The Aves Engine is a software development kit to generate spectacular isometric browsergames without the need for third-party plugins like Microsoft Silverlight or Adobe Flash on the end-user side. Highly inspired by Game-Engines from the PC and Videogame-Industry, Aves-Engine is aimed toward serious browsergame publishers who want to benefit from a component based engine architecture and cross-plattform compatible code to deliver on any desktop operating system or mobile devices.

All components are encapsuled in different logic layers which solve common problems of the games development cycle. Developers do not need to know about 3D-Coordinate Systems, Mapgeneration, Sharding, Collision detection, event delegation, and more more base requirements.

Besides a well documented API we deliver great development tools such as the real-time world editor and a professional asset management. We also integrate a code repository system and deployment tools which will easily bring your latest versions to hundred of servers. A unique encryption engine which automatically encrypts your sources on deployments will protect your frontend code from the competition.

You have to watch the detailed walk through of what the engine is capable of:

Thus far, we’ve mainly seen the up and coming  HTML5 web standard used for video. A bunch of Google engineers wanted to see what else HTML5 could do, and decided to try porting the classic first-person-shooter Quake 2. Lo and behold, they were successful — and they actually ended up surprising themselves with how well it ran.

 HTML5 is the latest revision of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the programming language that makes up most of the web. It’s being looked at as a challenger to Adobe Flash in many ways, since it allows for web animations and video without the use of a plugin. With this demonstration, these Google engineers also proved that HTML5 could be a legitimate threat to Flash’s stranglehold on online games.

Here’s what they did to bring Quake 2 to HTML5:

We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into Javascript. You can see the results in the video above — we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops (your mileage may vary)!

While it may look choppy, take note that the WebGL standard is still in its infancy, and this demonstration is also likely running off of unoptimized code. That they’re already able to surpass 30 frames per second — which is often considered the bare minimum for a game to be playable — is an achievement.

If you’d like to build the game’s code and test it out yourself, you can find the project on Google Code. Since it’s making heavy use of HTML5, you will need to use a browser like Chrome or Safari. Firefox currently doesn’t support all HTML5 elements.

Check out a video of the game running in a browser below:

EMBED ME

via games.venturebeat.com

ElcomSoft accelerates the recovery of Wi-Fi passwords and password-protected iPhone and iPod backups by using ATI video cards. The support of ATI Radeon 5000 series video accelerators allows ElcomSoft to perform password recovery up to 20 times faster compared to Intel top of the line quad-core CPUs, and up to two times faster compared to enterprise-level NVIDIA Tesla solutions.

The support of massively parallel computing available in the newest ATI video accelerators such as ATI Radeon HD5970 allows ElcomSoft to achieve password recovery speeds exceeding those of high-end CPUs and competing NVIDIA boards, including NVIDIA Tesla systems.

Benchmarks performed by ElcomSoft demonstrate that ATI Radeon HD5970 accelerated password recovery works up to 20 times faster than Core i7-960, Intel’s current top of the line CPU unit. The password recovery speed of the new sub-thousand dollar video card from ATI exceeds the performance of enterprise-grade NVIDIA Tesla solutions priced at $10,000. When password recovery is concerned, ATI Radeon HD5970 provides twice the performance of NVIDIA Tesla for a fraction of the price.

ElcomSoft is looking forward to testing its software on the upcoming NVIDIA Tesla (S2050/S2070), which will be available in Q2/Q3’2010, as well as NVIDIA’s Next Generation CUDA architecture code named Fermi, which is claimed to surpass anything announced by NVIDIA’s leading GPU competitor (AMD).

                       Unlimited Detail

Unlimited Detail is a new technology for making realtime 3D graphics.  Unlimited Detail is different from existing 3D graphics systems because it can process unlimited point cloud data in real time, giving the highest level of geometry ever seen.  If this all sounds a bit technical to you, just press the "What is it ?" button on the side and we will try and explain things in a bit more detail.

The above picture contains billions of points and we can run it all in real-time.
This site has a gallery of pictures for you to look at, as well as some video clips you can download. We also have a technical clip that will explain Unlimited Detail in more detail.

We are in the process of Negotiating to get the Commercial version of Unlimited Details SDK built. After that, you should expect to see 3D graphics take a huge leap forward in about 16 months when Unlimited Detail comes out commercially, in Games and other products.  

This afternoon's best mystery from the new reigning champs of brilliantly artful viral campaigns: a seemingly innocuous new update to the PC version of Valve's cult hit puzzle game Portal has turned out to be far more than anyone expected, and could be the first instance of using a three year old game itself to hint at future titles.

The update's changelog only wryly stated that Valve had "changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations", causing players to note that each section of the game had been updated with a new radio object. At first glance, the new radios appeared to be the same that otherwise normally existed inside the game, which simply chirped out a samba version of the game's iconic end-theme song. Only later was it discovered that these new radios each contain a hidden audio file that's transmitted when you carry them to one particular point in each of the game's levels.

Thanks to the Steam forum's overeager detectives, we've already learned that the most perplexing of these pirate transmissions are in fact SSTV encoded photographs -- the same used by shortwave operators to transmit images over the air -- each watermarked with the Aperture Science logo to stem any doubt about their authenticity. Follow the ongoing investigations here, and ponder, via Shawn Elliott, in-game lore tying the Half Life universe to Portal's via a character who "is cunning enough to encrypt... photographs, coordinates, blueprints and hailing frequencies within her message."

Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum manage - Steam Users' Forums