Tag Archives: gaming

For Riot Games, Big Data Is Serious Business

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Once Riot Games opened up a European base of operations, it couldn’t fit all its data into one instance of mySQL. “So we created a separate instance. That was a bad precedent and we needed to change that,” Livingston added. “We moved quickly to Hadoop as a scalable low-cost storage system. We use Hive to overlay an SQL-type interface on top of the Hadoop File System.” That helped scale up, but “the downside is that it takes a long time to spin up to do your queries, some taking a minute or more to complete, so it is difficult to iterate and build complex queries using Hive.”

via For Riot Games, Big Data Is Serious Business.

Part of the challenge is to maintain a level playing field for all players, yet constantly tweaking game play and game mechanics to make it more interesting for returning players: “We need lots of insight so that competitive play will continue to happen. We don’t want different versions of the game for pros and noobs, for example.”

A Slower Speed of Light | MIT Game Lab

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A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. Custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics code allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player’s own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect red- and blue-shifting of visible light, and the shifting of infrared and ultraviolet light into the visible spectrum; the searchlight effect increased brightness in the direction of travel; time dilation differences in the perceived passage of time from the player and the outside world; Lorentz transformation warping of space at near-light speeds; and the runtime effect the ability to see objects as they were in the past, due to the travel time of light. Players can choose to share their mastery and experience of the game through Twitter. A Slower Speed of Light combines accessible gameplay and a fantasy setting with theoretical and computational physics research to deliver an engaging and pedagogically rich experience

via A Slower Speed of Light | MIT Game Lab.

Valve: Linux More Viable Than Windows 8 for Gaming

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In a presentation at Ubuntu Developer Summit currently going on in Denmark, Drew Bliss from Valve said that Linux is more viable than Windows 8 for gaming. Windows 8 ships with its own app store and it is moving away from an open platform model.

via Valve: Linux More Viable Than Windows 8 for Gaming ~ Ubuntu Vibes | Daily Ubuntu Linux Updates.

Ubuntu is preferred platform as it has a large user base and good community support with a strong company like Canonical behind it.

The Game Console Is Dead. What Will Replace It?

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The pressure to evolve even further has become immense now that the quality gap between cheap-or-free games and full-price ones is narrowing. The best iPad games look like middle-of-the-road Xbox 360 games. Your smartphone is quickly getting to the point where its hardware could display good-looking games in 1080p on your television, and it won’t be long before your phone and TV can sync up without cables.

via Consolation Prize: The Game Console Is Dead. What Will Replace It? | Game|Life | Wired.com.

Gaming aficionados will pay up, they say, because the bigger games are of higher quality. But only a handful of developers can now afford to play in this rarefied and risky space, and even for these few, the returns will be smaller. The new leaders in the game, insiders predict, will be those who can shift resources into less ambitious, higher-return products, leaving the future of high-end games in serious doubt over the long haul.

The New Microsoft Walled Garden

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For the first time in the history of the PC, Microsoft is rolling out a new Windows ecosystem for which they will be the sole software distributor. If you buy Windows 8, the only place you will be able to download software that integrates with its new user interface will be the official Windows Store. Microsoft will have complete control over what software will be allowed there.

via Critical Detail.

This article has a very lengthy description of Microsoft Windows and MS-DOS describing  past evolution of the PC to where it is now going.  In essence, Microsoft want to be like Apple.  It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the next year.  Here’s another blurb:

Now, this is apparently a point of some contention. Perhaps because Microsoft has not made a bigger deal about it in their press releases, not everyone believes that distributing software for the modern UI will require developers to get Microsoft’s permission. But they are wrong. In order to set the record straight once and for all, a complete, thoroughly researched analysis of Microsoft’s official publications on the subject is included as Appendix B to this article. It demonstrates that there is no method for developers to distribute modern UI applications to the internet at large without receiving explicit approval from Microsoft.

cHTeMeLe is a board game about HTML

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Despite cHTeMeLe’s technical theme, its developers claim you don’t need any web programming experience to play. The game takes web design standards and boils them down into game rules that even children can learn. To help less technical players keep everything straight, the tag cards use syntax highlighting that different parts of code have unique colors — just like an Integrated Developer Environment. No one is going to completely pick up HTML5 purely by playing cHTeMeLe, but it does have some educational value for understanding basic tags and how they fit together.

via cHTeMeLe is a board game about HTML – Video Games Reviews, Cheats | Geek.com.

Entire Cities in World of Warcraft Dead, Hack Suspected

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Some particular user going by the name ‘Jadd’ has posted a video claiming to have nuked entire cities. There is no official news of Blizzard as yet about the reason behind the dead cities. We have got the videos [below].

[Update]: There is a lot of chatter on Ycombinator and WOWInsider about this story.

via Entire Cities in World of Warcraft Dead, Hack Suspected – ParityNews.com: …Because Technology Matters.

Zynga’s weak pivot to mobile, loss of casual gamers turns serious

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Wall Street’s excitement over a game publisher once counted among the stars of the new social Internet has cooled since its December initial public offering. On Friday, analysts slashed their price targets on a stock that dived as much as 22 percent, to $2.21 – more than three-quarters off its $10 debut.

via Zynga’s weak pivot to mobile, loss of casual gamers turns serious – chicagotribune.com.

How video games are becoming the next great North American spectator sport

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They’re all here to watch professional gaming teams battle it out in the North American regional finals in League of Legends, a PC action-strategy game that has exploded in the competitive video gaming scene over the past year. The tournament’s winning team will take home $40,000 and a trip to the World Championship in October, where the victor will net $2 million and international fame.

via How video games are becoming the next great North American spectator sport | Ars Technica.

In the last year or so, though, eSports has undergone a sudden exponential growth. The Major League Gaming Spring Championship in June (which featured tournaments in four high-profile games like Starcraft II and Mortal Kombat) attracted 4.7 million online viewers over three days in June, peaking at 437,000 concurrent viewers. That’s substantially more than all of their 2011 events combined. Over 2.2 million viewers tuned in to Ustream internet broadcast of the 2011 EVO fighting game championships from a packed ballroom in Las Vegas.

Zynga’s weak earnings show social gaming’s diminishing returns

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Zynga’s stock fell roughly 40 percent, to a price of just over $3, after the company posted per-share earnings of just a penny, well below analysts expectations of 6 cents a share. The stock is down almost 80 percent from a high of $14.69 back in March, and market analysts have severely scaled back their guidance on the company. “We were wrong about the current state of Zynga’s business,” Morgan Stanley’s Scott Devitt said flatly in an analyst note. “Something smells in FarmVille,” wrote Evercore analyst Ken Sena, who thinks the stock will continue to fall.

via Zynga’s weak earnings show social gaming’s diminishing returns | Ars Technica.

What’s really troubling for Zynga, though, is that each new release seems to be seeing further diminishing returns, with smaller user peaks and quicker drop-offs. While CityVille managed to attract over 100 million users at its peak in early 2011, CastleVille peaked at just over 50 million monthly users after launching last November, and is already back down to 16.7 million players (The Ville, which launched earlier this month, is still in the “quick growth” phase of the pattern). This isn’t that surprising, since with each new wave of what’s essentially the same game, more players are likely to be overly familiar with the basic concepts already, and get bored that much quicker.