French video games company Ubisoft Entertainment SA's board late Wednesday said no negotiations are currently held' with U.S. competitor Electronic Arts Inc., which last week acquired a 19.9 percent stake in the company. Ubisoft reiterated that it considers Electronic Arts' purchase as unsolicited and hostile, as it lacks information about intentions of the Redwood City, Calif.-based company. Electronic Arts, the world's leader in video games publishing, Dec. 20 bought 19.9 percent of Ubisoft's capital from Talpa Beheer BV, a Dutch investment fund owned by John de Mol, co-founder of the TV production group Endemol. Executives of Electronic Arts, which has a market value of about $19 billion, have said the stake could be useful if Ubisoft decides it wants to give up its independence. Most investors expect Electronic Arts to be preparing to bid for the French company. Shares of Electronic Arts were at $62.93 in early trading Thursday, down 51 cents, or 0.8 percent, on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

(Jeez, this is like a soap opera....Ed.)

In its latest filing with the US S.E.C. Infinium says it'll have to spend $US 22.2M over the next 12 months in order to execute its "current business strategy". Basically it says it'll need $US 11.5M to launch the Phantom Game Service and sell the first 10,000 units. Then another $US 10.7M to "achieve cash flow break even". Then, as if that weren't enough, it says it anticipates having to spend another $US 20.2M over the next 16 months for promotion and services.

Tough, since according to the Sept. 30 statement, it has $US 20,991 (yes, 20K) in the bank, leaving it a bit short. The company said it has hired SG Capital to help it raise the funding it requires, and indicated that it was already talking to a number of potential backers. It also plans to discuss a debt-for-equity scheme with its current creditors. But it warned: "If we are unsuccessful in raising capital or we do not launch the Phantom Game Service when currently planned, we will need to curtail our proposed spending."

Wednesday Microsoft reported sales of 2.38 million units for the game in the 24 hours since it went on sale in the United States and Canada at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. With the standard version of the game priced at $US 50 and the deluxe edition going for $US 55, the $US 125M tally handily beat the $US 100M first-day sales predicted by Microsoft Vice President Peter Moore. The game's $US 125M opening day lives up to Microsoft predictions that "Halo 2" would eclipse even the biggest Hollywood openings. "Spider-Man" holds the record for biggest opening weekend box office take, raking in a comparatively paltry $US 114M over three days. The Incredibles, launched this past weekend, drew a $US 70M in its first three days. Time to tell Uncle Bob to take a hike next time he ask how "that game job" is going.

NDL, the company that makes the Gamebryo middleware to help speed game development, announced that David Eberly has rejoined the company. Eberly left in 2000 to serve as the president of Magic Software, but has now rejoined the company to continue to work with NDL's technology team. Eberly previously was NDL's Director of Engineering and is now employed by NDL to work on future versions of their Gamebryo technology.

"Dave is a brilliant technologist, and one of the leaders in the field of physics and 3D graphics," NDL President and CEO John Austin told GameDAILY BIZ. "He has PhDs in Computer Science and Mathematics, and has written several books on the subjects."

Eberly is an industry veteran and well known mathematician, particularly as it applies to physics and 3D graphics for video game design. He contributes regularly to conferences and message boards in the game development community and is the author of "Game Physics," "3D Game Engine Design," "3D Game Engine Architecture," and "Geometric Tools for Computer Graphics." In addition to his responsibilities with NDL, Eberly will continue his role as an editor for the book series from publisher Morgan Kaufmann on Interactive 3D Technology.

The press release is here.

Infinium Labs and Sun Microsystems announced today that the companies have signed a collaboration deal to create a network and infrastructure that streams content for Infinium's Phantom Game Service, direct to the living room.

"The Game Technologies Group's understanding of online gaming, along with the broad-based expertise of the company in delivering content and services over networks, makes Sun an ideal partner for us. Sun's expertise in delivering content from back-end systems to the user will now become one of our biggest assets. We can focus on offering consumers choice, convenience and ease of use with our PC and Java-based game service." said Kevin Bachus, president, Infinium Labs.

(Yeah, Sun has always been a household name in gaming experience....)

