Don your loincloth, polish your bastard sword, and get ready to invade Germany as Funcom announces their plans for Age of Conan at next week's Games Convention in Leipzig. They'll be showing off new locations, new content, and new features of their massively-multiplayer swords & sorcery title during live stage shows at the convention, with Blue Orb on hand to show players how to work the game with a gamepad and the TripleHead2Go guys granting hands-on time with the game on a three-screen setup. There's also loot to be had in the form of free game trials, limited edition game DVDs, and inflatable swords - because giving out real swords would have been pricey, and things would have gotten ugly rather quickly.

They'll also be showing off features of the DirectX version of the game behind closed doors to members of the press. Hopefully I'll get a chance to slip inside one of the sessions while I'm in Germany next week to see what's what. Hit the jump for full details on Conan's German invasion.

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If you've got the time and the resources, your console game can look pretty damn close to its DirectX10-enabled PC counterpart. This from Massive Entertainment's VP of Development Peter Sydow in an interview with Videogamers.com in which he discusses development of the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of World In Conflict.

Yeah, at this point we've managed to replicate some of the effects, but I don't know what features will make it into the final release. Nearly all of our DX10 features are possible to do on the consoles if you give it enough time and resources, so we'll keep on working on them and see what happens.

World in Conflict Interview [Videogamers.com - Thanks David!]

Age of Conan's collector's edition is completely sold out, all over the world! This is the gist of the press release issued today, which points out that they actually printed more copies of CE, bringing the total to 111,000 units, which were all sold out, preorder numbers were astronomical, the game is set to be a tremendous success, and oh, the DirectX 10 version of the game isn't coming out this week.

Wait, what?

Buried in the last few paragraphs of the press release, Funcom...well I suppose it still counts as revealing despite being buried at the bottom...Funcom reveals that the DX10 version of the game needs more work, and will now be premiered at Games Convention in Leipzig this August. The extra time will be used to add in new features and focus on "building a DirectX 10 version worthy of Microsoft's great vision for the future of PC gaming". We'll be looking forward to that then. Hit the jump for the full press release. Remember to scroll all the way down.

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German site PC Games Hardware got in touch with Charles Beauchemin, the technical lead on the upcoming PC version of Assassin's Creed. In the interview, the developer confirms that the game's Direct3D 10 rendering pipeline will have better performance than its D3D 9 counterpart, while running under Vista. The thing is, in theory, Direct3D 10 should almost always be faster than Direct3D 9, but reality has shown this not to be the case.

Beauchemin goes on to say that AMD and NVIDIA's D3D 10 drivers still need work, and even once the engine code is finalised, driver updates could provide noticeable performance gains.He also mentions that the PC port of Assassin's Creed will focus on performance rather than visuals. When asked if there will be any new content thanks to D3D 10:

No. Most of the porting to DX10 involves optimisations of the existing calls, without any new content.

So, will Assassin's Creed on PC be the first game to warrant the installation of Vista? At the very least, it might take the edge off its hefty system requirements.

News: Assassin's Creed: DX10 confirmed, faster than DX9 [PCGH, via Blue's News]

If you think back hard enough, Falling Leaf Systems might ring a bell. It was the company of coders (read: one 19-year old kid) working hard to get programs of various operating systems working in other operating systems. For us, Falling Leaf's project of interest was the "Alky Compatibility Libraries", designed to permit DirectX 10 "only" games to run on Windows XP.

Unfortunately, Falling Leaf has decided to throw in the towel, sink, bath, ferret and source code. According to the latest post on the Alky blog by "CEO" Cody Brocious, he just wasn't able to get the whole compatibility schmoozle to click. Whether this was due to it simply being impossible or too much for one man, we'll never know.

Or maybe we will. As a parting gift, Falling Leaf has released the source code free, and is available to anyone with the balls to give it another go.

Even though it failed at its ultimate objective, Falling Leaf did manage to get the PC versions of Halo 2 and Shadowrun working perfectly on Windows XP, despite their Vista requirement. So some good did come of the affair.

