MW2 mod tools on the horizon?

Robert "FourZeroTwo" Blowing dropped a little bomb on the IW forums today:

Yes, we currently plan to release some mod tools for Modern Warfare 2 for PC in the future. No eta or date has been set on when you can expect them however. Other than that, there hasn't been much movement on them. If this progresses, I'll let you know.

A poster by the name of "brokenangel" asked this question:

and how the F*ck do you plan on distributing the content fool?

402 responded:

There would definitely need to be a patch for the inclusion of mod tools and for the use / testing of them. I'm sure once the release date of the tools is closer, then I'll have those details for you.

Right now though, I'd consider the Mod Tools as something that we'd like to add. Not something that is guaranteed to be added as I know game updates, patches, and DLC are currently the priority of the team.

There's just no effing way.

In theory, IW could set up a system similar to what L4D uses to allow players to run custom maps, but I  guarantee that won't happen. Does anyone really think that IW is going to unlock the dev console so people can test their maps? At most, you'll get a custom rule set maker for private matches, and that will be it.

And that's if you get anything at all. Don't count on it.

PlayStation 3 finally hacked?

Maybe so:

I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip.

3 years, 2 months, 11 days...thats a pretty secure system[.]

This is apparently the same guy that unlocked the iPhone, so the claim seems credible.

UPDATE: the BBC has picked up the story.

A Tale of Two Engines

Matthew Pruitt, an "Assistant Producer & Community Manager" from EA-LA, has dished some news on Medal of Honor via Twitter. MoH's single-player end will use a version of the Unreal 3 Engine, while the multiplayer end (being developed separately by DICE) will use the Frostbite Engine.

So the footage you've seen of MoH is probably not representative of how the game will look when played online. In fact - and oddly enough - it's quite possible that the game will look better in multiplayer, and have more in the way of destructible stuff.

Keep in mind that the EA-LA is reportedly* using a "highly modified" version of Unreal 3, so the campaign's visuals and physics might come close to what you'll get with the MP. Based on the videos we've seen of both MoH and Bad Company 2 (which uses Frostbite), however, there's no reason to think that will be the case. It could also mean a full-on redundancy of assets between the SP and the MP, which would make the installation huge compared to similar games.

* Note that the source cited above is Johan Andersson, a graphics "Rendering Architect" at DICE.

I really hate that news like this is disseminated through Twitter. It's a suboptimal medium to say the least.

The day's compendium of ME2 news

Mass Effect 2 hits the street tomorrow in the US, while the EU release falls on January 29. The Australian market is expected to have the game by the 28th, but that date has yet to be confirmed.

Those gaming media outlets that were important enough to receive pre-release review copies of the game have been gushing over it. Neither the PC nor the Xbox versions have received a meta-modified review score of less than 90 among the handful of available reviews that Metacritic tracks. The console metascore - a weighted average of six reviews - stands at a whopping 96 ("universal acclaim"). Thus far, it seems BioWare's efforts to "critic-proof" its baby have paid-off.

The news isn't entirely positive, however. BraveNewGamer has a list of 5 Things That Suck About Mass Effect 2, which amounts to one man's index of minor annoyances. Fear not: there are no deal-breakers here.

Finally, if you don't have those saves you were instructed to keep from the first ME, don't worry about that either. Penny Arcade contacted a Community Coordinator or some such person at BioWare, who advised "that they had fully accounted for this. When creating a new character, you can go down a list of key decisions and set them manually." Nice.

I'm pre-loading the game right now, but don't expect a "first impressions" review until the end of next week.

L4D2 tourney results

I T ( ) E - U N I T E D - N A T I O N

January 24, 2010                                                                    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TEAM PLUCKY VICTORIOUS!

With a final record of three wins and zero losses, TEAM PLUCKY dominated the competition to emerge as the undisputed winner of the IUN Left 4 Dead 2 tournament.

Attention shoppers: your ass is kicked.

As IT( )E's inaugural L4D2 tournament came to a close, all participants were still reeling from the uncharacteristic competence of Team Plucky's captain, the Pasty Prince of Pain. While he usually spends most of any given round on his back, covered in puke and goo, the Pluckster finally rose to the occasion, turning in three MVP performances to lead his team to victory.

Team Plucky had sobriety on its side, beginning its triumphant march by blowing the doors off Team Imperfect on Hard Rain. Plucky set the tone early, spawning as a smoker inside the Burger Tank. He picked up two guitars, and used them to fight off three survivors while he choked the fourth to death with his tongue.

After an impressive win over Team Sack in round one, Team Thong looked to be the dark horse of the tournament. But in round two, they folded against Triple-P's one man murder machine in Dead Center. Despite solid infected play from the Potent Panties, they withered as the survivors, falling victim to the Pluckinator's jockeys. Sitting on face after face, none could withstand the onslaught of his mini-manhood. Team Thong conceded the finale honorably, exchanging shotgun blasts to the face in the safe room.

Finally, Team Plucky met Team Sack in the consolation round. Team Sack was cradled, massaged, and finally molested, earning Team Plucky its third and ultimate victory.

