[GDC09] We were live blogging from the GDC09 keynote of Hideo Kojima, the creator of the Metal Gear franchise. His keynote was inspiring and entertaining. To make a long story short, Kojima-san advocated a pragmatic approach that takes into account the cold, hard reality of limited hardware and resources and told us how he and his team have overcome sometimes seemingly impossible goals.

Interestingly, he did simply change the goals many times because it's just unproductive to seek impossible goals. However, what's important is to make constant progress and innovate. In his visions, the ladder that takes one to the next level is made of: game design innovation, hardware advancements and software advancements. In his opinion, Japanese developers are more driven by game design while western ones tend to focus on technology to reach the next level.

It's been one year since last the GDC, but Neurosky has told us that they are officially taking pre-orders for their EGG "brainwave controller". It will ship in July and cost $199. Games are still scarce, even if Square Enix has announced some support for this hardware. The bottom line? Wait for the reviews.

We happened to be around when Ubisoft was demonstrating RUSE for the first time since its announcement a day before. We posted our first impressions live earlier today (see quote below), but check our photo gallery for in-game screenshots.

"RUSE is a WWII real time strategy game that offers the possibility to switch from battlefield commander view (map) to a close up view of individual units, seamlessly. It looks cool."

[GDC09] Just as it was announced, we got our hands on the Vuzix Augmented Reality Kit. Our conclusion: it is still rough and requires higher resolution cameras in the future. Clearly the demo works and depending on your application, the current setup might be "good enough", but for example the pistol demo lacked the resolution to align the sights as one would expect.

Vuzix Augmented Reality Kit uses a camera that can "see" and track the position and orientation of an object (included in the kit). From there, it can act as a controller. Developers are required to do more work to make their games compatible, so check Vuzix's website to be sure (GDC09 Booth 5123).

[GDC09] If you followed yesterday's coverage, you should know that Onlive is a startup that is trying to deliver gaming over the web. In essence, you would be remote-controlling a gaming PC located in OnLive's datacenter, as if you were using a super-fast remote desktop or VNC application. There's a lot of excitement but also skepticism around this approach, so we decided to try it for ourselves at GDC 09.

Of course, this was a demo in a (somewhat) controlled environment, but it gives us some interesting pointers and we can now talk about the following topics: Latency, image quality, deployment methods, business model.

[GDC 09] OnLive is a startup that aims to start "cloud gaming" - by that we mean have the server execute the game code, including the high-end graphics, then stream the (HD) video back to a much weaker gaming client. OnLive doesn't really explain how they avoid usual pitfalls like internet choke points, but they claim to have a great compression mojo and some secret sauce to make it all work.

If this works, it would effectively free client computers from having ultra high-end processors and graphics cards. Many companies have dreamed of this only to fail, but OnLive believes that they will be the first to make this work (at least for games where latency isn't such a big issue?). We'll take a look this week at the Game Developers Conference and we'll get back to you.

Update 03/25/2009: don't miss our hands-on with OnLive at GDC09

[GDC 09] GDC is kicking off and it is a good time for Adobe to launch its new version of Director. The new features include a 5.1 channel surround sound audio engine, and now game developers can use real-time mixing capabilities to create audio effects. Director 11.5 supports the H.264 video format and the RTMP based streaming (Real-Time Messaging Protocol, specifications to be published by Adobe first half of 2009), so developers will be able to integrate HD video content in their new games. Other features include compatibility with Google SketchUP and SketchUp 3-D Importer to create and import 3D assets, and an updated version of the NVIDIA PhysX engine, a physics simulation (gravity, collisions...) tool for 3D objects. Director 11.5 will be available by the end of March 2009 for $999 (full product) and $299 (upgrade). For more information visit adobe.com/products/director

[GDC 2008] Intel just announced the availability of the D5400XS motherboard based on the Skulltrail platform (now called Dual Socket Extreme Desktop) – a motherboard that can accept two quad-core processors for a total of eight computing cores.

Having more cores is great for applications that have a parallel nature such as video compression or physics. However, it doesn’t boost application like e-mail or word processing proportionally to the number of cores – if at all.

The motherboard should be available immediately. Retail price: $650 for the motherboard, $1500 per CPU (Core 2 Extreme QX9775).

[GDC] Today, Adobe launched Director 11 at GDC (Game Developer Conference). For those who are not familiar with Director, it is a Multimedia authoring software for building interactive presentations and applications.

It has been 4 years since the last version of Director and it was about time to upgrade it. The new features include the ability to import Flash SWF files from the latest version of Flash (Flash CS3), the ability to include video created in Flash, and the physics engine Ageia PhysX that allows developers create better animations for games and simulations. The native 3D rendering has been enhanced with the Direct X 9 support.

Director 11 is expected to be available end of Q1 2008 for $999 (upgrade will be $299). The international version in French, German and Japanese will be available Q2 2008. Director 11 runs on multiple operating systems, including Microsoft® Windows XP with Service Pack 2, Windows Vista® and Mac OS X version 10.4 on Intel-based Macintosh systems.

[GDC 2008] NVIDIA shocked a lot of people (especially the competition) when the company showed the APX 2500 for the first time at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The tiny chip contains a GPU, a video processor (VP) and a CPU.

There is a reason why the APX 2500 contains all these components: it allows NVIDIA to control the entire flow of data between the GPU, Video Processor and CPU. Earlier handheld GPUs were sometimes paired with a slow CPU, a slow bus or worse: both.