The NXE is finally out! The next time you switch on your Xbox (if you haven’t already), you will be prompted to update.

So now I must say, welcome to the NXE. I successfully got it from the second round of the preview program, and have been enjoying it since. It is a great change that really gives a new breath of life to the Xbox 360.

Whilst I was sitting on twitter and watching my friends login and gain the download tonight, I wrote up a small widget for BlogEngine.Net that displays your GamerCard, provided by MyGamerCard.Net.

If you want it for your own blog, you can download it from here. Instructions are in the archive.

(Or from my Skydrive)

On another note, A Kingdom for Keflings was released for Arcade, which takes advantage of the avatars you create when you download the NXE.

After a 12 hour long countdown on the Bungie website today, Bungie has released a teaser trailer for their next project, which is set in the Halo Universe.

The teaser trailer, entitled ‘Keep it Clean’ is very vague on details, however the keen eye will notice that it is in New Mombasa, the city destroyed in the beginning of Halo 2, and the fact that this game is still a part of Halo 3.

The trailer opens to cameras showing an evacuated New Mombasa. Then it cuts to some drop pods falling in the outer atmosphere.  The streets are deserted, as shown by the camera ‘Lubamba’ and there is a space elevator in the distance, as shown by camera ‘Mbaraki’. The camera cuts to thousands of drop pods falling in the distance, and focuses on a small group, before a large explosion (presumably the warp in Halo 2) occurs, destroying the city.

The AI and cameras reboot to show a destroyed city, however when the camera Mbaraki reappears, you see a single drop pod falling towards the city. It cuts to Halo 3, before showing the pod from a different angle, as it smashes past the camera. Then it cuts to black  and reads: “Prepare to drop”, before jerking around a bit more and reading Bungie, then showing the standard Xbox 360 clip.

Here are some more screenshots from the video. Note the entire trailer is pre-rendered, click on the thumbnails to get a hi-res version of the screenshot.

You can view the trailer for yourself, just head on over to Bungie.net and download it in either Quicktime or WMV, Small Medium or Large.

The game enjoyed an ‘early’ release in Australia, I picked it up last week and had loads of fun! For those who do not know, Spore is the latest game from the genius game designer that is Will Wright. Here he has taken his Sim style of games, where you create more than you destroy, and expanded it more than ever.

Now you can create life from the cellular stage, modifying your creature through some really intuitive and powerful tools before you get to the tribal stage where the game turns into a little version of Populous. (Also created by a game design genius, in this case, Peter Molyneux)

The game is lot of fun and I would recommend it to everyone, however I do have some issues with the DRM the game uses to fight piracy. Electronic Arts decided to use Securom to ‘protect’ the game after a large amount of backlash came from their idea to have people activate every 10 days. Now the game activates upon installation, however there are a limited number of activations possible before you have to contact customer support to reset your counter. In my opinion this does more to hurt the legitimate consumer than it does the pirates, as the scheme has already been cracked.

Those issues aside, the game runs great and is lots of fun. On the technical side the game makes heavy use of procedural generation, for textures, models, music and animations. The use of procedural generation allows people to share their creations using a small file that weighs in at less than 100kb. (In most cases 20-30kb)

Maxis have also developed an innovative way of sharing the content. Inside your ‘My Documents\My Spore Creations’ folder, you will fine png files that are 128x128 and contain an image of the creation. This is actually all the data the game needs to generate the creature/ship/vehicle etc. To share this, you simply give the png to others and they put it in their folder, and it is ready for use. The bonus of this is that because it also contains the thumbnail, you can easily create a small gallery for people to browse.

Not much has been heard on the Spore front recently, in comparison to two years ago. However today saw the release of the Spore Creature Creator Demo. Spore is the latest game from design genius Will Wright of SimCity and Sims fame. Taking the “Creation” gameplay idea to a whole new level by letting you create your own species and leading them from the cellular stage through evolution until they advance themselves to space travel.

The key element of the game that is being promoted by Will Wright and team, is the procedural content generation technology inside the game. To be able to create any kind of species you like, with practically any look, they let you do the art creation yourself through an easy tool, and generate the rest, like animations on the fly.

This tool, a simple modelling tool for your species, vehicles and buildings is what has been released early for fans to play around in. A demo of the Spore Creature Creator, featuring a subset of the “parts” available in the full game is now available to download from most game file sites on the Internet.

The editor is extremely simple to use, and does not need a tutorial or manual to start using. Some of the more advanced features are prompted by an unobtrusive text popup at the top of the screen, making it easy to jump into.

I did however find that creature textures were generated every time you switched from “Test Drive” mode to the editor and back. Which introduces a noticeable period of “lo-res” texturing on your creature. I feel that caching would have been a simple and effective option here, since if no changes are made during an editing phase, there is no need to regenerate the texture.

Aside from that, the editor was pretty easy and fun to use, and this is a good taste of a key element of the full game coming in September.

Go ahead and download the demo today, it weighs in at 205mb and runs pretty well on a decent system.

GameArena Download Link

or from the Official Spore Website (Mac version available there as well)

For those doing native application development that need a Physics or Animation product, Havok, partnered with Intel have released the world famous Havok Physics & Animation package for free.

This gives you the complete binary for use in your personal, educational or even commercial game as long as it is below US$10.

Currently there does not seem to be anything for XNA (despite an apparent job ad a while back), but I am sure this will be wrapped soon enough, and then the power of Havok will be available for use on the PC platform in XNA as well.

You can get Havok from http://tryhavok.intel.com. Just fill out the form and download the Programmer binaries and Artist tools.

In my preparation for CeBIT starting tomorrow I found an article on the website about the recent export numbers for Australian Game Developers.

http://www.ausinnovate.com/2008/05/05/export-boom-for-game-makers/

The article mentions that 06-07 data shows $139.7 million in generated revenue, with most of the market coming from Queensland or Victoria. Programmers accounting for 29% of those employed, compared to 34% for artists. A logical number. :)

If you missed out on the free registration, check for information next year around February, that is the time the free Registration occurs.

As of now the XNA 3.0 Community Technology Preview is available for download.

XNA 3.0 CTP

This requires a version of Visual Studio 2008 and will co-exist with Visual Studio 2005 and XNA GS 2.0.

Note there is no Xbox360 support in the CTP release, however there will be with the final release, currently only PC and Zune.

Now I am off to see what else they added. :) Enjoy.

Nvidia has released the first of their acclaimed GPU Gems series for free reading online in its entirety.

These are full HTML forms of the articles, all revolving around techniques for rendering. Completely free.

You can go and read the book here and even take advantage of 30% off the print copy. (See the top of the page, available at time of writing)

This weeks update to Zero Punctuation sees Yahtzee reviewing Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4, and it sits up there with some of his really hilarious reviews.

Infinity Ward must be cheering by now.

Click More to see the video. Not safe for work, contains swearing.

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