PLAYXPERT, a provider of in-game community management tools, has announced a new EverQuest 2 widget that will "provide Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest 2 players a more complete online gaming experience".

The widget will let players get guild information, item information, and character details right from within the game through PLAYXPERT's semi-transparent in-game overlay technology. The new widget will also be accompanied by standard PLAYXPERT widgets such as a universal chat widget and a Tunes widget that allows users to manage their music in-game.

"PLAYXPERT offers something for all EverQuest 2 players," said SOE president John Smedley. "Providing in-game access to character data, item data, leader boards, and guild stats is fantastic. We're excited to see third parties such as PLAYXPERT delivering this exciting new kind of UI mod."

The new PLAYXPERT widget will debut at the SOE Fan Faire in Las Vegas.

PLAYXPERT announced in an official press release that their new line of in-game "widgets," uncannily named PLAYXPERT (oh the horror!), for the avid PC LAN and MMO gamer. These little management tools sit inside your game, offering a semi-transparent feature so that they don't obscure your field of view, but still allow you to view content streamed right through.

 

The universal instant messaging and chat system (with VoIP support) is compatible with Xfire, Yahoo!, AOL, ICQ, and MSN engines for IMing or chatting. But the PLAYXPERT platform is especially helpful for World of Warcraft players, since the initial release will come with special features for the successful Blizzard MMORPG. Future support for other popular games will soon be supported through add-on releases to the platform.

Other widgets include the Armory widget, Thottbot Widget, WoWWiki widget, and a WoWhead widget. A Google widget will also be provided so that any game can find key information online without having to ALT-TAB out of the game and launch a browser. Utilizing an in-game overlay technology, the widgets actually are rendered through DirectX (with OpenGL support coming soon) and not through the Windows GUI.

Aimed specifically for the techie, geeky and even hardware enthusiast gamers, other future widgets will include real-time hardware diagnostics. Game stat tracking, clan and team management, in-game music access along with other additional community features are also slated to come soon.

And of course, budding coders can even add their own widgets to the platform without having to tackle the difficulties in coding overlay engines. PLAYXPERT has already published a full application programming interface (API) for the platform so widget coders can get started on their own custom additions to their gameplay experiences.

 

The 2007 Online Game Development Conference is now in full swing, as the agenda for the conference happening this May is now up, live on the official OGDC website. After the announcement of Speaker Force 8...err...the first eight confirmed speakers for the Online Game Development Conference, an official press release also previewed a few more speakers of the 80 speakers to attend the event:

• Herb Sutter - Software Architect, Microsoft
• Mike Goslin - Vice President, Virtual Reality Studio, Disney Online
• Diana Li - Vice President, Shanda
• Charles Manning - President/CEO, PLAYXPERT
• Robert Mitchell - Senior Programmer, Sony Online Entertainment
• Tony Park - Vice President, The9
• Michael Goodman - Director, Digital Entertainment, Yankee Group
• Christian Force - Director of Engineering, +7 Systems

Organized by Evergreen Events, the conference will be delivering "world-class content" to "everyone in the business of making online games." The work and preparation behind the conference soon brought forward a list of sessions and panels including, but not limited to:

• Automating Online Game Balance
• Xbox LIVE on Windows and 360: Are Your Games Dead or LIVE?
• The Chinese Game Market: Latest Developments and Trends
• Casual Games Go Global
• Dirty Secrets of Episodic Video Games
• User Research for Online Game Development
• Adapting your Online Games to the Mobile Platform
• Designing worlds - future directions of tools and technology in MMOs

Peter Freese, chairman of the OGDC, is proud to have finalized the conference's agenda, stating, "It's been a long and involved road to reach this point, but I am very proud of what we've accomplished to assemble this truly impressive slate of speakers and sessions." The 2007 OGDC will start on May 10, 2007 at the Fairmont Olympic, Seattle and will go on for two days. Click on the "Read" link below to hop over to the Agenda page.

 

Next-generation in-game community management tools provider PLAYXPERT has announced today that the beta version of their PLAYXPERTTM is now available for preview at the ongoing Game Developer Conference, located at the IBM boot #483. Charles Manning, CEO of PLAYXPERT, describes their product as being able to:

[enrich] gaming experience by empowering players to do more while in-game, enabling them to visualize and leverage their rich social fabric that ties them together with other gamers across games and across clans or guilds, and finally by providing a general purpose overlay architecture so that anyone can build widgets that gamers can use.

Be able to send IMs to your friends across any chat network, browse the net, check out the hardware stats and a whole lot more, minus the hassle of the alt-tab. It also enables you to reduce the time spent swapping between browser, searches, and the game client, thus making for a more enjoyable gaming experience.

Here's a quick lowdown on what exactly is there to expect from this program:

• Manage and stay connected to their virtual communities while in game
• Quickly access necessary tools like Thottbot and Allakhazam while in game
• Enjoy an optimized community experience via integrated community management tools
• Use community-developed ‘widgets’ extending the behavior of the PLAYXPERT

To know more about it, feel free to visit their site via our Read link below.