[…]

Today, via Reddit (while most the English-speaking world is on a holiday), it’s been announced that Need For Speed: Carbon, Need For Speed: Undercover, Need For Speed: Shift, Shift 2: Unleashed and Need For Speed: The Run will be “retired”. Which I suppose is an apposite word, given they’ll be limping off the tracks as they leave digital storefronts today, and their servers switched off come the end of August.

The reasons given are the usual: that maintaining servers for the few remaining players is prohibitively expensive, and hey, look, they’ve released loads of (astoundingly poor) NFS games since then, so you could buy those instead!

“[T]he number of players has come to a point where it’s no longer feasible to continue the work behind the scenes required to keep [the games] up and running. We hope you have gotten many victories, satisfying drifts, moments of friendly rivalry, and hours of joy over the last few years out of these games. And we hope you’ll keep driving with us in one of our newer titles…”

It’s always this way. “Shrug! What else could we do?!” Well, here are some other things they could do:

• They could release the source code for the 10-15 year old games, and allow others to continue their development in the public domain
• They could release the server code for the games, to allow enthusiasts to continue to host the few dedicated players remaining
• They could offer to upgrade players to one of the many NFS games of the 2010s (although this may be crueller than just nothing at all)
• They could recognise that last year EA made a revenue of $5.5bn, and it’s likely they could just about afford to leave the servers on with minimal maintenance, without taking too big of a hit

[…]

Source: Many Need For Speed Games Are About To Be Erased From Reality

[…]

tl;dr

• There’s a single thread CPU bottleneck while starting up GTA Online
• It turns out GTA struggles to parse a 10MB JSON file
• The JSON parser itself is poorly built / naive and
• After parsing there’s a slow item de-duplication routine

R* please fix

If this somehow reaches Rockstar: the problems shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve. Please do something about it :<

You could either switch to a hashmap for the de-duplication or completely skip it on startup as a faster fix. For the JSON parser – just swap out the library for a more performant one. I don’t think there’s any easier way out.

Source: How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

Video games look really good these days. I boot up almost any PS4 game released in the last few years and I’m impressed. But while games might look nicer than ever before, we lost cool looking “heads-up displays”, HUDs, in the process. Was it worth it?

I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey lately. A lot. And it got me interested in the past games, most of which I played long ago when they first released. In going back and looking at these games, I immediately noticed something. Their HUDs were so much cooler than what’s in Odyssey.

Here’s a screenshot of Odyssey via Stephen’s wonderful post about an annoying bow that he kept finding.

Now here’s a screenshot of the first Assassin’s Creed via WSGF.com.

Look at the weird map! And the cool looking DNA-inspired life bar. I also like how high contrast it feels. Odyssey’s HUD is clean and efficient. It gets the job done, for sure, but it lacks personality. And if we go back even further, to the PS2 era of gaming, we can find even more wild HUDs, as pointed about by Twitter user @BlacWeird a few months back.

Here’s what the HUD looked like in SkyGunner. It’s got a steampunk vibe to it.

Or how about Project Snowblind. What is happening in that mini-map in the top right? I have no idea.

And even a less obscure PS2 game, the original God of War, had a giant sword for its health meter.

Compared that last screen to this screenshot from the newest entry in the God of War series, confusingly named God of War, released on PS4 back in 2018.

Again, like Odyssey, it works great. But it also has almost no personality. It’s boring. And yet, for the most part, this is what all video game HUDs have become. Clean, slightly transparent boxes and white lines that often fade away when not needed. I understand, and even agree, that these new HUDS are more effective at translating information and data to players. But there has to be a middle ground?

An example of a game that has HUD graphics that aren’t boring, but not too weird or big is last year’s Devil May Cry 5.

The text is sharp and clean and the icons are small, but there’s also a variety of colors, a weird devil face, and some broken glass on the corners. It has style. It doesn’t look like a console from a JJ Abrams Star Trek film. It looks exciting but also I can clearly understand what information the game is sharing with me, which is always vital.

Source: Video Game HUDs Used To Be Cool

Ubisoft thinks it has a simple way to encourage people to stay at home and wait out the COVID-19 pandemic: shower them with games. It’s running a month-long campaign that will give away free games, trials, discounts and other offers to give you something to do while you’re cooped up. It’s starting things off by offering the PC version of Rayman Legends for free on Uplay from now through April 3rd. It’s an old title, to be sure, but it might hit the spot if you’re looking for an upbeat game to remind you that things will get better.

Future offers will be available through Ubisoft’s Free Events site.

