Play Heroes of Might and Magic 3 on your Android device. Original files required.

People who are fans of the long running RPG series called Heroes of Might and Magic will be happy to know that the engine to run the third installment of the game on your Android device is now available. Just like with the second one, this one requires you to have the original files.

Read more: Pocket Legends

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Steam Now Offering Free-To-Play Games

Valve's digital Steam service is going strong with 30 million active accounts, and now the developer has further boosted its offerings by adding free-to-play titles. Steam is kicking off its support of the free-to-play model with five titles (which will include in-game Steam exclusives): Spiral Knights, Forsaken Worlds, Champions Online: Free for All, Global Agenda: Free Agent, and Alliance of Valliant Arms. Valve's support of free-to-play shows just how widely accepted it's become.

Read more: Slashdot

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Minecraft sales top 2.5 million

Sales of indie phenomenon soar ahead of Xperia Play and Kinect release

Minecraft, the world-building indie project, has been sold more than 2.5 million times on PC, the game's creator has revealed.

Markus Persson posted a message on Twitter that read: “2.5 million sales! That’s as much as Diablo 1 and Far Cry, according to Wikipedia.”

The news comes just days after Microsoft announced a Kinect-compatible version would be coming to Xbox 360 by the end of the year.

Read more: Developer

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Angry Birds on IE9

I was asked recently where "angry birds for ie9" was. My answer was Angry Birds is already there, kind of, for IE9.   Actually its there for HTML5 browsers.  Angry Birds was released as a HTML5/Flash app targeted for Chrome at http://chrome.angrybirds.com recently.

Accordingly, ChromeBirds works pretty good on IE9 too. Simply point your IE9 browser to http://chrome.angrybirds.com and you'll have Angry Birds up and going in IE9. 

Why Blog this? Truthfully I was asked if there was angrybirds for IE9. I'm using this article this as a ref to email them.

Read more: DevFish on MSDN ...>««(o>... 

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Компилятор .NET в JavaScript и пример XNA-демо в браузере

Разработчик Kevin Gaad, который судя по его профилю работает в компании Mozilla, представил свою разработку – компилятор .NET(C#) кода в JavaScript. Для демонстрации работоспособности библиотеки Кевин опубликовал портированный пример демонстрационного проекта игры на базе XNA 3.1.

Игра работает в браузерах IE9+, Firefox 4+, and Chrome 11. Разработчик пишет, что Opera не поддерживается из-за проблем браузера с ECMAScript5 и в Chrome 12 и 13 есть баги, которые мешают нормальной работе.

Read more: microGeek

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Texas Hold 'Em (Silverlight 4)

Project Description

The objective of this project is to create a very exact approximation of a game of Texas Hold' Em as it's played in American casinos.

Particular emphasis is given to the use of LINQ to determine the winning poker hands and to properly assess kickers when ties occur. Poker hands use the IComparable interface.

In its native state, you are pitted against four other players. Your default is an AI player, but the code has a feature to allow you to play as a human and raise a dialog when it's your turn to bet.

In this initial release, a basic (and highly rudimentary) betting module is included in order to make the product complete from end-to-end. Full betting remains an area for further development.

There is a modest battery of unit tests included in order to gain confidence that the poker hand comparison logic is bug free.

This application is not intended to ultimately become a commercial offering, but rather it's for Silverlight developers to have some FUN experimenting with different AI personalities and betting strategies.

Read more: Codepelx

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XNA RPG - Learning XNA while building a RPG, a 26 part tutorial series

E3 2011 is a little more than a month away, the expo where nearly all the cool gaming news comes out. There's rumors that there's news coming about development "stuff" for the XBox 360 and E3 seems like the logical time for that news to be released.

To give you a leg up and help you catch that wave, today's post is curtsey of Jamie McMahon and his very cool  XNA Game Programming Adventures, XNA 4.0 RPG Tutorials series.

The series takes you from install to a playable 2D RPG with each in the series building on the last. The tutorial includes not only building the game but a game/level editor too.

Part 1 - Getting Stated

This first tutorial is about getting started with the role playing game, Eyes of the Dragon. I create the basic project, two class libraries, and some components that will be used through out the rest of the tutorials.

...

Part 4 - Tile Engine

The forth tutorial is about adding in a tile engine for the game. The tile engine is what you will use to draw the maps the player will use to explore your world. In the next tutorial I will add in more to the tile engine.

...

Part 10 - Character Classes

This adds in some basic classes for characters in the game and a class to represent the world the game takes place in. 

Part 11A - Game Editor

In this tutorial I add in an editor for the game and move from a static character class system to a dynamic character class system. This is part one of a three part tutorial.

...

Read more: Channel9

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Free CryEngine 3 to be released in August

Crytek takes on Unity and Epic Games with new SDK policy; No costs for non-commercial use

A free edition of CryEngine 3 will be available in August, vendor Crytek has announced.

The Frankfurt-based studio said the new SDK will be free to download for non-commercial purposes.

