GuildWars 2 is a new multiplayer game that is one of the most expected MMO in Europe. In addition, it is one of the most promising projects in the recent years. ArenaNet developers went through all standards of MMO and destroyed them, or at least they overtaxed them. If the developers’ promise will come true for at least 60% -70%, this game could really become something new and very interesting. According to the beta tests, they proved to be 90% for sure.

So, what's so special in this game? I want to make a reservation right away, the most features of the game are not new, but before all these solutions were never used together and worked out so carefully.

The first and perhaps the most curious feature is almost complete absence of standard in-game quests. They are replaced by the dynamic events. For example, the developers give the following situation:

In a regular MMO with the quests, you run into a farm during traveling around the world, at the porch entrance stands a peasant with an exclamation mark above his head. You come to him, click on the button and read the plain text, which states that a farm will be destroyed by terrible trolls. You take a task to protect the farm and go to the nearest glade with trolls. These miserable monsters did not even think to attack the farm, they just have grazed on this glade and gathered flowers all their life. You kill dozens of trolls and go back to the farm, there you hand over the task and get your reward ... It looks standard, it is known and boring.

So, the news says that someone else has died due to video game addiction. Yes, it is Korea again.

I am not trying to prove that the video games are heroin. I remember that in this case the victim had a lot of problems in live. But, half of you know that the World of Warcraft sucks you into that and doctors consider the game addiction as a serious problem. So here's the big question: Are some games intentionally designed to keep you playing, even when you are not enjoying it?

Surely, they are.

5. Forming the habits (reflexes)



If you have ever been addicted to a game or known someone who was, then this article is really disturbing. It is written by Microsoft game researcher on how to make video games that attract players, whether they like it or not. This person has a doctorate in behavioral and brain sciences.

The id Software company possesses a PVS-Studio license. However, we decided to test the source codes of Doom 3 that have been recently laid out on the Internet. The result is the following: we managed to find just few errors, but still they are there. I think it can be explained by the following fact.

Matthew Fisher from Stanford University wrote an interesting article about implementation of a robot on the basis of stream interception API library D3D9 (Microsoft Direct 3D, which is a part of the library DirectX).

According to the author, the robot plays StarCraft 2 (SC2) by intercepting, understanding and reacting to the D3D9 API stream, then sending keypresses and mouse commands back to the game. It is not like other robots made in the SC2 editor using a scripting language, or projects like BWAPI (it works with the original StarCraft only) that works by attaching to the address space of the host application. The robots that are based on these methods often can to bypass several restrictions that the human players must cope with; for example, they can give different orders to different units at the same time, they can see exactly what is happening off-screen at any time, and they do not have to deal with trying to click on ground units that are covered by flying units.

Minecraft has finally grown to a full release after several years of development. The day before yesterday the founder Notch announced that the game has gone gold and will be officially released on November the 18th at the first Minecon conference (this is a group of game fans that is named after the famous fan festival Comicon). Most likely, there will be an official presentation of iOS and Android versions.

I would like to share a prototype of game that is created just in a few hours. I hope that it will inspire some of you! In the industry of single-player browser-based games, it seems that there is not enough imagination and the ability to tell the stories, perhaps I just have not seen such games ;), but I miss these games like Grim Fandango.

Below is given a screenshot of the demonstration that consists of the multiple nodes of DOM, which represents the component parts of the protagonist, birds, and the scene. Most of the animations are done by CSS transitions / animations, some of which are dynamic and use the library move.js.



I have not yet engaged in profiling of anything, but this demonstration is working without a break rather smoothly, and there are many aspects that can be optimized, starting with simply dumping jQuery.

The Wemo Media company has partnered with top animators that worked on the movies Avatar and Tron for a new project called theBlu. The project idea is the creation of virtual ocean environment with all animals, plants and other representatives of underwater kingdom. All this can be called "Animated Wikipedia". Developers’ plans are simply grandiose: theBlu will include the entire Pacific Ocean with all elements of the ocean floor, as well as the entire ecosystem.

A former employee of Google who worked on Google SketchUp program that was intended to create and to edit three-dimensional graphics quickly. Presently, this employee has been working with Valve on a new level editor for Portal 2.



The main feature is an incredible simplicity of the interface and the process of creating levels. Isometric icon graphics is the arrangement of objects by dragging and dropping from the library. All that let a large number of people to embody their ideas into a complete level, and in order to share that level, we do not have to go through the seven circles of hell with uploading files, because Valve are working on the browser of levels that is built into the game, which would allow uploading and downloading user's maps.

This news is taken from the book The Final Hours of Portal 2 that is written by Valve.

I have never met a programmer during my short life, who would not love the games. Moreover, a programmer that has never written them.
Someone begins with “Tetris”, the other one with the “Snake”. Someone loses the interest, and the other one gets “sick” and turns that illness in a favorite work or entertaining hobby.

In the era of the Internet and social networks to play alone is boring, we want to communicate and play with friends.
We do not want just to communicate, but to go underground with the group or to show who is boss at the arena.
In this article I would like to tell about my approach to the server implementation of such interaction.

Task

Let us consider the example of a simple game application in which the player controls a character, which can buy \ sell items, fight at the arena, and go alone underground or with the friends.

Concept

For example, a player creates a group to go underground. The player sends a request to our server which adds a new group to the list of available groups to go underground, and then the other players are able to obtain this list and join it. When the group is formed by pressing a button, the creator sends it underground to meet the dangerous monsters.