It is with great sadness... [Alky Project via LinuxGames]

Turbine is extremely pleased to announce that their relatively successful MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online is the first MMO to fully support DirectX 10. The MMO is now sporting upgraded water shaders, better particle effects, and more far-reaching lighting than ever before, along with a DX10 exclusive dynamicshadowing system. In layman's terms, if you got the right parts, the game just got a lot prettier.

"The FPS genre has long dominated the race to better graphics but with this major update from Turbine, The Lord of the Rings Online players can enjoy graphics as good as or even better than many FPS games. This is an outstanding achievement and the whole Turbine team should be rightly proud of what they have produced," said Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations at NVIDIA.

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Following a lacklustre infomercial CES keynote, Microsoft sent out a press release this morning touting the "powerful momentum" of Games for Windows and the addition of nine new Games for Windows-branded titles including Alone in the Dark and LEGO Indiana Jones.

"Games for Windows truly thrived in 2007. We went from two titles in 2006 to a continually growing portfolio of over 60 titles here at CES 2008," said Kevin Unangst, senior global director of Games for Windows in the Entertainment and Devices Division at Microsoft. "We delivered on our promise one year ago to reinvigorate the PC gaming space and bring the best portfolio of games to Windows. And this is just the beginning. With our partners, we will continue to drive the resurgence of Windows-based gaming."

The full list of new GFW games includes:

• "Alone in the Dark" (Atari)
• "Bionic Commando" (Capcom)
• "Conflict: Denied Ops" (Eidos Interactive)
• "Empire: Total War" (SEGA)
• "LEGO Indiana Jones" (LucasArts)
• "Microsoft Train Simulator 2" (Microsoft Game Studios)
• "Sins of a Solar Empire" (Stardock)
• "Space Siege" (SEGA)
• "Tomb Raider: Underworld" (Eidos Interactive)

The release also went on to point out that the casual games industry generated $US 2.25 billion in revenue last year and has a projected increase of 20 percent. I wonder if that now includes the Wii? Hit the jump for the full release.

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I was fortunate enough to sit in on Martin Slater's BioShock post-mortem down at Game Connect last weekend.

With hands firmly clenching his speaker podium, Slater held his ground against a steady bombardment of questions on BioShock. I found his experiences working with Microsoft's DirectX 10 the most interesting, so I've replicated them here from data carefully extracted from my voice recorder:

[DirectX 10] offers your gameplay nothing ... DirectX 10, probably for the next three, four, five years is not important to you. Microsoft are going to tell you everything under the sun differently. Everybody under the sun is going to tell you differently.

DirectX 10 isn't all bad though - hey, Microsoft didn't go to all that trouble for nothing:

You've got the business side and you've got the games side. The games side, you want to minimise the technology because you want to maximise the amount of time you spend interacting with game design. DirectX 10, for all your game programmers, is a beautiful place.

From what I can see from this post over at Crysis-Online.com, you don't need Windows Vista and Direct3D 10 to get all those gorgeous effects that are supposed to be "exclusive" to the new API. Windows XP and Direct3D 9 appear to cope with it fine, and even boast better performance.

My home PC is still out of commission (waiting for a new motherboard now), so I can't test the legitimacy of this, but it looks kosher. Keep in mind this is not a hack to get Direct3D 10 working on Windows XP, just to get Crysis pumping out D3D 10-like graphics in D3D 9.

Crysis was meant to sell Vista to gamers. Seems it's not the killer app we thought it was.

The details of the tweak after the jump.

DX 10 Features in Windows XP - MUST SEE [Crysis-Online.com]

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Gears of Wars hits PC in about a month, so Microsoft put together this rather chunky fact sheet to remind us why we should buy the game. To summarise: The PC will have some new content, DirectX 10 support and a game editor that will let you create your own levels using the Unreal Editor.

Hit the jump for the full fact sheet via Beyond Unreal.

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