The epic play of the tourney, however, belonged to a non-IT( )E member. Team Thong's Maugchief was unavailable for the first round due to injury (sprained fallopian tube), so the squad picked up "Jesus on t" from the pub circuit at the last minute.  The Son of God descended to smite the enemies of the Thong, charging both Stinky Sack and Lonewolf off the top of the sugar mill - to their immediate deaths - in a single life. All who witnessed the event were in awe, and Karnage openly wept.

All hail the victors.

TEAM PLUCKY                             
 IT( )E Plucky                              
 IT( )E Frisky Wabbit                    
 IT( )E Bizzy Bone                       
 IT( )E Moto'freak

TEAM THONG
 IT( )E Miss Wabbit
 IT( )E Mr. Smiles
 IT( )E Maugchief
 IT( )E Messiah Complex
 Jesus on t

TEAM SACK
 IT( )E Stinky Sack
 IT( )E Karnage
 IT( )E Slam
 IT( )E Lonewolf

TEAM IMPERFECT
 IT( )E Imperfect
 IT( )E AndyBal5
 IT( )E Cybermage
 IT( )E Blake Ice

Maximum PC reviews the ATI Radeon HD 5970

And calls it "the undisputed performance champ."

AMD’s Radeon HD 5970 takes the performance crown, and now offers DirectX 11 GPUs top to bottom.

IGN reviews Mass Effect 2

This makes sense

Some good news for Versus in the next L4D2 update. From the L4D blog:

• The infected team, when it has less than four human players, will get bots. No word yet on how that will affect the respawn timer.

• Auto-spawning during finales is done, over, kaput.

On the auto-spawning issue, Valve waxes sarcastic:

Even though it's pretty obvious from the L4D forums that EVERYONE LOVES auto-spawning in finales, we figured, what the hell-we'd just go ahead and remove auto-spawning anyway.

Simple but substantial improvements. It's what Valve does, even when they should have done it a long time ago.

Lots of info on Nvidia's Fermi

From hardwarecanucks.com, an (almost) exhaustive preview of the specs and capabilities of the GeForce GF100. I'll throw up a few random bits to get the juices flowing:

Framerate comparison in Far Cry 2 (DX10)

Tessellation Performance

For those of you wondering what the tests above represent, the first three on the left show tessellation performance with an increasingly higher level of geometric complexity. The next two focus on situations that use a combination of geometry processing and DirectCompute operations to render a high-resolution scene and finally the last test is run on a direct draw call from Unigine’s tessellation engine.

We know from experience that while ATI’s 5000 series was the first on the market with DX11 compliance, it has some serious issues rendering scenes with more advanced DX11 features. NVIDIA meanwhile made an investment towards geometry performance which should vastly improve DX11 performance.

Prospectus

The increased rendering efficiency does seem to go a long way in making the GF100 a viable solution for the future but let’s put this into context for a minute. This is one complicated GPU and as such has proven to be extremely hard to produce in sufficient quantities as is evidenced from it being MIA in the current marketplace. Meanwhile, the overall complexity and integrated cache contribute to that massive 3 billion transistor count which leads to a cause for concern on the power consumption front as well. So, while we do know more than we did last month about the GF100, there will still be some fine tuning needed on NVIDIA’s part before its ready for primetime. What we can say is that we are confident the 512 core GF100 should consume under 300W under load.

On the plus side, the GF100’s architecture really does seem to be a departure from the GT200 in terms of scalability. As was discussed in the Modular Architecture section, NVIDIA is aiming to have a chip that can efficiently scale down for appropriate markets. This will eventually lead to a long line of GF100 derivatives and finally replace the endlessly renamed G92-based cards of yesteryear. To make matters even better, this new class of cards will fall under the umbrella of NVIDIA’s Unified Driver Architecture program so they will be able to continue releasing one driver for all of their products.

Still no official word yet on price, final clock speeds, memory sizes, and availability, but you'll still go blind reading all of it.

BioShock2: clarification on activations

From a community manager on the 2K forums:

Hey guys,

As many of you are aware, yesterday Steam's pre- purchase program began and the specs for BioShock 2 were posted along with that announcement.

These specs were taken from the retail packaging of BioShock 2. And since bullet points on the back of the box don't always explain the full story, here is a little more detail about what that means.

BioShock 2 is using a standard Games for Windows Live activation system, much like other games you have played in the past. That doesn't mean you always have to be online to play or save the game - you can create an offline profile for the Single Player portion of the game (you just won't earn achievements and you can't play Multiplayer, of course.)

We are using SecuROM only as a disc check method for the retail copy of BioShock 2. That is it's only use.

I am now checking the final plans for BioShock 2's specifications for Steam - and I'll get you a more complete answer by the end of the week. I have also been compiling a feature that will help answer a host of questions about BioShock 2 on the PC, including a podcast and screenshots of the PC version, and that should be out within a few days as well.

I'm sorry for the confusion, and I hope to clear it up entirely for you soon.

-Elizabeth