Joey Davidson & Erik Norris run a weekly web show called “Watch Us Play…” where they play through a game and provide commentary.

Being pretty entertaining guys, their playthrough of 38 Studios’ demo for their upcoming Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (prologue to the BigWorld-powered Copernicus MMO, no release date) is worth a watch.

EA has brought two of its studios together to cross-promote their anticipated action RPG’s.

If you download and play through the 45 minute demo of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning on Jan. 17th, you’ll unlock a set of Mass Effect-style armor for your full-game purchase. The same works, vice versa, if you play and complete the Mass Effect 3 demo.

38 Studios is building its Amalur followup, an MMO stealth-titled Copernicus, on BigWorld Technology.

Amalur Armor in ME3

4

ME3 Armor in Amalur

2011 has been a landmark year for BigWorld. Our team has expanded, we’ve made some major improvements to our product, and we’ve seen our clients leverage our technology to do some amazing things. We hope yours was as fruitful as ours, and we wish you an excellent 2012.

So, from all the BigWorld cells scattered across the globe, we wish you a happy new year.

Our friends at Develop Magazine have put their iPad app up on Apple’s Newsstand Service, and BigWorld is sponsoring its launch.

The app provides access monthly to each issue of the game-dev-focused publication.

As well as offering access to a wealth of video content, the Develop iPad app also includes outbound links throughout each issue, caters for searching every edition, includes a comprehensive contents and navigation tools, and provides a number of social sharing options.

BigWorld is also proudly sponsoring Develop’s online digital edition, available here.

Matt interviews Tiffany Nelson, producer at enVie Interactive, regarding BigWorld-powered VIE: Virtual Island of Entertainment, as well as the evolution of virtual worlds over the past decade.

BigWorld Booth, GDC Online 2011, Austin TX

Matt interviews Jay Moore, president of Bitraider Technology, a cloud game asset streaming solution that is currently integrated into a BigWorld-powered title: VIE (Virtual Island of Entertainment)

BigWorld Booth, GDC Online 2011, Austin TX

Matt interviews Thomas Puha, Chief Visual Optimizer at Umbra Software. Umbra is an occlusion culling optimization software that keeps unseen geometry in a 3D space from being unnecessarily rendered. It is one of the directly-integrated 3rd party plugins in the BigWorld technology suite.

BigWorld Booth, GDC Online 2011, Austin TX

Afterparty at TAD (The Art Department), where we sprung a surprise trophy on Victor Kislyi and Wargaming.net, for excellence in record-setting and game development on BigWorld-powered World of Tanks (and upcoming World of Warplanes, World of Battleships). Note: 37MM 1942 Stuart tank shell is the real deal

Carey from Original Gamer and RPG Fanatic took some time out to interview Adam, our lead technical artist, on some of the client and server enhancements coming to BigWorld 3.0.

Austin, Texas – October 6, 2011

BigWorld Pty Ltd, enVie Interactive™, LLC, and BitRaider come together in Austin for this year’s GDC Online to discuss the successful integration of their three properties.

VIE™: Virtual Island of Entertainment™ is a 3D virtual world with social game elements developed by enVie Interactive. The studio has licensed both BitRaider and BigWorld technologies to help facilitate VIE’s development process. BigWorld provides the end-to-end game development middleware technology and support that has allowed enVie Interactive to focus their efforts on the actual design of their virtual world without needing to dedicate resources to internal tools development.

“We’ve been happy to see how enVie Interactive has leveraged our tools, client and server technology to create their rich 3D world, and are thrilled to see BitRaider’s streaming solution actively making the experience even more frictionless and enjoyable for their users,” says John De Margheriti, CEO of BigWorld.

BitRaider equips VIE with cloud-based asset streaming, allowing users to progressively download the virtual world’s assets as they play, instead of downloading one large package installer. Other BitRaider features include progressive patching during gameplay and character movement prediction about twenty times per second to ensure the game world quickly streams from the cloud to the end user.

