing their prices, but so far I’d only seen US prices, which are usually considerably lower (after exchange rates) than in the UK because of tax, but i had no idea it was going to be £115 on amazon.co.uk. I paid something like £190 with a voucher for £12 pound off on launch day. Now they have released this Ambassador program whereby early adopters that visit the eshop with their 3ds before the end of 12/08/11 will get 10 free nes games on the virtual console, and 10 free gameboy games when they become available, though slightly earlier than everyone else. But seriously, that doesn’t appease me in the slightest. Even if i had free run of 20 games from the virtual console it wouldn’t make up for it. So if you don’t have a 3ds and you are into legally buying your games, and you don’t already have anything after the original ds, then it looks like this is a good time to buy. Zelda is amazing, and they may have other games worth getting soon to, maybe.

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The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time 3D Soundtrack has arrived

Posted on August 8, 2011 12:21 pm by lartens

Zelda OOT Soundtrack front coverZelda OOT CD SoundtrackFor those early adopters of the 3DS verison of the Ocarina of time, and by early i mean the first week of release, and who registered it on Club Nintendo, you should be receiving your free Soundtrack CD right about now, mine came through the door literally as i was writing the last post about the Symphony tickets being on sale.

So what is it? Well its the in game music, 51 tracks of the music you’d hear in the game when wandering the fields of Hyrule, visiting towns, battling monsters in dungeons and more.

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