"The Phantom Gaming Service model of delivering games to the home over broadband via a receiving device dovetails with Sun's goal to use Java technology to allow people to play their favorite games without platform restrictions. We share Infinium's vision of making games available over a network so they can play anywhere, anytime. Infinium's mission is in line with Sun's goal to leverage the network as a vehicle to make entertainment content, information and services ubiquitous for consumers, and we want to empower the company to make that happen in the video game arena. We're glad Infinium's direct to consumer model furthers our initiative to help developers using Java technology to distribute and sell their games to a wide audience." said Chris Melissinos, chief gaming officer at Sun Microsystems.

(C'mon - did you even know Sun had a chief gaming officer?)

Sun is providing architecture design and back-end infrastructure, as well as managed hosting services, as part of the overall solution.

Originally slated for a November 18 release in North America, with a European launch following next year, Infinium Labs now plans to launch its Phantom Game Service "sometime" in 2005. As spun by Infinium president Kevin Bachus; the explanation goes like this;

"Retailers gear their fourth quarter holiday promotions around gift-giving opportunities, and they feel, as we do, that our service will not be bought primarily as a gift for someone else. It will more likely be a self-purchase."

Which explains that since Christmas doesn't matter, we'll just delay anyway? Bachus denied that the delay indicated that Infinium is having trouble preparing the console and service for launch, saying that "we were on track to offer the Phantom Game Service later this year." and "Many of our key marketing and retail partners, as well as publishers, have told us that they believe the best way to make the service successful is to hold off for now."

Regardless of Infinium's explanations, this is certainly going to create further criticism for the company - especially from the ranks of those who remain unconvinced that the device will ever launch at all.

Microsoft's Graphics group is very close to finally releasing the long awaited next generation DirectX. You can forget the name DirectX as Microsoft has decided to call this one WGF (Windows Graphic Foundation). The interface will, for the first time, reunite Direct Draw part that was mainly used for drawing 2D windows and Direct 3D part of DirectX used to draw 3D scene. WGF will unite them into one item. It is intended to change things by allowing graphics subsystems to be served with as much performance as you will need. Windows always had rather good looking graphical user interfaces and that's not going to change. But Microsoft also wants to give 2D elements some special features and effects to snazz things up. Why is it important to have the WGF 1.0 specification? If you are a hardware vendor such are NVidia or ATI or even S3 and XGI you need this final specification to allow your engineers to experiment with hardware designs in order to bring WGF 1.0 compliant hardware when things are good and ready.

As for the next generation of cards such as NV50 and R520, if the vendors feel like it they could theoretically make them WGF compliant. I am certain that at least one of those chips won't be WGF compliant as it does not make any sense. Longhorn is two years away. WGF will bring Shader Model 4.0 to life.

(If you want to know more, you can get the Meltdown 2004 slided here - Ed.)

The OpenGL ARB has formally released the OpenGL 2.0 specification. This not only included things like the improved OpenGL Shading Language API's, but a bunch of other new features as well. The highlights are;

This brings OpenGL up to speed with DirectX 9, and since most of the folks on the ARB are video card manufacturers whom have to support DirectX as well, it's in their interest to have as few differences as possible. Given OpenGL's extension mechanism (which is rumored to be considered as a possible feature for DirectX 10), and the rapid development of the last few OpenGL versions, it's obvious that the hardware folks don't want Microsoft to dictate the way that 3D graphics are going to look in the future.

So...should you go for OpenGL or DirectX? Just listen to John Carmak from his Feb. 2003 .plan

Reasonable arguments can be made for and against the OpenGL or Direct-X style of API evolution. With vendor extensions, you get immediate access to new functionality, but then there is often a period of squabbling about exact feature support from different vendors before an industry standard settles down. With central planning, you can have "phasing problems" between hardware and software releases, and there is a real danger of bad decisions hampering the entire industry, but enforced commonality does make life easier for developers. Trying to keep boneheaded-ideas-that-will-haunt-us-for-years out of Direct-X is the primary reason I have been attending the Windows Graphics Summit for the past three years, even though I still code for OpenGL.

