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If you fancy having your mind somewhat blown, try playing the Mass Effect 2 demo in your browser. Unlike most graphically impressive browser games, this isn’t a huge download running via a special plugin: all you need is Flash and Java, which you likely already do, and you’ll be playing in a few seconds. The only catch is you need a good connection – about 10Mb/s – and the demo won’t appear if you don’t.

The service is called Gaikai, and it’s live in 12 countries right now. The focus is on letting you into the game with no fuss or sign-up process, so it’s perfect for demos. At the end of the Mass Effect 2 or Dead Space 2 demos available now, you get a link to buy the full game.

If the Mass Effect 2 demo link doesn’t pop up when you visit the Gaikai site, try the Spore one – it has the same requirements but it’ll tell you what’s wrong if it doesn’t work.
The service has actually been running in a low-profile way for a couple of months. There’s a slight lag on interactions when playing on our office connection, but performance is generally very good. Since it’s web based, it means you can now play these PC games on a Mac or Linux system. It’s set to be demonstrated in full at the Games Developer Conference this week.

Unlike the similar game-streaming service, OnLive, Gaikai doesn’t charge for its services and allows users to play in their browser right away. At the moment it only offers some choice selections from EA, but is hoping to move onto including a larger catalogue of blockbuster hits from them and other publishers.

Writing on his blog CEO David Perry explains that he hopes to eventually end up with servers in every major city in the world to stream data from, saying that “if [Gaikai's] engineers work really hard, they can maybe squeeze out another thousandth of a second from our compression but if we set up in a data center two states closer to your house, we dramatically improve the performance”.

The creator of Earthworm Jim hopes to eventually expand the service to allow YouTube-style embedding of demos on websites, and the service will eventually work with Facebook. The aim is to have the embedded demos appear on Facebook, and at the end of reviews, so players can hop straight in and play.

Other demos currently available include Spore, The Sims 3 and, after completing a short survey, Dead Space 2.

Let us know if they work on your connection and, if so, how the performance feels to you.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/02/28/play-mass-effect-2-and-dead-space-2-in-your-browser-no-special-plugin-needed/

“Steam just made it easier to take and share screenshots of your favorite games.

Press your hotkey (F12 by default) while in any game that runs the Steam Overlay to take screenshots. Then publish them to your Steam Community profile as well as Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit to share them with your friends.

With 1GB of personal Steam Cloud storage, you can upload thousands of screenshots to show off your best moments for all your friends to see. Or you can make them private if you’d rather keep them to yourself.
Use the new screenshot manager to upload your screenshots while still in the game, or at a later time. You can customize your screenshot hotkey by visiting the In-Game section of Steam settings.

To give the new screenshots feature a try, just restart Steam to get the latest client update.”

A big thank you to elbrian87 for writing a nice tutorial on how to install Bukkit and Essential Mods that are compatible with the 1.3 update.  You can read and follow his instructions on Hosted Game Server’s forum, here:

http://forum.hostedgameservers.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=608&p=1651

Thanks again elbrain87!

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Think we’re cool? You can buy a Minecraft server from us, ya know!

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• @notch – You might want to let people know that c10t will now bring down your server with the new maps released today! http://bit.ly/hhJWYh #
• @jeb_ – You might want to let people know that c10t will now bring down your server with the new maps released today! http://bit.ly/hhJWYh #
• @MinecraftImages sure! We wouldn't mind at all. I would be impressed actually! #
• @notch Try crouching and getting in bed in multi-player. #

With some problems on sound they seems to have squared that away and are working on 166.
http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/news/2011/2/ns2_build_165_released

Build 165 changelog

Changes

•Fixed bug where logging into the command station would mess up player’s weapons when logged out
•Updated infestation building sound to not be looping to reduce/fix out of channels problem
•Disabled distress beacon until it works without spawning people in stuck
•Fixed bug where looping sounds weren’t destroyed when entities were destroyed
•All parented sounds and particles for all Actors are now destroyed when they are
•Fixed bug where armory arms opened on the wrong side (due to new random rotation of structures)
•Mask alien players’ names from marines while gestating. This way, aliens can take advantage of the “camouflage” in the hive provided by all the other eggs (thanks Skyler!)
•Improvements and tweaks for all alien heal effects
•Added s_stats console command to display sound system statistics
•Added parasite animation and effect
•Added a tooltip for failing to place infestation as a Gorge
•Constrained the Gorge move velocity if building (used to work and then stopped for some reason)
•Added some tooltips to HydraAbility for failing to build Hydra
•Added additional profiling sections for particle related functions
•Increased infestation health from 250 to 500 to make currently slow-growing infestation from being wiped out too easily (especially at the hive)
•Fixed bug where Observatory could scan when it wasn’t powered
•New pistol sounds
•Tweaks and iterations to guns and explosions (rifle, grenade launcher, shotgun)
•Parasite on power point goes away when power point destroyed
•Added back in marine/rifle/end
•Increased the amount of time the give damage indicator is visible from 0.25 to 1 second

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After hours of troubleshooting and seeing numerous boxes go down to ridiculous io. This is how we felt:

We found that map generators like c10t create high amount of swap usage which locks the box up. I guess the new map saving changed how the chunks worked. If you use this, turn it OFF!

The process to watch out for is c10t. We stopped this by shutting down crond on all of our boxes.

At 4am we are going to be preforming the memory upgrade to 16 GB.

Love was just rebooted. It looks IO destroyed. This is probably due to disk use overloading on patch day. oooops.

If you want to move off Love, use the migrate server button in your user panel.

Aqua just did the same thing and was rebooted as well. It looks like the map conversion is pretty hard on the boxes!

Update: Love is running smoothly now, but aqua is a different story. Aqua is having several problems with the hard drives. We are doing a check disk at the moment. Ill update this when it is done.

Update 2: Today is not a good day for servers. Aqua is finally up after fixing a corrupt boot sector from what we think IO disk usage just choked the box. There was a problem indigo, but that was fixed. Now there is a problem with hope. Which we dont know what is wrong right now.