Latest News - Page 2567

Thanks to a chat with Rock, Paper, Shotgun - we're learning that Ubisoft seems to at least state that it cares about the PC. Creative Director on The Division, Magnus Jansén, said during the interview: "PC is incredibly important to us. There are plenty of incentives to do a good PC version".

He continued: "Personally it's important - a I play on PC whenever I can and I want the thing they play at home to be the best possible version. That is not to be underestimated as a driving force. Secondly, both of the studios, Massive and Red Storm started out on PC so it's a matter of pride, or heritage and pedigree if you will. We feel kind of ashamed if we don't do the PC version really well. It really is something that we care about".

"We're a very technical studio as well. Sweden is a very technical country - we're good at infrastructure and design, and a lot of our staff come from the old demoscene as well", he added. Continuing, Jansén said: "We're a very technical studio as well. Sweden is a very technical country - we're good at infrastructure and design, and a lot of our staff come from the old demoscene as well. There's a lot of that heritage in the Swedish dev community and that is true here at Massive as well. It comes very natural to us. The engine, Snowdrop, enables the artists to do all of that great UI work and makes it relatively easy to expose all of those options on PC".

Just weeks after the death of star David Bowie, Sony Pictures have announced they're moving forward with a planned remake of the actor-singers fantasy musical cult classic 'Labyrinth'.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the studio has hired 'Guardians of the Galaxy' writer Nicole Perlman to write the script after coming to a financial arrangement with rights holder The Henson Company.

The original film which was directed by Jim Henson and produced by 'Star Wars' creator George Lucas also starred Jennifer Connelly and a range of quirky Henson puppets was not a box-office success on initial release, but went onto gain success on the blossoming home video circuit - where it terrified many Gen-Y'ers including yours truly. Now the only thing that scares me about the film is Bowie's tight tights.

Saints Row Undercover was going to be a hand-held exclusive on Sony's PSP, until the project was cancelled, but Volition is more than happy to show-off the progress they made.

Originally Volition wanted to just port over Saints Row 2 onto the PSP, but that idea evolved into a full-blown PSP exclusive that could better take advantage of the handheld form-factor and to scale down to the PSP's horsepower level.

Strangely it seems that the majority of the staff at Volition didn't even know it existed until an associate video editor, Josh Stinson, found it by accident while rummaging through a storage room. Thankfully, the senior staff have no problem letting the public know about this would-be project of yesteryear.

A very interesting themed hotel seems to have sprung up in Amsterdam recently, being dedicated to providing a gaming friendly atmosphere and experience.

This so called Arcade Hotel has 36 different rooms in the heart of De Pijp area of Amsterdam, that include consoles of various types in your room. Room service also includes game rental for those consoles, and any console you happen to bring along with. And if you somehow get bored of playing games, there's always the comic library you can visit as well.

But more than just allowing gamers a place to unwind, it's also a place to get together with like-minded individuals. This is a gamer paradise. And if you're hungry, never fear, for this special hotel also pretty nice restaurant with food from local farms. They'r especially excited about their cheese products.

Fallout fans agree: New Vegas is one of the best games in the franchise. But where's the sequel? Surely Bethesda couldn't lose by betting on Obsidian again, and according to lead writer Eric Fenstermaker, the studio would love to make another Fallout game.

In a recent Twitter post, Eric Fenstermaker was asked if Obsidian would consider making another Fallout game, maybe something like Fallout: New Orleans. "I'm always up for working on a Fallout. I think most of us generally are. Really fun property to work with," he said.

While this isn't a confirmation, it's great to see that Obsidian still wants to tackle the series. Fallout gamers have been clamoring for the devs to spin their magic on a sequel for years now, and Obsidian even drew up ideas and plans for Fallout New Vegas 2 back in 2013.

Both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive require cables tethered to your head, and your PC in order to get VR experiences to consumers. But it looks like Nitero might have worked out a way of delivering wireless VR, thanks to using 60GHz wireless, and video compression to send data and high-fidelity visuals to a VR headset with "latency in the order of 100s of microseconds".

