Torque 3D goes for a web plugin

 Posted by (Visited 10828 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Jun 262009
 

Torque 3D looks to be challenging Unity for the 3d game in a plugin market; check out this feature on their home page:

Deploy any Torque 3D project from the World Editor to a web browser in seconds with our web publishing options. Torque 3D supports all major browsers and operating systems, including IE7, FF3, OS X and Chrome. Games perform at 100% native speed, with no performance cost, completely in your browser.

Both solutions,  of course, require that the plugins that host the native client be widely deployed, which is the biggest challenge. The gap between something like Flash or Javascript, and something like this, is measured in the hundreds of millions of installs. Of course, what you get for the native renderers in the plugins is desktop quality graphics.

The push on the other side, of course, is to upgrade the graphics in a form basically native to the browser, so you don’t need a plugin at all, or if you do it’s one you already have (because you visited YouTube once).

Lockhart’s Lament

 Posted by (Visited 9670 times)  Misc
Jun 252009
 

Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of disvovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion — not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a breakthrough idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it. Remove this from mathematics and you can have all the conferences you like; it won’t matter. Operate all you want, doctors; your patient is already dead.

— A Mathematician’s Lament, by Paul Lockhart (PDF).

Justin Smith / Inside Social Games – Social Gaming Summit Talk Slides

 Posted by (Visited 5381 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Jun 252009
 

Justin Smith’s slides for the Social Gaming Summit are a great overview of this burgeoning area. Keep in mind that virtual worlds are barely tapped in this area as of yet!

Justin Smith / Inside Social Games – Social Gaming Summit Talk Slides

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All VWs/games over 15+ banned in Australia?

 Posted by (Visited 7551 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jun 252009
 

The headline reads, “Confirmed: Second Life, online adult games to banned outright in Australia“. But I don’t know enough about the issue.

If true, it’s boneheaded. I dont think Australia bans books and movies intended for ages 15+, do they?

A spokesman for Censorship Minister Stephen “Goebbels” Conroy confirmed to Fairfax newspapers that “under the filtering plan, it will be extended to downloadable games, flash-based web games and sites which sell physical copies of games that do not meet the MA15+ standard.” In Australia, the MA15+ rating means that the content is restricted to those aged 15 and above. Australia does not have a R 18+ or similar rating for computer games, with all adult games automatically being classified as RC (Refused Classification.)

A commenter in the thread notes,

The reason it’s news now is because Conroy just got around to answering the latest batch of Senator Ludlum’s questions on notice in which he confirmed that games will be blacklisted – prior to this, many knowledgeable people in the debate assumed that they would somehow make an exception for games. See QON 1496(13) from the Hansard of Monday, 22 June 2009.

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