Game Developers Conference Live Stream 7pm!

Dayum

Epic have released UnrealEngine 4 for free ahead of GDC 2015! It starts at 7pm GMT! Here's the live stream...

http://www.hitbox.tv/gamespot

Predictions on what we might see? Valve are showing off hardware so I'm guessing Steam Machines as well as their new controller. SteamVR? Half-Life 3?

http://www.gdconf.com/

Dayum

Shiminay

Just saw Donut County, looks like a fun little game.

Watching a game called Seasons After Fall at the moment, it looks soooo pretty! The season changing mechanic along with the style put me in mind of Braid and Limbo.

gizmo

Shiminay wrote: »

Just saw Donut County, looks like a fun little game.

Watching a game called Seasons After Fall at the moment, it looks soooo pretty! The season changing mechanic along with the style put me in mind of Braid and Limbo.

Aye, Donut County is an IGF nominee and looks awesome alright. I'd expect to see some more coverage of the other nominees during the week.

Lumino City is similarity beautiful by the way even if it seems to have fallen slightly short on the gameplay side.

And then there' this...

Dayum

Unreal Engine 4 is FREE!

Unity apparently have a "massive" announcement for tomorrow...let the battle commence....

Dayum

Unity has "exciting news" for us today. Live stream of their conference here....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Ao5oyflik

Sony's Project Morpheus VR is being demonstrated here....

http://live.arstechnica.com/sony-project-morpheus-event-liveblog-gdc-2015/

Nvidia says it's announcement today will "redefine gaming"....

http://ie.ign.com/articles/2015/02/24/watch-nvidias-gdc-press-conference-right-here-on-ign

Dayum

Procedurally generated FPS...

gizmo

More development orientated but there are some nice bits of info coming out about Vulkan, the name name for GLNext, in these articles from Ars and Anandtech.

Even more interested in seeing their joint presentation with Valve and the other vendors on Thursday now.

EDIT

And the Unity news which should be of no surprise: Unity 5 released, Free version with full functionality, Pro with additional commercial-orientated functionality with a per-seat licence and each with no royalties.

Dayum

Source 2!!!!

March 3, 2015 -- Valve announces a number of product and technologies at this week's Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

"We continue to see very strong growth in PC Gaming, with Steam growing 50% in the last 12 months," said Gabe Newell, Valve's president. "With these announcements we hope that we are helping build on that momentum."
Steam Machines, Windows PCs, Macs, and Linux PCs will be able to take advantage of a new product announced at GDC called Steam Link. Designed to extend your Steam experience to any room in the house, Steam Link allows you to stream all your Steam content from any PC or Steam Machine on the same home network. Supporting 1080p at 60Hz with low latency, Steam Link will be available this November for $49.99, and available with a Steam Controller for an additional $49.99 in the US (worldwide pricing to be released closer to launch).

Steam Machines from partners Alienware and Falcon Northwest are being shown, with Machines from a dozen other partners slated to release this November. Steam Machines will start at the same price point as game consoles, with higher performance. Customers interested in the best possible gaming experience can choose whichever components meet their needs. Epic will give a demonstration of the newly announced Unreal Tournament running on a 4K monitor driven by the Falcon Northwest Steam Machine. "We love this platform," said Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games. "Whether you're running incredibly detailed scenes at 4K or running 1080p at 120 FPS for an intense shooter experience, this brings world-class gaming and graphics to televisions with an open platform true to Valve's PC gaming roots."
Valve will show a virtual reality (VR) headset. Developer versions of the headset will be available this spring, and partner HTC will ship their Vive headset to consumers by the end of the year.

Two new technologies are part of the VR release - a room scale tracking system codenamed Lighthouse, and a VR input system. "In order to have a high quality VR experience, you need high resolution, high speed tracking," said Valve's Alan Yates. "Lighthouse gives us the ability to do this for an arbitrary number of targets at a low enough BOM cost that it can be incorporated into TVs, monitors, headsets, input devices, or mobile devices." Valve intends to make Lighthouse freely available to any hardware manufacturers interested in the technology.

"Now that we have Lighthouse, we have an important piece of the puzzle for tackling VR input devices," said Valve's Joe Ludwig. "The work on the Steam Controller gave us the base to build upon, so now we have touch and motion as integrated parts of the PC gaming experience."
"We've been working in VR for years and it was only until we used SteamVR's controllers and experienced the magic of absolute tracking that we were able to make the VR game we always wanted to make," said Alex Schwartz of Owlchemylabs.

VR demos being shown at GDC include work from Bossa Studios, Cloudhead Games, Dovetail Games, Fireproof Studios, Google, Owlchemylabs, Skillman & Hackett, Steel Wool Games, Vertigo Games, and Wevr.
Valve announced the Source 2 engine, the successor to the Source engine used in Valve's games since the launch of Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2. "The value of a platform like the PC is how much it increases the productivity of those who use the platform. With Source 2, our focus is increasing creator productivity. Given how important user generated content is becoming, Source 2 is designed not for just the professional developer, but enabling gamers themselves to participate in the creation and development of their favorite games," said Valve's Jay Stelly. "We will be making Source 2 available for free to content developers. This combined with recent announcements by Epic and Unity will help continue the PCs dominance as the premiere content authoring platform."

Also as part of supporting PC gaming, Valve announced that it will be releasing a Vulkan-compatible version of the Source 2 engine. Vulkan is a cross-platform, cross-vendor 3D graphics API that allows game developers to get the most out of the latest graphics hardware, and ensures hardware developers that there is a consistent, low overhead method of taking advantage of products. Vulkan, previously called Next Generation OpenGL, is administered by the Khronos Group, along with other standards such as OpenCL, OpenGL, and WebGL.
GDC 2015 will mark the 13th anniversary of Valve's first public announcement of Steam, which has since become the leading platform for PC, Mac, and Linux games and software. In the last year, Steam realized the addition of many new services and features - including In-Home Streaming, Broadcasting, Music, and user-created stores - as it grew to over 125 million active accounts worldwide.
For more information, please visit www.steampowered.com/universe.

Dayum

Valve demonstrated Unreal Tournament 2015 running on the Steam Machine today. It's coming along nicely.

Dayum

Steam Link available November 2015!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/353380/

Dayum

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2015/03/03/project-morpheus-ps4-vr-upgraded-coming-in-2016/

SeantheMan

So.....the Nvidia shield......

Not particularly impressed. Probably get the same hype as that....was it OnLive or something ?

Can't see it really competing with PS4 , Xbox1 and Nintendo.

Also....Irish Internet, broadband caps, etc....seeing how it's a streaming service.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/03/04/nvidia-announces-the-shield-console

Nvidia announced a new addition to its Shield lineup of devices, an Android-based living room device capable of 4K playback, during its Game Developers Conference 2015 press event.

“First, it’s based on the most popular OS in the world. Second, the richness of the Google Play store, with it huge range of applications,” Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said. “Third, it syncs with all my other devices. Finally, it has an incredible voice search capability.”

The Nvidia Shield offers 10-bit processing and will be able to receive 4K, 60 hertz video “very soon.” The living room entertainment device also packs Android TV functionality so users can access a library of movies.

The set-top box and console hybrid packs a Tegra X1 processor, which sports a 256-bit Maxwell GPU with 3GB of memory.

The Nvidia Shield can run both local, and streamed games via its Nvidia Grid subscription based game streaming service, up to 1080p at 60fps. The gaming-centric device will launch with more than 50 games on the Grid store.

Some of the games mentioned during the event include Doom 3, Crysis 3, Portal, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, The Witcher 2, Dead Rising 2, Metro Last Light Redux, Batman: AO and Ultra Street Fighter 4.

The device will ship bundled with the Shield Controller for USD$199.

Dayum

SeantheMan wrote: »

So.....the Nvidia shield......

Not particularly impressed. Probably get the same hype as that....was it OnLive or something ?

Can't see it really competing with PS4 , Xbox1 and Nintendo.

Also....Irish Internet, broadband caps, etc....seeing how it's a streaming service.

Steam has grown 50% in the last 12 months. Valve has over 125 million active user accounts and it's growing daily. PC gaming is back on the rise and with the Steam Machines launching this November along with Valve's ReviveVR I think they'll take a big bite out of the console market going forward.

Nintendo are a company on the downslide and have been for quite some time. They're a company still stuck in the 80's and simply refuse to move into the 21st century. Regardless of whatever affinity anyone may have for them from our childhood, the people over at Nintendo are incompetent at the highest level. In the 90's Sony approached them with a new idea to create a CD console called the Nintendo Playstation. Nintendo went forward with the idea but thinking of themselves all high-and-mighty they pulled the plug on the idea because they wanted more dough from Sony. Sony later released their own console and the Playstation was born which, as it turned out, destroyed Nintendo and it was a mistake the company has never recovered from to this day. They're constantly shooting themselves in the foot and refuse to acknowledge that the internet exists. The way they treat their Youtube promoters is beyond contempt. I wouldn't be surprised to see that company gone from hardware manufacturers to solely a software firm in the next 5 years.

In 2015 people want options. They don't want to be trapped down in a closed shop which is what these consoles offer. They want the highest quality product at the lowest possible price and that is something only a PC can give. Maybe this new Nvidia product won't do much of a dent but they have had to have done their market analyses or else it wouldn't have got past the concept stage. The more company's throwing their hats in the ring that are offering open source platforms is nothing but a good thing for gamers, regardless of whether or not the PS/XB crowd think so or not.

Dayum

ZOTAC's Steam Machine




Syber Steam Machine

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gizmo

The Titan X powering this certainly helps but hats off to Epic for this, some really stunning tech on display.

K.O.Kiki

Final Steam pad.