iDevGames

Thirteen 3D Dashboard Widget games created in just two weeks by as many teams are now up for public voting. At least four of those teams were comprised of iDevGames regulars. Six of the Widgets have been open-sourced under a BSD license by their creators so that others may learn from their work (and mistakes). Visit the site and vote for your favorite widget! Created by 13 individuals and small teams with many different skills and backgrounds, there are action games, puzzle games, puzzling games, polished games, cool gameplay ideas, remakes, each Widget game quite quite dazzling. The Widgets in the contest were created using Unity, a 3D game editor which happens to contain one of the most advanced game engines in the Universe.

The only Mac-like tool to create 3D games, it is packed with power and built to meet the demands of next-generation game developers. Apart from Dashboard Widgets, Unity produces Mac and Windows standalone games, and games can be deployed to be played in Mac-based web-browsers. (Hint: because of limitations of Dashboard, the Widgets run somewhat slower than they should in there. Therefore you can press Cmd-F (or click a full-screen icon) to switch them to full-screen mode.) Everyone who likes small and free games is encouraged to come over and try out as many as will tempt them. Afterwards you can head over to the forum to throw your Ballot on the Widget you love the most.

The Unity Dashboard Widget Challenge

http://otee.dk/widget-challenge.html

OverTheEdge

http://otee.dk/

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voting,begins,in,unity,dashboard,widget,challenge

Due to a growing concern among officials, the Chinese government recently announced plans to adopt measures to limit the time a citizen can play an online game at a time. Most officials believe that players should not be online for more than three consecutive hours. The purpose of this action, according to officials, is to “prevent young people from becoming addicted to online games.” The preventative measures will go into place in October and greatly affect online gaming operators who receive permission from the government in order to operate. Any players that remain online for more than three hours will have their in-game characters limited. Gamers online for over five hours will have their in-game characters severely limited.

BBC Article

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4183340.stm

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china,to,limit,gamers,time,on,online,games,2

It was inspired by pizza and spawned an industry that generates $30 billion a year—but 25 years on, the world’s most recognizable computer icon has not made its creator a rich man.

Happy birthday, Mr Pac-Man

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1718312,00.html

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interview,with,pac,man,creator,toru,iwatani,2

Intel announced Tuesday that it will port its software developer tools to Mac OS X. The tools will consist of compilers and performance enhancement tools, and will function as plug-ins to the XCode IDE. While Intel will not provide an Objective-C compiler, the tools will be interoperable with the language. In addition, the tools will not initially integrate with IOKit, and Altivec support is still up in the air. However, Intel’s compilers promise better performance on Intel-based Macs.

eWeek: Intel Preps Mac OS X Developer Tools

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1851752,00.asp

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intel,to,port,developer,tools,to,mac,os,x

Elpida Memory has announced plans to begin testing a 512 megabyte DDR-3 memory chip. The new chips have been rated with clock speeds up to twice that of DDR-2 memory (approximately 1.3 gigabytes per second). DDR-3 is the new successor to the DDR-2 memory and is looking to render DDR-2 out of date by early next year, by creating higher speeds and lower voltages inside computers. Mac users can expect this to influence them by mid-2006 as Apple begins its switch from PowerPC architecture to an Intel based architecture. Soon Mac games will be able to take advantage of this new, high-speed memory in servers as well as client machines to create stunning experiences while consuming less energy than DDR-2 memory. Elpida Memory has also stated its plans to work on 1 and 2 gigabyte chips after the 512 megabyte chip is released.

Article on ExtremeTech.com

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1851383,00.asp

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elpida,to,begin,work,on,ddr,3,memory

In a recent article, Apple reviews several popular Macintosh game development tools such as Garage Games Torque game engine and Unity. The article is targeted at gamers, artists and advanced hobbyists who would like to bring their concepts and designs to life without a huge budget or large development team. If you’re not interested in burying yourself in complex code and want to start Mac game development immediately, this article is a good place to start.

Apple—Games: Game Building Tools——-

apple,reviews,game,design,tools

KToon is a 2D Animation Toolkit designed by animators (Toonka Films ) for animators, focused towards the cartoon industry. This project is covered by the GPL License using C++, OpenGL and QT as programming resources from KDevelop as the development platform. At the moment, KToon is only available for Unix systems but the developers expect to make it work on Windows in the future. Minimum Requirements:

• Unix-based Operating System
• QT 3.3.2 or higher
• 256 MB on RAM
• 800MHz or higher
• 5MB of free HD spaceThis application would be quite useful for sprite work if it could be ported to Mac OS X. Perhaps some of the developers here could take a crack at porting it?

• KToon
• Comment on this application——-

2d,animation,toolkit,requires,mac,os,x,port

Unity is a 3D game editor which happens to contain one of the most advanced game engines out there. Packed with power it is built to meet the demands of next-generation game developers. Create dazzling, different, captivating games with state of the art technology such as the Ageia physX� Physics Engine, the most modern graphical effects, and highly optimized JavaScript. And when you are done with your prototype, drafter demo, or gold master, you are only one click away from having a Windows runtime, a Mac runtime, a Browser version, or even a Dashboard Widget. One source. No differences.

Highlights of new features in Unity 1.1 include:

• Windows standalone deployment of games made with Unity is now fully supported
• Several next-generation render-to-texture effects, and virtual displacement mapping
• A 30 page scripting tutorial making it a lot easier to get started with scripting
• Greatly expanded documentation with many new examples of how to achieve various effects
• Possibility to extend the functionality of Unity-made games with through a new C/C++ plug-in SDK to interface with any hardware or software Unity doesn’t support out of the box
• Big game workflow has been greatly improved allowing the entire flow of arbitrarily sized games to be designed, tested, and tuned inside Unity.
• Asynchronous internet access supported in an easy-to-use API
• And of course the usual host of minor improvement and bug-fixes are included

Unity 1.1 is a free upgrade for existing customers, and the early adopter rebate will still be available for a short time.

Over The Edge Entertainment

http://otee.dk

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3d,game,editor,unity,11,released

id Software has released the source code for Quake III under the GNU General Public License. At the time of its release in 1999, the game was immensely popular, and many considered it to be at the forefront of gaming technology; indeed, its engine was widely licensed for use in games such as American McGee’s Alice and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. The package released by id Software today contains the complete source code for the Mac, Windows, and Linux versions of Quake III, including a Project Builder/Xcode file for the Mac code. While the Quake III engine is obviously no longer state-of-the-art, the release of its source code gives developers an opportunity to see the code behind a major AAA title by one of the most popular and respected game developers around, and if projects such as Doom Legacy and Aleph One are any indication, it may even give the game a new life in the open source community. (It should be noted that this release contains only the source code for the Quake III executable, not any game data files; it is still necessary to own a commercial copy of Quake III to actually play the game.)

• quake3-1.32b-source.zip
• Q3 Source
• Q3 Source——-————

quake,iii,source,code,released

Cheetah3D is a lean, fast and elegant 3D modeling, rendering and animation tool for Mac OS X with an easy learning curve. It offers many tools from powerful polygon editing over advanced subdivision surface modeling to HDRI and radiosity renderings. Support for many common 3D file formats rounds up its feature set. Cheetah3D 2.3.2 just contains one bug fix—HDRI textures should now be loaded correctly again.

• Cheetah3D

3d,modeler,cheetah3d,2,3,2,released