From Abrash’s recent Game Developers Conference talk…

I’ve just spent 25 minutes telling you how hard VR is – and that’s certainly true. But realtime 3D was equally hard – just check out Chapter 64 in my Black Book about the lengths John went to in order to solve the potentially visible set problem, or think about how crude the early 3D accelerators were – and over time all that has worked out amazingly well.

This is the kind of opportunity that everyone in the gaming industry should dream of; if you want to do challenging work that has the potential to affect almost every game written in five or ten years, VR is a great place to be right now.

It really is like when I was working on Quake – a new world is emerging.

Both have written some great articles that describe VR implementation challenges in detail. If you are developing for the Oculus Rift you really need to read and understand these.

Michael Abrash

• Slides from my Game Developers Conference talk
• Two Possible Paths into the Future of Wearable Computing: Part 1 – VR
• Two Possible Paths into the Future of Wearable Computing: Part 2 – AR
• Raster-Scan Displays: More Than Meets The Eye
• Latency – the sine qua non of AR and VR
• When it comes to resolution, it’s all relative

John Carmack

• Latency mitigation strategies

Dishonored Demo

I started off playing QuakeCon 2012 with Arkane Studios’ new first person assassin game. I already did a full detailed experience of the demo and so I won’t say too much other than it was incredible to mess around with going stealth and going all out guns blazing. I found the weepers, the plague ridden citizens of Dunwall, to be very creepy and the tallboys to be a little intimidating at first. However, even with time and experience the most challenging part of the demo was certainly figuring out how to fulfill your mission. Even going guns blazing required some thought behind it.

The Annual Keynote with John Carmack

This is just a general welcoming and a few a lot of wise word from John Carmack. They started off stating the plan for the weekend and explaining what the prize car would be for this year. Every year they have a vehicle to raffle off and this year was a super sweet Shelby GT 500! They also announced that the previous organizer of QuakeCon, Marty Stratton, is stepping down and Michael Wolf has taken his place. I’m sure Michael will do an excellent job in the future QuakeCons. They also went to announce that they had demos of Dishonored and Doom 3 BFG Edition on the showfloor and that the Dawnguard expansion for Skyrim is currently available for the PC, but the PS3 version is still in the works. Also Steam decided to put together a really sweet QuakeCon sale and had all the Bethesda/id Software titles on a massive discount. I personally took advantage of the Doom/Quake sales they had. Also QuakeLive isn’t dead afterall. Last year John Carmack gave the impression that QuakeLive was simply not working out and is in the process of dying, but through a QuakeLive Pro membership they have slowly started to rebuild themselves. They are now offering a 1, 3, and 6 month Pro membership in addition to the previous annual one. If you are a previous annual member then you get 2 free months as well.

Then John Carmack stepped up to talk about a few things. He begun stating that Rage had a few flaws; this included the crappy ending and the checkpoint system. More importantly, he apologized deeply for the PC version of Rage as it had so many problems for many of its users. They really wanted to fix their mistakes and hash out a Rage 2 or something, but they figured that it would be best right now for the team to be focused on Doom 4. Which Bethesda the team decided it wouldn’t be best to talk about right now and wait for it to be more done. John also made a comment about his impression on games before and games now, and the way he sees it is that games are better now. Through the graphical and programming advances made since the olden days he believes that games are well made and more fun, but the old games are still so much harder and no less fun than what they used to be. Then things got really interesting with his keynote. He began to talk about virtual reality and how he expected it to be just awesome, but it hasn’t been too impressive in the past. So after a decade of waiting for someone to perfect it, he still didn’t see anything much better. Well John got tired of waiting and so he stepped into the equation finally and started doing things himself. Through this journey he encountered a fellow named Palmer Luckey who was behind this company Oculus and they were making this headset called Rift. John was extremely ecstatic and got behind it right away by putting Doom 3 BFG Edition as the first Oculus ready game.

The Game of Making Games Panel

A group of great game developing minds got together and answered a couple questions about making their games. Todd Howard from Bethesda says that great games are played and not made, meaning you play the game as you develop it to understand how to make it great. He feels that you can’t over design things, as it can get a little bit out of control sometimes and that you really need to understand how things feel in the game in order to make them work. Ted Price from Insomniac says that their games are tested daily, because a great idea on paper might not translate into a fun concept in the game. They mainly aim for a fun experience with their games and they really like crazy and unique weapons in their games. One downside to testing daily is realizing you might have to “kill your babies” (throw away your ideas) and that is a very difficult thing to do for everyone. Raphael Colantonio from Arkane Studios says you need to embrace the fact that there will be bugs, because that is an unavoidable fact in game developing. You need to design with the most basic rules and the way they do it is just design aspects separately then put them together in the game and experiment with how the game reacts. You literally let the game engine decide the outcome and progress of your game.

