Latest News - Page 1157

Ubisoft is currently developing a new Ghost Recon game but its Quartz NFTs may not be part of the core gameplay experience.

Yesterday saw the end of Ghost Recon Breakpoint's new updates. Now sources tell Kotaku that Ubisoft is working on the next Ghost Recon game, and it looks like the controversial Quartz NFTs may not be included. Sources have also said that the company's Strategic Innovations Lab--the experimental technology division that oversees its Quartz NFTs, crypto, and blockchain gaming--have stayed out of the conversation following significant push-back from gamers.

The Ghost Recon game is codenamed OVER and was part of the massive NVIDIA GeForce server leak. The document reveals that Ubisoft Paris is developing the project, which has reportedly been in development for over a year.

Nanite is one of Unreal Engine 5's most powerful new features that can help game developers make their titles look better without meticulous work.

Epic just released Unreal Engine 5 with a host of new improvements, optimizations, and features to power next-gen games. UE5 emphasizes streamlined workflows in an effort to reduce friction and give developers tools to make games faster and more detailed than ever before. One of the headlining new features of UE5 is Nanite, a new micro-polygon geometry feature that allows devs to directly import ultra high-definition movie-quality assets into scenes without kit-bashing or having to bake down assets into low-poly models.

Epic Games has signed a long-term partnership with LEGO to help shape the early formative years of the "new internet."

Epic's vision of the nebulous metaverse is starting to take shape beyond Fortnite. The gaming giant is taking literal building blocks from LEGO to help build the foundation for its new web 3.0 infrastructure as part of a significant new multi-year agreement between Epic and LEGO.

Epic and LEGO promise to deliver a safe, kid-friendly digital experience for children of all ages to enjoy. The experience itself is never really defined, but expect some sort of cross-platform online game that probably includes VR, AR, consoles and PC in one cohesive package.

Activision has told employees that Call of Duty has moved away from an annualized franchise towards a live service business model.

As part of today's announcement that all Activision QA testers will become full-time employees with benefits and $20/hour salaries, company leadership tells employees that Call of Duty is shifting towards an "always-on" structure.

The news was relayed to Bloomberg via internal correspondence with Chief Operating Officer Josh Taub telling workers that the world's most popular FPS is moving away from annual releases and towards a live model.

In a major win for its contractor teams, Activision-Blizzard today announced that it will make all of its QA testers full-time employees.

Following months of walk-outs, protests, and pressure, Activision-Blizzard plans to enfold 1,110 quality assurance (QA) testers into its ranks. Activision says that all of its QA teams will become full-time employees with benefits and wages starting at $20/hour.

The move comes after employees and developers banded together to form A Better ABK, a coalition aimed at fair wages and better treatment of workers. A Better ABK has organized various walk-outs at the company and a separate group, Game Workers Alliance, has formed in an effort to unionize QA testers at Raven Software. Activision previously announced that it will not formally recognize the Game Workers Alliance union and today's move is a direct response to the demands made by the pro-union group.

Western countries have been slapping Russia and its most wealthy individuals with sanctions that have resulted in million-dollar assets being seized by authorities.

It was only earlier this week that Spanish authorities seized a massive $120 million superyacht through US sanctions imposed on Russian oligarch businessman Viktor Vekselberg. Now, an exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky has spoken out about the sanctions imposed on Russia and its elite individuals and if they have impeded Russian President Vladimir Putin's motivation on invading Ukraine.

According to Khodorkovsky, who is the former CEO of Russian oil giant Yukos, the sanctions from the West won't be enough to stop Putin's invasion into Ukraine, and instead, there needs to be a "consistent policy of force". Notably, Khodorkovsky said that the oligarchs that have had sanctions thrown at them are "just Putin's footmen" and that "Putin has said from the very beginning that this war includes them." The exiled oligarch also called on the US to make a "moral statement" if it wants to be a "moral leader."

The sun experiences many different types of eruptions, but two major types of eruptions occur on the sun's surface: solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME).

NASA has taken to its blog and to the "NASA Goddard" YouTube channel to explain the difference between solar flares and CMEs. Solar flares and CMEs often occur at the same time but are very different as solar flares are giant bursts of X-rays and energy that travel at the speed of light in all directions. These flares come from the motion of the sun's interior, causing the magnetic field to build tension and then explosively realign, much like a rubber band.

A solar flare can last minutes to hours, and throughout that period, it releases a large amount of charged particles that can reach Earth in eight minutes or less. As for a CME, NASA explains magnetic contortions can also cause plasma from the sun's corona to be shot into space. This plasma is a wave or cloud of magnetized particles that travel at more than a million miles per hour and usually take about three days to reach Earth.

