The “Break it Down” Blog

Quantum of Solace Using Call of Duty 4 Engine

Thank the gods, a developer that is smart enough to reuse an existing engine and add enhancements to it instead of re-writing their own in a 2-year dev cycle and having the game suffer all sorts of hickups because of it. Treyarch, the badasses behind Call of Duty 5, are working together with Activision and bringing [...]

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AlterEgo Facial Animation Studio Launched

Pendulum Studios has launched their facial-animation studio branch: AlterEgo. AlterEgo is also the name of the cutting edge facial mo-cap and animation software that Pendulum has developed and integrated with a handful of other developer studios (Konami, Digital Extremes, Lion Head, THQ, etc.) and projects out there (Silent Hill 5, Dark Sector, Stuntman: Ignition, etc), [...]

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Tracing JavaScript Engine Coming in Firefox 3 Could Give 20-40x Performance Boost in Some Scenarios

Ars has a piece up about the Tracemonkey JavaScript engine work that we will first see in Firefox 3.1 (currently in nightlies) but is the first part of major JavaScript work known as Tamarin that won’t be seen until Firefox 4.0. Apparently the Mozilla JavaScript engine is getting worked over from the ground up with an [...]

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MDI’s Air Car Brought to US by Zero Pollution Motors

We covered the MDI-designed “Air Car” back in May, with a very cool video describing the design of the air engine and technology behind the futuristic “to be” car as well as the existing in-use applications of the hyper-powerful compressed-air-based engines. Jens Eckels has sent along news that it looks like US company Zero Pollution Motors [...]

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NVIDIA Released PhysX-Enabled Drivers and Demos

Right after we got done covering the news that the upcoming 177.79 Forceware drivers from NVIDIA would add the PhysX physics engine support, NVIDIA made liars out of us and released that PhysX engine support in their new 177.83 drivers… so burn… on us I guess… Either way, getting tasty physics in games via your existing [...]

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Scramjet Engine Technology “Nearing” Launch

Popular Science has a technically-awesome article on scramjet technology getting closer and closer to deployment in military aircraft. The “technically awesome” part comes from what exactly a “scramjet” engine is, and how it works. Existing jet airplane engines are based around turbines moving air through an engine as fast as possible with turning blades. The problem [...]

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