The age old question of how to actually get into game development was asked and these guys provided some great tips! For one, put your ego away. That is something everyone has a problem with, but you work as a team and for it to function you need to understand you aren’t the greatest thing ever. Also you need to find your passion in games whether it be fighting games, racing games, role playing games, etc… You also need to prepare for the difficulties, like mentioned earlier about having to “kill your babies”, and use modding tools in games to play around and create stuff. A lot of the id team is from the modding community. Probably most importantly though, is you need to have that drive to be good.

Interview with Harvey Smith

Harvey is an awesome guy and I was happy to get to speak with him for a few moments at QuakeCon. I already have a fully detailed description of our talk and so not much will be said here. I will say that Dishonored is a game bred from a group of people who love the first person stealth action kind of game and so that game is in good hands.

Capturing the Fan Panel

This was dedicated to understand the making of multiplayer games and featured some great minds behind some great multiplayer games. There was Max Hoberman from Certain Affinity whose first multiplayer experiences came from the Mac and then Warcraft 2 and Marathon, also we had Chet Faliszek from Valve Software who used to sit around and drink beer while playing Doom and Quake as his first multiplayer experience, and lastly was Marty Stratton from id Software who would go around arcades with friends trying to beat each others high scores and later Doom/Doom 2 and Command & Conquer as his first experiences. In terms of what makes multiplayer games engaging Stratton believes that it comes from the new experiences in the game developed when playing with friends; Max believes it comes from the epic and crazy unique moments that can only come from a multiplayer match and that we all are actually social creatures; Chet told of a story about a soldier in Afghanistan who would play Left 4 Dead with his wife in the states instead of talking over the phone or through Skype, because their own worlds were really sad and depressing (zombie world not too much better to be honest) and playing a game together got their minds off of it. Now we all have to wonder what goes through the mind of developers when they put/don’t put multiplayer in games that we play, so the panel gave some insight on that subject. Stratton says that a lot of different things filter into that process and with Rage for example, they just wish they had more time for it and he assures us they have big plans for multiplayer at id as well; Chet spoke in regards to Portal 2′s multiplayer, he said that he heard about people playing Portal by switching off to see if they could beat each others times and working along side each other to try solve the puzzles so at Valve they decided to implement a co-op feature that always required a second person; Max believes that not every game needs to have a competitive multiplayer experience and that co-op is the right direction, and more importantly he feels that if you are doing something then you need to do it right. At id, Stratton says that the biggest hurdle in multiplayer for them is trying to be a service and be a game at the same time. You have to understand the scope of it all very well and have a lot of resources available.

On the subject of how multiplayer is evolving Stratton says that the current tech drives the progress of games; Chet says that he doesn’t want to be tied down with mobile games, because they are time wasters and it isn’t tech or anything that drives multiplayer, it is the community; Max says that games that don’t require instantaneous reactions is growing and the reason is that way you don’t have to coordinate between friends. Next they go into detail about why modding is import and Chet says that it is important because it allows them to play the way they want and that those who do it should be justly rewarded; Stratton believes it is a huge part to games and would love to make it easier and the Rage editing tools are planning on being released sometime, but they hire a lot of people at id who were modders of their games first; Max wants to see more user-generated content on consoles, because even on consoles you can be creative like with the Halo forge mode and the community works around the limitations.

Next are a couple fan based questions such as why are some publishers encouraging or restricting modding? Chet says that unmodded games give a guaranteed experience; Stratton says that if you’re restricting mods then you have more control over the intellectual property; Max basically said their team was just like “ah screw it lets do it” to modding. The final question was in regards to the decision of LAN versus online connectivity. Stratton says they are gearing towards connectivity, but it is still important to have LAN; Chet says that the future is for connectivity, because patches and such allow for developers to take risks and that is a good thing; Max says that they want to bring the magic of LAN onto the online experience and it started for him with Halo 2.

