Latest News - Page 2831

Crytek has been going some tough times lately, not paying its employees on time, key talent leaving, and more, but the German studio behind CryEngine and Crysis has finally made a formal statement to GamesIndustry.

The company said that it "has been in a transitional phase" as it changes from being a developer to an online publisher, something that requires considerable sums of money. Crytek said that it has secured the money required, and is better prepared for the long term, but added that "we won't be communicating further details about our developments and progress".

The full statement we have below:

We don't really know what is going on with the new Nexus, with LG saying that it will not be making the new Nexus, and with all of the news of the Android Silver program, we truly don't know what to expect. That was however, until the latest rumor popped up that Motorola - which Google sold to Lenovo - would be constructing the new Nexus for the search giant.

Android Police has the hot rumor in its hands, giving it a "confidence level" of 6.5 out of 10. The rumor is that Motorola is working on a new smartphone with Google that goes by the codename of Shamu. Shamu will reportedly be aimed at major US carriers, as well as other large carriers throughout the world, carriers that most likely already handle the Nexus 5.

Shamu will reportedly feature a large 5.9-inch screen with an unknown resolution, and something that makes this rumor stand out: a fingerprint sensor. We are meant to be expecting this new smartphone in November, which should be an interesting time for a smartphone release. We'll have more information on the new Nexus as it materializes.

Google's research and development arm, known as Google X, is working on something new: the Baseline Study project. The goal of this new adventure is to hopefully one day, better detect health risks such as heart disease earlier in a patient's life, so that the patient can take preventative measures before it is too late.

Dr. Andrew Conrad, a molecular biologist, is the lead on the Baseline Study project, who has been credited with creating a cheap way of scanning donated blood for HIV. Conrad joined the ranks of Google in March 2013, assembling a team of 70-80 experts in the fields of biochemistry, imaging, molecular biology, optics and technology.

Google's Baseline Study began earlier in the year through an unnamed clinical testing firm, where doctors started collecting bodily fluids such as urine, blood, saliva and tears from 175 anonymous volunteers. Google will use these fluids and its mammoth computing power to hopefully find patterns called biomarkers. These biomarkets will help the search giant, and its researchers detect health issues before a person even shows symptoms of this issue. We don't know when we will hear more about this, but it's great to see Google working on something so important with its resources.

We've now just had our first look at the new Unreal Tournament, with a bunch of detail talked about for the upcoming first-person shooter. There's a few videos you can get your hands-on, with the game's Art Director, Chris Perna, giving us a bunch of information.

All-in-all, there's 47 minutes worth of video from Epic Games' streamed reveal of brand new concept art on the next-gen Unreal Tournament. Perna discusses this in the video above, where he says they're going for a "Chris Nolan Batman Begins look" instead of a "Tim Burton Batman look". Perna wants "something more polished" with "more realism, without going over the top" and repeating what Epic "did with Gears of War and UT3" where those games were "dark and grungy".

Senior Designer Jim Brown jumps in, saying: "You start with a map that's just kind of the basic shell, and we just focus on the gameplay. Independent of us doing that, a lot of times, Chris and the art guys will make these little vignettes that are - what would you call them?" Perna continues: "There are many different environments in UT. There's going to be different colors and different environments, but what this does is give you, maybe, a quality bar. 'Hey, all those different things need to have a lighting quality and a mood about them that feels like this.'"

While on a research trip to Nepal, two Ubisoft developers experienced a legitimate ritual sacrifice of a goat. The two developers jetsetted off to Nepal for some research, as Nepal is the inspiration for Kyrat, the fictitious Himalayan setting of Far Cry 4.

Far Cry 4's Game Narrative Director, Mark Thompson and the Associate Producer on the game, Phil Fournier, made the trip with Vice's Krishna Andavolu. Once they arrived in Kathmandu, the group heard a rumor that there was going to be an animal sacrifice, so they found their way into the event. The sacrifice was made possible thanks to a man providing the goat on behalf of his family to Kali, who is the Hindu goddess of change and destruction.

The video, above, is the first of a three-part series that goes into the source material and inspiration behind the fourth outing in the Far Cry world. At Comic-Con, the Creative Director behind Far Cry 4, Alex Hutchinson, told the audience that another Vice documentary titled "The Vice Guide to Liberia" offered another inspiration, this one for the game's villain, Pagan Min.

