grid
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Codies share design knowhow with automotive tech firm
Worlds are colliding, as Codemasters has announced what it calls a "strategic partnership" with automotive 3D effects firm Realtime Technology to share vehicle rendering and modeling practices for upcoming projects. The partnership includes collaboration over rendering tools such as RTT DeltaGen and RealTrace, used in rendering CAD models in real time, and Codemasters' EGO game engine, seen in titles such as last year's DiRT and the upcoming Race Driver: GRID. What exactly this meeting of the minds will mean for gamers remains fuzzy, though considering Realtime Technology's considerable footprint in the automotive industry with clients such as Audi, Maserati and Rolls-Royce among many others, maybe this is all part of Codemasters' grand scheme to make racing games exciting once more.
GRID screens and box art skid online
Race Driver: Grid is the latest installment in the TOCA Race Car series developed and published by Codemasters. Running on the same engine that powered Dirt, Race Driver: Grid is set in an urban environment where street racing has taken over the underground circuit. Underground street racing? We're surprised no one thought of this idea for a video game a long time ago. They should really look into making a movie or something. Well, at least these 20 screens look good. %Gallery-18617%
Cisco invests in internet HD delivery startup GridNetworks
Figuring out a way to get HDTV through " a series of tubes" is becoming an increasingly interesting -- and crowded -- venture. GridNetworks has revealed Cisco is one of the companies behind a recent $9.5 million dollar investment in the company that's focused on providing a delivery system for TV and film content in HD to PCs or TVs over the internet. What's so special about this group's GridCasting technology? We don't know yet, but with ties to a giant like Cisco we'll probably see applications sooner rather than later.[Via TVWeek]
Codemasters announces Race Driver: GRID for DS
Despite our affinity for playing the DS while in the car, we're not sure the DS is the platform we want to race cars in, if you catch our drift. Nevertheless, Codemasters is bringing the Race Driver: GRID franchise to Nintendo's ubiquitous handheld. Most notable is the game's track editor, first spotted in last year's Race Driver: Create and Race DS game. Online multiplayer functionality enables up to four-player races, online leaderboards, and track-sharing ability including the ability to upload and download new tracks from a central server. The DS version is scheduled to release simultaneously with the already announced PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 releases sometime mid-2008.%Gallery-15852%
Raid Rx: Unkicking butt (a Grid story)
Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. See that up there? That's Grid. Honest. No, really. The names have been blanked out to protect the wicked. Ok. Stop the QQ'ing right there. I know WoW Insider has covered Grid before and mentioned it last week, and even I've talked about it in passing. What's the difference now? I'm covering nitty gritty, the stuff you need to know to make your raiding life easier. We're talking a full-body assault on one of the most popular healer raid frame addons out there. And it's our secret, kk? 'Cause the Addon Spotlight people will prolly kill me if they caught wind of it. If there's no article next week, you know someone ratted me out. Grid has long been worshipped as the ultimate compact raid frame, a place where all of the information you need to know about your raid is provided in a single display. In fact, Grid's raid frame so small only those with binoculars strapped to their head and serious affection for tiny squares have been able to use Grid right out of the box. For those that have neither, they tend throw in the towel at the first sign of the configuration menu. And that is what I intend to stop. Put your textiles back on their racks and prepare to become a... /insert dramatic music... MASTER OF GRID!
New Codies racer aims to 'make racing exciting again'
We hate to be the ones to break it to you, but you know those racing games you think excite you so much? Well, they really don't. But don't worry, because according to Codemasters' game design chief Ralph Fulton, the studios' newly announced racer Grid aims to "make racing exciting again." How? Well, according to Fulton, the game, which is the latest in Codies' Race Driver franchise, is not about collecting cars or tweaking suspensions, but rather about "the drama, the rivalries, the aggression and the crashes." Sounds like someone's a fan of Burnout. Due sometime in the middle of 2008 for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC, Grid is being developed on a refined version of the engine used to make Dirt, and will include a variety of different circuit and drift vehicles, new and old. Grid aims to test your driving prowess on both real life tracks as well as in street races "on the fringes of legality" in cities such as Detroit and San Francisco, as well as in the neon underworld of the Far East. Forget Burnout. It sounds like Need for Speed has passed the baton.
