UberStrike, the world’s first browser-based multiplayer first person shooter is now available as a native client, ‘UberStrike HD’. Connecting Mac gamers to over 2 million pre-existing players worldwide, it is the world’s first Multiplayer 3D FPS of its kind to debut on the Mac App Store. Its developer, Cmune, has garnered industry accolades from Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, & Amazon. *

“UberStrike [..] is for lack of a better word, awesome. Playing much like commonly known games such as Quake, UberStrike brings the traditional online FPS to the world of social games in a huge way.” – Games.com

“Mac gamers deserve easy access to great FPS action. That’s been at the heart of our development since we launched the world’s first 3D FPS as an Apple Dashboard Widget in 2008”, said Shaun Le Lacheur Sales, Co-Founder and CTO of Cmune. “With a native client we’re able to deliver higher resolution textures, better graphics and performance optimizations that ensure smooth gameplay even on older generation Macs”.

UberStrike is the world’s first and largest FPS built on the cutting edge Unity3D game engine. The game builds its innovation around its online community staging developer run online tournaments, and more recently crowd sourcing in-game content with its BlueBox maps. New in-game content is added regularly, including exclusive items for Mac App Store players.

“First-person shooters are a multi-billion dollar genre.” said Ludovic Bodin, Co-Founder and CEO of Cmune. “Much of UberStrike has been shaped by our Mac community, and I’m thrilled for Mac users to be the first to enjoy an HD client. With ‘UberStrike HD’, we’ve made the world’s first social shooter even better”.

In ‘UberStrike HD’ Mac gamers connect to over 2 million players to battle it out over a variety of game modes and 3D environments. Players earn XP and collect points to unlock new content. There are 38 different weapons to play with and over 9 million different character customization options.

‘UberStrike HD’ is available for $9.99 now on the Mac App Store: http://bit.ly/UberStrikeHD

The free-to-play web version is available on the UberStrike Website (www.uberstrike.com) & Facebook (http://facebook.com/uberstrike)

* No.1 Dashboard Widget (Apple 2009), Facebook Fund Winner (Facebook 2009), Most Innovative Company (Microsoft 2009), Real-time 3d Games in the Cloud (Amazon 2010).

Press Contact
press@cmune.com

Bluebox Maps are experimental maps that we’re quietly previewing through our community. They have very basic blue grid textures, no jump pads or ammo (yet) and are focused just on gameplay. We currently have two new bluebox maps –  Sky Garden and Fort Winter!

Why have we done this? We want our awesome community to help us get new content into the game quickly. This gives you more maps to play on and gives us more time to focus on the core issues that improve the gameplay.

Soon, we’ll be releasing a set of tools that will enable you all to build your own maps.

Watch this space.

New Content:

-Added new map: Gideons Tower
-Added new game mode: Team Elimination Mode
-Added Mac License item for users playing from the Mac App Store
-Added Mac T-Shirt and ILauncher for users playing from the Mac App Store
-Added new gear item set: the Arctic Dreads
-Added new shirts for Mods and Global Mods

New Features and Updates:

-New font for all in-game text
-Players can now set custom resolutions in the options panel
-New level powerup placements for all levels to support Team Elimination
-We’ve added support for offline mode
-Added character count for Name/Password in Create Game screen.
-Added Equip/Buy panel when using the shop and equipping an item that the user owns already
-Member names can’t contain admin or cmune anymore
-We now support more currencies
-Buy panel always pops up – even if player doesn’t have enough money
-Updated Create Game screen UI
-Added support for Korean String Input
-New GUI for friends list in inbox page
-Deliverator is now available in the Shop for points
-Updated server player limit
-Added follow player and free look spectator modes for Team Elimination game mode
-New team specific spawn points for Team Deathmatch

Shop Updates:

-Magma Rifle is now available at level 15
-Thunderbuss is now available at level 15
-Executioner is now available at level 12
-Mad Splatter is now available at level 12
-Shadowgun is now available at level 5
-Painhammer is now available at level 1
-Judge is now available at level 1
-Uberhammer is now available at level 1
-Deliverator is now available at level 1 for points
-Spring Grenade 3 Pack is now available at level 5 for points
-Spring Grenade 1 Pack is now available at level 1
-Julia Holo is now available for points at level 1

Bug Fixes:

-Fixed auto limit fps bug
-Fixed sticky walls bug
-Fixed bug when connection fails on high ping
-Fixed duplicate clan tag bug
-We can now accept Korean characters for the member name
-Dropped weapons and coins are now correctly destroyed when a player leaves the game
-Removed small delay when weapons were switched
-You can now go back to login screen from the create game screen on the Mac App Store

UberStrike 4.1 is Live! New Features:

Player Tagging
- Visibility mechanics for player names have been updated.

Remote player name opacity changes based on distance from local player.
- Visibility distance is based on the size of the level, so player names will be visible from a larger distance on bigger levels.

Team Identification
- Friendly players are highlighted by white outline.

Damage Feedback
- Added numbers to show exact amount of damage dealt per projectile.
- Added stars with increased visibility to replace the red spots to signify visual damage feedback.

Communicator Updates
- Only 100 active players are now listed in the lobby. These are players who are actively chatting or are in your friends list.
- New colour schemes for players. Admins are red, Moderators are Orange, Friends and Clan Members are green and all other players are white.
- The Communicator now displays a history of players you have played with in the current session.

Anti-Hacking Measures
- A wide variety of anti-hacking measures have been implemented that will allow admins and moderators to detect hackers and take immediate action.

Visual Updates
- Motion Blur, Bloom Effect and Colour Correction options are available in the options panel.
- Lighting in all levels has been updated using a new lightmapping system.

Audio Updates
- A much wider variety of footstep sounds for different terrains have been added.
- Environmental bullet impact sounds have been updated for instant hit weapons.
- Updated weapon sounds for the default machine gun and the default shotgun.
- Underwater weapon sound effects have been updated.

Shop Updates

New Shop Items
We’ve got a whole lot of new items in the shop with 4.3. We’ve added some items that have been requested by the community as well as some brand new weapons that have never been seen before.

Julia Holo
- A holographic disguise kit that will make you look like Julia. (Female Avatar)

Spring Grenades
- They are back and better than ever!
- Spring Grenades regenerate 1 per minute.

Weapon Release
- The Final Word is now available in shop.

Weapon Updates
- Damage for The Battlesnake has been increased by 2 per projectile.
- Damage for The UMG has been increased by 1 per projectile.

Bug Fixes

- Fixed a display error with the textures of the Viktor Ironfist and Sir Magnus knight sets.

- Fixed a bug where players would always see the new message notification over the inbox tag every time they log in.

- The Daily Point Allocation screen can now appear above pages other than the home screen.

- Points decrease is not based on the last login deposit date anymore but on the last login date.

- You are now able to unequip and switch between weapons in the loadout. Including the Splatbat, meaning that you can enter a game without any weapons.

- Fixed an issue with Facebook invites during daily point attribution screen not working correctly.

- Players that reach level 29 or 30 are now displayed at the proper level.

- Fixed a bug where splatter guns projectiles would collide with the player and impede player movement.

- Client now accepts server time as the default date and time rather than the system time.

- Fixed an issue where the chat from the previous game was showing up in the new game.

Cmune is adding new distribution partners to its existing channels – Facebook and Cmune’s Portal. UberStrike will be released soon on MySpace and Apple Dashboard Widgets. Contact us at info [at] cmune.com to add UberStrike to your portal or service!

Read more about it here. The case study is reproduced below.

Cmune is the producer of UberStrike, a 3D game on Facebook and MySpace, with over 650,000 users. Cmune’s UberStrike is a browser-based massively multiplayer online first person shooter (MMOFPS) game available across Facebook, MySpace, Apple Dashboard Widgets, in addition to Cmune’s own portal. UberStrike runs directly in the browser, using micro-transactions and leveraging the distribution and viral aspects of social networks.

Cmune chose to build an FPS for the speed of use, multi-billion dollar market, and lack of competition within social networks. However, FPS games are extremely sensitive to lag, according to Cmune Co-Founder & Chief Architect Shaun Le Lacheur-Sales, giving widely distributed multiplayer games a technical barrier difficult to overcome through social networks. At the same time, says Le Lacheur-Sales, traditional online games generally require either a console or high-spec PC, huge client installs, and a financial investment by the user. “Users are looking for something easier to access, more social and free.”

Cmune’s UberStrike is a free-to-play FPS, making the service not only highly sensitive to performance and lag, but also requiring constant improvement and the addition of new content. A flexible and scalable infrastructure is critical to Cmune’s success.

For these reasons, Cmune chose to host their platform backend exclusively on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. The Cmune core technology includes:

• Datacenter – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) hosts all database servers
• Channels – Servers containing the business logic and Web-based presentation layer for Cmune apps, Facebook, MySpace, and the Cmune portal are hosted on Amazon EC2 servers.
• Real-time Infrastructure – Cmune’s real-time infrastructure consists of lobby servers, messaging servers, and game servers, allowing players to find games, communicate with each other, and synchronize real-time game environments (i.e. network physics) across Facebook, MySpace, stand-alone clients, and the Cmune portal.
• Global Deployment – Cmune game servers are deployed in every global region, with the Cmune master servers hosted in the Eastern US region.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) – Amazon CloudFront is used exclusively for client distribution and hosting heavy Website data.
• Continuous Integration/Deployment – Cmune hosts their staging environment side-by-side with the production environment, for ease of testing new game clients, database changes, and real- time networking. Cmune’s continuous integration/deployment runs in-house and is currently being porting to AWS.

Due to Cmune’s open standards in client/server communication and the simplicity of integrating the Cmune datacenter (asynchronous) and real-time (synchronous) communication SDKs, games running on the Cmune platform are easy to integrate into other channels such as new social networks, downloadable builds, and new devices. With the distributed infrastructure of AWS, players enjoy quick download times from most modern countries and low-latency access to real-time servers. For those players with higher latency connections, Cmune employs corrective/predictive algorithms.

Cmune uses dedicated AWS servers to host the client/server messaging system with this stack also servicing the real-time server to datacenter messaging. That means both Cmune real-time servers and clients use the same messagingAPI, with different channels to talk to the centralized Cmune data-tier. This creates one common layer of abstraction for the highest traffic nodes, the clients and real-time game servers, so that solving the scaling solution with AWS facilitates two critical platform components.

Cmune saw a large gap between high-quality 3D low-latency real-time console/PC game titles and the games available on social platforms, and found a way to address that gap with AWS. “Online games and social networks are converging,” says Le Lacheur-Sales. “And we are pioneering the field of 3D social games.”

December 9, 2010

MMOfront | Cmune Launches UberStrike, the First Cross-Platform Free-to-Play FPS

November 22, 2010

Inside Mac Games | ÜberStrike Now Available

Shazoo | Онлайн-FPS на Facebook (Russian)

November 21, 2010

Sector.sk | Uberstrike – multiplayerová fps na facebooku (Slovak)

Gamoholic | Anuntat UberStrike FPS pentru Facebook (Romanian)

November 19, 2010

Games.com | Facebook FPS: UberStrike brings gunslinging action to social networks
“Cmune has brought its browser FPS game, UberStrike, to Facebook. And it is, for lack of a better a word, awesome. Playing much like commonly known games such as Quake, UberStrike brings the traditional online FPS to the world of social games in a huge way.”

F2PGames | Cmune Launches ÜberStrike, Facebook’s First Free-To-Play Cross-Platform FPS

November 18, 2010

Gamasutra | Cmune Launches UberStrike, Facebook’s First Free-to-Play Cross-Platform FPS

TECHSpotlight | Uberstrike: Now you can play an online FPS on Facebook, too!
“There’s definitely a milestone being hit here with the launch announcement of an online first person shooter in the vein of Unreal Tournament that you can play on Facebook: Uberstrike!”

IronHammers | UberStrike: An FPS for Facebook (and many other platforms)
“After playing a few rounds myself, I’d have to say I’m actually very impressed. [...] The only thing left to say really, seeing as it’s free, is that you should really go and check it out for yourself.”