CryEngine 3 is the high–end multi-platform game engine that powered the FPS blockbuster Crysis 2. In making it free to play with, Crytek is following the path of rival engine firms Unity and Epic Games.

Company CEO Cevat Yerli said the new SDK would reignite the modding community. In an open letter to his fans, he admitted that Crytek recently had few resources to support this area of its business. 

“In recent times our focus has been heavily on the development of Crysis 2, however our modding community has been, and remains, very important to us,” Yerli said.

Read more: Develop

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WoW player reaches level 85 without killing

Well I did it lol, it was certainly a different way of levelling, requires lots of patience, but I did get to see the whole game in a new light.

Being on the ground and sneaking around mining and herbing and eventually archaeology, going everywhere to get every single point of discovery xp that you can, really gives you a chance to see an amazing world up close and personal. I spent hours swimming around reefs and flying to the farthest reaches of the maps.

If you like to explore, and enjoy a challenge I really REALLY recommend this, I have been playing since day 1 on other characters and I even have an original Loremaster (you know, back when it was hard) and I saw so MANY new things with Everbloom that it really made it worthwhile for me to continue on with this character, and each level was a major achievement!

I would like to ask Blizzard to possibly look into changing the "Invitation to the Argent Tournament" scripted event so that it doesn't flag you as having completed a quest when you haven't actually completed a quest, that almost broke my heart when I logged in and checked my stats page to find my 0 kills 0 quest stats had gone to 0 kills 1 quests completed when all I did was open a letter. 

I opened a ticket and requested the quest be removed but was told it is not possible and that I should mention it on the forums in the hope that Blizzard changes it.

SO now I am server transferring this one to Antonidas to join the guild which is a 0 kills guild that was started there for us alternate advancement people! I think most of the guild is searching out quests that require no killing, but I shall stick to my 0 kills 0 quests attempt yet again! Come join the ... fun? ;)

Read more: GameGuru

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DiRT 3 Group B Rally Trailer

Codemasters released a snazzy new trailer for DiRT 3 featuring the banned Group B rally cars doing what they were designed to do and showcasing the power and speed that got them banned from the rally circuit. You can check out the new Group B rally trailer below or head on over to the official website to pre-order the game. DiRT 3 is due out on May 24th for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. 

Read more: GameGuru

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Crysis 2 Patch v1.2

Electronic Arts issued for a new patch for Crysis 2, the sequel developed by Crytek for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. The patch addresses a handful of issues and, in fact, adds in a new load time bug specific to Steam users. Here are the highlights from the update, along with a note about the increased load times for Steam users that will be addressed. This is also not the full list of changes in today's update. The update should automatically download for you through Steam. It is roughly 42MB in size. A manual download can be found on PatchesScrolls.

- Further improved anti-cheat measures

- Fix for spurious characters appearing when initiating text chat

- Fix for Chatlog doesn't disappear after kill cam

- Fixed occasional login issues

- Changed VOIP defaults

- Fixed some UI aspect issues on multiple monitors

- Added option for crouch toggle in MP & SP

- Fixed a bug where players lost Nano Catalyst points after restarting the game

- Filter settings in server browser are now retained

- Default player count required to start a game from the lobby lowered to 4

- Fixed issue related to “Deleting Reference Counted Object Twice” error that appeared for some users with strict router/firewall settings

- Fixed issue of not being able to melee after dying

- Fixed issue where some video cards were being stated as unsupported

Read more: GameGuru

Read more: Patches scrool

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Under The Hood of Unreal Engine 3

The clip includes a number of DirectX 11 features and more updated graphical goodness:

Read more: GameGuru

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Fallout Mod Studio - A new mod manager for Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas

Project Description

FOMS provides a simple, graphical, and highly useful approach to installing and managing modifications for Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas.

It utilizes XML templates to quickly sort mods, and offer solutions to missing dependencies, conflicting mods, missing patches, and more.

Read more: Codeplex

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Crytek to release UDK alternative

Co-founder Yerli ponders releasing engine for free; talks up mobile future

CryEngine 3 vendor Crytek is planning the release of an indie-friendly SDK, the firm has told Develop.

Crytek co-founder Anvi Yerli said his firm already “has a business model in mind” for the CryEngine software development kit.

“It will be extremely user-friendly,” he said.

“The barriers for entry will be very low, and perhaps [it will be distributed] for free”, he added.

Yerli said he was aware the strategy will naturally be compared to Epic Games’ own UDK – a high-end game engine that is freely available for developers and hobbyists to download.

“Of course this [the CryEngine SDK] will be compared to UDK and Unity and so on, but we think this sort of competition is very good for the community.”

Yerli held back on discussing details of the dev kit. Its revenue model, and available platform, is a matter of speculation.

Epic Games’ own UDK takes 25 per cent of wholesale revenues from commercial games built on the engine. The tech can be used to make games across a variety of platforms, from PC to smartphone.

Asked about Crytek’s plan for mobile, Yerli said “the use of CryEngine outside of core games makes a lot of sense to us and we are very interested”.

