Latest News - Page 2513

Oculus Software and VR apps must be installed to the C: of your PC... did you know that? No, you didn't - well, you probably didn't - and neither did I. It's utterly ridiculous, but it's coming directly from the Oculus support forum, after my friend Anshel Sag sent me the link on Reddit. I'm still in disbelief.

On the Oculus support website, a question asks: "Can I install the Oculus to another drive or directory?". The answer? Well, it says: "No. Currently, the Oculus Software and VR applications must be stored in C:Program Files (x86)Oculus. We plan to enable installing downloaded VR applications to another location in a future release".

With the Oculus Rift set to launch next week, I have to ask: what the f*** is going on, Oculus?

Blizzard has just released the first eight-minute animated short for Overwatch, giving players much-needed backstory for the game's scientist gorilla Winston. Since Overwatch is multiplayer-only, its' super important that Blizzard releases these clips to tell the stories of the game's many characters--and so far it's quite magical.

The clip, entitled Recall, not only gives us a look at Winston's backstory but also tells the main story of Overwatch. Winston is a super-badass scientist gorilla (who very much reminds me of Beast from X-Men) that runs an advanced labratory tied with the International Justice Commission, a government arm. Essentially, Overwatch is a group of super elite operatives who are sent in to solve problems--kind of like the Justice League. But instead of being hailed as heroes, Overwatch agents are now treated as dangerous weapons, with international sanctions against the order.

The video is touching, revealing, and rather entertaining all at the same time, and gives key inference to the multiplayer-only arena shooter. Blizzard plans to release a bunch of these animated shorts in the future to highlight the game's various characters, so keep an eye out.

VR is set to change everything, from gaming to entertainment and everything in between. But a recent survey reveals that not everyone is particularly excited about slapping on a headset, and despite having better hardware options, PC gamers aren't as hyped as their console brethren.

According to a survey held by Gamesindustrybiz, 63% of European console gamers are interested in VR, whereas only 51% of PC players are hyped for the platform. The info also shows that a whopping 72% of Xbox One and PS4 gamers are hyped for virtual reality, which is corroborated by the reports that Sony's PlayStation VR became the #1 best seller on Amazon.

Looking at some of the survey results, we see that 35% of gamers are simply just not interested in VR in any shape or form. The final answers show that 58% of gamers have no plans to buy into VR. That's a pretty big chunk of the gaming crowd who sees VR as a passing gimmick--after all, VR is something you have to experience to believe in. Accessibility is the biggest roadblock for VR, so Sony/Oculus/HTC will have to do their part to convince gamers to adopt VR.

The stars really aligned for AMD during the Game Developers Conference, with their Capsaicin event being a success. The company not only officially unveiled the Radeon Pro Duo (the dual-GPU based on the Fiji architecture) as well as a double down into VR and a tease of their GPU roadmap through to 2019.

On the roadmap itself, we can see Polaris promising a 2.5x performance-per-watt over the current 28nm-based GPUs, but Vega is sitting above it waiting for a early 2017 release - and that's what we're reporting about today; Vega. AMD should begin playing around with Vega sometime this year, since it is being positioned for an early 2017 release and promising the use of HBM2 - which clocks in at 1TB/sec of memory bandwidth (up from 512GB/sec on HBM1).

Vega has been spotted on the Zauba database, thanks to the predictible nomenclature used by AMD. For their Hawaii XT boards, it was the C67101. Tonga was C76501, while Fiji XT was C88001. Now we have the new C9XXXX series cards flowing through, but we don't think they are Polaris boards. The Baffin XT GPU that was on Zauba was the C98101, which is a Polaris card.

Although we've already blown the lid off of a ton of No Man's Sky details, a lot of our questions have gone unanswered. Slowly but surely we're piecing together key elements of the game, and today we've spotted some new details on No Man's Sky's dialogue.

Thanks to a recent leak from GDC 2016, we get a nice glimpse of how the game's dialogue system will work. The pic shows a straightforward linear dialogue tree rather than a pesky wheel, with responses written in weird alien letters. Hello Games previously explained that aliens will have all kinds of crazy languages to decipher, and players will begin to understand the strange words the more they interact with certain races.

Aliens will be parts of different factions and groups, all with their languages, cultures, personality traits and technological advancements. So if you want to do business with a militant interstellar alien faction, you'll have to not only learn their language first but most likely earn their favor by doing quests and the like. Pretty neat, huh?

Microsoft has been proudly beating its chest about Quantum Break over the past months, that is, until it was revealed that Quantum Break only runs at 720p on Xbox One. Faced with this controversy, both Redmond and Remedy have kept mum on the subject, but the devs did let slip that the game's day one patch won't "remedy" the game's lower res.

According to Remedy PR rep Thomas Puha, Quantum Break's day one patch isn't going to instantly ramp the game's resolution to 1080p on Xbox One. Instead, the patch will be your standard fare of bug fixes and tweaks, despite the reports of a massive multi-GB graphics overhaul update. "No, we have never said anything like (a big graphical update). There is a title update, mostly bugfixes etc. Reviewers got it last week already."