There’s no doubt that Ubi is using this partly as a promotional tool for its catalog. You might try a game you skipped the first time around, or might feel compelled to subscribe to Uplay+ to see more. At the same time, it might be particularly useful in some households. Not everyone has a backlog of games to burn through until lockdowns come to an end, let alone the money to buy more.

Source: Ubisoft offers free games to encourage you to stay at home | Engadget

The developers of cutesy Animal Crossing–Pokemon mashup Ooblets just had a weekend from hell. After trying to preempt a tidal wave of rage over their newly announced Epic Games Store exclusivity, they got hit with a swirling tsunami of foaming-at-the-mouth anger, up to and including death threats and anti-Semitic hoaxes. This is the worst overreaction to an Epic deal that’s yet been publicized. It’s also part of a larger trend that the video game industry has let run rampant for far too long.

Today, Ooblets designer Ben Wasser published a lengthy Medium post about the harassment that he and his sole teammate at development studio Glumberland, programmer/artist Rebecca Cordingley, have been subjected to. In it, he discussed in detail what he’s only alluded to before, showing numerous screenshots of threatening, often racist and sexist abuse and pointing to coordinated efforts to storm the Ooblets Discord and propagate fabricated messages that made it look like Wasser said anti-Semitic things about gamers. In part, he blamed the tone of his tongue-in-cheek announcement post for this, saying that while it’s the tone the Ooblets team has been using to communicate with fans since day one, it was a “stupid miscalculation on my part.”

It is, on no uncertain terms, insane to expect that anyone might have to deal with a reaction like this because of some slight snark in a post about what is to them very good news. Actually, let’s just sit with that last point for a second: If you’re a fan of Ooblets, the Epic Store announcement is fantastic news; no, you don’t get to play it on Steam, and yes, the Epic Store is a weird, janky ghost town of a thing that’s improving at an alarmingly slow rate, but thanks to Epic’s funding, Ooblets and the studio making it are now guaranteed to survive. Thrive, even, thanks to additional staff and resources. You’ve got to download another (free) client to play it, but you get the best possible version of the game you were looking forward to, and its creators get to keep eating, which is something that I’ve heard keeps people alive.

And yet, in reaction to this, people went ballistic, just like they have so many times before. This is our default now. Every tiny pinprick slight is a powder keg. Developers may as well have lit matches taped to their fingers, because any perceived “wrong” move is enough to set off an explosive consumer revolt. And make no mistake, the people going after Ooblets were not fans, as evidenced by the fact that, according to Wasser, they didn’t even know how the game’s Patreon worked. Instead, they were self-described “consumers” and “potential customers” who felt like the game’s mere existence granted them some impossibly huge stake in its future. Wasser talked about this in his post:

“We’ve been told nonstop throughout this about how we must treat ‘consumers’ or ‘potential customers’ a certain way,” he said. “I understand the relationship people think they might be owed when they exchange money for goods or services, but the people using the terms consumers and potential customers here are doing so specifically because we’ve never actually sold them anything and don’t owe them anything at all… Whenever I’ve mentioned that we, as random people happening to be making a game, don’t owe these other random people anything, they become absolutely enraged. Some of the most apparently incendiary screenshots of things I’ve said are all along these lines.”

We need to face facts: This kind of mentality is a major force in video game culture. This is what a large number of people believe, and they use it as a justification to carry out sustained abuse and harassment. “When presented with the reality of the damage inflicted, we’ve seen countless people effectively say ‘you were asking for it,’” said Wasser. “According to that logic, anything anyone says that could rub someone the wrong way is cause for the internet to try to ruin their life. Either that, or our role as two people who had the nerve to make a video game made us valid targets in their minds.”

Things reached this deranged fever pitch, in part, because companies kowtowed to an increasingly caustic and abusive consumer culture, frequently chalking explosive overreactions up to “passion” and other ostensibly virtuous qualities. This culture, to be fair, is not always out of line (see: loot boxes, exploitative pricing from big publishers, and big companies generally behaving in questionable ways), but it frequently takes aim at individuals who have no actual power and contains people who are not opposed to using reprehensible mob tactics to achieve their goals—or just straight up deploying consumer-related concerns as an excuse to heap abuse on people and groups they hate. While the concerns, targets, and participants are not always the same, it’s hard to ignore that many of these mob tactics were pioneered and refined on places like 4chan and 8chan, and by movements like Gamergate—other pernicious elements that the gaming industry has widely failed to condemn (and has even engaged with, in some cases).