The Virtual Insanity Panel

This panel is similar to the end of the keynote presentation, but goes into more detail and had a couple other brilliant minds up there such as Michael Abrash from Valve Software, John Carmack from id Software, and Palmer Luckey from Oculus/ModRetro. Michael actually worked on the original Quake games and in fact! Valve started off their company using the Quake code base apparently. Michael says that we’re at a point in the game industry like when Quake came about and revolutionized first person shooters, but this time with virtual/augmented reality. He believes that in full potential augmented reality will be a game changer and will appeal to the masses, but virtual reality will no doubt give the best gaming experience possible. He then went into saying that Valve is actually doing R&D with both AR(augmented reality) and VR(virtual reality) and would love to get games on the Oculus Rift. Palmer has been into VR most of his life and in fact owns 42 unique units of VR headsets and as he collected them he took them apart and reverse engineered them to understand it and he used what he learned to construct the Oculus Rift. I go into detail about the Rift and have videos on another article so make sure to check it out and learn more about it along with my personal experience with it.

Wrap-Up

So basically QuakeCon is amazing and there was a lot to see this year. Ranging from Arkane Studios’ supernatural assassin game to getting virtual with the Oculus Rift. Also no where else on the planet will you find as many people playing games in the same room… ever. I hope you guys make your way out to Dallas next year to check out what Bethesda and id Software have to bring to the table. I’m sure they’ll bring out Doom 4 next year too! *crosses fingers*

Luckey denies that he’s made any monumental advances in the technology behind virtual reality. He explains: “it isn’t even really me or Oculus or any other VR company that’s making this happen, it’s much bigger, more massive markets like the cell-phone industry and motion controllers in gaming”. “It’s because of those advances that have just really pushed forward in these past few years, all of a sudden the technology exists where we can make really good VR platforms just by using that existing technology.”  It appears capitalism is to thank for enabling these advances; the great leaps forward made in other consumer devices have enabled innovative ideas and opportunities to arise in niche areas such as virtual reality.

Carmack, when later asked about the possibility of having hundreds of games playable via the device mentioned that developers will definitely want to work with the Rift; even though it may not be financially appealing, it will at the very least be a useful PR device. He went on to mention that the use of the Rift would be ‘a secret weapon for Doom 4′s showing’. It’s great to see so much enthusiasm for this new virtual reality technology, as it has the potential to drastically change how we not only play games but also how they are designed and developed. Entirely new experiences may be the horizon if Oculus can realize their vision and bring virtual reality gaming to the masses.

If you’d like to watch the entire panel discussion click the link and look at some of the previous presentations from QuakeCon 2012, which include John Carmack’s Keynote and  ‘The Game of Making Games’ which features Todd Howard (Bethesda), Jens Matthies (MachineGames), Raphael Colantonio (Arkane Studios), and Ted Price (Insomniac Games).

(This article was originally published at New Gamer Nation)

First off go here and watch the promo video so you actually know what I’m talking about.

So the first question out of almost every ones mouth seems to be is it heavy? The first thought that comes to mind is of those massive heavy VR headsets from the 90s. Basically a pair of small CRT monitors strapped to your head. Let me put your mind at rest the Rift is seriously light. Not quite a pair of glasses but getting pretty close. I could easily see a few hours in the headset at a time with no discomfort. The product is still under development so I have no doubt it’s going to get even lighter and even more comfortable. The cable is the biggest hindrance to it’s comfort and some recent tweets by Palmer Luckey indicate he’s looking in to wireless HD video.

The field of view is very wide to the point where you don’t notice black spaces around the edges and your entire view is consumed. The outside world is simply gone.  To help suck you in to the immersion the headset is sporting some reasonably high res displays that when combined come out at a proper high def resolution. The 3D effect is a little tricky in that it’s so good. We’ve all gotten used to the slight blur and some times odd frame rates and things that go along with movie theater 3D glasses. None of these defects exist in the 3D created in the Rift and the result is that it’s smooth and natural and hardly seems like 3D since it appears as  our world appears in front of you. It’s interesting to think that this can create an uncanny valley of sorts. Not one of characters but one of environment. In fact the only thing that let on that this wasn’t the new real world was that the ground plane was visually straight but due to how the goggles were seated was off just the slightest bit. This created a disconnect between my eyes and my sense of balance.  Of course this issue was because we were standing while demoing and I’m sure is basically non-existant if you’re sitting.

So is this the next big thing in gaming? It’s hard to tell. There was a bit of an issue with looking around since you are used to turning your head and your torso to look at things and in the game your torso is represented by the right stick. This makes for a pretty awkward experience while turning. Part of this issue is due to a conversion of an old game not originally designed for the controller. Like wise the balance issue possess a bit of an issue for coupling the device with something like a Kinect or other motion tracking devices. It’s yet to be seen if that’s something people will adjust to or not and it’ll actually work but the initial experience wasn’t to promising.

