It seems that Valve need to stop trusting Paypal with the dates of their sales if they want to release the dates themselves. After giving a nod to the short sale that ended less than a fortnight ago, they’ve once again sent out an e-mail that lets us know when the Steam Winter Sale is to be taking place.

Paypal Japan have been sending out the e-mail in question which pinpoints the start of the Winter Sale as December 18th, which is just less than a week away. Best hope your wallets are recovered from the last sale.

Close as it might be to the Autumn Sale and Black Friday, the Winter Sale lasts longer and hopefully we’ll get some flash sales, badges and a bunch of other things that were absent from the last sale.

Did you miss any games last time?

Lovers of classic strategy games will be pleased to hear that another classic is due for a polish and re-release on Steam soon.

The game in question is Might & Magic III and its getting an HD remake it’s just been announced. As a strategy game it is not of the real-time genre, relying on turn-based combat but for fans of the original game they’re going to love the remake. There’s not any new content coming, but nothing’s being changed either. The new art is in the same vein as the original art and just serves to give the game a well-needed polish to make it look beautiful, and the music and sound are being fine-tuned to make them crisper and sharper.

Neither of the expansions are getting an upgrade as of yet, but if Might & Magic III HD does well, who knows? If you want to re-live some nostalgia or are just interested in what the fuss is about you can pick up a Steamworks-supported Might & Magic III HD from January 29th.

After a lot of hype from Blizzard in the wake of its reveal at Blizzcon last month, Hearthstone’s first proper expansion has released to players around the world.

Goblins vs Gnomes added over 120 new cards to the mix, including an awful lot of ‘random card’ effects which can do everything from giving you a random ‘Spare Part’ card to making it a 50/50 chance you attack the wrong opponent (thanks to those pesky Ogre cards). They also introduce a new minion type: the ‘Mech’.

The expansion launched first on the North American server but problems saw the release in further territories delayed as a result. Indeed the EU servers didn’t see release until quite late last night and even then it came with some authentication server issues that took an hour or two to clear up. Fortunately, there don’t seem to have been any purchase issues with the new card packs like the ones that plagued some of Naxxramas’ first few weeks. Well, unless you hastily forgot to check which card packs you were buying before you purchased as some unlucky players already have…

Blizzard are giving 3 free packs of the new cards to all players who log in before December 19th for a launch event so log in to claim those if you haven’t already.

And keep an eye on our own Twitch page for a livestream from 2pm BST. I’ve six card packs to open for you and a deck to hopefully construct.

[plumwd_twitch_stream channel=”sanitariumfm”]

The new Unreal Engine 4 release has been made public today, release 4.6, bringing with it a whole bunch of improvements to the game engine.

Among the updates are additional lighting options and improvements to materials; network demo recording and playback support; new assets in the Unreal Marketplace and updates to animation workflows. The full list of improvements are as follows:

New to 4.6

• User Interface: Easily add 3D user interfaces using the new widget component; navigate between UI elements using a joystick; and localize games faster using font families and composite fonts.
• Lighting: Emissive materials can now directly illuminate surrounding objects, and precomputed lighting and shadows are now supported on foliage objects and instanced meshes!
• Demo Recording: Also known as Network Replay Capture, you can now save an “instant replay” of gameplay, stream it, and share it. Use time-warping to slow down or speed up the replay.
• Multiplayer: It’s now possible to host, discover, join and leave Steam and LAN online sessions using Blueprint scripting. No coding required!
• Animation: Play multiple animation montages on a skeletal mesh at once; utilize blended root motion from numerous animations; and enjoy even more control over animation with Blueprint scripting.
• Materials: Material complexity can be pushed even further with support for up to 128 unique textures per material, a huge bump up from 13. High-quality characters, layered terrain and such will benefit from this enhancement.
• Large Worlds: Build a single world up to 20 kilometers across! Make your play space as large as desired by connecting worlds via the World Composition feature.
• Mobile Preview: Preview exactly how scenes will look on mobile platforms without ever leaving the Unreal Editor.
• Web Widget: The new Web Browser UI Widget enables you to host and navigate web pages right inside your game.
• Performance: Stream sections of precomputed navigation data in or out of memory on the fly.
• Workflow: Packaging and cooking content from within the editor is now faster than ever! Loads of C++ optimizations, including simplified class declarations and the improved Cast() function, will benefit code-based projects.
• Learning: Check out new content example maps in the launcher’s Learn tab! Other new additions in this depot include resources for in-game analytics, source control, localization, and many documentation updates.

Marketplace additions

• Medieval Inn and Tavern by Ennelia Studio
• 3D Cloud Models by Quantum Theory Entertainment
• VFX Weather Pack by Thomas Harle
• Military Pack Part 1 by Manufactura K4
• Hand Painted Textures Pack by 3DFancy
• FX Alpha Textures by UETools
• 50+ Vector Particles by W3 Studios
• Space Shooter/Sim Music Loops Pack by Stephen Lu
• Ultimate Rocks by Ultimate Assets
• Ambient Sound FX Collection by Storm Bringer Studios

Microsoft have a bit of a reputation for not being wonderfully indie-friendly with their consoles, a reputation they’ve been trying to change recently. However, there are some suggestions that they still have quite a ways to go.

A few months ago they neglected to pay some indie developers who had published their games on the Xbox Live Indie Games Market their rightful share of the revenue from sales. They give themselves a fairly lengthy 45 days before payment can be considered ‘late’ and they exceeded that by about a week before those developers got paid. And now, it’s happened again but this time it’s already 19 days late. Oh dear.

To sum up what should happen, the Market was meant to be a self-publishing option. Games are passed by peer review, allowed to be sold on the system and each quarter Microsoft pay the developers their portion of the money taken. The quarter concerned here is the Q3 one, which was due to be paid September 30th. Although developers were told that payment might be a few days late, at this stage quite a few of the developers are rightfully beginning to ask where their money is. There’s even rumours that similar payment issues are taking place for developers of apps and games for Windows Phones.

Even speaking to developers on our Indie Game Show, we know that Microsoft was not doing enough to attract the developers to release games on their consoles, and with this on top of the parity policy that means indie games need to release first on Xbox One or release at the same time across all platforms you have to wonder how Microsoft is hoping to improve their reputation among the Indie community.

Microsoft have released a public statement calling this incident an “unfortunate error” and saying that they are working hard to resolve it and get the money to the developers who are missing it.

 

Enclosed is an official statement and apology from Microsoft on the Xbox Live Indie Games for Xbox 360 payment issue pic.twitter.com/FJJ2hqqffG

— ID@Xbox (@ID_Xbox) December 3, 2014