UltraMega

By my measure, this will be the first major release for a UE5 game that's set to make proper use of UE5's advanced features like lumen and nanite. Really looking forward to seeing how it all comes together. Xbox could definitely use a win right now. Note: There is no source for this news post because it is an original post, no source to quote. I will update this post with reviews and analysis as more info comes out. I know we don't usually have news for just one game here, but this is more about the tech and seeing is UE5 can actually deliver a good showing on current gen hardware.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/gaming/valves-next-game-rumored-to-be-a-6v6-hero-shooter-called-deadlock/ar-BB1mApqC?ocid=BingNewsSerp Just what everyone wanted from Valve, a trend chasing hero MOBA shooter. /s

What games are you good at? Where do you play for rank? Me personally, I'm not good at much, but I am stupid good at battlefield games, and OK at rocket league. In battlefield, I can drop in anytime and as long as I get on a vehicle, I'm liable to do massive damage. K/D around 5-1 is not uncommon for me in the slightest. Maybe a bit of bragging, but I don't play the game as much as I would if it were harder IMO. It's just too easy, it almost feels like a single player game for me. All that aside, I'm only a little above average on the run and gun aspects... but as soon as I get in a vehicle, I'll do a LOT of damage. Later Desert Combat There: Rocket league, I started playing in 2016 well before it was free to play. I ranked around diamond 1 back then when playing with good friends. They don't play anymore and I probably would rank around gold 3 or plat 1 now. I still play, but not for rank. It's fun to play against the newer gen because they're typically really good at the mechanics of the game, but really bad at the meta. EX, fake outs. It's really easy to play to their predictions and then undercut them, which can be a lot of fun in and of itself. Getting old, not as good as I used to be, but hanging in there. Do you guys still play anything competitive? If so, what?

Joe is good people. It took him a minute to adjust to the same level of autism that we are all on, but he's entranced now. No escape.

I definitely agree with your comments about halo infinite getting messed up by the higher ups. Counter point, I don't think that was the case with forza but the most recent forza game is still a disaster. Its definitely both. Lack of good games, and perhaps the management has contributed to that to some degree, maybe a large degree, but at the end of the day Microsoft wouldn't be in this position if they had enough good game to satisfy their customers, and there not just a little bit behind... their not even on the board right now. Trust would be irrelevant if the proof were there in the form of games. But I agree that given the lack of games currently, all there is to fall back on is trust and they are screwing that up spectacularly.

Just a quick note, arcade games released on dreamcast were not 1:1 ports. Usually lower frame rate and/or visuals. Daytona for example was 60 fps and higher res in the arcade vs 30 and lower res on dreamcast. As for Xbox mods, I believe the Sega arcade version of the original Xbox hardware not only came with double the ram, but also a had option for a faster CPU. There are also mods to replace the original 733mhz CPU with a ~1.4GHZ CPU.

I think this would work https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/chat-with-rtx-available-now/ Closest thing I'm aware of to what your looking for, tho there are probably dozen of other options.

I agree that their leadership on Xbox is poor, but their leadership wouldn't really matter if they had good games. People only need to talk about execs setting up a good vision for the brand when the games aren't there to do that on their own. Sony missed their most recent sales target as well. Just can't have a good gaming market without good games. Nintendo is doing well, and Nintendo has a healthy stream of good games. Just a note on the Hi-Fi Rush thing, according to a report I read the other day Hi-Fi Rush was developed by a small group within the dev team that made Ghostwire Tokyo. It wasn't a big project at all, John on Digital Foundry said the other day that Hi-Fi Rush had 1400 people work on it for 5 years, and that is wrong. It was a small project by a small group within a larger dev team. It seems entirely possible that Microsoft closed the studio but kept the 4-5 people that made Hi-Fi Rush. While it does seem confusing that they closed down a dev that made a highly acclaimed game, personally I played Ghostwire Tokyo and I tried Hi-Fi Rush. Ghostwire was a very "meh" game that didn't have a lot going on. The world was very copy paste and the gameplay was very simple and underwhelming. Hi-Fi Rush I just didn't like at all. I appreciate the visual design and how it did a good job nailing the comic book vibe, but I think it was seen as a hit mostly because it was a surprise release. It's not actually very fun to play IMO, and it's not a game that attracts many buyers. There was definitely a better way for Microsoft to handle this, but based on the two games the studio released recently, it doesn't really surprise me that they would get the axe.