Remedy and Microsoft have caught a lot of flak from upset Xbox gamers, especially since Microsoft continues to maintain a kind of skewed favoritism to the new platform. But then again PC gamers have the awful UWP platform and janky Microsoft Store to contend with.

Encryption is a very pertinent issue in the modern age. We're at an impasse where certain individuals and groups would rather encryption be the stuff of history, perhaps even segregating encryption strengths like was common during the 80's and 90's. Email encryption isn't exactly the easiest thing to setup and requires a bit of preparation to do right. It can be cumbersome even to those that know what they're doing. A group of tech companies and independent researchers have gotten together to help make encryption of your emails easier, and much more seamless.

The new protocol that has been proposed is called SMTP STS, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Strict Transport Security, and is designed to ensure a secure, encrypted connection with email servers. It's not a method of encrypting your emails themselves, which would be best served by any free, or paid, PGP solution, but it adds a measure of security to email that helps to make sure that you're messages are at leat going through real, authentic mail servers to get to their destination.

What it does is talk those email servers that it's traveling through to determine whether or not the connection is secure and that it's who they say they are. If the server can be authenticated (through the use of certificates and a TLS encryption-based connection), then your message will pass along, knowing that at least that server is legit. If no encryption can be used, then there's the option that the message won't be sent.

Vizio has partnered with Google to bring Chromecast to its TVs, multiple sources have claimed to Variety. As of now, it's unclear whether this simply means Chromecast will be included with the TVs or if it will be directly built into them, but we do know you will still initiate streaming from another device, as is currently the case with Chromecast. We also know that no smart TV apps are apart of the plan, and that this could happen as early as springtime.

Sources have also indicated Google has shown similar interest with at least one other TV manufacturer, so this could well be the first step in a broad, long-term plan.

Google declined to comment on the matter, while Vizio was not immediately available for comment.

The biggest roadblock that VR faces is accessibility. Since PC-powered VR requires newer, higher-end video cards like NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 970 to function, users have to shell out quite a bit to update to the requisite hardware. But what if you could make an HTC Vive work with older, less expensive video cards?

At GDC 2016, Valve's Alex Vlachos revealed that the company is working on a way to reduce the cost for VR by adding support for older video cards. By making older cards like NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 series compatible with VR, Valve would open the doors to accessibility by giving consumers an enormous range of PC hardware options to power the HTC Vive.

"I can run Aperture [Portal-themed VR demo] on a 680 without dropping frames at a lower quality, and, for me, that's enough of a proof of concept. As long as the GPU can hit 45 HZ we want for people to be able to run VR," Vlachos said at the event. "We've said the recommended spec is a 970, same as Oculus, but we do want lesser GPUs to work. We're trying to reduce the cost [of VR]. Most art we're seeing in VR isn't as dense as that. So we should be pretty good to go... everything should be able to support that low-end hardware. But we need the right safety nets in place."

There was an unexpected outcry when the iPhone started growing in diagonal size. The smaller, and original(ish) 4" screen was sorely missed. Apple has heard those cries of anguish and have revived that particular size as the iPhone SE. But it definitely isn't the iPhone 5C of this generation.

Inside the new phone are flagship level parts, with the full A9 and M9 chips found in the 6S. The only difference is the smaller Retina screen. The camera around back is also the same 12MP one featured in the 6S, 6S Plus and the recently announced 9.7-inch iPad Pro. That means this small phone is capable of 4K video and can produce slow-motion video at up to 240FPS.

NFC is also supported so you can use Apple Pay or any other NFC related app that can make use of it. For other connectivity, you'll have faster LTE support but only single-stream 802.11ac Wi-Fi support. Missing from the spec sheet is 3D touch, however. You'll be able to pre-order the iPhone SE on March 24th and they'll show up in stock on March 31st. The iPone SE will be priced at $399 for 16GB and $499 for 64GB of storage.

Apple's "Loop you in" event just finished up in Cupertino today, the last one in this particular amphitheater, and it was full of updates to their mobile line. The newest member of the iPad family was announced, firmly taking the spot in the line that's slotted directly before the larger iPad Pro yet after the current iPad Air 2.

This iteration is almost exactly the same as it's big brother with the same A9X chipset, 4 speaker audio setup and Apple Pencil compatibility. The screen has a resolution of 2048x1536 with full DCI-P3 color gamut support. From the video, it looks like it's actually calibrated individually at the factory, so it should prove to have accurate color rendition out of the box.

Apple has added something they're calling True Tone display to the screen, which uses a set of 2, four channel, ambient light sensors to change the color temperature of the screen based on the ambient light around you. The screen borrows similar IGZO and the custom timing controller from the larger iPad Pro and is capable of a whopping 500 nits of brightness.

A MOBA generally isn't expected to be the most demanding of games anyway, and Paragon follows that tradition by being playable on nearly anything. Epic Games has even taken the liberty of testing quite a few different GPU's to show you what you can expect for performance.

They took the time to even test out various mobile GPU's to ascertain how it'd run. As it turns out, it certainly is playable, though at much lower settings and resolutions, even on Intel's HD 4000. the below requirements aren't much for a good experience, meaning just about anyone can play the game at decent framerates.