Acclaim Entertainment filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in a filing with the US Bankruptcy Court in Central Islip, New York. 600 employees have lost their jobs and the fates of several in development games, inluding Juiced, The Red Star and 100 Bullets, as well as new entries in the "Worms" franchise, are currently up in the air. The company has also faced lawsuits from some of its top licensees, including ones from teen superstars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and biking legend Dave Mirra.At least one creditor was owed more than $20 million.Earlier this year, it restated three fiscal years of financial results to correct an accounting error. The company had been trying for months to get new financing. Negotiations with a proposed lender to replace the company's former primary lender, GMAC Commercial Finance had terminated and the company's credit facility with GMAC expired on Aug. 20 and was not extended. According to its annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company's assets totaled $47.3 million and liabilities of $145.3 million, as of July 1. Shares of the Glen Cove, New York-based company, which was founded in 1987, peaked at more than $30 a share in late 1993 but last broke $5 in mid-2002 and have traded below $1 since last September. Over-the-counter Pink Sheets of Acclaim traded at around 2 cents on Thursday morning. RIP.....

Kevin Baccus shared the stage with Sun's Scott McNealy at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco to announce the "Phantom Gaming Service is slated to go live Thursday, Nov. 18, 2004. The Phantom Game Receiver will ship with the full Java 2 Standard Edition Runtime Environment and supporting game APIs. All Java technology-based games will be able to run on the Phantom out of the box."

The console will is based on an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ and contains a 40GB hard drive, 256MB of memory TV output and broadband Internet feed. The graphics come courtesy of an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra ship. The box, which clearly amounts to little more than a low-end PC, will retail for $199, Infinium said. The Phantom Game Service costs $29.95 a month, and if you sign up for a 24-month period, you'll get your Athlon XP box for free.

The first launch was supposed to be in Q1 2003. The second was supposed to be Q1, 2004.

The prospect of consolidation of the video game software sector took another step forward Friday, as Acclaim Entertainment warned that it may soon wind up in bankruptcy after shares hit a 52-week low of 25 cents a few days ago. "Acclaim shares remain a speculative investment until management demonstrates its ability to execute on its strategy of making fewer, higher quality games," Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter wrote Friday. "We believe that the company has a respectable lineup of games planned for release in [fiscal 2005] , but due to continuing cash flow problems, its ability to deliver these games on time remains in question." In its annual report filed Thursday and in an earnings release on Friday, the game maker reported that it is in default on some of its convertible notes and at least three of its licensing agreements are in dispute, in part because Acclaim's partners claim it hasn't been paying royalties on time. While Acclaim negotiated a $30 million line of credit in May, it is facing a cash crunch. At the end of fiscal year on March 31, the company had just $1.1 million in cash, compared to $41.2 million in short-term debt.

Ex-Infinium Executive Vice President Terry Nagy is suing Infinium Labs as well as officers Timothy Roberts and Robert Shambro for fraud and breach of contract. Nagy started working for Infinium in 2002. He says his job was to acquire gaming content for the Phantom and that they used his reputation and experience in the industry to generate publicity and credibility for the system and to raise approximately $US 15M in venture capital - while promising him a big payoff in shares of company stock. Nagy says Infinium cancelled his email and cell telephone service in the fall of 2003 and stopped returning his calls. Infinium then merged into a shell company and a public market for its stock developed. Nagy claims Roberts and Shambro netted millions of shares of stock but he received nothing. He's seeking the value of the stock the company owes him for his work. The case was later cancelled when Infinium offered to negotiate a settlement out of court, details unknown. The suit is dismissed without prejudice, meaning that the suit can still be filed at a later date.

Kyle Bennett, owner and mouthpiece for HardOCP.com, announced that HardOCP has filed a lawsuit against Infinium Labs in response to Infinium Lab's demands to HardOCP demanding that the site retract an article published last September which profiled Infinium's CEO Tim Roberts and delved into Roberts' past business history and Infinium's record to date in a highly unflattering manner This was supposed to force Infinium to bring the issue to a quick resolution. Infinium eventually filed its own lawsuit in response. Here a short synopsis from GameSpot. If you'd like to read the - rather scathing - article on Infiniums Labs CEO Tim Roberts that was posted on HardOCP the get it here. Ya gotta wonder at someone who had the phrases "Long before the Internet existed" and "where wizards stayed up late," in his resume. Gack. HTOH, he did co-found Broadbrush Coatings, a full-service industrial, commercial and residential painting contractor specializing in new commercial exteriors, tenant finish contracts, high-quality wall covering and upper-end custom homes. 1999-2003. ...amongst other things - like a surprising number of CEO/Director/etc. positions in the last eight years.

In short - rather that worry about the effect all this crap has on the E3 showing, Infinium is bothering with this and bringing a shitstorm of unwanted publicity on themselves. Not a good sign.

