With CES behind us now it’s time to remember some of the cooler things we saw at the Convention. AMD was certainly one of the companies that had a lot to show. What was  especially neat was the new graphic card technology. Most companies were sporting the 3D. While I’m quite enamored with 3D I’m not necessarily sold on it. AMD had it’s 3D demos but it also had something I was far more interested in. It was the ability to stretch the visuals on games to a much wider view. We got to see a demo with Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X and it’s looked great.

Check out the Video above for our hands on time with Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

One of the additions that struck me a bit was the Asura, a very small, yet technologically savvy race from beneath Tyria. They control magical machines and are adept spell casters.

See more at the official site.

1st half of tickets go on sale on May 16. 2nd half on May 30th.  People who cannot make the convention can watch via DirectTV. The ticket price has gone UP to $125.

1) Create a Battle.net Account

We highly recommend you create a free Battle.net account before ticket sales begin, if you haven’t done so already. Please make sure the payment information associated with the account is up-to-date by going to My Payment Options in Battle.net Account Management. Doing these things ahead of time will help speed up the purchasing process for you once tickets go on sale.

2) Entering the Queue

If a certain level of shopping activity has been reached on the Blizzard Store, you will enter a queue before you are able to check out and complete your purchase. The ticket queue allows controlled batches of visitors to smoothly purchase tickets on a first-come, first-served basis.

On the days BlizzCon tickets go on sale, you will be able to initiate a ticket-purchase request from a special streamlined ticket-sales starting page, which will be linked from our websites and forums. From this starting page, you’ll be able to select the number of tickets you want to buy from a drop-down menu, and then click a button to immediately enter the ticket queue.

If you don’t encounter a queue, you will be able to purchase the tickets immediately.

3) In the Queue

Once you’ve entered the queue, you will be redirected to a page which displays an estimate of the time remaining until you reach the front of the queue, along with a meter showing the percentage of ticket stock remaining, updated in real-time. Simply wait at this page (do not close the window or refresh your browser!) until you reach the front of the queue. Please note that being in the queue does not guarantee that you will have the opportunity to purchase a ticket. The system will inform you if tickets sell out before you reach the front of the queue.

4) Finalizing Your Purchase

When your number is called, it’s time to buy those tickets! You will have 15 minutes to finalize all details before your session times out and you are removed from the queue, at which point you would need to begin the process again. If you are unsure of any attendee information now, don’t worry — you won’t need to provide this information until after the ticket purchase is finalized.

This Friday only, Valve and Steam are letting you play the super popular PC zombie apocalypse game for free for 24 hours! If you haven’t tried this game yet and were curious about it, here’s your chance.  You’ve got nothing to lose! Except for time installing and playing the game.  But that’s part of the fun!

Go to [VALVE]

When hover over this red circle, you’re mouse point has a pattern of letters and numbers:

0.0.F.F.C.F
F.F.0.0.D.0
8.E.0.1.F.F
D.A.F.F.0.0
F.F.0.1.0.1
0.1.D.4.F.F
0.0.0.B.F.F
4.2.F.F.0.0
F.E.A.7.0.2

What do they mean? Are they a code of some sort? Are they hex color codes? Upon further investigation of this page, viewing the source, there’s this code:

<frame src="http://babel-research.eu/witb">

More information on this site, after the break.When going to http://babel-research.eu, we are greeted with a completely different website. But, on every footer of this website are three logos. Two of which made me smile.

Black Mesa, Aperture Science, and the Hanso Foundation Logos

Could this mean there is something in the works from Valve? With E3 only about one month away, we could only hope. Here is the video, uploaded on March 13th, that started this viral teaser site.

Click here to view the embedded video.

======

Update: Looking through the source, I found this: http://babel-research.eu/snd/hidden.mp3 . Someone play it backwards and tell us what it says.
Update: James (aka forevil) played it backwards and said “”something november. 19 november maybe. or thank you november. its REALLY distorted” The plot thickens!!! New game from Valve on November 19?!