Consoles sales declining are a huge factor here, but it makes sense that AMD would be falling behind since their GPUs don't really have any AI specific feature. I suspect the 7000 series will be the last gen from AMD that lacks more dedicated hardware for stuff like AI or RT. Right now Nvidia can sell RTX GPUs to gamers and anyone looking to run some AI, but AMD isn't there yet. Once they are, I'm sure their gaming revenue will normalize somewhat. For now, this just points out what we already know; AI hardware is becoming more important and AMD is behind on integrating AI hardware into their GPUs. Nvidia's gaming revenue was flat last quarter. Seems reasonable to assume if AI wasn't propping up sales of RTX GPUs, Nvidia would also be seeing a decline. There just isn't really enough compelling reasons to buy a new gaming GPU or console these days with so few big budget games of significant quality being released. Apparently Square Enix lost $200 million on the Suicide Squad game and that was after the Justice League game flopped. I guess they needed to be beat over the head with it until they realized people don't want games filled with more buzz words than quality content. So long as big dev studios are losing money by releasing games full of micro transactions and live service crap that no one asked for, the gaming market will suffer. Can't have a healthy gaming market without good games.

There was a big solar flare from a sun spot, directed at earth, emmited approximately 32 hours ago. The flare is hitting the earth now. It's visible to the naked eye in more norther areas. Closer to the equater like where I am, it may be visible via your phone camera's ability to take night photos, or photos with a long exposure. My phone was able to capture it with a 3 second exposure. My gfs iPhone was able to capture it better than my $200 android phone. I can't see it anymore, but it may be visible again tomorrow night. https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/behemoth-sunspot-ar3664-unleashes-its-biggest-solar-flare-yet-sparking-radio-blackouts-on-earth-video/ar-BB1maM28?ocid=BingNewsSerp

Solar Flare!

Watch monster sunspot grow to be 15 times wider than Earth (video) | Space WWW.SPACE.COM The sunspot region AR3664 is so large, you might be able to see it with only eclipse glasses. Go outside and look at the sky. If you can't see the Aurora, try taking a night photo/long exposure photo with ur phone. I'm in central California.

Why Xbox believes it must cut costs and close studios | Eurogamer.net Lots of bad news for the Xbox brand lately. TLDR, Microsoft is not selling as many game pass subscriptions and games in general as it had hoped and is trying to cut costs as a result. To be fair, Sony has been doing a bit of the same lately. One thing that really doesn't get brough up enough is the simple fact that Microsoft has not delivered a single game to really move the needle for Xbox/Game Pass since maybe MSFS2020. Every big budget game they have released has flopped hard due to simply being poor quality. Halo Infinite is an extremely one note Halo game with massive launch issues, Starfield was a major disappointment, The new Forza is so buggy and broken that Microsoft started dumping fake reviews onto Game Pass to hide how low it's score was. These articles blame all kinds of economic conditions and business hurdles but often fail to mention just how poorly Microsoft has delivered on just putting out a line-up of competent and functional games. I don't think they have a single current gen game that people hold in high regard outside of some smaller indie titles that get good reviews but not a lot of sales. 100 billion spent and not a single successful big budget game to show for it. From my perspective it seems like all they need to do is get their house in order to the point where they can release at least 2 successful big budget games a year. Heck, even a single game per year that actually stood out would be a huge improvement. It's crazy to me that people talk about the Xbox brand struggling without mentioning that there is not even a current gen Halo game almost 4 years into the current Xbox lifecycle. There's not even one in development as far as we know. I mean, we all probably assume there is, but nothing has been announced. That in and of itself is all you really need to know IMO when talking about the brand struggling. A bit of a side rant, I think this console generation has been a bit of a disaster because the hardware is just not compelling. PS5 and Xbox are so similar, they might as well be the same. Had they launched one year earlier, they wouldn't have come with half baked RT hardware that has every other developer bending over backward to try to force the feature into their games. No one would miss RT on consoles at all if it were not included. Had these consoles come out a year or two later, they could have launched with more practical RT hardware and probably some DLSS like hardware driven upscaling. But as is, these consoles really offer nothing to be excited about. The hardware is a little bit too weak to really handle UE5, but UE5 has taken over the game development industry. Close to 4 years since these consoles launched and still the most impressive tech to come out for them is the Matrix demo, with nothing else even getting close. We have games running crappy RT effects with native rendering going down as low as 540p at times, and then upscaled with FSR which was never designed to be pushed so hard. It's just a bit of a mess, and I think the failures of this gen have more to do with the hardware being badly timed and thus not able to work well with popular dev tools/UE5, and a huge lack of solid and interesting games coming out than they do with economic conditions or anything else. Perhaps when GTA6 comes out, hardware sales will start to catch up, but it seems like it's too little too late at this point, at least for current gen console hardware. /rant

High level nerd skills, the curse the binds us.

