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Filed under: Games, Windows, Open Source

Max out your World of Warcraft character with a free, open-source application called Rawr

This is one of the most popular and effective tools to improving your WoW gameplay. No, it's not the Peggle add-on (though that is very cool) -- I'm actually talking about an external application! Something you can use in the office, away from your gaming PC!

This tool is very popular amongst the serious World of Warcraft players but chances are, if you're a little more casual, you've probably never used it, let alone heard of it.

I'm about to tell you how all of those weak, made-of-paper mages do so much more damage than you and your rusty, rogue swords. You've probably wondered how -- try as you might -- one particular player always does more damage or heals more. "They must be cheating, damnit!" Well... almost! They're actually using an application called Rawr.

Rawr lets you experiment with different weapons and armor, upgrades, sidegrades -- you name it, Rawr lets you do it. We WoW players call it 'theorycrafting': it's like... Warcraft only... in theory. You don't have to actually be playing WoW to theorycraft. In fact, many people theorycraft in a loud and excited manner, often in public, on the back of napkins (it can be very embarrassing). The term itself predates World of Warcraft incidentally, originally coming from the Starcraft days of yore.

If I haven't sold it to you yet and you need further proof as to why Rawr is awesome, just watch the video after the break.

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Filed under: Developer, Fun, Games, Microsoft, Open Source

Popfly is dead, long live Popfly


Microsoft's Popfly, a place to create games and game mashups, closed down on August 24. Although all the site's users lost their accounts, Popfly is far from completely dead. Microsoft has open-sourced the code and put it up on CodePlex, free to be used by any aspiring game makers out there.

Of course, features that depend on the now-defunct site, like high scores, aren't included, but someone ambitious could host them in the future. On the Popfly page at CodePlex, the developers have left some suggestions for directions people could take with the code:

  • *Example code for a simple, general purpose Silverlight game engine
  • Create a Silverlight 3 scene / actor / behavior editor for the data format and make new games
  • Porting the engine to run your games on other platforms, like XBox 360 or Zune via XNA Game Studio or client PC via WPF
  • Building a copy of the game engine to use with your game data to post on your website.
  • Fix multi-actor collision resolution and make Lots O' Peas go faster!
  • Add new features like grid-based terrain, dialog trees, etc
I'm not sure how likely it is that any of this will actually get done, but there have to be some coders out there with time on their hands.


[via OStatic]

Filed under: Design, Developer, Windows, Microsoft

Microsofts most active open source projects on CodePlex

Microsoft's most active open source projects on CodePlexMicrosoft's CodePlex is an open source project hosting website. Microsoft has no control, review, revising, endorsing or distributing control over any projects on the website. They simply provide the web storage for developers.

So many new projects have been created to share with other developers on CodePlex, and the system seems to be progressing quite nicely. PlentyofCode lists out the current top 25 live projects that are being hosted, and describes what they do.

This is a great initiative that Microsoft has underway, demonstrating that the open source Windows platform is a going to be a great opportunity for them.

Some top ones from the list include:

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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