Development Agency Search Results

News: Performance Hacks & Tweaks for Linux

If you have made the switch from Windows to Linux, I want to congratulate you in advance. I'm sure you have noticed a huge performance increase when using Linux over other operating systems. This is only half the battle, though! Most users who are new to Linux end up using Ubuntu. I have no gripes with Ubuntu, but I do not agree with their philosophy. It almost mimics Windows. Ubuntu favors ease of use, and despite valiant efforts by the development team thus far (Ubuntu is crazy fast), all o...

News: Hideo Kojima and Fox Engine Make Special USC Appearance

Hideo Kojima is one of the biggest names in Japanese game design. He's the man behind every Metal Gear game, each of which has been beautiful but divisive. He's an auteur, a rarity in AAA game design, managing business, design, and programming for Kojima Productions. Last week he made a rare public appearance at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, which contains the school's video game programs, and gave a 90-minute talk about his career, influences, and the specifics of his new Fox game design...

News: Iconic Indie Game Publisher Interplay Struggles to Make a Comeback

For more than a decade, Interplay was arguably the best video game publisher in America. Their list of games is a who's-who of the most creative and forward thinking games of the '90s, including everything fromOut of This World to Alone in the Dark to Earthworm Jim to Descent. They've been around since 1983, but have fallen on hard times since 1997, when they became a public company. They were acquired by a French publisher who then went bankrupt. They were forced to close their internal deve...

News: Project Zomboid Has More Problems than the Guy in this Screenshot

Making a video game requires an incredible amount of work. It requires people skilled in many disciplines to work together for thousands of hours merging visual art, computer programming, game design, sound design, and music composition into a fun game. The Indie Stone is a Scottish indie development studio started, like so many others, by industry vets who were tired of corporate restrictions and wanted to make the crazy games they had always imagined.

News: XBox 360 Remake-O-Rama!

The aging and maturity of video games as a medium has lead to some unfortunate consequences. One of these, perhaps drawn from the film industry, is the spate of remakes that has overtaken the game market over the last few years. It hasn't been as bad as the remakeorama trend in cinema, but developers have recognized the value in releasing the same thing they already made and making more money off it. Below, a roundup of some remakes of classic games released for XBLA recently, some fantastic,...

News: The Basics of Facebook Privacy Settings

Just how private is your Facebook profile? To some extent, that's up to you. Many Facebook users share and poke their days away, never knowing about the plethora of custom privacy settings that lie just a click away. Facebook's privacy menus can look a little complicated to the newcomer, so today I'm going to give you a basic look at what lies under the hood.

News: Has SimCity Been Destroyed for Good?

Yesterday, Electronic Arts had a nice sale on Steam for 40-60 percent off some of their Sims titles, which included The Sims 3 (along with its DLCs) and SimCity 4. I've never been a big Sims fan, especially with the slew of virtual people games in the last decade, so I didn't realize until now that Maxis had stopped making their SimCity games; They haven't released any city building Sim games since SimCity 4 eight years ago. There was SimCity Societies in 2007, but it was made by a different ...

How To: Use machine shop tools to build prototypes with MIT

This ten-part series on machining skills for prototype development comes straight from MIT & Erik Vaaler. It's one of the most extensive video tutorials available on the web for machining. MIT's artificial intelligence laboratory's primary work is done for their robotics group. And most of their equipment is unavailable to the public because they're machines that MIT have built directly in their machine shop, or items that came into the shop needing repair. But if you can get your hands on so...

The Brooklyn Grange: A Farm up on the Roof

Up On the Roof: Urban Rooftop Farming and The Brooklyn Grange So sometimes something inspires me so much that it makes me want to run to the rooftop of my eastside L.A. apartment and shout out at the top of my lungs "LOOK AT THIS, THIS IS AMAZING!". The Brooklyn Grange is one of those kinds of things.

News: Levon Helm Bustin' Out the Nitty-Gritty Mud Beats

Levon Helm... The longtime drummer for The Band , Levon Helm wore many musical hats throughout his long career, including multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, singer, impressario, studio owner, studio engineer and producer. He grew up working on a farm in Arkansas; his first instrument was guitar, which he began playing at ag eight, but after seeing the F.S. Walcott Rabbits Foot Minstrels, he decided to ...

IPsec Tools of the Trade: Don't Bring a Knife to a Gunfight

Pull up outside any construction site and you'll see tools scattered about—hammers, jigsaws, nail guns, hydraulic pipe benders—these are the tools of the trade. You would be hard-pressed to build a home or office building with just your hands! On that same page, security professionals also have their own go-to tools that they use on the job site, only their job site is your server.