Nitero CEO Pat Kelly says he's confident that apart from "a meteor hitting the Earth", his company will release a product with a hardware partner in the "second half of 2016". This product would be an accessory at first, versus "something sold with the headsets themselves", reports Upload VR. Sven Mesecke, VP of Business Development for Nitero, added: "We have a large roadmap with second and third generation HMDs approaching big resolution numbers we are building our system to scale with the technology. We are making sure that this tech will work with 8K VR and beyond".

The final specification for GDDR5X, the successor to GDDR5, has been decided, and though it doesn't allow for quite as much bandwidth as HBM or HBM2, though it's a technology that's a lot easier to implement than the latter, with fewer modifications needed to the GPU design to use.

GDDR5X allows for up to 14Gbps of total bandwidth and because it's based so heavily on its predecessor, it's pin compatible though highly internally revised in order to facilitate actual advancements in memory speed and bandwidth without making something entirely new. How JEDEC and Micron have done this is by increasing the prefetch by double, mandating the use of Phase Locked Loops and Delay Locked Loops as well as being able to transmit data at a rate that's quadruple the actual clock speed. In other words, it's fast. For comparison, GDDR5X running at the top-end 14Gpbs could potentially provide 448GBps of full bandwidth, which isn't too far off of the memory bandwidth of the R9 Fury X.

Micron, one of the leading manufacturers working on GDDR5X, estimates around a 10% power consumption decrease at the same VRAM size. VRAM sizes of 4Gb up to 16Gb can be used with the new specification. The reason for coming out with this new specification is to further address every segment of the market, especially those where HBM2 might not be economical, despite AMD's efforts to implement HBM in all segments of their GPUs. Now all GPUs can enjoy a healthy bandwidth increase for very little, if any, cost increase.

Strong evidence suggests a new planet 10 times the size of Earth has been hiding out at the edge of our solar system for...quite some time now. Tentatively named "Planet Nine", it would found in the outer darkness 30.5 billion kilometers from the sun, or about five times farther than Pluto.

Evidence for this possible planet surfaced in 2014 but wasn't strong enough to be taken too seriously. Recently, scientists Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at the California Institute of Technology uncovered "anomalies in the orbits of a handful of smaller bodies they can see", indicating they were being "shepherded" by the gravity of a planet. As a result, the likelihood Planet Nine does indeed exist has majorly increased, and the scientific community at large is taking note.

While there's no detection as of yet, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii says it's "pretty convincing", while David Nesvorny, a solar system theorist at the Southwest Research Institute remarks, "These guys are really good. They make a good case."

You won't be able to race against yourself in ghost mode in the newly re-released Mario Kart 64 on the Wii U. Just as it was missing in the Wii version, so too is it here.

The ghost feature lets you race solo against your best time, sometimes being a pretty good motivator. But the Wii U Mario Kart 64 version can't actually save any of your ghost data, because normally it would save that to the N64 controller pak memory card. The same problem was present with the original Wii re-release.

Nintendo has been unwilling so far to provide a work-around, and it might mean that any N64 game that absolutely requires the memory pak might not be able to work properly unless Nintendo modifies the game. Until then, you'll have to remember your time and race against an imaginary ghost instead.

Microsoft's Office Insider Program used to only be for Windows users, letting you download beta updates that let you preview experimental upcoming features. Now Apple users can get in on the fun with a preview program of their own.

The Mac Preview Program lets Office 365 subscribers opt into the program by checking the appropriate box from inside the Microsoft Auto Update tool. It's simple and generally the features that get pushed to the insider program don't cause Office in general to be unstable.

The blog post announcing the insider program didn't specify anything Mac users can look forward to, though it's not too much of a stretch to think that whatever features come to the Windows version will also find their way to the Mac version as well.

Announced in November, backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One was almost like the holy grail for some. Despite being a newer console, there're still just so many fantastic games on the 360 that bear replaying, since a lot still had a plethora of games for the older console.