“We actually have some developers going towards mobile and online for web and browser games,” he added.

Read more: Develop

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Light probes

Hello everyone. I wanted to show you something I’ve been working on last couple of FAFFs. The purpose of this post is to interest some of the technical types among you. If you don’t care about a technical discussion about an unfinished feature, you can just read about the basics or jump right to the video showing some WIP pretty pixels.

The Basics

The problem we are trying to solve is how to use baked lighting on dynamic objects and characters. After lightmapping a scene all static objects have nice, high quality lighting. If we don’t do anything about the dynamic objects though, they might look dull and detached from the environment with their direct light and ambient only.

One solution is to use light probes to sample the nice baked lighting at various points in the scene. We can then interpolate the nearby probes to guess what would the lighting be at the current location of our character (or other moving object) and use the result to light the character.

Let’s see how it looks like in action! (Apologies for the cheesy lighting with over the top light bounce, but it makes it easier to illustrate the effect)

Read more: Unity 3D blog

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SilverSprite

Project Description

Run XNA games without code changes in Silverlight 3. SpriteBatch based graphics only, no 3D. Since the game compiles into straight Silverlight code, it will run anywhere that Silverlight can.

SilverSprite is brought to you by Silver Arcade http://www.silverarcade.com, an ad based game site for Silverlight games. Please consider hosting your game with Silver Arcade once you get it working. If your game is also on Xbox Live Community Games, we will feature that prominently and provide a link to the Xbox Live Marketplace page for your game.

Watch the Channel 9 video on SilverSprite here: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Continuum/SilverSprite/

See SilverSprite in action:

Farseer Physics XNA demos: http://www.bluerosegames.com/silverspritefarseerdemo

Xbox 360 version of Dr. Popper in the browser: http://www.bluerosegames.com/drpoppersilverxna.web/

Read more: Codeplex

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MonoGame

Project Description

MonoGame is a free implementation of the XNA Framework for MonoTouch, MonoDroid and Mac OS X. Our goal is to allow XNA developers on Windows and Windows Phone 7 to port of their games to the iPhone / iPod / Android / Touch (and vice versa), as seamlessly as possible.

See XnaTouch in action:

On the Apple iOS App Store

Console Wars

Think Thought Thunk

Rocket Station Alpha

Perplxt

Arca

Blow Him Up

On the Mac OS X App Store

Coming Soon

On the Android App Store

Coming Soon

Let us know about your XNATouch game/app that is on the Apple App Store, so we can feature it here.

Read more: Codeplex

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Crysis 2 Multiplayer Demo

As promised, Electronic Arts has released a multiplayer demo for Crysis 2 (PC, Xbox 360) offering two maps, two modes (Team Instant Action pits two teams against each other as they kill as many opponents as possible to win the round and Crash Site, where players will battle for control of alien drop pods, earning points by guarding their pods and keeping enemies at bay), and hours of multiplayer action. The first map, Skyline, is set along New York rooftops and is playable in Team Deathmatch. The second, Pier 17, is a more open map that's playable in Crash Site mode -- a variant of King of the Hill where you will fight for control of alien drop pods and rack up points in the process. The 1.6GB PC download can be found on AtomicGamer, CGO.ro, NVIDIA, GH, STEAM and SI. If you're an Xbox 360 user, you can download the demo from the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Read more: Gamrguru

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GDC11: Akamai launches net games publishing kit

Electronic Software Delivery for Gaming offers download aid and metrics insight
Cloud optimisation services firm Akamai Technologies has unveiled an online gaming solutions package for devs called Electronic Software Delivery for Gaming.

Akamai has said that the package, which comprises the Akamai Download Manager, Akamai Download Analytics and HTTP delivery, 'leverages the strengths of the Akamai network to enhance a consumer’s game download experience and increase download completion rates for publishers.'
The package is targeted at working with 'try-before-you-buy' MMOGs and free casual games. Akamai has also talked-up the download metrics and consumer behaviour information it makes available to publishers, as well as its business support models.

“The Internet has transformed the gaming industry and presented new opportunities for game distribution and monetisation,” said Akamai senior product line director Reynold Harbin.
“Online and digitally-distributed games have advantages over the traditional software-in-a-box retail model, including more efficient game distribution, global reach, more social gaming experiences, and the opportunity for innovative, new business models.

Read more: developer

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Press Start: launching Google Game Developer Central

Today, the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) officially kicks off in San Francisco. From browser technologies to cloud storage solutions, Google has many products and services that can be useful to game developers. Until now, it was hard for developers to track down information on how Google can help them build, distribute and monetize their games. This is why we are excited to release Google Game Developer Central.

Google Game Developer Central provides an overview of Google products and services that are particularly relevant to game developers. You’ll be able to explore different platforms like Chrome, learn about technologies such as GWT, WebGL and HTML5, and check out monetization options like AdMob.

Read more: The official Google Code blog
Read more: Google Game Developer Central 

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