Sunday, April 24, 2011

PSN to be Down Until Tuesday



According to a source of Playstation Universe's, PSN will be down until Tuesday for NA & EU users, Monday for JP users. The source also added that the PSN servers were hit with a LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) which allowed a DDOS (Dedicated Denial of Service) attack to occur. The hackers were able to gain access to the user account database & admin Dev database. Because of this, Sony decided to take down PSN & Qriocity to transfer back-ups to new servers, reissue Dev accounts, & conduct a thorough investigation.

It will be interesting to see how Sony conducts itself after everything is brought back up. The once-a-day blog updates help add to the validity of this information and show just how serious this is to the network.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Tri-Ace Releases a Tantalizing Tech Demo



The video is called "Physically Based Rendering version 0.1" and shows off their in-house game engine. The theme of the video is set within the Star Ocean universe showing off elements of the third & fourth games. Tri-Ace goes into further detail on their Research & Development page about what is taking place.

Technical facts:
  • Rendered in real-time on Xbox 360 / PlayStation 3
  • Runs at 30Hz with 720p and is directly captured from the video output on the devkit
  • Real-time lighting and shadowing used (no baked light maps)
  • Key features are physically-based shading models, physically-based lighting and image-based global illumination

Ragnarok Online goes Free 2 Play



This weekend the team behind Ragnarok Online, GRAVITY Co., Ltd., announced that the game has gone "Free to Play." Doing away with monthly subscriptions, Gravity now offers the game free of charge to all of their users. Players can now instead pay a fee for a VIP package to get all of the bonus' subscribers had received (better drop rate, higher EXP gain, larger storage, and additional buffs). As an added bonus for this weekend, RO players can try-out the VIP package for 3 days to get a feel for what they could be playing with. To get in on the action, head over to Play Ragnarok and download the client.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011