Collada tutorial

A good friend of mine wrote a really useful Collada tutorial recently so I wanted to mention it here. If you want to implement Skeletal Animations using Collada, check out this tutorial at the following link,

Collada Tutorial

Need for Speed Shift Team Racing Pack

A free DLC is coming out for Need for Speed Shift on the 1st of December for the Xbox 360 and PC and December 3rd on the Playstation 3.

The Team Racing Pack downloadable content for Need for Speed SHIFT includes five new cars: 1998 Toyota Supra Mark IV, 1967 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, 1967 Shelby GT500, 1969 Dodge Charger R/T and 1969 Dodge Challenger R/T, as well as the new Team Racing mode.

Grab your friends, create a team and take on the world in Team Racing. Using a combination of teamwork, skillful driving and the occasional slick maneuver to topple your opponents, you’ll be atop the podium in short order.

To go to the news announcement page, visit the link below.

Need for Speed Shift Team Racing Pack

AMD interviews DICE for use of DirectX11 in their next game

AMD interviewed DICE and asked some interesting questions about next-gen hardware and how they plan to implement it in their soon to be released Battlefield Bad Company 2 video game. Here is an exerpt from the interview,

(2) Can you share any details of how you plan to use DirectCompute 11 to implement deferred shading? What does that mean in terms of how your games would look or perform?  Can you think of other way you might use DirectCompute 11?

Our plan is to improve performance and at the same time be able to have many more dynamic light sources than we’ve been able to have previously — and by a wide margin even. This is possible as the culling & processing of large light sources can be done much more efficiently and directly in a compute shader compared to traditional deferred rendering techniques.

To red the full interview, head on to the following link,

AMD DICE Interview - 11 Days of DirectX 11

DiRT 2 PC System Requirements

Here are the system requirements for the upcoming PC title, DiRT 2. The game was recently released on the consoles and received excellent reviews. The small delay for the PC version was due to the added DirectX 11 support which will be well worth the wait.

Recommended (Enhanced for DirectX 11)

• OS: Microsoft Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7
• 
  Processor: Intel Core i7 or AMD Phenom II
• Memory: 3GB
• HD Space: 10GB
• Video Card: ATi Radeon HD 5700 Series

Minimum:

• OS: Microsoft Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7
• Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 3400+
• Memory: 1GB (2Gb for Windows Vista)
• HD Space: 10GB
• Video Card: ATI Radeon X1500, NVIDIA GeForce 6800

Source

Please fill out this survey

I am running a survey these days for my Master thesis and researching on blogs and what motivates people to write them and how do they generate revenue and so on. Even though, I am a blogger myself, it is very interesting for me to try and understand how other bloggers do it. If you want to help me with my thesis and you are a blogger, you could contribute to my research by going to the following link where I have the survey set up. Please note that the survey is completely anonymous.

Blog Survey

Your help would be greatly appreciated. =)

Microsoft says, "Xbox console ban is permanent"

The recent banning of users who had modified their Xbox consoles to play pirated games may have been banned permanently from using their Xbox consoles and may have to buy a new console if they want to continue playing online. In an interview to the BBC, the firm said,

"Users of banned Xbox consoles can recover their profile to another, unmodified Xbox 360 console to resume their Live service"

"The banned console will be unable to connect to Xbox Live."

It was mentioned however that the banned consoles will still be able to work offline.

To read the full news story, head over to the link below.

Xbox console ban is 'permanent' - BBC News

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 breaks sales record

It seems that COD MW2 has broken the sales record which was previously set by GTA IV. COD sold over 1.23 million units in its first day and it turned around profits of over 47 million British Pounds.

You can read more about it at the link below.

Modern Warfare 2 breaks UK record.