The library has expanded to well over 100 games, but performance issues might make some of them nearly unplayable. Digital Foundry did a test of every major Xbox 360 game that's available right now and found some surprising results. In general, performance is much improved since it was first available, but some games still perform much more poorly than they do naively on the 360.

Halo: Reach is the biggest disappointment with framerate that sometimes dip well below 15FPS. An unacceptable experience. But the underlying emulation might not be optimized for every game yet. Gears of War: Judgement also suffers a similar problem, suffering from horrible framerates that make it unplayable.

Synaptics is helping to bring fingerprint readers and biometric safeguards to the masses. They're making it accessible and not just an afterthought, something easy to put on any notebook because no modifications are needed with the integration of a sensor into their trackpads.

And now they're breaking into an entirely different market with ThermalTake in this latest venture. They've gone and placed one of their IronVeil fingerprint sensors into a mouse, giving even gamers easy access to biometric. And this idea is full of untapped potential, not from a marketing standpoint, but from a security standpoint.

Biometrics represent a distinctive authentication method that can save time and potentially money. It's not perfect and spoofing, as well as other issues regarding how different types of fingerprint sensors work, do exist but as part of a multi-factor authentication scheme, it's perfect. Because it's easy. And it generally works well.

While Microsoft's Xbox One continues to move sizable volume in North America, other regions like Japan are completely disinterested in the all-in-one. Case in point: out of the nation's 127 million strong population, only 99 bought an Xbox One last week.

According to Japanese site 4Gamer, Microsoft only sold a measly 99 Xbox Ones in Japan from Jan. 11 to Jan. 17. For the sake of comparison, over 30,000 New 3DS handhelds were sold during the same period, along with 25,592 PlayStation 4 consoles. That's a pretty serious thrashing, but remember that Japan has traditionally been dominated by mobile and handheld gaming, with Sony's native PlayStation consoles for living room gaming.

This news isn't really surprising considering the Xbox One was pretty much DOA when it launched in the region. During its launch, Microsoft's all-in-one only moved some 25,000 units in its first four days of availability. The PlayStation 4, on the other hand, utterly smashed that number with over 300,000 sales during its launch.

France's ministry of culture and communication says it's "nearly impossible to correctly write French" on its current keyboards, and so has teamed up with a standardization group -- AFNOR -- to create a new norm. This summer, that norm will be shown to the public, at which time feedback will be taken and considered for potential further iteration.

Where keyboards in the US and Europe use the QWERTY layout (with rare exception), French keyboards (like the one pictured here) utilize an AZERTY layout and suffer from a lack of standardization, so you'll see all kinds of variations from manufacturer to manufacturer, and what is seen will often be non-intuitive. As a result, what should be simple, nearly effortless actions like typing accented capital letters can be frustrating, obscure, and even impossible, leading to citizens taking liberties with the language and sometimes incorrectly expressing ideas as a result. Recent studies have shown more spelling errors among French students, which some blame at least partly on this keyboard issue.

Curiously, the new standard will be voluntary to manufacturers, the exception being for computers used within the field of public administration.

Atari is launching a new compilation of classic games on Steam sometime this Spring. The Atari Vault will include a lot of the great classics you may love or hate, with Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command, Tempest and even Warlords making the cut.

The new Atari Vault is supposed to have full support for the Steam Controller so you can blast your enemies on a 2D plane with better precision. Atari is also adding in multiplayer support with a Steam leaderboard to help you compete.

This version of the Atari Vault is being developed by Code Mystics who has a lot of experience with bringing old-school Atari games to life again. This compilation will be playable at PAX South which is happening later this month in San Antonia Texas.

Bungie's sequel to its lukewarm MMO-style shooter Destiny has reportedly been delayed, with further rumblings that the developers may not know what's coming in the pipeline.

Many gamers feel that Destiny is less of a game and more of a kind of psychological experiment. Bungie has caught a lot of flak over the game's lifetime due to overpriced, insubstantial content, and now the devs fail to properly communicate with their dwindling playerbase. Amid this transparency breakdown comes massive speculation, some of which appears to be right: Bungie's plans for Destiny aren't set in stone. Thus, Destiny 2 has likely been delayed past its September 2016 projection.