GRID will burn rubber mid 2008
Codemasters just officially announced that their upcoming racing game (once referred to as Race Driver One) will be ready for a mid 2008 release and it's going to be called GRID. GRID is currently being worked on by Codemasters' DiRT team and aims at being all about racing with no busy car work. You know, just straight up racing. GRID will dabble in the somewhat standard list of locals around the world including Washington DC, Pagani and Japan's ever popular drift racing circuit. The game's early visuals look solid enough and it does have the DiRT team's pedigree behind it, so it's quite possible GRID could be something worthwhile. But we'll just have to sit back and see if game's visuals impress, if the gameplay is there and if it can bring something unique to the racing genre sometime next year. Until then, we'll just play with our graph paper
Leave the glue at home: concept phone lets you bejewel by grid
Picture this doomsday scenario: you've gone and covered the screen of your phone with stylish hearts and esses, only to discover that the design just doesn't fit your mood anymore. With classic methods of bejeweling, that puts you in a bit of a pickle, seeing how your phone's now covered with a nice, thick layer of glue separating the sparkly stuff from the shell of the handset. It's all good, though -- with his new concept, designer Nils Siegel pictures a world where you can change your phone's gems as quickly as... well, popping out and plugging in a couple hundred tiny squares. A fun task? Not necessarily, but in the scheme of things, it's probably cheaper than buying a new phone for every mood change.
AddOn creation site needs your help
WoWAce is a set of libraries heavily used by developers to create many of those nifty AddOns we know and love like FuBar and Grid. Unfortunately, their Wiki site lost its data and the latest usable back up is over two months old. Everything since then has been lost.In an effort to reconstruct the lost pages, they have pulled HTML copies of those pages from Google Cache and now they need your assistance. You can go to their Rebuilding page and help them convert the HTML into Wiki format and repost it on the site.If you have some spare time, head on over and help them get back on their feet so they can continue to help developers create those AddOns we can't live without.
E307: Nintendo Crossword kind of announced
Nintendo never got around to announcing this new game at E3: a crossword game tentatively called Nintendo Crossword. For sudoku fans, a "crossword puzzle" is a grid puzzle much like sudoku, but with letters instead of numbers, and completely different rules in place of the sudoku rules.Nintendo's presentation is much more staid than that of its competition, New York Times Crosswords, passing over odd color schemes and Comic Sans-alikes for a traditional newspaper-like display. It's boxy, but good.%Gallery-4773%
AddOn Spotlight: Grid
I used to raid heal using mainly the CT_RaidAssist emergency monitor. Call me a bad healer if you want; it was a lot nicer than having 40 health bars all over my screen. The emergency monitor is not clickable in WoW 2, and thus began my hunt for a way that I could see everybody's health and still see the fight. CT_RA bars, Blizzard's bars, and the like were all out due to being simply too big. Furthermore, I find them a bit overwhelming, making it hard to spot who's low on health. I mostly heal main tanks, but I like to be able to easily see if a Rogue or something takes a big hit. So where does one turn for a set of raid health bars that's small, legible, and informative?
Return of the addons to Azeroth
My guild headed back to raiding last night (seems a lot of guilds are taking a vacation lately, with the patch and the expansion giving a one-two punch to the PVE game), and while BWL wasn't quite ready for us-- the Razorgore orb was bugged, and our MT couldn't see a pet bar for him-- we finally got back in the groove in MC. We'd been at a loss with new specs and a lack of our usual mods, but tonight, with various means and instruments, we were able to finally down some of our old farm targets and pick up some epic gear.Decursive, as I said last week, was the big one. Apparently it was number one on the devs' hitlist, and for good reason, because it definitely took a lot of work out of cleansing decurses (like the one Lucifron throws out). But we've found alternatives that are "good enough." One of our mages now swears by Grid, an addon that works with 2.0.1 (I haven't tried it, but it comes highly recommended). And even more people benefited from this macro, posted in the Forums. It seems that if you create a macro that says "/cast [target=mouseover] Remove Lesser Magic" (or whatever decursing spell you want to use), you can then run your mouse over players or their raid icons while spamming the macro button, and you've got a reasonable facsimile of what Decursive used to do. In fact, this is even better-- Shaman (like myself) can create a mouseover Purge macro, run your mouse across a group of enemies in PVP while spamming the button, and never have to put up with a buff or renew spell ever again.Speaking of my Shaman, when I asked for help last week, you all gracefully answered. I was extremely frustrated with the changes to addons (I lived by all the extra info redHeart gave me), but when I finally tried out and used Clique, I finally felt back at home. It's simple to set up and use, and makes things almost as easy as they were pre-2.0 (the author even has a video up showing how simple it is to use). Finally, the brand new version of CTRaid, 1.621 (I think that's the third version they've released since the patch) finally gets rid of that extremely annoying "clicking" noise the patch added to raids. A few things are still bugged in a few raid instances, but finally, raiding is getting back to normal.