Recommended Requirements

Halo 5 continues to get the free content updates that they've promised us and we're very close to receiving the next one, called Ghosts of Meridian. This next update will have everything you could ever want, from new weapons, a new Warzone map and more skins and customization items than you might be comfortable with.

The most anticipated inclusion is that of the new Warzone map, Skirmish at Darkstar, which is supposed to bring something entirely new to the experience. 343 Industries has taken the time to design it different enough to be unique, with an interesting blend of odd sight-lines, cover pieces and opportunities for more lateral movement than in previous maps.

To help make things even more difficult, they're adding in a new vehicle known as the Mantis, which is a bi-pedal mech type vehicle. The concept art so far is incredible and shows off the many different weapons you'll get to play with. I'd imagine this will be quite the opponent in some of the back alley's of the new Darkstar map.

The art and design lead from BioWare, Alister McNally, showed up to GDC excited to show off his new shirt, but no one seemed to really care what was on it, even if it was a teaser for the new unannounced IP from them. The shirt and it's graphics went unnoticed it seems.

What an interesting way to reveal what you're working on. But if the shirt isn't particularly eye-catching or from something that people know about already, then it's safe to say that it would go unnoticed as just something random or obscure. Now there's a force of individuals who're attempting to figure out just what it was. So if you happen to look through your own photo collection and have a picture of Alistair McNally while walking around, then share what he was wearing!

If you own a Kindle, then you need to update it to the latest version of software as soon as possible. Otherwise you may not be able to use it anymore. Well, you won't be able to use it as a proper e-reading device connected to Amazon's cloud services, or access the store, or do much of anything with it seems.

Amazon is making some changes that require this update in order to continue normal operations, which is not fun for anyone, though the update process is a fairly simple one. Though you'll have to update via the approved avenue for doing so, either via Wi-Fi or Wireless if you happen to have those radios available. It seems to really only apply to any Kindle that was made prior to 2013, however. They're quite serious about needing to update, though.

Microsoft seems to be getting quite curious about a second-hand digital game store. At least a survey that's being passed around seems to indicate their newfound interest.

But the question is an interesting one, and would you sell back your games for 10% of the purchase price? That doesn't seem like much, despite being more than you'd get otherwise. 10% of the usual $60 modern price of a AAA game would net you a whopping $6. You'd be rich.

It's an interesting business to get into, the resale of digital goods that have already been "claimed" so to speak. There are sometimes limited numbers of keys available to access and download a given game, but that's a limit of any database software and not any practical limit. As a longer-term analogue to a return policy, it could help gamers afford the latest, boosting business in the present, but there are other implications of doing something like that. Is this something they plan on having available after a certain amount of time, where a drop in price of that particular game negates any angst at trade-in price and complaints of not being able to simply trade or sell your digital keys to others? It's a start of doing something new, so one would hope they're at least asking all the right questions.

To celebrate this week's release of 'Hell On Wheels: Season Five - Part 1' on Blu-ray HD and DVD, we have five Blu-ray prize packs to give away thanks to our friends at eOne Home Entertainment.

Cullen Bohannon, a former soldier and slaveholder, follows the track of a band of Union soldiers, the killers of his wife. This brings him to the middle of one of the biggest projects in US history, the building of the transcontinental railroad. After the war years in the 1860s, this undertaking connected the prospering east with the still wild west.

To go into the running to win a prize, simply answer the following question in 50 words or less:

Back in 1994, Blizzard North changed the course of video games history by pitching one of the most iconic ARPG's in the industry. That game was an immortal PC classic called Diablo, and if the original pitch was heeded, the game would be very different than it is today.

At GDC 2016, David Brevik--one of the original co-founders of Blizzard North who created the Diablo series--held a lengthy postmortem on the Diablo franchise. As part of the talk, Brevik revealed the studio's original idea pitch for the first game, revealing some key facts that dungeon delvers never knew.

The pitch is quite interesting and clearly details many concepts that aren't found in the final game. Did you know the original pitch makes Diablo into a turn-based game? That's right, Condor Inc (which later turned into Blizzard North) initially wanted Diablo to take a more RTS approach. "The game runs on a turn-by-turn basis; the player moves, the then opponents move. Each character and monster may have a certain amount of action points which would determine what actions are possible in a given turn," reads an entry on page 5. We've included a few pages below, but you can check out the full PDF file here.

Now that the new Need for Speed is out, after its many delays, the PC version is being tested on the graphical side of things, with some very interesting results.

DSOGaming tried out Need for Speed in both Low and Ultra graphics settings, with the site noting "On Low settings, some shadows are missing, the absence of Ambient Occlusion is noticeable, and some environmental objects are less detailed".

As for the screenshots above, the top one is Low, while the one below it is Ultra. Can you tell the difference? There are more screenshots here.

The PC version of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition has been a mess since the start, with developer The Coalition pumping out new updates to slowly make the game what it should've been at launch. The new patch has the current focus from the team:

We should see the new patch for Gears of War: Ultimate Edition in the coming weeks.