The take away is that in the grand scheme of things, despite previous attempts, this thing is new thanks in part to modern technology. It’s going to be a long road to find out how and when this device will be truly useful. If you want to know more make sure you check out the “Virtual Insanity” panel from Quakecon with John Carmack (id Software), Michael Abrash (Valve), and Palmer Luckey (Oculus). Moderated by Todd Hollenshead (id Software).

Virtual reality (VR): Virtual reality  is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds. These are  visual experiences displayed either on a computer screen or through special stereoscopic displays etc.

It mainly deals with making the user feel to be in another space and work in environments different from his existing surroundings while he physically is present in his surroundings.

It provides virtual presence of users with the concepts of telepresence and telexistence or a virtual artifact (VA) either through the use of standard input devices such as a keyboard and mouse, or through multimodal devices such as a wired glove, the Polhemus, and omnidirectional treadmills. Using these devices the user can touch, feel and sense the virtual world and its objects –  it provides a life-like experience. Virtual Reality is being used in simulations for pilot or combat training, VR games etc.

Users normally view the VR’s using a head mounted displays and data suits.

Augmented reality (AR): Augmented reality is conventionally a binding of the real and virtual objects, in this the user will be in his original time space and surrounding while, integrated with his normal view he will be able to see virtual objects as well. Instead of considering AR and VR as opposites, AR can be considered as an extension of VR. It is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.

It provides a view of reality which is modified (possibly even diminished rather than augmented) by a computer. As a result, the technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality. By contrast, virtual reality replaces the real world with a simulated one. You may have seen the sports scores on the tv screen during a match, which is an example.

Head-up displays in AR cars such as some BMW 7 Series models or on airplanes are typically integrated into the windshield are other examples of VR.

Both these technologies are of immense use in many fields such as medical, navigation, industries, military, space programs, pilot training etc

Valve is one of the most successful independent game developers, and they’ve consistently pushed the form out to the edges, right to the point where you can feel a new art emerging. (See 1998′s release Half-Life for the origins of this approach.)

If most of the value is now in the initial creative act, there’s little benefit to traditional hierarchical organization that’s designed to deliver the same thing over and over, making only incremental changes over time. What matters is being first and bootstrapping your product into a positive feedback spiral with a constant stream of creative innovation. Hierarchical management doesn’t help with that, because it bottlenecks innovation through the people at the top of the hierarchy, and there’s no reason to expect that those people would be particularly creative about coming up with new products that are dramatically different from existing ones – quite the opposite, in fact. So Valve was designed as a company that would attract the sort of people capable of taking the initial creative step, leave them free to do creative work, and make them want to stay. Consequently, Valve has no formal management or hierarchy at all.
– Michael Abrash, Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing

In my own experience, the best work outcomes have happened in just these kinds of environments, ones where teams of creative people (across disciplines) are entrusted to do what they do best, and where management mainly works to support the playing field for the team. These situations are only possible when there’s massive trust in the capabilities and judgment of every person on the team, which Abrash also writes about.

Hardest of all to believe is the level of trust. Trust is pervasive. All of Valve’s source code is available to anyone in Perforce, and anyone at Valve can sync up and modify anything. Anyone can just up and work on whatever they think is worth doing; Steam Workshop is a recent instance of someone doing exactly that. Any employee can know almost anything about how the company works and what it’s doing; the company is transparent to its employees. Unlike many organizations, Valve doesn’t build organizational barriers to its employees by default; it just trusts them and gets out of their way so they can create value.

I think this perspective only works in practice if the leadership of a company operates from a view that every employee in their organization merits this kind of trust and respect — and this perspective itself presumes a baseline positive orientation towards human possibility that I see emerging in many new companies.

That’s huge, and exciting.

This is a bit of a departure from Friendly Fire’s usual fare, but I urge you to check out this blog post:

Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing

It was written by Michael Abrash. I’m prepared to admit that that name didn’t mean anything to me when I started reading the article; and I’ll also admit that, when I was done, I was rather ashamed of myself.