“VIE has been an excellent showcase for BitRaider streaming technology,” said Royal O’Brien, CEO of BitRaider. “The very smooth launch where VIE starts playing in minutes and patches while it’s played is a great testament to an excellent partnership.”

enVie Interactive’s adoption of these two technologies has enhanced the quality of experience for guests on VIE and has broadened appeal by increasing the speed at which guests can enter the world.

“By integrating BigWorld Technology, we are able to make VIE the most visually immersive 3D virtual world experience,” said Stacey Hirata, President of enVie Interactive. “BitRaider has helped us accelerate the delivery of this experience to our guests and we’re thrilled by the results from these amazing partnerships.”

# # #

About BigWorld

BigWorld Pty Ltd was formed in 2002, and has offices in Australia, Europe, USA and China. BigWorld Technology provides developers of online games a competitive advantage by significantly reducing risk, cost and time to market. The BigWorld Technology Suite includes a highly scalable and stable server, robust next-gen client, content creation tools, a library of 3^rd party plugins, full support, and other accompanying tools. Multiple licensing options are available. More information at www.bigworldtech.com

# # #

About BitRaider

BitRaider MMO, LLC. is a Baton Rouge, Louisiana company that licenses a disruptive game streaming technology to publishers who want to provide a superior player experience faster, more easily and without the pain of current download and patching methods. More information at www.bitraider.com/

# # #

About enVie™ Interactive LLC

Based in Sunnyvale, California, enVie Interactive LLC is a ground-breaking developer, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment. Players can sign up for enVie’s flagship product, VIE: Virtual Island of Entertainment at www.viethegame.com, join us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/viethegame or follow us on Twitter @viethegame to receive additional information.

# # #

Contact
Matt Daly
Social Media Director
BigWorld Pty Ltd
mdaly@bigworldtech.com
+13133554347

GDC Online 2011 is this Monday. We’ll be keeping you updated from the field as thousands of game developers descend upon downtown Austin, and upon BigWorld’s booth.

A number of our partners and licensees will be on-site, BigWorld festivities have been arranged (speak with us in person), we have new features to demonstrate, and World of Tanks has been nominated for a “best online tech” award.

Come visit booth #203, where a mixture of our Austin and Australia team will be congregating. We’ll be conducting interviews, chatting, and demonstrating the newest developments in BigWorld Technology.

Email us for a meeting.

Here we have a trailer for Virtual Island of Entertainment (VIE), a new virtual world being built on BigWorld Technology by enVie Interactive LLC.

VIE is currently in open beta.

A quick demonstration of a new features coming to BigWorld 3.0… Realtime Shadows & Dynamic Time of Day

We’ll be attending the following conferences over the coming couple months, some with booth presence, some on foot…

See our events page for full details and/or ping ping us to arrange a meeting!

Wargaming.net has released patch 0.6.5 for its flagship game, World of Tanks.

Among the big changes is an entire U.S. Tank Destroyer line from tiers 1 through 9, two new maps and the introduction of the top-tier M46 Patton main battle tank.

Lots of discussion popping up these days regarding massive server scaling, cloud computing, and the future of truly massive gaming.

In 1999, BigWorld had 900 entities (realistic user server load) running around in the same space simultaneously. This was neat, but what we quickly came to realize was that we’d been asking ourselves alot of “if” questions quite easily, but not much “why?” At that point it was clear that it would be incumbent on game designers to conceive of awesome practical use cases for having 1,000 people in the same game space simultaneously.

We thought about truly massive gaming, perhaps something like the huge melee battles of Dynasty Warriors 2, a model that has been adopted by BigWorld licensee Userjoy on their title Kingdom Heroes. We thought about Tribes as far as scale, but the server population never really crept up past 50 or so. It’s challenging to conceive of compelling game design at that scale.

Then, in 2005, large scale tests were carried out at the IBM Deep Computing facility in Poughkeepsie, NY. BigWorld successfully demonstrated the linear scalability of its load balancing technology by dynamically balancing 100,000 entities across various cell apps on a single server. Obviously, there are other hardware/fabric issues involved in scaling a gamespace to this population, but we demonstrated that we could conceivably continue to add more and more users without predictable server load.