Now that some of the more popular torrenting software is available on portable devices, it was only a matter of time before the likes of The Pirate Bay optimized their websites for mobile.

Head on over to The Mobile Bay and you'll notice that the site looks nice and clean on mobile devices, scaled down and with a bit more room to breathe. The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that its website rendered poorly (or "like crap") on mobile, and so a refresh was inevitable. Mobile users are automatically redirected to the domain, although users will have the option of using the desktop layout if they like. The idea is that each section of the world's most notorious torrent indexer will get its own dedicated page - so users looking for TV episodes would be able to find season packs easily as well as see episode overviews.

Of course, in countries where such websites are blocked anyway mobile users will need to find their own proxies to access The Mobile Bay. As smart devices become ever more pervasive, it's no surprise to see The Pirate Bay paying attention to its consumer UX needs, in much the same way legal services have had to catch up too.

Most social media users feel jealous and inadequate, according to a report from British disability charity Scope.

The organisation surveyed 1,500 social media users and found that of these, over half of Facebook and Twitter users were left feeling like their life came up short compared to posts from peers. And although young people are the top demographic, many of those between 18 and 34 have considered quitting social media entirely, but stay online because it makes keeping in touch with friends easier. Roughly half of 18-34 year olds found that being an active user led to feelings of ugliness, being unattractive, or loneliness.

A chief event coordinator at Scope, Debbie Bines, suggested trying life without the internet for a little bit as part of the charity's Digital Detox weekend, which suggests frequent users take a 48 hour break from social networks. "Social media at its best is a great way to stay in touch with friends, as well as being the world's leading source of amusing cat pictures," Bines said. "But when things get out of balance and we start comparing ourselves to others, or feeling irritated, jealous or even ugly, it's got to be time to take a break."

Today just about everything we use relies on electricity to operate from our smartphones and computers to our toilets in some cases. On July 23, 2012, the sun threw two gigantic clouds of plasma into space and they barely missed the Earth. In fact, had the coronal mass ejections happened only a week before, they could have devastated life on Earth according to scientists.

These storms wouldn't have killed people necessarily, but they would have likely damaged satellites and the electrical grid to the point that anything that plugs into the wall wouldn't have worked. Physicist Daniel Baker says that if those solar eruptions had hit the Earth, we would still be picking up the pieces two years later.

NASA said, "Analysts believe that a direct hit ... could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps. According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion or 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina. Multi-ton transformers damaged by such a storm might take years to repair."

For those of you with an Oculus Rift, you might want to grab the just-released Oculus SDK version 0.4.0 beta. The new Rift SDK includes some great new features, starting with DK2 support obviously.

The new SDK includes an Oculus Runtime that is installed separately from the SDK itself. The runtime package includes the Oculus Config Utility, service and drivers. We also have the star of the show, an Oculus Display Driver under Windows, something that routes the rendering output directly to the Rift headset, offering up an option to mirror this display output in a window.

There's also a new Health and Safety Warning screen that will display in front of you once an application starts up. You can grab the new Oculus SDK 0.4.0 beta package from the Oculus VR developer website, which requires a login.

Apple is still reportedly preparing two next-gen iPhones, with a 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch version. It looks like we could see the 4.7-inch version launched first, with the larger 5.5-inch model to be launched several months later. Why? Well, there's a good reason for that, in Apple's eyes anyway.

DigiTimes is behind the new report, citing their usual anonymous supply chain sources, where they said: "The different timetables have been set as Apple does not want to repeat the mistake it made in 2013 when it launched the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c simultaneously, said the sources". There are still conflicting rumors that Apple will launch both new iPhones at the same time, but I think we will see a staggered release.

Apple won't want to cannibalize its own sales, and it knows that releasing two new bigger iPhones at the same time will do just that. There are a lot of people who have been waiting for a 'bigger iPhone' and being torn between two models won't help. One will sell more than the other - I'm banking on the 4.7-inch version - which will allow Apple to do a Samsung. Samsung launches a Galaxy Note around six months after its flagship Galaxy S smartphone, where Apple could start doing the same thing - releasing the 4.7-inch version, waiting six months to launch the bigger 5.5-inch iPhone 6.

