CEGUI 0.7.4

An urgent update to CEGUI 0.7.3 has been released. The changelog is long, with a lot of bugfixes and a few additions.

LOTR doubles revenue after going F2P

Good news from Turbine, the developers of Lord of the Rings Online: after switching to Free to Play they have doubled revenues, registered 1 million new accounts and recovered a 20% of old users. Seems that the move worked.
With such numbers they have one of the most important assets MMO should have: user base. Users bring more users. Unless, of course, you have too many users and your server starts lagging.

Gloomy effect from "Silent Hill: Home Coming"

An user from FreeGameDev forums posted the code to implement the gloomy effect he saw in this game. Follow the link to see the screenshots and download the source code.

Attaching objects to game character

After some research and testing I found a way to implement item equip in my game. Basically my idea of attaching entities to bones was right and Ogre provides the mechanism through Entity::attachObjectToBone(), as I mentioned previously here. After more tests I learned a bit more about the process. There is no need to use your character model as template for the position of the item in space, anyway you will have to deal with offsets. Also, I had to rotate the item in Blender to make it fit more accurately the character model. Probably I will have to create a software to help finding the proper offset for each item.

Primal Carnage switches to UDK

The Phoronix community is quite upset today after the announce of Primal Carnage team switching to UDK and abandoning Unigine. In any case, seems that there wasnt any confirmed port to Linux before (and neither will be now), but the Linux users preordered or donated mostly to support, even indirectly, Unigine. Those who preordered the game are requesting refunds, and fortunately they are getting them without difficulties.
Whats the reason of this change? Nothing clear. The team complains about lack of support and Unigine being "an unfinished engine". Not the impression I get from the Oil Rush trailer and its release date. I mean, how can be an engine unfinished if a game is going to be released before end of this year? Also, these guys got a free license, and they complain about lack of support?
Something we should learn from this is that never use an engine you havent tested carefully. If the Primal Carnage team were proficient enough in Unigine, the support issue (if it really exists) wouldnt be so important, and in the first place they would have known that it was an unfinished work (which I dont think).