39w ago - Sony Blog Manager Fred Dutton announced today that the upcoming Dust 514 Neocom PS Vita application promises MMO on the go for fans.

To quote: Looking for a little more depth from your FPS? Hugely ambitious free-to-play sci-fi shooter Dust 514 might be just the ticket. CCP's PlayStation 3 exclusive sits alongside its enormously popular PC space MMO Eve Online, with players' actions in one game directly affecting the environment in the other.

See our recent post from the Icelandic developer for more on exactly how this plays out.

The third string to the whole intriguing project is Dust 514 Neocom - a companion PS Vita app that lets you interact with various systems from the PlayStation 3 game directly from your handheld.

In search of a little more information on exactly how it works, we collared CCP Creative Director Atli Mars Sveinsson and Marketing Director Cameron Payne at last week's Gamescom event in Cologne, Germany.

"It's a companion app to the PS3 game," explains Payne. "It brings all the customisation, community and commerce features onto the Vita. There's no direct gameplay but you can use pretty much all the features that...

219w ago - A start-up founded by former Apple Inc. engineers said it has developed technology that could bring film-like realism to computer games and change the way movie makers and other design professionals work.

The San Francisco company, Caustic Graphics Inc., plans to exploit a technique called ray-tracing that generates extremely accurate three-dimensional images. Ray-tracing is a mainstay of Hollywood studios, but remains out of reach for most PC users. A single image can take hours to generate; rendering a film can take months on hundreds of server systems.

To quote: Computer games and other PC software typically rely on a technology called rasterization. Though the results keep getting more realistic, developing an interactive form of ray-tracing has been a longtime quest in the computer industry.

Caustic, whose name refers to light rays reflecting off a curved object, says it is close to achieving that goal. The company says its software and chips allow graphics chips to carry out ray-tracing calculations at a 20-fold speed-up compared with existing PC hardware. It said it expects to deliver chips by early 2010 that will be about 200 times faster.

In a demonstration, Caustic executives manipulated a photo-quality image of a sports car, removing components and changing lighting and...

226w ago - The official European Final Fantasy XIII Web site (linked above) now features a ticking clock which promises to end on January 28th at 4pm GMT. What happens then? Apparently "a new vision will soon be revealed to the world."

I just got an email from Square Enix. The email contains something new about Final Fantasy 13. If you click the link HERE you can see the counter.

America also has its own countdown page. Square Enix says it's "the first of many countdowns to come."

It is unknown what exactly it could be.. the only we can do is wait!

227w ago - Ultra-high-speed wireless connectivity capable of transferring 15 gigabits of data per second over short distances has taken a significant step toward reality.

A recent decision by an international standards group could help bring this technology to market soon.

To quote: Short-distance 60 gigahertz (GHz) technology could offer many benefits to bandwidth-hungry applications such as high-definition video and high-capacity data storage. The new standard would support extremely fast wireless peer-to-peer connectivity, PC connectivity and High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) cable replacement.

Among the many potential 60 GHz applications are virtually wireless desktop-computer setups and data centers, wireless home DVD systems, in-store kiosks that transfer movies to handheld devices in seconds, and the potential to move gigabytes of photos or video from a camera to a PC almost instantly.

Industry group Ecma International recently announced a worldwide standard for the radio frequency (RF) technology that makes 60 GHz "multi-gigabit" data transfer possible. The specifications for this technology, which involves chips capable of sending RF signals in the 60 GHz range, are expected to be published as an ISO standard in 2009.

"We believe this new standard...

250w ago - Drk||Raziel, developer of Dreamcast emulator NullDC, has issued a clarification statement in regards to the recently unveiled PSP port.

First off, he notes that due to RAM constraints, the PSP port of NullDC will be compatible with Slim units, which house 64MB RAM compared to 32MB on the previous hardware revision.

Furthermore, the author explicitly mentions that he is not making any promises concerning the speed of the emulator, only that he will attempt to get it running as fast as possible.

Certainly, we're excited over the prospect of Dreamcast emulation on PSP, but as with the PSP version of StrmnNrmn's N64 emulator Daedalus, don't expect games to run at a playable speed any time soon.