When it rains, it pours. We're being treated to a slew of new shader writing tools. ATI updates their previously available RenderMonkey. NVIDIA jumps into the fold with FX Composer. And RTZen joins as well with a more production oriented tool for shader writers. There are some other tools that are out there but they are generally student/hobbyist products and the support is somewhat iffy. Here's a quick summary of each product.

RTzen™, Inc., a new company dedicated to empowering 3D artists, today announced it’s conducting the first public demonstration of its RT/shader editing tool at the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in numerous partner booths.* RT/shader, shipping later this month, is the industry’s first 3D editing tool with the capability to automatically generate high-level shading language code in real-time, leading to a dramatic reduction in development time and cost. Moreover, it enables more 3D graphic artists to leverage shaders to increase the realism and image quality of 3D digital content – like in games, product design and environment simulation. RT/shader will be on display in the ATI Technologies (booth#827) and NVIDIA Corporation (booth#808) booths and during Alias and Discreet technical seminars. If you get it at GDC the price is $US 1595. - regularly it's $US 1995. Get more information here.

NVIDIA has released FX Composer. FX Composer enables developers to create high performance DirectX 9.0 HLSL shaders in an IDE with unique real-time preview and optimization features. FX Composer was designed with the goal of making shader development and optimization easier for programmers while providing an intuitive GUI for artists customizing shaders for a particular scene. FX Composer comes with dozens of sample projects, performance tutorials, and more than 120 sample shaders. You down load it here.

ATI has released RenderMonkey 1.5, and it's the only tool out there that supports the OpenGL shader language GLSL. There have been a lot of usability improvements since the initial release. The interface has been redone and it'll look familiar to those who use Microsoft's Visual Studio. A lot of drag and drop, right-click properties menus, and much more attention to making writing shaders as effortless as possible. There's a review of RenderMonkey in the April Game Developer magazine (which is distributed free at GDC). Download RenderMonkey here.

Summary: From conversations with Jeremy Hubbell at RT/Zen & the FX Composer group at NVIDIA and the RenderMonkey group at ATI about the capabilities of their products I can do a quick summary of the products. If RT/Shader has done a good job of integrating with Maya and 3dsMax so that it really is seamless integration and the price is well worth it. ATI and NVIDIA are seemingly squaring off against each other, intentionally or not, with very similar tools. They both are similar in outlook and design, but neither offers seamless integration with the usual tools. NVIDIA has done a nice job of predicting performance using GPU cycle count, register usage, utilization rating, and FPS but it requires a information of the target GPU - which currently exist only for NVIDIA's products. ATI supports OpenGL shaders on GLSL capable ATI & 3DLabs, which pretty much decides that issue if you need to use GLSL. And NOBODY provides a real debugger in any of these tools. The closest is to use the DirectX 9 reference (i.e. software emulation) driver in Visual Studio.

In what was probably one of the most successful spamming campaigns yet (judging by the sheer number of "announcements" that hit the web) two ex-Microsoft employees - Herb Marselas & Chas (Charles) Boyd formed Redmond game studio Emogence LLC. If you are at all familiar with DirectX development then you know these guys have been in the trenches at Microsoft for years. Marselas is Emogence's CEO and is a veteran who worked for game developers Ensemble Studios and Bungie Studios, both of which were acquired by Microsoft where he became a lead developer on DirectX graphics. Boyd was the architect of Direct3D at Microsoft for the last several years. Marselas is quoted as stating that the game is being designed to his and Boyd's strengths, with an emphasis on advanced graphics technology. The two say they founded Emogence last September to create games that will take advantage of the latest, fastest technology, such as video cards and graphics chips. But the programmers, who run a "virtual company" that employs half a dozen artists across the country, have no publisher for their game, called "Grafan",' at this time. They plan to show the game at E3 this year.

In an interview with CNNMoney, Valve's marketing director Doug Lombardi stated that the company "is currently targeting this summer for the completion of Half-Life 2". They aren't going to reveal any more information till E3 in Los Angeles (May12-14). The article discusses the other games that were delayed along with HL2, those that are planning to use the HL2 engine. The article also claims that between the HL2 delay and the delay of id Software's Doom 3, PC games sales are down due to gamers waiting for these games to ship before upgrading their systems. (Sales were down 14% from 2002) They also think that games sales will pick up once these title hit the shelves.