In this context, it definitely kills you. Not just that, but since only data is transferred, and only at the speed of light, a pretty large "transporter buffer" would need to be in effect to compensate for the data transfer time. The receiver transporter would need to have access to all the constituent matter to reassemble a person, not just based on instant entanglements, but also the transporter buffers ability to cache the data.

Definitely never thought about light and heat being sperate forces in relation to evaporation before. I think I would have guessed light could cause evaporation, as would most people perhaps but without ever really giving it serious thought. Definitely raises some interesting prospects to think of light and heat as separate forces for evaporating water. Water is pretty interesting in chemistry. As far as I know, it's the only substance that has the ability to be all three different states of matter at relatively close temperatures to each different energy level/matter state barrier.

I didn't know anti-cheat could make use of TPM. That is a revalation on its own.

Interesting news, tho the terminology around this stuff seems to have evolved to be a little more misleading since the last time I read up on any of this in a serious way. As I understand it, the term quantum teleportation is actually just sending information via entanglement, which is something that we weren't sure was possible a decade or so ago. Nothing is actually being teleported, but information can be sent from on entangled atom, or in this case a photon, to another via entangled qbits. This new method seems to refine the process so that is is more reliable. That said, entanglement can only send info at the speed of light so it's not a method of overcoming the light speed barrier which makes it's practical applications pretty limited.

Props to anyone who can identify any one of the mathematical properties represented here:

Agreed on Administration. If I had a tech issue that I had questions about that I could not find the answer to on my own, this would be the absolute best place to seek further information. Hands down. It is extremely rare that I find myself in that situation, but it's great to know where to go when it happens. I think it's extremely rare for all of us to need help on tech stuff because we are all so good at our craft. It's too bad there are not more users here seeking expert knowledge (maybe a marketing angle @ENTERPRISE)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/webb-studies-planet-k2-18-b-again-to-confirm-presence-of-gas-only-produced-by-life/ar-AA1nGfUo If real, this is probably some kind of alge or something similar. This planet is ~ 2.6 times the size of earth and suspected to be an ocean planet. Given the size of the planet, it would be virtually impossible for any intelligent life to ever make it to space due to the increased gravity which would make reaching escape velocity extremely difficult. So while they a may be life, and we may never really know for sure, it's very unlikely to be intelligent life.

This seems relevant: Apple Car | Project Titan, Canceled APPLEINSIDER.COM Apple's Project Titan could have led to a fully autonomous Apple Car, but it was canceled in February 2024. Learn about it here. They just don't know where to direct all that cash. I think the era of iterating on the same design for mass appeal is just over. As @Sir Beregondpointed out, there is just virtually nothing to gain from upgrades for the average user. IMO Apple would have been better off focusing on a cheaper VR headset, maybe something around the same cost as an iphone. If they had been able to successfully create an appealing product that felt more in reach, they could have had a shot at creating a new market segment. Still, I think VR is ultimately niche for now and any near future, and it was a mistake to make this an area of focus to begin with. Apple magic goes hand in hand with mass appeal. Bill Gates wrote a book in 1995 that described his vision for future tech, and in it he described what he called at the time, a "pocket computer". I read the book sometime around 2014, so it was well after smart phones came to fruition, but it was really interesting to see how spot on some of the predictions from Gates were back then. More interesting perhaps, is that Gates had such a clear vision for the future that Microsoft let go to Apple under Balmer despite clear insight that an iphone like device was inevitable. I mention this because back then, there was a clear path to the future of computing. Smaller, better, faster. Now, I'm not sure what comes next for a company like Apple. When the hardware is already so perfected, the only thing left to do is real science. That has never been Apple's focus. Yes, they make some great chips today, but they also typically have a process node advantage from their deep pockets so it's not exactly an even comparison on the engineering side.

https://www.gasworld.com/story/georgia-tech-group-create-worlds-first-graphene-based-semiconductor/2138021.article/ Is it finally coming the fruition? Perhaps.

Just search for the Razor Kishi.

Apple slashes Vision Pro production, might cancel 2025 model in response to plummeting demand | TechSpot IMO, Apple needs a new CEO. One that is in touch with developing technology vs trying to perfect ideas from ten years ago. The Apple magic is gone. We're all waiting for Apple to come out with a really great AI to revitalize the Siri level excitement, but I don't think they are capable. I've been following this stuff a lot, and AI seems to have caught them really off guard, and I suspect they will be playing catchup from now on. While Microsoft is building on demand AI super computers, Apple is still dicking around. 15 years old, but still feels relevant: