67w ago - Sony Senior Social Media Specialist Sid Shuman has revealed a release date for Aliens: Colonial Marines alongside a chat with Randy Pitchford of the prometheus possibilities on PlayStation 3.

To quote: The Alien films have always held enormous power over me, occupying the same sphere of significance that Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings do for many others.

So it's been with great interest and no small amount of hope that I've watched the development saga of Aliens: Colonial Marines. This Gearbox Software-developed first-person shooter promises to pick up where James Cameron's 1986 classic Aliens left off - an irresistible premise for any diehard fan of the series.

A recent trailer (watch it below) presented a convincing succession of sound and images, yet carried the sadface news of a new fall 2012 release date. What's an impatient Alien fan to do?

Well, I went to Randy Pitchford to get some answers. The gregarious CEO of Gearbox Software was all too happy to share new insights into the studio's plans for Aliens: Colonial Marines, including multiplayer concepts, the control scheme, play style... and, perhaps most tantalizing, what he knows about the upcoming Ridley Scott-directed origin tale Prometheus....

204w ago - Recently SKFU shared some details on a PC / PS3 Messenger project in development, and over the weekend he has also theorized on some other untapped potential via the PS3's XMB (Cross Media Bar) interface.

To quote: The XMB is a nice core for a lot of features but why are they not unlocked yet? To mention a few examples:

Selfmade Widgets
The PS3 uses a widget engine based on open source for the information board. So why not give us the ability to load our own homebrew widget's from external mediums or install them like themes? As they mostly use XML and flash files it wouldn't even compromise PS3's security.

Music Visualizations
The PSP has a lot of them, the PS3 only three. Next-Gen multimedia entertainment? Not really, yet.

Universal Messenger
The PSP can use Skype, why not the PS3? The PS3's messaging system is based on Jabber. It would be very simple to allow the PS3 to communicate with iCQ, Google Talk and other instant messenger protocols.

Open File Transfer
Why can we only send pictures with size limitation via the PSN while we would more like to send music files or savegames. If that uses to much ressources like traffic,...

242w ago - It is commonly known that Nvidia showed a Bugatti Veyron at the Full HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 running a 30 fps - inclusive anti aliasing and the multiple refractions common in ray tracing.

Unfortunately this requires a Quadro-Plex 2100 D4 with four G92 based GPUs to be calculated.

Now there is additional material available in an Nvidia presentation. Here not only pure ray tracing is introduced, but also examples for Hybrid rendering, like mixing rasterisation and ray tracing.

The developers of the Nvidia demo themselves say that both systems are used. Additional info can be found at Nvidia's developers' site.

Nvidia: Hybrid rendering example below, and more screenshots can be seen at the link at the top of this article!