Software

Bethesda Softworks, a publisher specializing in videogames owned by ZeniMax Media Inc. which also owns videogame producer id Software, announced that Doom 3 will be published this fall in the BFG Edition, a new commemorative edition of the entire legendary saga of Doom. This edition will in fact contain Doom, Doom ][, and Doom 3 and the Resurrection of Evil expansion pack with new 7 levels titled “The Lost Mission”.

Wolfenstein 3D screenshot showing food, treasures and dead Nazis

May 5, 1992, marked the release of the videogame for MS-DOS “Wolfenstein 3D”, a milestone in the field of videogames created by id Software and published by Apogee Software. “Wolfenstein 3D” is an FPS, meaning that it’s played from a first-person perspective so the experience of the action takes place through the eyes of the protagonist.

Space Race Blast Off

NASA has announced the immediate availability of the game Space Race Blast Off on Facebook. This game contains questions on various scientific and technological topics but also about NASA’s history and pop culture. Players can choose from 14 predefined avatars which include an alien, an android and a robot. The game is generally multiplayer so if there are other players two of them are selected to play with you, otherwise you can play alone.

Last month, Hewlett-Packard announced that it would release its webOS operating system as free / open source software after the debacle of the HP TouchPad tablet in the last summer. Now HP has announced the roadmap for the development of Open webOS, the free version of that operating system under the Apache License 2.0, which should lead to the release of its version 1.0 in September 2012.

SAOImage DS9 screenshot

Since last spring a group of 23 manuscripts have been used for the first scanning test using the open source FITS format developed by ESA and NASA since the ’70s. Now they’ll proceed to the digitization of the other manuscripts for a total of about eighty thousand.