OpenAI has recently released the successor to its previous AI system, DALL-E 1.

The DALL-E 2 system is a generative adversarial network (GAN), which according to the OpenAI website, "can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language." Using short, simple descriptions, DALL-E 2 can create not just one but a variety of slightly different images that match the provided caption.

DALL-E 2 can also edit images to add or remove elements while taking the relevant shadows, reflections, and textures into account in photorealistic images. On the OpenAI website, a number of interactive elements demonstrate this function in action, as well as the AI's ability to illustrate numerous novel and bizarre concepts to produce rather excellent artworks.

The United States Navy currently uses Boeing's E-6B Mercury aircraft as its doomsday plane.

The currently underway Sea-Air-Space Exposition saw the reveal of the next doomsday plane the U.S. navy will soon be using, now provided by Lockheed Martin instead of Boeing. The EC-130J, like the United States Air Force's E-4B doomsday plane and Russia's Ilyushin II-80 doomsday plane both serve to ensure that their nation's heads of state and top military personnel can remain in control in the event of nuclear war or other disastrous situations.

The U.S. navy uses such aircraft for what it calls the Take Charge And Move Out (TACAMO) missions. It has sixteen Boeing E-6B Mercury aircraft that can connect to and command submarines within the naval fleet that can deploy ballistic missiles. During the Cold War, Lockheed Martin's EC-130Q was used on TACAMO missions, and the company will now reprise its role in supplying aircraft with such missions with the EC-130J Hercules aircraft.

NASA recently released plans for the International Space Station (ISS) to continue service until 2030.

However, Russia has only committed to supporting the ISS until 2024. The nation may use that opportunity, paired with recent sanctions on its space industry due to its invasion of Ukraine, to sever ties with the project. This would leave NASA responsible for keeping the space station in orbit for at least the rest of the decade, a task Russia is presently responsible for.

Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, has tweeted a variety of things alluding to Russia pulling out of the ISS following the sanctions imposed on the country and its space agency. On April 2nd, he tweeted to say that "normal relations" between Russia and its partners on the ISS would only return to normal with "the complete and unconditional lifting of illegal sanctions."

Returning to Earth on a Soyuz spacecraft after record-breaking spaceflights, the trio had plenty of time to talk.

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth with his Russian crewmates from the International Space Station (ISS), cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov. Vande Hei said that everyone working on the space station continued working together as normal, despite the geopolitical turmoil on Earth taking place in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions placed on Russia's space program.

The rocket destructively re-entered the atmosphere, breaking apart as it fell towards Earth's surface.

The third stage of a rocket came from a Chang Zheng Long March 3B (CZ-3B) and crash-landed back on Earth after being launched just over a year ago. It was launched on February 4, 2021, to remain in orbit for much longer than it did. As it completed orbits around the Earth, the rocket continued to lose altitude and energy until it eventually fell far enough to return to Earth.

LG's next-gen OLED TV display technology, OLED.EX, is primed for the future and has been detailed in a recent keynote speech by Lee Hyeon-woo, Senior Vice President and Head of Life Display Business Group at LG Display.

The next-gen LG OLED.EX panel technology boosts screen brightness by 30% and reproduces natural colors more precisely, which is thanks to the innovations in LG Display's world-leading OLED technology. Lee Hyeon-woo explained: "As a result of analyzing the color distribution of content such as over-the-air and OTT videos that customers mainly watch, 70% of the images were in the high-brightness area adjacent to white".

He continued: "There are very few videos that use primary colors or colors that combine only primary colors. It is more important to improve the image quality in the color gamut near white, and it is effective in realizing realistic images. By improving the screen brightness of OLED.EX, LG Display has completed a display that is closer to natural color expression".

There are many craters across the surface of the moon, and while all have been caused by impacts of some kind, the craters themselves vary in shape and complexity.

NASA has explained that on the surface of the moon, some complex craters feature ring structures as well as mountains closer to the center. An example of a mixture of simple craters and complex craters is "Bell E", which is a small crater located within the larger Bell crater, as seen above. These special types of craters are called concentric craters and are often referred to as "donut" craters for obvious reasons.

Researchers have multiple theories for how these concentric craters have formed, but lunar geologists believe that the theory that has the most validity is "Magmatic Intrusion", which is when magma from beneath the lunar surface is pushed up through the floor of the crater. Researchers believe that the moon was volcanically active at the same time the donut craters formed and that most of the identified donut craters are located in regions that had high amounts of volcanic activity.