Update: (by forevil) My findings so far…

From the “whatsinthebox” site

from the “thehansofoundation” site

http://whatsinthebox.nl/ –> http://babel-research.eu/

The joke of “What is in the box” plus “Is That a Cat I Saw” = http://babel-research.eu/images/schrodinger.gif

–> http://www.thehansofoundation.org/ –> http://www.rachelblake.com/ containing:

R — I respect your caution.  Suppose it’s warranted, after all you’ve come through.  I can’t remember it exactly, but I think when we were in the stairwell in Paris, you muted the mic as I said “Because he wanted me to help you, and I can’t question a man who would launch the Mental Health Appeal… to save a loved one.”   Say what you will about him now, his heart was once in the right place.

–> http://www.hansoexposed.com/

Some time ago, PopCap released a Bejeweled add-on for World of Warcraft, allowing users to play the addictive puzzle game in between raids and quests. A welcome addition, many wondered if Peggle would ever be making its way into Azeroth. Well, the wait is over as PopCap has finally released a Peggle add-on for WoW. In addition to simply playing the game within World of Warcraft, the folks down at PopCap have added a few additions to further integrate the Peggle experience into WoW, such as giving players the ability to activate the Peggle loot system, which can be used as Master Looter, allowing friends and guild members that have the add-on take Peggle shots to decide which player gets loot drops.

The add-on is currently available for free from PopCap’s website so Peggle fans in Azeroth should have nothing stopping them from enjoying the Peggle/WoW experience.

[Source]

Got room for this beast next to your quad SLI setup?

Have you ever fancied the kind of graphics possible only in highly detailed fully rendered films from the likes of Dreamworks and Pixar in your video games? Well Caustic Graphics reckon they’ve got the answer with their graphics co-processor the Ray Tracing Processing Unit (RTPU). For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of Ray Tracing it is a computational technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane. The benefit of this technique of image rendering is that it’s able to produce an extremely high degree of photorealism capable of simulating a wide variety of optical effects, such as reflection and refraction, scattering, and chromatic aberration, higher than that of the typical scanline rendering methods currently used in games and anything real time. The main problem with Ray Tracing is that it comes at a considerably greater computational cost, especially for typical graphics processors and CPUs which aren’t geared up for this task. This means Ray Tracing is only really suitable for pre-rendered images and video such as still images plus film and television special effects.

Hit the Read link for more on what Caustic’s got up it’s sleeve

The theory behind the integration with current technology

Caustic Graphics are aiming to handle the Ray Tracing duties in conjunction with current GPUs to allow frame rates to reach acceptable real time rendering which is certainly not available unless you put something like Road Runner on the case. Their current generation hardware RTPU CausticOne, the large card shown above that certainly wouldn’t fit in my PC case, manages a meagre 3-5 frames-per-second which doesn’t sound all that impressive, but given the large amount of processing needed to get to even that stage I guess we can let them off. They do however promise up to 14 times that, which would definitely let you get your frag on, from their second generation hardware. The only problem with this technology and it’s potential for gaming could be the cost to the consumer. Current estimates tag the tech at about $4,000 including the CausticGL software stack, a single CausticOne card and a year of firmware and software updates for developers, which isn’t too bad considering the cost of current Nvidia workstation GPUs. The problem comes when you ask the punter to pony up money, I really don’t see this taking off if you’ve got to drop $500 on this bad boy. Anyway check out their preview of the CausticOne below for a video of what the tech could do for your gaming in the near future.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“What is this crap?” I said to myself. Where’s all the text that I had been accustomed to since the day I started looking at it. I decided to read what it said, “coming at you live 02.24.09″ and “no way!” I said. I had to call Kyle (a friend) to confirm what I was seeing is true. Oh, and is it so true. Tuesday people, Tuesday.

For those of you that don’t know what Quake Live is I’ve provided you with a couple links. You geeks out there know what I’m talking about.

Quake Live Site
Quake Live Wiki
Quake Live Screen Capture