Just to say it up front: I’m very smart. My mom says so. That means it’s totally fine that, according to recent Tweets from former BioWare cinematic designer John Ebenger, I’ve been bamboozled into thinking my characters are moving faster when they aren’t, thanks to techniques like “speed lines” and “whooshing sounds.” Yes, I’ve basically fallen for the video game equivalent of when you trick a dog by pretending to throw something. I’m not at all upset and I’m handling it very well.
We owe this latest reveal of game developer villainy to Twitter user @dyingnome, who tweeted on Saturday that a Dragon Age: Inquisition dev once admitted that they “just added some wind lines” to obscure the fact that DA:I horses weren’t actually going any faster while sprinting. Ebenger quoted …
Read moreThe release of Valve’s SteamOS for handheld gaming devices other than the company’s own Steam Deck hasn’t quite reached Half-Life 3 levels of can-kick-down-the-roadery. But it’s getting there.
Last week we reported on a tantalizing hint that Valve’s Linux-based gaming operating system might be just about to roll our for Asus’s ROG Ally handheld. It still might be. But we’ve now spoken directly with Valve designer Lawrence Yang and, well, let’s just say it doesn’t seem imminently imminent.
“SteamOS isn’t ready to run out of the box on other handhelds yet, but we’re continuing to work on adding support,” Yang told PC Gamer when we asked about a new entry reading “Added support for extra ROG Ally keys” in the SteamOS release notes.
So, SteamOS isn’t ready to r…
Read moreTSMC’s position as the world’s largest chip manufacturer puts it in an enviable position in many ways, not least that the entire world is dependent on its output of today’s best computer chips, and it reaps huge financial rewards as a result.
However, nowhere is that dominance more keenly felt than in the United States, as US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo ponders what might happen should it fall into antagonistic hands.
When asked about the impact of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and the subsequent seizure of TSMC, Raimondo said it would be “absolutely devastating” to the American economy (via Reuters). Adding that, “right now, the United States buys 92% of its leading edge chips from TSMC in Taiwan”.
These comments come in the wake of reports that TSMC, Samsun…
Read moreNexus Mods user garbageman42069—you read that right—uploaded a mod titled “Comprehensive Sh-t Upscale” today, which is something that at least 42 people in the world want according to the downloads statistics at the time of writing.
“Ever ride through Valentine and wish it was MORE IMMERSIVE??” garbageman42069 writes in big, bold letters. “I PAINSTAKINGLY upscaled SEVERAL SHIT textures for the benefit of the whole RDR2 community.”
The page itself has several wonderfully arranged advertisement images, promising a “comprehensive overhaul”, which makes Red Dead Redemption 2s dung “shinier than ever”. “Even wolf poop!” it boasts. Comprehensive indeed.
The comments page has not made me less upset or worried about this corner of the modding community. “next time …
Read moreWoW’s Pandaria Remix feels like it’s emerged from an extended Pandaren brew session in the dev room-
The WoW expansion Mists of Pandaria, initially released in 2011, built out a faction and region of Azeroth that had been a part of Warcraft since 2003: essentially, boozed-up kung fu pandas. It’s definitely one of my favourite expansions purely for the change in tone it brought to the game, and now Blizzard has announced a time-limited event called WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria is under development, and it looks… well, it looks like someone’s been on the panda brew.
The remix idea is all part of Blizzard’s commitment to “evolving” how it updates WoW, the most recent example of this being the battle royale mode Plunderstorm (which has generally gone down very well with players). Mists of Pandaria remains playable in current WoW and this Remix is a re-jigged vers…
Read moreTransistors are one of the major building blocks of modern electronic devices. They allow us to regulate current in electronics which makes most of what we do regarding tech, including PC gaming possible. As tech moves forward we see these little miracles get even smaller, with large fabrication facilities already prepping for newer, tinier transistor manufacturing. But it turns out making transistors smaller and made out of silicon isn’t the only way, we could also be making them much larger and out of wood.
Tom’s Hardware reports researchers at Linköping University in Norrköping, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, have managed to develop an early version of a wood electrochemical transistor (WECT) that appears to be the first of its kind ever logged. T…
Read more