In the world of PC gaming, Valve is the biggest example of a company that utterly failed to keep its audience in check. Valve spent years lingering in the shadows, resolutely remaining hands-off until everything caught on fire and even the metaphorical “This is fine” dog could no longer ignore the writing on the wall. Or the company got sued. In this environment, PC gamers developed an oppositional relationship with game makers. Groups sprung up to police what they perceived as sketchy games—but, inevitably, they ended up going after perfectly legitimate developers, too. Users flooded forums when they were upset about changes to games or political stances or whatever else, with Valve leaving moderation to often-understaffed development teams instead of putting its foot down against abuse. Review bombs became a viable tactic to tank games’ sales, and for a time, any game that ran afoul of the larger PC gaming consumer culture saw its score reduced to oblivion, with users dropping bombs over everything from pricing decisions to women and trans people in games.

Smaller developers, utterly lacking in systemic or institutional support, were forced to respond to these attacks, granting them credibility. The tactics worked, so people kept using them, their cause justified by the overarching idea that many developers are “lazy” and disingenuous—when, in reality, game development is mind-bogglingly difficult and takes time. Recently, Valve has begun to take aim at some of these issues, but the damage is already done.

Whether unknowingly or out of malice, Valve went on to fire the starting gun for this same audience to start giving Epic Store developers trouble. When publisher Deep Silver announced that Metro Exodus would be an Epic Store exclusive, Valve published a note on the game’s Steam store page calling the move “unfair.” Inevitably, Steam review bombs of previous games in the series followed, as did harassment of individual developers and even the author of the books on which the Metro video game series is based. Soon, this became a pattern when any relatively high-profile game headed toward Epic’s (at least temporarily) greener pastures.

That brings us to Ooblets. The game’s developers are facing astounding abuse over what is—in the grand scheme of life, or even just media platforms—a minor change of scenery. But they’re not backing down.

“I recognize that none of this post equates to an apology in any way that a lot of the mob is trying to obtain, and that’s by design,” Wasser wrote in his Medium post. “While some of what I’ve said was definitely bad for PR, I stand behind it. A portion of the gaming community is indeed horrendously toxic, entitled, immature, irrationally-angry, and prone to joining hate mobs over any inconsequential issue they can cook up. That was proven again through this entire experience. It was never my intention to alienate or antagonize anyone in our community who does not fit that description, and I hope that you can see my tone and pointed comments were not directed at you.”

And while Epic is, at the end of the day, an industry titan deserving of some of the scrutiny that gets hurled its way, it’s at least taking a stand instead of washing its hands of the situation like Valve and other big companies have for so long.

“The announcement of Ooblets highlighted a disturbing trend which is growing and undermining healthy public discourse, and that’s the coordinated and deliberate creation and promotion of false information, including fake screenshots, videos, and technical analysis, accompanied by harassment of partners, promotion of hateful themes, and intimidation of those with opposing views,” Epic said in a statement yesterday, concluding that it plans to “steadfastly support our partners throughout these challenges.”

So far, it seems like the company has been true to its word. “A lot of companies would’ve left us to deal with all of this on our own, but Epic has been by our side as our world has gone sideways,” said Wasser. “The fact that they care so much about a team and game as small as us proves to us that we made the right call in working with them, and we couldn’t be more thankful.”

That’s a step in the right direction, and hopefully one that other companies will follow. But the gaming industry has allowed this problem to grow and grow and grow over the course of many years, and it’s hard to see a future in which blowups like this don’t remain a regular occurrence. In his post, Wasser faced this sad reality.

“I hope that laying all this out helps in some way to lessen what pain is brought against whoever the next targets are, because we sadly know there will be many,” he said. “You should have opinions, disagree with things, make arguments, but don’t try to ruin people’s lives or jump on the bandwagon when it’s happening. What happened to us is the result of people forgetting their humanity for the sake of participating in video game drama. Please have a little perspective before letting your mild annoyance lead to deeply hurting a fellow human being.”

Source: Epic Store Rage Has Gotten Out Of Hand

This is insane

Phantom Brigade is a hybrid turn-based & real-time tactical RPG, focusing on in-depth customization and player driven stories. As the last surviving squad of mech pilots, you must capture enemy equipment and facilities to level the playing field. Outnumbered and out-gunned, lead The Brigade through a desperate campaign to retake their war-torn homeland.

 

Source: Phantom Brigade | Brace Yourself Games

Game developer and designer Rich Whitehouse gave the world an unusual present this Christmas Eve. It’s called Doomba, and it uses the popular Roomba vacuuming robots to create levels for Doom, the classic first-person shooter.

Whitehouse is a 20-year veteran of the game industry, with credits on titles such as the original Prey and Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast. Along the way, he also built a tool called Neosis, which helps game developers and designers move digital assets between different platforms. The Doomba module works on similar principles; it just takes the digital maps created by the Roomba’s own internal software and converts them into Doom levels.

So what’s your Roomba doing creating maps of the inside of your house? Many of iRobot’s modern robotic vacuums rely on VSLAM, also known as visual simultaneous localization and mapping. Rather than wandering around like slow-moving ping-pong balls, modern Roomba devices methodically sweep back and forth in long passes like they’re mowing your lawn. That makes them much more efficient than previous models.

To do the work, some Roombas use a creepy little electronic eyeball to create detailed maps of your home. Doomba takes that map and makes it into a level of Hell.

As Whitehouse explains, it was fairly short work to turn his creation toward evil.

“I soon realized that there was a clear opportunity to serve the Dark Lord by conceiving a plethora of unholy algorithms in service to one of the finest works ever created in his name,” Whitehouse writes on his personal blog. “Simultaneously, I would be able to unleash a truly terrible pun to plague humankind. Now, the fruit of my labor is born. I bring forth DOOMBA, a half-goat, half-script creature, with native binary backing for the expensive parts, to be offered in place of my firstborn on this fine Christmas Eve.”

Source: This Roomba can create its own Doom levels – Polygon

“Red Dead Redemption 2” broke records in its first three days on sale, pulling in more than $725 million in worldwide retail sales and achieving the biggest opening weekend in the history of entertainment, developer Rockstar Games announced.

That tops the highest-grossing movie in history, “Avengers: Infinity Wars,” which earned more than $640 million during its opening weekend earlier this year. But “Red Dead Redemption 2” still isn’t the highest grossing entertainment launch of all time. That honor also goes to Rockstar Games for “Grand Theft Auto V,” which earned more than $1 billion in sell-through in its first three days. Because “Grand Theft Auto V” launched on a Tuesday, it left the door open for “Red Dead Redemption 2’s” — which launched on a Friday — record-setting weekend.

Rockstar also reports that according to Sony Interactive Entertainment, “Red Dead Redemption 2” set records for highest ever pre-orders, highest day one sales and highest sales for the first three days in market on the PlayStation Network.

“Red Dead Redemption 2” is currently the highest critically reviewed game on the PlayStation 4, with an average score of 97 on Metacritic, and the top game on Xbox One, also with an average score of 97 on Metacritic.

Source: ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ Earns Record-Breaking $725M Opening Weekend – Variety

SUBSCRIBE AND GET A LOT OF GAMES

Humble Monthly is a curated bundle of games sent to your inbox every month. Subscribe for $12/month to immediately unlock Destiny 2 ( MSRP: $59.99) with more to come! Build the ultimate game library. Every game is yours to keep. Cancel anytime.

Redeem on Blizzard Battle.net

10% off the Store

Support Charity

$100+ in Games Each Month

Source: Humble Monthly

SpyParty is a tense competitive spy game set at a high society party. It’s about subtle behavior, perception, and deception, instead of guns, car chases, and explosions. One player is the Spy, trying to accomplish missions while blending into the crowd. The other player is the Sniper, who has one bullet with which to find and terminate the Spy!

Source: SpyParty – A Subtle Game About Human Behavior

Pokémon Go and other games that use real-world maps are all the rage, but there’s a catch: they typically depend on semi-closed map frameworks that weren’t intended for gaming, forcing developers to jump through hoops to use that mapping info. Google doesn’t want that to be an issue going forward. The search firm is both opening its Maps platform’s real-time data and offering new software toolkits that will help developers build games based on that data.

The software includes both a kit to translate map info to the Unity game engine as well as another to help make games using that location data. The combination turns buildings and other landmarks into customizable 3D objects, and lets you manipulate those objects to fit your game world. It can replace every real hotel into an adventurer’s inn, for instance, or add arbitrary points of interest for the sake of checkpoints.

Source: Google opens Maps to bring the real world into games

A group of video game preservationists wants the legal right to replicate “abandoned” servers in order to re-enable defunct online multiplayer gameplay for study. The game industry says those efforts would hurt their business, allow the theft of their copyrighted content, and essentially let researchers “blur the line between preservation and play.”