So, the “if” was proven long ago, but the “why” has yet to be really answered. What are some great game applications for a truly massive co-present gamespace?

Addtl. Reading…

• BigWorld Server/IBM whitepaper detailing 100k user concurrency
• IBM press release detailing 100k user concurrency on BigWorld Server

Wargaming.net recently announced that World of Tanks has surpassed 3 million registered players!

2 million are now registered in Russia alone, while Europe and the US host over a million players and climbing fast. With the release last month in China, we’re certain that this is just the beginning of World of Tank’s meteoric rise.

“At the very beginning of development for World of Tanks, we were assuming that the maximum number would be around 600,000 players worldwide. Now, we have 2 million registrations in Russia alone, not to mention the Western audience and its immense growth,” said Wargaming.net CEO Victor Kislyi. “With the tremendous number we’ve reached in Russia as well as the dynamics of community growth in Europe and North America, we are looking forward to the many more milestones to come.”

Continuing our exclusive coverage of the recently-announced, BigWorld-Powered, Userjoy MMO “Moego,” it’s on to the cat pet. It’s becoming increasingly clear, with each passing video, that the order of things in Moego tend toward: player joins/creates family, recruits various animal castles, which then release pets of the same animal type out of the gigantic building on their back. It looks like the animals and animal castles come out to fight… but, what we can say for sure is that this little guy carries a pipe and/or large ladle… which endears him to us greatly.

In Moego, once players have joined or created families, they are able to begin recruiting and raising pets. These furry little cuties, whose titles include “crispy sheep” and “fancy raccoon,” act as your personal posse, laying down adorable pain on your adversaries. Each pet is upgradable, and also has a unique crafting and item upgrade ability, so progression through the game will largely depend on your pet platoon.

MOEGO is a “community-centered free-to-play MMORPG,” with all the expected accoutrement, as well as some very unique offerings in the MMO space. These include family groups, “animal castles,” pet armies, and a few others.

Continuing our exclusive coverage of the recently-announced, BigWorld-Powered, Userjoy MMO “Moego,” we’ll take a little-bo-peek (unavoidable, sorry) at another acquirable pet: CRISPY SHEEP. We’re still not entirely clear on the meaning behind this little buddy’s name, nor are we totally clear on the “100%” bib that he/she is born wearing, but we love it. The video below showcases pet upgrading pretty well.

In Moego, once players have joined or created families, they are able to begin recruiting and raising pets. These furry little cuties, whose titles include “crispy sheep” and “fancy raccoon,” act as your personal posse, laying down adorable pain on your adversaries. Each pet is upgradable, and also has a unique crafting and item upgrade ability, so progression through the game will largely depend on your pet platoon.

MOEGO is a “community-centered free-to-play MMORPG,” with all the expected accoutrement, as well as some very unique offerings in the MMO space. These include family groups, “animal castles,” pet armies, and a few others.

Continuing our exclusive coverage of the recently-announced, BigWorld-Powered, Userjoy MMO “Moego,” here’s a couple more character classes: The Swordsman, y El Soulkeeper. A note on aesthetics: we’ve enjoyed the contrast of simple, strong tones on world assets, which provide a nice, clean canvas upon which characters in increasingly complex and awesomely-designed garb can run around doing their thing. We think this video exemplifies this pretty well.

MOEGO is a “community-centered free-to-play MMORPG,” with all the expected accoutrement, as well as some very unique offerings in the MMO space. These include family groups, “animal castles,” pet armies, and a few others.

Continuing our exclusive coverage of the recently-announced, BigWorld-Powered, Userjoy MMO “Moego,” another look shall be had the legions of animal pets that the player will acquire through the course of the game. This time, it’s a Rabbit. We’re extrapolating here that the now-infamous animal castles (building-sized animals with buildings on their backs) are the source of pets in Moego. This is depicted in the video below, wherein a gigantic rabbit animal castle basically poofs a new rabbit in front of the bowing player character.