It was only a few days ago that the now privately-owned Dell opened up another payment option: bitcoin. Now the company has announced that its subsidiary arm, Alienware, also accepts the digital currency as payment for its custom-made goods.

Alienware took to Twitter to announce the news, with @Alienware saying: "Alienware now accepts Bitcoin! For a limited time, get up to $150 off when using this payment method! https://www.alienware.com/". As you can see, Alienware is actually offering $150 off any purchase on its goods when using bitcoin, which is a nice way of attracting some new customers.

Samsung's venture into virtual reality has becoming slightly more real today, with a tease of its new Gear VR software platform. Sam Mobile is behind the latest leaked screenshots, showing off Gear VR Manager, Samsung's software that is required with its Gear VR hardware.

The Gear VR Manager includes some core apps like VR Panorama, VR Cinema and an early version of the HMT Manager. Once you've got it all paired and setup, there's a tutorial that will show you how you can slide your Galaxy smartphone into the VR headset, connecting it with Gear VR using a USB 3.0 connection. Sam Mobile has confirmed that there is a touchpad and back button being built into the Gear VR headset itself.

How will you be able to control Gear VR? Thanks to Samsung's S Voice, you'll be able to speak voice commands into Gear VR. The rumors are that Samsung will launch Gear VR sometime this year, most likely alongside the launch of its upcoming Galaxy Note 4 smartphone.

Thanks to San Diego Comic-Con currently underway, we've just received the first look of the upcoming Ridley Scott-produced digital series, Halo: Nightfall. Microsoft, 343 Industries and Scott Free Productions have been working together, unleashing this trailer to the world just hours ago.

Halo: Nightfall is a live-action digital series with its story taking place between the events of Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians. At the center of it, is Agent Locke, who is a character that is new to the Halo universe. Locke leads a team of soldiers from the Office of Naval Intelligence as they are investigating terrorist activity on a distant planet known as Sedra.

The trailer doesn't inspire much, but we might just be seeing a bare tease of Nightfall, but let's hope things get better from here.

Even though Facebook has spent $2 billion so far on its acquisition of Oculus VR, the money won't stop flowing. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said during the week: "We've mostly been a company that has played on top of the different mobile foundations other people have built".

He continued talking about his social network, explaining: "One of the things I care really deeply about on a 10-year arc for the company is having a different relation to what the next set of computing platforms are. We can help define what the next generation of computing is going to be". When pressed about Oculus VR, Zuckerberg said: "We're really excited to welcome that team. They're extremely talented and have pulled off something that people have been talking about for a really long time and now is possible thanks to the technology that team has developed".

When it comes to the future of computing, Zuckerberg said to investors: "Expect us to continue investing heavily, and our costs will increase. There are huge opportunities to build the next generation of computing platforms". Oculus VR and virtual reality itself isn't Facebook's only interest, with Zuckerberg telling investors that augmented reality, vision technology and AI are things that the social network is looking into. Zuckerberg added that whether they pay off in a "five or 10-year time frame" or even "further out than that".

Fans of social networking in the US really like to spend their time on Facebook. New statistics showing the usage of the site have turned up and show that the average American spends 40 minutes each day using the site. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also said that the 40 minutes spent on the social network each day by most Americans accounts for one in five minutes spent on mobile in the US.

Overall, in the US, Zuckerberg says that people spend nine hours a day interacting with digital media on TV, on the phone, and via a PC. Facebook currently has 204 million monthly users in the US and Canada.

Facebook is also hosting Pages for 30 million businesses and has 1.5 million advertisers. There are also reportedly hundreds of apps that use the Facebook deep-linking standard called App Links.

SpaceX is working on a way to be able to retrieve the main stage of the Falcon 9 rocket to be reused for future flights. This month the Falcon 9 was used to put six ORBCOMM satellites into space and after that launch was completed successfully, the main stage of the rocket went on to perform another test.

The main stage fell back into the atmosphere at hypersonic velocity and a camera on the outside of the rocket recorded the landing process. As the rocket came back to a water landing in the Atlantic Ocean, the main rockets fired up twice to slow the rocket down to a velocity of near zero at touchdown.