GamersHell | Billed as the world’s first cross-platform free-to-play FPS, available on Facebook now and elsewhere soon

SpawnPoint | UberStrike, Facebook’s First Free-to-Play Cross-Platform FPS

Voodoo Extreme | Uberstrike – Facebook’s First F2P Cross-Platform FPS

GamesIndustry.Biz | Uberstrike Billed as the world’s first cross-platform free-to-play fps – available on facebook now and elsewhere soon

OriginalGamster | UberStrike Free To Play FPS Hits Facebook

PCGamersWorld | UberStrike, Facebook’s First Free-to-Play Cross-Platform FPS

Haven4GamerZ | Cmune Launches UberStrike, Facebook’s First Free-to-Play Cross-Platform FPS

MCVUK | Cmune Launches UberStrike, Facebook’s First Free-to-Play Cross-Platform FPS

TheGameCast | UberStrike devine primul Shooter pentru retele sociale cross-platform (Romanian)

Facebook’s First Cross-Platform First-Person Shooter – UberStrike, by Cmune – Launches at G-Star 2010
Console-quality FPS Social Game Breaks New Ground

BUSAN, South Korea – Cmune Ltd. announced at G-Star 2010, South Korea’s biggest game trade show, the launch of UberStrike, the world’s first cross-platform free-to-play first person shooter. UberStrike is available for both Mac and PC on Facebook, MySpace, as an Apple Widget, on Cmune’s own portal and as a HD client. It is the first and largest first person shooter built using the Unity game engine.

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“It is the dawn of a new era for FPS games where the action is just a click away, directly in your favorite social platform, enabling you to connect and play instantly with your friends. We found that a large number of users had interests beyond farming, pet breeding and aquariums, so we wanted to offer them a dose of adrenaline.” says Shaun Lelacheur Sales, Co-Founder of Cmune and lead designer of UberStrike.

In UberStrike, players battle it out across all major social networks with players from every continent. During its open beta, the game registered over 1,000,000 visitors across its various channels and keeps growing at a fast pace.

“First-person shooters are a multi-billion dollar genre and totally untapped inside social platforms. No need for a console, a powered-up PC, or buying anything, we offer all the epic action you can take directly where you are.” says Ludovic Bodin, Co-Founder and CEO of Cmune.

The UberStrike community culture has been maturing since the alpha launch and its active membership organizes and moderates itself around a shared spirit of fun and action. Here are some of the things they have to say about UberStrike:

“…never played a FPS this good in a browser.” – KXI System

“I play UberStrike for the uberness of the game, the fans, and the smackdown you can unleash on someone!” – Crimson Assassin

“It’s free, it’s fun and it’s awesome. There are heaps of community members willing to give you virtual cookies. What more could you ask for?” – Shadowhand

“I will not stop playing this until I’m dead. It’s action packed with real people. You have to play it if you want to be Uber like the rest of us!” – Paint-B Master

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[About UberStrike]
• Dozens of sick weapons, including huge guns like the Force Cannon and the Battle Snake, deadly sniper rifles like the Vanquisher and the Particle Lance, and gruesome melee weapons such as UberHammer and the Mythic Edge to show others who’s boss.
• Varied maps to fit your gameplay.
• Friendly community, tournaments and beastly clans.
• Over 10 million gear combinations to personalize your character and new items introduced at neck-breaking pace.
• Multi-access via Facebook, MySpace, Apple Widgets, Portal and HD client download. Yes, in the browser and on your Mac too.
• No farming… Adrenaline!

[About Cmune]
Cmune Ltd. is an independent publisher creating the next generation of social games: 3D, social and cross-platforms. Headquartered in Beijing with representation in Seoul and San Francisco. UberStrike was awarded as “Best New Game” by MySpace at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March 2010. For more information, visit http://cmune.com

[Contacts]
Press contact | press@cmune.com
Business enquiries | info@cmune.com

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The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across Asia. The nominees are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the actual track record and standing of a company, which allows Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list an invaluable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.

“This year was especially difficult,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “Despite the global economic situation, there were many great companies producing really innovative and amazing products that we had a difficult time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. Cmune shows great promise therefore deserves to be among the Finalists. Now we’re faced with the difficult task of selecting the Winners of the Top 100 Asia Award.”

Thanks to Reshma and Philipp for the great event!