Both sides are arguing their case to the US Copyright Office right now, submitting lengthy comments on the subject as part of the Copyright Register’s triennial review of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Analyzing the arguments on both sides shows how passionate both industry and academia are about the issue, and how mistrust and misunderstanding seem to have infected the debate.

Source: Game industry pushes back against efforts to restore gameplay servers | Ars Technica

That’s the problem with the Cloud(tm). IMHO you paid for the game and thus should have the right to play it, also after the games company takes down the server hosting it. If the game industry doesn’t like it, they should keep the servers up. Maybe that’s the case they should argue: once you sell a server centralised game, you are obligated to keep up the server for perpituity.

0 A.D. (pronounced “zero-ey-dee”) is a free, open-source, historical Real Time Strategy (RTS) game currently under development by Wildfire Games, a global group of volunteer game developers. As the leader of an ancient civilization, you must gather the resources you need to raise a military force and dominate your enemies.
[…]
We intend to portray some of the major civilizations over the millennium of 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. (Hence the midpoint, zero.) That is an ambitious prospect, so in the first edition of 0 A.D. we focus on the last five centuries B.C. Perhaps in future expansion packs, more civilizations will be added, along with additional gameplay features.

We put a strong emphasis on historical accuracy while developing 0 A.D. We plan all our units and all our buildings based on reconstructions of how the units and the buildings might have looked like in the ancient world. We even name them in the original languages, such as Greek and Latin. But it’s worth remembering that any game should be fun to play, so, in many cases, we preferred playability over historical accuracy.

Source: 0 A.D. | A free, open-source game of ancient warfare

POSTAL 1 source code.

Source: gopostal / POSTAL 1 Open Source — Bitbucket

Go play with Postal!

According to an official Activision support page, both games will be available for separate purchase through Microsoft’s storefront. These will be entirely separate products from the Xbox One versions of the game and won’t take advantage of the Xbox Play Anywhere initiative. This eliminates both cross-platform multiplayer and purchases between Windows 10 and Xbox One, requiring two separate purchases to play on both platforms.

While it’s somewhat expected that Xbox One players and PC players should be separated, due to the accuracy gulf between controllers and mouse players, it’s a little unexpected that Windows 10 Store players will be isolated from other PC versions of the game.

Source: [Updated] Call of Duty Infinite Warfare is coming to the Windows 10 Store – with caveats

So… why buy from Win10? Dunno…

Almost a decade ago, a talented team started working on what was to become the favorite game for many of us. Version 0.7.1, released in 2013, was to be the final version of MechWarrior: Living Legends by Wandering Samurai Studios.

Our community has stayed loyal and active since then, bringing us amazing events such as Chaos March, Planetary League and Open Merc Night. For this community, we have worked hard towards a new release. Introducing MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.8 – Community Edition!

Using the experience gained from years of public and league gameplay and numerous player requests, we have refined just about everything for a more balanced, player-friendly experience. Of course this also includes a ton of fixed bugs and new shiny!

We are dedicated to finish what Wandering Samurai started, and this is just the beginning. Upcoming patches will focus on bringing in new toys, further refining gameplay and making this game better than ever.

Source: MechWarrior: Living Legends Community Edition

This is an incredible mod of Crysis wars and new life is being breathed into this wonderful product.

Open Source reimplementation of Westwood Studios’ 2D Command and Conquer games

OpenRA is a project that recreates and modernizes the classic Command & Conquer real time strategy games. We have developed a flexible open source game engine (the OpenRA engine) that provides a common platform for rebuilding and reimagining classic 2D and 2.5D RTS games (the OpenRA mods).

This means that OpenRA is not restricted by the technical limitations of the original closed-source games: it includes native support for modern operating systems and screen resolutions (including Windows 10, Mac OS X, and most Linux distros) without relying on emulation or binary hacks, and features integrated online multiplayer.

While we love the classic RTS gameplay, multiplayer game design has evolved significantly since the early 1990’s. The OpenRA mods include new features and gameplay improvements that bring them into the modern era:

A choice between “right click” and classic “left click” control schemes
Overhauled sidebar interfaces for managing production
Support for game replays and an observer interface designed for streaming games online
The “fog of war” that obscures the battlefield outside your units’ line of sight
Civilian structures that can be captured to provide benefits
Units gain experience as they fight and improve when they earn new ranks

OpenRA is 100% free, and comes bundled with three distinct mods. When you run a mod for the first time the game can automatically download the original game assets, or you can use the original game disks.

Source: OpenRA

Happy game building!

Source: Amazon Lumberyard Downloads