Monsieur Abrash worked at id Software, where he and John Carmack double-handedly (technically, I suppose, that could be construed as quad-handage) programmed Quake. Then, Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell asked him on their way out of Microsoft if he wanted to be the third founder of this company they were putting together, tentatively titled ‘Valve’. He said ‘nah, not really’ and went back to walking on water or whatever he was doing; along the way, though, he managed to contribute to what would eventually become Half-Life. Eventually, he gave in to Valve’s persistent wooing and joined them sometime last year.This post talks about part of the journey that landed him at Valve, but mostly about Valve itself. It’s pretty fascinating to be given this peek behind the curtains of one of the biggest companies in the gaming industry.

Thanks for the opportunity, Mr. Abrash. I’d wish you all the best for your new career at Valve; but, based on the above paragraph, I don’t think you really need it.

PS : You had me at ‘Snow Crash’. Why, oh why haven’t more people read Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk masterpiece?

Former employee of Microsoft and id Software is in the process of working on “wearable computing” prototype devices for Valve. Abrash explains in a blog post on the official Valve site that he’s been working on what he believes is ”the most valuable thing I could do at Valve,” making use of computer graphics that are overlaid onto what you see in the real world, just like Google’s Project Glass which was revealed not long ago. ”The underlying trend as we’ve gone from desktops through laptops and notebooks to tablets is one of having computing available in more places, more of the time,” Abrash stated as well as that he believes that this interface will “almost certainly” be available through glasses or contact lenses within the coming decade.

Two words: Dennou Coil. This is seriously one of the coolest cyberpunk fantasies ever dreamed up and it might actually be a reality. I’m pretty stoked but at the same time I know that everyone is probably gonna make it lame, especially if it’s actually popular. It might be like a tablet that you wear on your face. Gross. I’d rather see stuff that’s cool rather than stuff that’s casual and allows me to be more conveniently disconnected from everyone around me. But obviously that idea doesn’t get the majority vote. Cool stuff is unacceptable in any market. But anyway I do hope for the best of this. If Valve actually released products like this, which I doubt they will, it’d be pretty awesome I think(assuming that Apple isn’t too influential). Especially if games are supposed to be involved. Think of how much fun a kid could have with something like that. The technology could be used as a learning tool for toddlers as well, and then people would be freaking out about this new way of delivering media that’s destroying the next generation because it distorts their perceptions of reality supposedly. Nevermind, I’m ranting way too much about this, I just think it’s really cool, and maybe you should too. Maybe…

Source: Valve Software

Project Glass: is this what an Apple console would look like?

Apple boss Time Cook was spotted making an unexpected visit to Valve HQ on Friday, with US reports over the weekend speculating that the two companies are collaborating on a new home console.Earlier last week all the rumours were centred around Half-Life and Portal developer Valve making it is own home console, a so-called ‘Steam Box’ that worked together with Valve’s iTunes-inspired download service Steam.

It doesn’t seem as if things are anywhere near that simple though, with Valve’s Michael Abrash posting a lengthy blog entry on Saturday which describes what his new hardware project really is: wearable computing.

‘By ‘wearable computing’ I mean mobile computing where both computer-generated graphics and the real world are seamlessly overlaid in your view; there is no separate display that you hold in your hands (think Terminator vision), he wrote.The concept sounds very similar to Google’s recently announced Project Glass (illustrated in the video below), but Abrash is careful to make it clear that the technology won’t be viable for three to five years at the very earliest.’To be clear, this is R&D – it doesn’t in any way involve a product at this point, and won’t for a long while, if ever – so please, no rumours about Steam glasses being announced at E3,’ he says.That would seem to account for why Valve has been hiring so many new hardware people lately, and yet it doesn’t explain what their patent for a customisable joypad was all about or why the boss of Apple had popped by for a visit.Maybe he’d come round to hear about wearable computing, but it seems impossible to imagine Apple aren’t working on that sort of technology themselves. Instead websites such as Cult of Mac have convinced themselves that Valve and Apple are working on a home console together, with Steam at the centre of it.

According to Cult of Mac the collaboration won’t just involve the long rumoured, but never confirmed, Apple HDTV but also a ‘revolutionary home console’. The website claims that ‘Apple’s television set will come with an Apple-branded, Kinect-like video game console. The interface will rely heavily on motion and touch controls.’We’re not so sure though, and not only because they seem to think motion sensor Kinect is a video game console. Apple doesn’t tend to collaborate but rather invent its own technology, or at least buy out competitors.Perhaps an acquisition is what Tim Cook went to Valve to discuss, but that’s pure speculation on our part. The first step in finding out if there’s any truth to these rumours is getting an announcement on the Apple HDTV. This is rumoured to be happing this year, but then everyone said that last year too…Video:Check out the Project Glass trailer

Thoughts? Email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk or leave a comment below

That post led me to his .plan updates from back in the day. And I mean the italics: the day was the development of Quake.