At the same time, no one's sure what's going on with Destiny. That's basically the main problem. Bungie has this insanely ambitious idea, but things keep on moving around. First the Halo creators had a 10-year "Comet" roadmap for future content, but that plan ultimately evolved and shifted into a new microtransaction-funded model. Bungie promises that this new model will launch free, substantial new content, but there's been no announcements or reveals.

Elite: Dangerous developer Frontier Developments has always been one of the original supporters of VR as it became mainstream, and they're shifting focus to concentrate on the SteamVR platform while still supporting the Oculus Rift.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Frontier said that they've altered the course of their VR focus due to SteamVR having a more stable driver out much sooner than Oculus. That doesn't mean that they won't support Oculus' solution, just that their teams will are going to more actively pursue the SteamVR solution, as that makes more sense at the moment.

In the end it makes sense to support as many VR HMD's as possible for a game that can actually make use of the head-tracking and immersive experience. But it seems that after Oculus 0.6 SDK, they're switching gears. But they're still working closely with Oculus as well.

With Facebook owning Oculus, it should come as no surprise that the social networking giant is optimizing 360-degree video for VR experiences. Facebook engineers are now encoding videos using pyramid geometry, which reduces their file size by a huge 80%.

The pyramid geometry technique takes flat frames, turns them into spheres, and places them inside of a pyramid. From there, it uses the highest resolution image at the base of the pyramid, with the sides "gradually decrease in quality as you go up", reports Engadget. Each pyramid has 30 different views, with Facebook creating five streaming in various resolutions for each one. Facebook then saves all 150 versions of your video on its servers, streaming the one you're looking at - depending on the speed of your Internet connection.

Before using the pyramid geometry technique, Facebook used cube mapping which reduced file sizes by 25% - but a saving of 80% is a huge deal. The company has also replaced its video processing system with Streaming Video Engine (SVE), which splits files into multiple parts in order to upload and encode them separately, all at once. This method both speeds up the encoding process, and playback, by 10x.

Many people dream of a career in making huge games like Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, but an ex-Ubisoft developer dispels the fantasy and reveals the true reality of AAA games development, and it's not so pretty.

I've often wondered what it's like working with hundreds of other developers on massive projects. In a recent blog post, an ex-Ubisoft games architect known simply as Maxime answers many of these questions and shares why he left his cushy, well-paying job at one of the most renown studios in the world so he could go indie. The result is a truly eye-opening story about the inherently flawed nature of big-budget games development.

According to Maxime, big projects are inherently unfulfilling because no one feels like they're making an real impact on a game. When there's a huge team of people, the work itself is reduced to repetitive gruntwork, severely cutting off that personal pride you feel in your creations. There's also an incredible breakdown of communication, meaning most of your team members will be ignored, regardless if they have great ideas or not. Over time, motivation wanes and the roaring inferno of passion you once felt dies down do a flickering flame...until you quit, or come to terms with your reality. Maxime compares AAA games development to an assembly line on a factory: soulless, rote, and never-ending.

Skype has just made a big change to the way in which their omnipresent messaging app works, adding in a level of privacy that wasn't quite there before. Now your IP address is hidden by default, to help prevent an easy avenue for launching a DDoS from.

It seems that the gaming community is the reason for this change, because of how vindictive and angry players can get if they lose, or if someone says something they don't agree with. DDoS's are a real threat carried out on a variety of scales almost daily, and Skype has previously been an easy way to facilitate that. Just use a tool to backtrace a persons IP using their Skype ID. But now that won't work, because your IP address will be obfuscated by default, a great leap forward for privacy.

"Starting with this update to Skype and moving forward, your IP address will be kept hidden from Skype users. This measure will help prevent individuals from obtaining a Skype ID and resolving to an IP address," the news update says. It's a great thing, because it was one of the easier avenues attack.