24w ago - Following up on the previous rumor and PS4 (Orbis) details, IGN has shared some video footage and details on Version 2 of the PlayStation 4 (PS4) Developer Kits below.

According to their source, a new version 2 of the PlayStation 4 dev kit is currently being distributed to developers with the final version expected next year.

To quote from their page (linked above): Anonymous sources have reportedly told VG247 that new versions of the Orbis kit are winging their way to developers, replete with Blu-ray support and housed in the humble cases of normal PCs.

This is apparently the second iteration of the dev kit; the first, which appeared earlier this year, was in essence just a graphics card, while this version is now a "modified PC". The report asserts that the next update will come in January, when it'll be close to final specifications, with the ultimate version landing with devs next summer.

The shipping of the Orbis kit apparently follows a series of meetings held by Sony...

31w ago - Giant Sparrow Game Designer Ben Esposito has shared a video today spotlighting the art and design as part of their The Unfinished Swan developer diary.

To quote: Like a lot of folks, I first saw the tech demo for The Unfinished Swan when it made the rounds online in 2008. The idea stuck in the back of my head but it wasn't until later when Giant Sparrow put up a job posting that I decided: I had to make that game.

I had just graduated from college without much professional experience, so I did what I do best and made a game for them. You can check it out here if you'd like. The video cuts off because the end of the game says "Call me" and has my phone number on it.

It got the attention of the Giant Sparrow team, and I ended up flying out to Los Angeles to work on the game. I was elated and a little shocked, but I came to learn that at Giant Sparrow, the player experience always comes first - and my little game was designed to create a very specific experience.

Now, in October 2012, The Unfinished Swan is out in the wild (well, to PlayStation Plus members) and we're proud that we were able to make a truly experiential game.

33w ago - Killzone Community Editor Victor Zuylen has shared Part 2 of the Killzone HD Re-Developer PS3 interview today with fans.

To quote: In Part 1 of the Killzone HD (re-)developer interview, Guerrilla Technical Director Michiel van der Leeuw and Senior Programmer Frank Compagner discussed the challenges they faced while bringing Killzone to a new platform. In the second part of our interview, they talk about the changes and enhancements made to Killzone HD by the conversion team.

Victor Zuylen: Last week you explained how you retrieved the code and assets for the original Killzone. What happened once you handed them over to the conversion team?

Michiel van der Leeuw, Technical Director: That's where the real fun began! There were corruptions and missing bits in the exported data, which caused all kinds of weird artifacts like polygons shooting through the game world. For the conversion team, the first order of business was to go in and fix all that.

Frank Compagner, Senior Programmer: Our old exporters no longer functioned, so the conversion team rather ingeniously re-used portions of the Killzone 3 pipeline...

34w ago - Killzone Community Editor Victor Zuylen has shared Part 1 of a Killzone HD Re-Developer PS3 interview with fans below today.

To quote: When Killzone HD drops on October 24th, the original Killzone will be one week short of eight years old.

In this (re-)developer interview we talk with Guerrilla Technical Director Michiel van der Leeuw and Senior Programmer Frank Compagner, who were there when Killzone was first released.

In part 1, Michiel and Frank talk about the challenges they faced and the discoveries they made during the conversion process.

Victor Zuylen: What prompted the HD remaster of Killzone?

Michiel van der Leeuw, Technical Director, Guerrilla: It was an idea whose time had come. Internally we had talked about bringing Killzone to PlayStation 3 before - Killzone fans frequently asked us about it, and we knew from other developers that such projects could be a lot of fun.

VZ: How many of the original team were involved?

ML: A number of developers who worked on the original Killzone for PlayStation 2 helped get this project off the ground, including Guerrilla's main producer, Angie Smets, who first started producing on Killzone; producer...

68w ago - Following up on his status update for the PS3 4.0 Homebrew Enabler (HEN), today Sony PlayStation 3 hacker KaKaRoToKS has explained how the ECDSA algorithm works.

To quote: To popular demand, I have decided to try and explain how the ECDSA algorithm works. I've been struggling a bit to understand it properly and while I found a lot of documentation about it, I haven't really found any "ECDSA for newbies" anywhere.

So I thought it would be good to explain in simple terms how it works so others can learn from my research. I have found some websites that explain the basic principles but nowhere near enough to actually understand it, others that explains things without any basics, making it incomprehensible, and others that go way too deep into the the mathematics behind it.

ECDSA stands for "Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm", it's used to create a digital signature of data (a file for example) in order to allow you to verify its authenticity without compromising its security. Think of it like a real signature, you can recognize someone's signature, but you can't forge it without others knowing.

The ECDSA algorithm is basically all about mathematics.....