There’s a great segment in his notes where he remarks on John Carmack’s focus, his drive to find a neater programming solution to a particularly hard problem – how to cull the most amount of work from the game’s renderer to let it run at as fast a frame rate as possible. As Michael put it back then: “Generally, if you find your code getting more complex, you’re fine-tuning a frozen design, and it’s likely you can get more of a speed-up, with less code, by rethinking the design.”

At id, John Carmack, really, really, really wanted to solve the problem. All manner of solutions were tried. I don’t understand a third of what that entailed. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure I understand the principle of the problem. But I love his determination.

“When I came in on Monday, John had the look of a man who had broken through to the other side–and also the look of a man who hadn’t had much sleep. He had worked all weekend on the direct-BSP approach, and had gotten it working reasonably well, with insights into how to finish it off. At 3:30 AM Monday morning, as he lay in bed, thinking about portals, he thought of precalculating and storing in each leaf a list of all leaves visible from that leaf, and then at runtime just drawing the visible leaves back-to-front for whatever leaf the viewpoint happens to be in, ignoring all other leaves entirely.”

Here’s a thought. Right now, we’re in a pre-launch holding pattern. There’s a new generation of consoles coming, and with it, a new generation of technical challenges. At this very second, some of the brightest minds on the planet are looking at the silicon arranged in front of them and are asking themselves, “how do we make THIS do THAT.” And they’ll answer “have you tried…”

One of my favourite memories of E3 this year was interviewing John Carmack on camera for a good half-an-hour. There’s a moment in it where John talks about why his tech matters: because if he solves the problem, artists can be let loose to create something incredible. The engine isn’t just for the engine’s sake: it’s to create a moving picture, and a place, and for an artist to come in and sculpt it into something beautiful

I can’t wait to see what next-gen games can look like. I can’t wait to see what our worlds can play like. And I can’t wait to hear about how it was done. Even if I’ll only understand a fraction of the details, I’ll understand the effort.

Oh, and wearable computing, eh? Valve <;3

1UP is also hosting a leaked video of the 3DS system (here)

Previously Banned in Australia, Games Now Available Through Steam – vg247 brings word that Steam’s Australian portal is now selling a handful of titles that had previously been banned due to falling outside of the country’s games rating system. These titles include Manhunt, Grand Theft Auto: III and San Andreas, Bully, Max Payne 1 and 2, and Midnight Club 2. Apparently they’re still awaiting official statements from the Australian Communication and Media Authority as well as Valve, while Rockstar’s Australian studio declined to comment. (Source: vg247)

Pandora Saga Open Beta Begins – Atlus Online has announced today that the open beta for Pandora Saga will begine 1/7/2011, which just so happens to also be today. Convenient. The announcement can be found on their website here.

BBC Reports PS3 Hacked, Master Key Published – The BBC is reporting that the same hacker who gained notoriety for jailbraking the iPhone has now deduced the PS3 Master Key, after an exploit was revealed by a group known as fail0verflow. This, according to group member “pytey”, completely compromises the system, allowing it to run unauthorized programs (such as pirated games.) Kevin Costner knew this was coming, stating only, “If you build it, they will hack.” Okay, that last part might not be true; but find the full BBC article here.

GDC Offers Look Back Through Time at ’97 Quake Tech Talk - The GDC blog post takes us back to the ’97 keynote speech by (former) id programmer Michael Abrash (found here.) The speech covers technologies and techniques used to program the then-recently-released game ‘Quake’. The blog article offers links to excerpts from the speech, and a full audio log, and also notes that the full video will be available sometime in the future.

All this stuff was well beyond me escaped my notice then, but I’ll mention that my very first PC upgrade was done solely for the purpose of being able to play this game. Good times. (Source: GDC)

Stardock (and ex-Fireaxis) Designer Jon Shafer on Middle-Market Games – In an interview with Gamasutra, Jon Shafer — the lead designer on Fireaxis’ Civilization V , now a designer with competitor Stardock — says the gaming “middle-market” is currently under served. He also offers an opinion on the advantages of this segment of the industry. The pertinent segment of the interview can be found here, which also includes a link to the full interview. (Source: Gamasutra)