With Fabric Engine’s Server technology its possible to take current backend infrastructure and redeploy it to scale and gain impressive performance increases. In Nexalogy’s case we have to do a lot of back end processing on blog posts for our SDAS (Social Data Analysis System), so in order to get an idea of how much faster Fabric was we ran a standardized co-word analysis on 20,000 blog post snippets (time in seconds):

Using our PHP Engine: 105s
Using our Java Version 1 Engine: 18s
Using Fabric Engine: 2s

The results speak for themselves.

Fabric Engine Server has other advantages too. In addition to using a language very similar to Javascript for the high-performance operators (vanilla JavaScript/node for everything else), which reduces the need to learn or bring in C++ coders, you can avoid the whole code-compile-run cycle with its sometimes long delays, and use a more immediate execute model.

Fabric Engine Server is currently in alpha deployment with just a handful of startups including Nexalogy. The Fabric Engine team is very smart and responsive, and are currently building out new functionality to the Server constantly as it moves through Alpha. Turning performance into a commodity, this could be a game changer for startups needing to go to the next level. Fabric Engine is currently in Silicon Valley strutting their stuff with other top notch startups at C100′s “48 Hours in the Valley”. We wish them all the best!

Army of Two

As you can see from the Lexical Map, there are four main areas of importance. The upper part of the map, contained within the region of the dashed lines, indicates lots of activity related to trading and second hand sales. While all popular titles will see this kind activity, Ao2 was unusual in that many players specifically cited the length of mission play (just ten hours on average) and MSRP ($59.99) as reasons to buy second hand, trade, or even rent.

Although players found limited overall game re-playability, there was significant discussion related XBox Live – people wrote about replaying to gain Achievement Points. This is represented by the coloured group on the left of the map. Its no coincidence that it is next to the region associated with trading and second hand sales, as those discussions are clearly related.

In an interesting note, Michael Capps talked about this very issue (loss of first hand sales due to the second hand market) in a recent interview in gamesindustry.biz, specifically with respect to Gears of War. Gears of War was another game that was frequently mentioned along with Army of Two, not just in “want to have” lists, but also in trading and the second hand market.

Interestingly, there was also a discussion about several of EA’s licenses and movie production – this can be seen in the third area of the map on the right hand side. Here we can see conversations around Mirror’s Edge, Dead Space, and Need for Speed, which were all associated with Army of Two. Just a few weeks after we had completed the mini study, EA and Universal announced a partnership to produce an Ao2 movie.

The final region on the map is activity related to trades and second hand sales – not of games, but hardware. Army of Two was frequently sold alongside hardware, for example people looking to upgrade their systems.

Aside from these issues, the title was very well received by those who wanted to have a two player co-op experience, and there were many examples of gamers buying the game to play with a younger sibling or other family member. Gamers particularly enjoyed the special co-op moves, and the ability to “pimp” out their weapons with various customizations.