If you think we were taking a break here at DirectX.Com, so did we. The news has been particularly sparse the last 3 months. We hoped that CES might liven things up but apparently things are gearing up for GDC and 3E. We're finally starting to see some movement in the 3D graphics area - product announcements, hints of announcements, rumors of DX9.0c, etc. In the next few months we've got some 3D board reviews, a Pixel/Vertex shaders 3.0 review, a PCI-express summary, and a look at the next Microsoft OS 's user interface - Longhorn's - "Avalon" interface.

Infinium Labs reported that it's hired Kevin Bachus as President and Chief Operating Officer. The Florida based start-up announced that his immediate focus will be the launch of the company's Phantom Gaming Service, a broadband-based gaming system that will provide consumers with video games, games on-demand, game rentals, and other interactive entertainment services. The Phantom has caused the media to term it "vaporware" at best and at worst some sort of scam. It was supposed to launch in September 2003 and the demo at CES never actually had a unit powered up. Though one does note that they got another $US15 Million in funding recently. Infinium has also started trading publicly on the stock market (OTC BB: IFLB) earlier this month - through the acquisition of another publicly traded (but inactive) company - thus avoiding an IPO and a lot of the scrutiny that goes along with it. Though we note that Wall Street still isn't the happy-happy place for IPO's it once was. It gets weirder since the SEC filing was not only the first apparent mention of Bachus' hiring, but also a stealth 5-1 stock split that still has the shares of the company wildly gyrating. This changes the outstanding shares from about 5 million to 25 million, with the two founders holding about 60% of the company. You can read more about it at the HeraldTribune article.

In an interview on GameIndustry.biz, Bachus is brutally honest about the problems of the "vaporware" reputation he'll have to overcome and how he's so new to the company he's still got to find out who the target customers are. It's a good read. However I still have my doubts about attempting to go up against Sony & Microsoft, particularly when they are poised to demo their new consoles in a GDC timeframe and, according to Bachus, the Phantom's hardware specs haven't been finalized yet even though they intend to demo a unit at E3 this year. Still, if anyone can steer the Phantom to production, Bachus probably has the experience. Good luck Kevin.

(For an interesting look at how the Xbox was created/launched, I recommend Dean Takahashi's book, "Opening the XBox".)

Data released on Monday by Mercury Research shows that ATI edged out NVIDIA in sales for Q4 2003. The numbers were Intel 31.7%, ATI 24.9%, and NVIDIA 24.7%.ATI increased at Intel & NVIDIA expense. Most of the change was in add-in cards (vs. integrated chipsets), where ATI has handily been beating NVIDIA. This was quickly followed by Goldman Sachs analyst Andrew Root questioning if NVIDIA can meet is revenue estimates, though he didn't change his estimates for the company. NVIDIA's stock price has dropped about 10% this year while ATI's has increased about the same amount. NVIDIA will host a conference call to discuss its financial results for the fourth quarter and the fiscal year ending January 25, 2004 on February 12, 2004 at 2:00 PM, Pacific Time. The Company's prepared remarks will be followed by a question and answer period, which will be limited to questions from analysts and institutional investors. To listen to the conference call, dial 706-679-0543; no password is required. The conference call will also be webcast at www.nvidia.com and www.streetevents.com.

As you already know, someone hacked into the Valve offices and stole the HL2 code, prompting a 8-9 month delay in the publishing of HL2. According to some recent articles on Slashdot and HalflifeRadio, the FBI launched a raid on the San Francisco home of programmer Chris Toshok, confiscating various items of hardware and software. Toshok was also questioned by the FBI and Secret Service regarding his association with Hungry Programmers, his ex-house mates. While some of the source code has already shown up on the net, apparently a 2-disc pirated version has found its way onto store shelves in the Russian city of Novosibirsk this month, translated into Russian, but with some gaps in the game. This delay has really screwed up ATI's million-dollar deal with Valve - particularly the HL2 bundle with the Radeon 9600XT. Many of ATI's partners are pulling out of the deal, not providing the HL2 copy supposedly included with video card, or just covering over the HL2 mention on the box with a sticker. ATI says;

"Beginning in December board partners had the option of purchasing the bundle from ATI for a small fee with all RADEON 9800 and RADEON 9600 series products except the RADEON 9800 XT which continued to include the bundle without charge. So, there hasn't been any change in the availability to our partners and they all have the option to continue with the bundle or not"