Company Photon Neutron Developer Blog Shop

April, 2009

24
Apr 09
robert

Robert

Continuing with our team member introductions, this friendly fellow is Robert, EVP Marketing & Sales. May I? Robert, the world – the world, Robert. If you’ve been to one of the trade fairs where we go such as the Games Convention, GDC, Casual Connect and the like, you’ll probably have met him.  Also, if you’ve enquired about business opportunities, you’ll very likely have received mail from him.

hail_to_the_mustardRobert is not only busy explaining and selling Neutron and Photon,  holding speeches and managing clients, he’s also a keyboard player and enjoys the art of surreal Skype personal messages such as “hail to the mustard”.

21
Apr 09

Tech UpdateWe updated the SDKs for Win32, WinMobile, iPhone (each with v5.7.1) and Unity3D (v5.3.8).
The Unity3D SDK includes fixes for Neutron / HTTP to run in all web players alike. Also, this marks the release of several Photon Client enhancements. One particular hidden issue: UDP packages were dropped when they reached more than 1300 bytes length. Our internal size limit is now 1270 instead of the regulart 1400 bytes.
Check the Developer Network for all the updates and the release_history.txt for more details.

20
Apr 09
Chris

Chris

Continuing our team introductions: This is our CTO and Exit Games founder Christof Wegman, also known as Chris, also known as Bertelmonster2K, also known as He’s-in-a-meeting. Chris is wireframed to all our servers, he receives downtime alerts by brain implant and dreams in binary patterns.

Apart from that he’s a great boss, the best boss on earth, actually we thought about nominating him for president, we all love to make him an extra coffee, and I’m writing all of this just in case he reads it.

Chris loves good food and travels, his wife and his baby daughter, and best of all, he loves BBQ-ing just as much as I do, so I’m pretty confident we’ll have a great BBQ summer fest this year again.

17
Apr 09

In March, the United States Golf Association (USGA) and World Golf Tour (WGT) had announced that they had formed an agreement to host the first Virtual U.S. Open Championship on www.USOPEN.com.

The Virtual U.S. Open will take place on a state-of-the-art simulation of the Black Course at Bethpage, allowing golf enthusiasts everywhere to play an online golf championship from their computers at no cost, at the same time and on virtually the same course as the actual U.S. Open competitors in June.

Qualifying rounds for the Virtual U.S. Open are playable May 25 through June 21. The top 156 qualifiers plus ties will then square off for the Virtual U.S. Open title on June 22. The winner will be crowned the USGA Virtual U.S. Open Champion and will be a guest of the USGA at the 2010 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach Golf Links in Pebble Beach, Calif.

A closest-to-the-hole challenge on WGT’s virtual Bethpage Black is already be available on http://usga.usopen.com/2009/virtualopen/ for players to test their skills, before the Virtual U.S. Open qualifying rounds begin.

16
Apr 09

Now that we have this blog, wouldn’t it be great if all of Exit Games’ team members would stop by, maybe contribute some posts and introduce themselves? Well, the problem is, or rather the good reason for this not happening is that they need to work. Which on a side track just makes me wonder if it’s a clever idea that I take any time to post here … Oh, well, where was I? Oh yes, the Exit Games team.

Tobias

Tobias

Let me introduce our lead client engineer, Tobias Schweers. He is responsible and coordinates the development of the various client libraries of Neutron and Photon. He knows absolutely everything about every command there is and on top of that he also knows why this is the case, since he’s involved in concept and development of new functions as well. Sometimes support enquiries seem to get him close to taking out his “RTFM” t-shirt, but in the end he’s too much of a nice and helpful guy, enjoying red wine and a decent multiplayer gaming session.

09
Apr 09

You have seen this before, it’s our good old familiar company logo

eg_logo_old

Well, the world changes and so does Exit Games. During the last couple of months we have invested an enormous effort and spent massive amounts of money to have our logo entirely redesigned. And today, we’re proud to present our completely new outfit:

eg_logo_new

Can you spot the difference? Ok, agreed, it’s minor, but it’s really all about what’s different: We don’t want to appear focussed on mobile games only. Neutron and our latest product Photon are aimed at all kinds of games, PC games, browser games, online games, console games, you name it. So there you are: We have a new logo – and you may not even have noticed …

07
Apr 09

I was asked at the GDC several times how Photon differentiates from competition (SmartFox was most mentioned, Electro Server second) so here is an quick overview table:

photon_vs_smartfox_vs_electro-server4

Photon and Competition

Although this is just a very basic overview it already shows the advantages of Photon: (reliable) UDP, C++ server, extensible in C#, support of any data types.

03
Apr 09

You may have read it in the press on Gamasutra, DevelopMag, GamesIndustry.biz or MCV:

We’ve only just announced our new Product “Photon”. While our other product, “Neutron”, enables multiplayer game development as a managed service, “Photon” is a development framework for multiplayer games aimed at hands-on developers looking for maximum speed and freedom.

Of course, “Photon” SDKs are available for all major platforms (PC, MAC, Flash, Unity3D, iPhone, Android, Brew, J2ME/SE). Coming as a regular software licence starting at only $ 500 for a single server licence and 100 concurrent users, you can simply download our free full-featured 30-day trial version (including demo applications) and start developing right away. Send us an email if you’re interested in other licences or have a look at the Photon website for further information.

As a major client, Cmune chose Photon for their “Paradise Paintball” game. Reworking the multiplayer functionality from a prior multiplayer engine to Photon is currently on the way. Look out for the game at Facebook soon!

Unity LogoSince “Paradise Painball” is based on Unity 3D, have a look at Unity’s discussion forum where an interesting discussion is going on.