News: Anonymity, Darknets and Staying Out of Federal Custody, Part Three: Hidden Services

For a moment, picture a situation where you want to host some files or images, but you do not want it traced back to you. Perhaps you're working on a project with others and need secure data storage. Anonymity is the new shield of the 21st century—and you best protect yourself. As always here at Null Byte, we are trying to make that happen. Before someone can learn how to root a box, they need to learn how not to be found. I can not stress that point enough.

Uncrackable: Secure Your Secrets with 4096-Bit Encryption

As you progress in the world of information security, you'll find yourself in situations where data protection is paramount. No doubt you will have files to hide and secrets to share, so I'm going to show you how to use the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG for short) to encrypt and decrypt as you need. GPG is a great open-source version of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), a similar application used for encryption, but licensing and patent problems led to the development of GPG in its wake.

News: Minecraft World's Minecon Wrap-Up

Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. Minecon 2011 went really well. If any of you World Members attended, please post about your experience to the community corkboard. The opening ceremony was amazing! Here's a video of the release: After the release, we attended the panels for Scrolls and Cobalt. We then attended the Official Mojang Panel.

How To: Deal with Waiting for a Google+ Feature

Google+ is the greatest social network to emerge since Facebook annoyed everyone into joining, but that doesn't necessarily mean that our relationship with it is all rosy. Although Google+ has amazing innovations, like hangouts and circles, users are spending a lot of time begging for core features that take what seems to be an eternity to emerge.

News: Indie Games Hit the Red Carpet at the IndieCade Awards

Last Thursday, on October 7th, indie game developers from around the world walked down a red carpet in Santa Monica, California in the hopes of winning an IndieCade award. We previously discussed the IndieCade festival and conference, but the award show is a smaller, more inclusive event that provides finalists the opportunity to see their project on stage with rewards by sponsors such as LG, who presented this year’s ceremony.

News: G+Me Makes Google+ (Almost) Perfect: An Interview with Huy Zing

G+Me is one of our favorite Chrome extensions here at Google+ Insider's Guide. We love it because it's one of the most comprehensive extensions out there. It attempts to address the "noisy streams" issue, with list mode, and collapsible posts and comments. The creator, +Huy Zing, is very responsive to feedback, and he's been quick to address any issues that arise, including privacy concerns. He's even created a G+Me (Paranoid Edition) extension, for the extra careful Google+ user. And if you ...

News: BioShock's Libertarian 'Rapture' of the Deep Evolves into Real-Life Seastead Cities

BioShock is one of the best games of all time. It combines FPS gameplay with RPG storytelling and supports multiple systems better than any other game, that much is for sure. And the setting of its amazing story is a place called Rapture, a high-tech libertarian colony at the bottom of the Atlantic built by Andrew Ryan, a greying industrialist clearly inspired by John Galt and his creator Ayn Rand, the mother of Objectivism and modern American libertarianism in general. Ryan is a Soviet exile...

A First Look at Call of Juarez: The Cartel

The developing team Techland gets a free pass. Having thoroughly enjoyed their previous title, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, this sequel was bought on day one by good ol' fashion blind faith. After playing for most of today, it's still to early to tell if the game is a mess or a fun romp. Here are some first impressions.

DIY Plastination: Turning Dead Animals Into Science-Jerky

If you found the world renown Body Worlds exhibition gnarly and perverse, perhaps you'll find this latest parade of plastination a little less so—considering we don't share the same DNA as these specimens of jerky-in-the-name-of-science. The Koerperwelten der Tiere—or Animal Body Worlds–doesn't showcase preserved corporal matter, but rather 20 odd plastinated mammals, currently on display at the Cologne Zoo in Cologne, Germany.

Project Cafe: The Specs Behind Nintendo's Newly Rumored Console

In the past 25 years, there have been five generations of home video games systems. Since Nintendo changed the world by releasing the NES in 1987, there has always been at least two consoles competing for dominance in the wild west of the games industry. This competition— coupled with rapid advancements in technology—has led to a new generation of battling systems coming out every five years, like clockwork.

News: Foreign Countries

International Pet Travel: Taking Your Pet Animal to a Foreign Country If you are taking a pet to another country (permanently or for a visit), contact that country's consulate or embassy for information about any requirements that you must meet. A list of consulates can be found at Foreign Consular Offices in the United States