Facebook has been going through some rather large changes over the last few months, one of the biggest is rebranding itself "Meta" and then there is the news just hours ago of "Zuck Bucks" and now the social networking giant is reportedly getting into "more traditional financial services".

The news of Meta offering "more traditional financial services" comes from the Financial Times, with Meta putting a "focus on helping to provide small business loans at attractive rates", according to "several people familiar with the initiative" adds FT. The site said that while "nothing is immediately planned, the company had previously held discussions with potential lending partners".

Is it any wonder Facebook, sorry Meta, is getting into "more traditional financial services" given that Facebook parent company Meta lost over $230 billion in a single day, on February 3. Zuckerberg's company now has the title of the biggest US stock market drop in history... close to a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Epic Games detailed and unleashed its next-gen Unreal Engine 5 during its State of Unreal 2022 event earlier this week, with game developers also teasing their new UE5-powered projects.

Gears developer The Coalition teased a rather beautiful Unreal Engine 5 demo running on Microsoft's next-gen Xbox Series X console. During the State of Unreal 2022 event the video was teased, but then Coalition Technical Director Kate Rayner provided more details during an interview with Xbox Wire.

Rayner said that Nanite -- Unreal Engine 5's new virtualized geometry system -- allows for over 100x the detail than previously possible. Rayner continued saying that the team can do so many new things with light, saying that fully dynamic real-time global illumination lighting "has been a long sought-after feature, but up until now, it's not been possible on console. Lumen is a total game-changer".

PC gamers are flocking to Windows 11 faster than you'd think, with the new Steam Hardware Survey data for March 2022 showing that 16.84% of users on Steam are now using Microsoft's latest OS.

There are around 16.84% of Steam users running Windows 11, where in March 2022 the new operating system scooped up another 1.25% (up from 15.59% in February 2022) away from Windows 10. Windows 10 lost 1% of users in March 2022, dropping to 74.69% of PC users running Windows 10.

The results aren't too surprising, given the big push by Microsoft for Windows 11 but there's just nothing pulling gamers to it. Sure there's some cool new tricks under the hood, but there's no games where I'm sitting here like "oh man, I've got to install Windows 11 so I can play X". Nothing. Nada. Zip.

I think the simulation is real at this point -- within a single week, we've got SpaceX and Tesla boss and the world's largest troll Elon Musk buying a 9.2% stake in Twitter and joining the board of directors -- and now Facebook is reportedly working on "Zuck Bucks".

"Zuck Bucks" isn't some nightmare rumor but it seems to be real, according to a new Financial Times report, with Meta staffers reportedly calling the social networking giant's new virtual currency "Zuck Bucks" after CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In the report, the Financial Report explained: "Instead, Meta is leaning towards introducing in-app tokens that would be centrally controlled by the company, similar to those used in gaming apps such as the Robux currency in popular children's game Roblox". It seems it won't just be the "Zuck Bucks" but also "social tokens" and "reputation tokens" that FT says "could be issued as rewards for meaningful contributions in Facebook groups, for example".

Intel has officially teased something fresh in a new video, a desktop Arc GPU with 3 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors... a response to NVIDIA's new flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.

In a video interview with Intel Graphics Innovation Fellow Tom "TAP" Peterson and HotHardware, we get a tiny glimpse of the Intel Arc GPU with 3 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors. We don't know anything about it, other than the 3 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors capable of feeding 150W each for a total of 450W + 75W from the board for 500W.

This isn't a regular Arc Alchemist, but it could be the higher-end Battlemage which Intel is get aring for the "Enthusiast" performance market. Intel also recently introduced the new ATX 3.0 and ATX12VO 2.0 standards, which are ready to rock and roll with next-gen GPUs and up to 600W of power.

Seagate and Phison have been working closely on storage technology together since 2017, where the companies cooperated on Seagate's mainstream SATA SSD development.

We've seen that partnership work through the last few years as Seagate pushed out its FireCuda-branded gaming NVMe SSDs , and then we have the world's first purpose-built NAS NVMe SSDs. So we've got mainstream SSD, gaming NVMe SSDs, NAS NVMe SSDs... and now Seagate and Phison are doubling down on that storage dominance.

The world seeks more capacity, higher speed, new technologies, and cheaper prices with their storage -- especially when it comes to the enterprise market -- with Seagate and Phison's extended partnership seeking to do just that... lower the cost for enterprise. The new SSDs will help companies keep the total cost ownership (TCO) by advanced storage density, lower power consumption, and increased performance.