In Moego, once players have joined or created families, they are able to begin recruiting and raising pets. These furry little cuties, whose titles include “crispy sheep” and “fancy raccoon,” act as your personal posse, laying down adorable pain on your adversaries. Each pet is upgradable, and also has a unique crafting and item upgrade ability, so progression through the game will largely depend on your pet platoon.

MOEGO is a “community-centered free-to-play MMORPG,” with all the expected accoutrement, as well as some very unique offerings in the MMO space. These include family groups, “animal castles,” pet armies, and a few others.

Continuing our exclusive coverage of the recently-announced, BigWorld-Powered, Userjoy MMO “Moego,” we’ll peek at two character classes: The Monk, and Le Priest . Comprising the more spiritual side of the character class array, these short video overviews demonstrate some of the unique abilities and tendencies that these two exhibit. Our particular favorite, visible below, is the massive flying fist of doom that the monk throws around with reckless abandon… or is it controlled abandon? Do or do not, there is no try.

MOEGO is a “community-centered free-to-play MMORPG,” with all the expected accoutrement, as well as some very unique offerings in the MMO space. These include family groups, “animal castles,” pet armies, and a few others.

Continuing our exclusive coverage of the recently-announced, BigWorld-Powered, Userjoy MMO “Moego,” it’s time for our first look at one of the key ingredients of the game’s unique hyperbolized world: PETS. In particular, you’ll find a video below featuring Dog… who is apparently a crack shot in a gentleman’s duel.

In Moego, once players have joined or created families, they are able to begin recruiting and raising pets. These furry little cuties, whose titles include “crispy sheep” and “fancy raccoon,” act as your personal posse, laying down adorable pain on your adversaries. Each pet is upgradable, and also has a unique crafting and item upgrade ability, so progression through the game will largely depend on your pet platoon.

MOEGO is a “community-centered free-to-play MMORPG,” with all the expected accoutrement, as well as some very unique offerings in the MMO space. These include family groups, “animal castles,” pet armies, and a few others.

Aeria games, who runs BigWorld-powered Realm of the Titans, has begun a machinima overdubbing contest.

It’s an interesting approach toward user-generated-content. Download the original video here, sign up at the forums here if you don’t already have an account, and submit.

Continuing our exclusive coverage of the recently-announced, BigWorld-Powered, Userjoy MMO “Moego,” we’ll now run through a couple of the game’s more domestic, albeit equally well-designed activities: Farming & Fishing.

MOEGO is a “community-centered free-to-play MMORPG,” with all the expected accoutrement, as well as some very unique offerings in the MMO space. These include family groups, “animal castles,” pet armies, and a few others.

Paul Hyman over at UBM TechWeb recently interviewed Gavin Longhurst, BigWorld’s VP of Business Development.

They discuss the new production considerations for casual games. as well as game development in China, and BigWorld’s place in all of that.

Have a read.

Ultimately, getting people into your game, engaged, and paying for the experience is what it’s all about. The key to adoption is a mitigation of entry barriers like copious clicks, security/system mods, reboots, and huge downloads. Many players download a game but abort the download costing the publisher bandwidth money. Some users will finish a download, but won’t install the game. This might be attributed to install complexity, security, or “onerous” registration requirements. The onus is on the developer to lessen entry barriers; the success of their game depends on it.

enVie, the developers of BigWorld-powered VIE: Virtual Island of Entertainment have released a short interview with their lead artist. He elaborates a bit on the aesthetic direction of the game, as well as some of the technical requirements for developing on a platform like BigWorld’s.

On top of the style and quality of the asset we also take into account how the player can use these assets to show their own personal style in their living space. Sometimes that’s just finding a fun and quirky object like that chair that’s shaped like a hand. Sometimes It’s offering different color combinations or patterns on the asset. We’re also looking to add more assets that show off personal interests or include game play. But that’s secret stuff right now. More to come in those monthly updates!

Continuing our exclusive coverage of the recently-announced, BigWorld-Powered, Userjoy MMO “Moego,” we’ll peek at two character classes: The Knight, and Ze Archer.