You can see in the video above that the landing process appears to have performed flawlessly. The landing legs on the rocket pop out and the rocket lowers itself into a very soft landing in the water before toppling over on its side in the ocean, as planned. SpaceX says that the structural integrity of the rocket was damaged during the flopping over horizontally portion but the camera footage shows things performed as planned and data needed was gathered in the test. The goal is to eventually land the main stage on a floating landing pad for reuse with no refurbishment.

Respawn has just announced its new Titanfall DLC known as Frontier's Edge, but the company also took the time to tease that it is introducing something it is calling "The Black Market".

The Black Market is Titanfall's way of offering in-game currency, which will have two different sets of items that you can purchase: Burn Cards, and Titan Insignias. There are multiple sets of Burn Cards that are based around a theme, but the cards themselves you'll receive are random. There's a Weapons Pack, which should include some cards about weapons, for example.

The cards will be purchased using the new in-game currency known as "Credits". You can earn these credits by doing various things in Titanfall, with six ways of acquiring Credits: by winning a match, completing a match, for your first victory of the day, completing daily challenges, selling burn cards you don't want to use, and once you reach level 50, a portion of your experience will be converted into credits. You can only access The Black Market once you've reached level 11 in Titanfall.

After what has felt like years of teasing, Cyberith has finally placed its immersive VR gaming device on Kickstarter, known as the Virtualizer. The Virtualizer is a locomotion device for virtual reality gaming that allows gamers to move freely within the VR world.

The Virtualizer has been in development for two years now over at Cyberith, but now it is on Kickstarter. The cheapest way to get your hands, or body into the Virtualizer is to pledge $599. For $599, you get the Virtualizer without the sensors, which is a kit that is "specifically targeted at developers and researchers who want to track movement with/via different sensor solutions like optical tracking or the PrioVR Suit from YEI Technology".

For $699, you're getting the real deal: the Virtualizer. This is the early bird special, with the first 150 backers receiving their Virtualizer for a special price. On top of this, these 150 backers will have their name registered in Cyberith's hall of fame as VR pioneers. The Virtualizer has a current ETA of March 2015, but this could charge for various reasons.

The federal government might have disrupted Cryptolocker ransomware operations, but the Benjamin F. Edwards & Co. brokerage house recently suffered an attack by the CryptoWall, the DOJ.NH website recently reported. The incident took place in late May, with the unauthorized third party compromising their computer systems - informing customers of the data breach.

Many companies are rolling out new security and try to educate users about safely and properly interacting with emails, online accounts, and other cloud-based services proves to be difficult. As users are compromised, critical work documents become unusable until a payment has been made to operators of the ransomware - and educating users to spot these social engineering techniques should be a first great step.

"We are seeing a new wave of ransomware created by Russian cybercriminals, and our recent survey shows that IT pros expect it to get worse the rest of the year," said Stu Sjouwerman, KnowBe4 CEO, in a press statement. "To add insult to injury, apart from the confidential files being encrypted and ransom extorted, the ransomware sends unidentified data out of the victim's network. That means the malware infection needs to be treated as a data breach with accompanying very high costs."

Hot on the heels of Microsoft's so-so fiscal fourth quarter earnings, CEO Satya Nadella has pledged that the Windows experience is set to be unified across all devices capable of running a variant of the OS.

Speaking with analysts during an earnings call, Nadella suggested Windows is currently a fragmented experience. "We will streamline the next version of Windows from three operating systems into one single converged operating system for screens of all sizes," he said in the call. It is thought the efforts could also provide a much-needed boost to the company's ailing app ecosystem, which pales in comparison to the marketplaces on iOS and Android.

It was also confirmed that the company had scrapped a "new form factor" being developed - which could well be the Surface Mini, a teeny tablet running the much-mocked Windows RT, details of which leaked earlier this year. "During the quarter, we reassessed our product roadmap and decided not to ship a new form factor that was under development," CFO Amy Hood said in the call. Of course, it's unclear right now just what this means for the future of Windows, other than users hopefully getting a more seamless experience between devices, and perhaps a rethink of the future for Windows RT.