Gaming News Journal

Pickens writes "The Xbox 360 recently turned five years old, and with no known successor on the horizon for the 360, PlayStation 3 or Wii, Cnet reports on the death of the 5-year console cycle — one of the video game industry's most longstanding truisms. For example, the Nintendo Entertainment System came out in 1985, followed by the Super NES in 1991, the Nintendo 64 in 1996, the GameCube in 2001, and the Wii in 2006. But now, why should console makers upgrade their offerings? Consumers are still buying their machines by the hundreds of thousands each month, and ramped-up online initiatives are breathing new life into the systems. A lot of it has to do with the fact that with the current generation of consoles, each company found a way to maximize either the technology behind the devices, or the utility to a wide range of new gamers."

Upgrade Notes

Due to changes in PhysX you should re-save all of your content.

UDKGame

Fixed leaning during jumps in UDK.
Fixed UDKVehicle crash.
‘AllowNVidiaStereo3D’ is false by default for UDK.
Switched UDK maps over to use precomputed visibility.
Resaved UDK maps for updated PhysX changes.

Profiling

Gameplay profiler tool now available in UDK!
- ‘GamePlayProfiler’ is a tool that allows digging deeper into time spent in gameplay code.
- Read more:
  - http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/GameplayProfiler.html

Matinee

Allow movement tracks to be split so that translation and rotation components can be individually manipulated.
- Read more:

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MatineeUserGuide.html#Separating Translation and Rotation

matinee

You can now disable the audio radio filter effect in Matinee Kismet blocks.

Particle System improvements

Now supports multiple ribbons per emitter.
New ‘RandomSeed’ module in Cascade helps particles play back more consistently.
Random size and lifetime can now be specified per ribbon in an emitter.
Particle spawn rates are now clamped to prevent negative spawn rates.

Rendering

Added ‘ImageGrain’ to ‘UberPostProcess.’
Improved post processing.
- Uses less memory.
- Better CPU/GPU performance.
- Improved quality and consistency.
- New features such as HDR scale and film grain.
Optimized distortion pass.
Fixed multiple split-screen issues causing color leaking.
‘F5’ key now enables shader complexity mode by default.

Animation

Added support for rotating Joint Bone to ‘SkelControlLimb.’
Animation compression improvements.
- With automatic or the ‘CompressAnimations’ commandlet.
  - Savings of 30% over the previously compressed size are typical.
  - Can be much higher on some animations or with adjustments to the compression parameters.

Scaleform GFx

Integrated fix for sRGB handling with fonts from Scaleform.
GFx now supports Distance Field and RGBA UFonts.
Added a sample GFxUI.int to Engine/Localization/INT/.

DCC Tools (Max/Maya)

ActorX for Maya and Max 2011 is now supported.

PhysX

‘PhysXDestructible’ has been removed.
APEX destructibles are replacing them.

Other Improvements:

Workflow enhancements (e.g., find all materials using this texture, support for local collections to the Content Browser).
Fixed hitches during gameplay caused by long processing times for zero length linechecks.
OBJ mesh export now can generate a diffuse, specular and normal texture from the material.
Alternate mesh bone weight import tool has been much improved and supports both low->high and high->low bone count swapping.
Streaming texture stat enhancements including the new STAT TEXTUREPOOL command.
Landscape editing improvements.
The new color picker is now integrated into the mesh paint tool.
The mesh paint tool now supports flood fill.
Gamma can now be used even if the tonemapper is activated.
Texture properties can now be edited in bulk via the Content Browser.

UDN Pages

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/UDKTrademarksAndLogos.html
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/CapturingCinematicsAndGameplay.html
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/GameStatsVisualizerReference.html
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/CreatingGameStatsVisualizers.html
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/InstrumentingGameStatistics.html
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/HitMask.html

Updated

Source: http://www.epicgames.com/news/epic-games-releases-september-2010-unreal-development-kit-beta

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Gaming News Journal

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Crosshairs--Dead Space 2, Shift 2 Unleashed, Battlefield Play4Free

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Halloween is almost here!

The 5-Year Console Cycle Is Dead

New Web Store icon appears in Google Chrome

The Wizard of Blox

Wakeboard Pro

Epic Games Releases September 2010 Unreal Development Kit Beta