MOEGO is a “community-centered free-to-play MMORPG,” with all the expected accoutrement, as well as some very unique offerings in the MMO space. These include family groups, “animal castles,” pet armies, and a few others.

Victor recently visited a tank museum in Finland, where he describes the release of Wargaming’s World of Tanks as a sort of “tanksgiving.”

Victor’s a pretty entertaining interviewee/presenter, so you should mosey on over to this interview in the tank yard by Dome.fi writer Jukka O.

Continuing our exclusive coverage of the recently-announced, BigWorld-Powered, Userjoy MMO “Moego,” we’ll take a look at one of the two opposing kingdoms in Moego: The Western Penguin Kingdom. Also shown here is the character creation screen for players who choose Penguin allegiance.

Also featured prominently in this video is the kitty animal castle, which will kill you with cuteness…. don’t turn your back on it.

In a recent move that can only be termed “audacious,” Wargaming.net, the developers of BigWorld-powered World of Tanks have taken popular gaming news site The Escapist by storm with a lightning strike of tanks. At an unspecified time, a battalion of tanks ripped through the background image of the website, which until that point had done well enough to protect it from the vast expanses of the internet.

The international community has decried this invasion, urging Wargaming to withdraw immediately.

Official figures have yet to be released, but estimates suggest that a number of lines of code will need to be modified in order to restore the website to its former, non-paper-ripped-looking protected bounds.

Continuing our exclusive coverage of the recently-announced, BigWorld-Powered, Userjoy MMO “Moego,”, we have reached the point in the show were we take a look at… ANIMAL CASTLES. By far our favorite awesome anomaly to come out of the Userjoy collective brain, the animal castle is a superstructure riding on the back of a gigantic, but nonetheless adorable, uber animal. Undoubtedly, depending on which kingdom you fight for, your family will have access to the appropriate mobile animal castle, an entity that can be upgraded progressively over time. The strategic benefit of having a building-sized animal holding a building on its back should be, at the very least, moderately clear.

MOEGO is a “community-centered free-to-play MMORPG,” with all the expected accoutrement, as well as some very unique offerings in the MMO space. These include family groups, “animal castles,” pet armies, and a few others.

David Saito-Chung over at Investors Business Daly, writes a bit about Netease’s approach toward expansion as a means toward growth and continued engagement for its users.

Netease, who uses BigWorld’s platform technology, has grown to prominence through web development services, game development, and its 2009 licensing of World of Warcraft for China.

Among the company’s recent successes has been the BigWorld-powered MMO Tianxia 2 (Video of one of the expansion trailers).

MOEGO is a “community-ceentered free-to-play MMORPG,” with all the expected accoutrement, as well as some very unique offerings in the MMO space. These include family groups, “animal castles,” pet armies, and a few others.

The Metaversum team has released a whole slew of new martial-arts themed content for their BigWorld-powered Virtual World/Mirror World.

Twinity is a 3D mirror world based on real cities and real people. A few added benefits to being in a mirror world, however, is that you can run around London or Berlin in a Karati Gi and no shoes, and not get arrested… Well, maybe a bit more applicable to London than Berlin, but still! Go take a discerning peek.

MOEGO is a “community-centered free-to-play MMORPG,” with all the expected accoutrement, as well as some very unique offerings in the MMO space. These include family groups, “animal castles,” pet armies, and a few others.

PC Gamer has released some exclusive details on the skill system underlying Aeria Games’ Realm of the Titans, a BigWorld-powered, DotA-style game.

These include Meditation, Frenzy, Fireball, Purify, Teleport, Draining Power, Power transfer, and others.

Go have a read.

Continuing our exclusive coverage of the recently-announced, BigWorld-Powered, Userjoy MMO “Moego,” we unveil the Ninja Character Class.

MOEGO is a “community-centered free-to-play MMORPG,” with all the expected accoutrement, as well as some very unique offerings in the MMO space. These include family groups, “animal castles,” pet armies, and a few others.