Category: News

Capcom published its latest financial results earlier today, detailing financial performance for the year ended March 31 2018.

For the period spanning April 1 2017 to March 31, 2018 net sales were reported as ¥94.5 billion (~$867.5 million), up 8.4 percent compared to the previous fiscal year.

The Japanese publisher called out its digital contents business as the key driver of this growth, citing Monster Hunter: World as a record-setting success that’s become the best-selling title in company history.

Net sales from Capcom’s digital contents business came to ¥74.2 billion (~$681.1 million), up 26.3 percent year-over-year from ¥58.7 billion (~$538.8 million). Operating income was listed at ¥19.1 billion yen, up 72.2 percent from the previous fiscal year. 

The strong sales of Monster Hunter: World and other titles published by Capcom helped offset the “worsened conditions” of the company’s amusement equipments business, which saw net sales drop by 53.7 percent to ¥7.8 billion (~$71.6 million).

As for the upcoming year, Capcom plans to continue growing its digital contents business by pushing for more download sales and increasing the number of major releases in the medium-term. The publisher also mentioned making esports a “priority area of investment”. 

Capcom is estimating increased sales and profits for the next fiscal year, aiming to reach March 2019 with net sales of ¥96 billion (~$881.2 million) and operating income of ¥17 billion (~$156 million).

A federal court has sentenced Calin Mateias to a year in federal prison over a distributed denial-of-service attack he launched against World of Warcraft servers in 2010.

Mateias, a Romanian citizen, was extradited to the United States over the accusation last year. NBC Los Angeles reports that he pled guilty to one count of causing intentional damage to a protected computer in February while prosecutors recommended a 10-month prison sentence.

On top of spending the past six months imprisoned, Mateias has also paid a sum of $29,987 in restitution to Blizzard to make up the costs the developer said it accrued as a direct result of the 2010 attack.

“Angered by a player he regularly competed against, the defendant determined to defeat his WoW opponents by interrupting the game’s server so they could not access the game,” argued Mateias’ defense during the sentencing. “His actions were motivated by a juvenile desire to win the game, and for others to lose it.”

The 2010 attack targeted the European World of Warcraft servers and blocked thousands of players in the affected area from logging into the online game. 

Additionally, the BBC reports that Mateias was facing charges over his alleged involvement in an effort to hack the California-based company Ingram Micro, but those charges have been dropped following his sentencing in the DDoS case. 

Oculus has only just released its standalone Oculus Go headset and still has the wireless “Santa Cruz” prototype in the works, but the Facebook-owned company isn’t resting on its laurels quite yet. 

Instead, Oculus revealed another virtual reality prototype it has in the works at this year’s F8 Developer Conference.

That headset, the “Half Dome”, aims to offer VR with a 140-degree field-of-view (compared to the Oculus Rift’s max of 110 degrees) and lenses that automatically move within the headset to help players focus on objects in the virtual space.

As noted by Ars Technica, Oculus calls this tech a “varifocal display” and hasn’t fully broken down how it works or if it’ll rely on eye tracking-tech, but the company says that the prototype comes packed with a mechanical system that constantly adjusts the distance of each lens from a players eye with “sub-millimeter precision.”

In VR, this theoretically would allow players to view more details on virtual objects near their face as the varifocal lenses automatically adjust to help their eyes focus on those up-close details. A video demo offered during F8, for instance, showed how previously blurry text on a small object held close to a person’s face in VR became noticeably clearer when the varifocal tech was used.

Of course, the Half Dome is still a prototype and, as such, Oculus hasn’t mentioned much else about the in-development tech as of yet.

This article was originally posted on the Joy Machine blog; maybe check it out too! <3

I tend to do a major iteration on the overall scene composition in Steel Hunters every month or two and since the public trailer is now approaching, I decided to just did one six-seven hour block fo sitting at my computer until I was happy with the results. It should be obvious that this iteration started like most: “just a few quick tweaks.”

The Problems

• I wanted heavier atmospheric haze/fog. The reasoning for which is two-fold:
• The general feel of this area is a barren “post-apocalyptic” wasteland. And I don’t mean that in the traditional post-apocalyptic Mad Max sort of way; the world of Steel Hunters wasn’t ever decimated by nuclear war but, rather, the slow depletion of natural resources (unrelated) and the onset of, basically, the worst possible nightmare version of climate change that could be imagined (and is almost certainly scientifically… non-scientific). In short: every environment has a unique feel/setting and the goal of each of these sandboxes is to fully embrace a worst-case scenario of what that environment in the game’s world.
• More practically, it’s way easier to handle the blend for the unbelievably intense sand storms (literally, they can not be believed because it’s not also, likely, scientifically non-scientific) that can crop up mid-mission — requiring players to adjust their approach entirely.
• Along that same line of thinking, there is entirely too much blue sky if you catch a glimpse of the sky through the clouds — and just adding more cloud-cover would obscure the actual sun vector all the time (instead of 75–85% now).
• To adjust this, I have to modify the rayleigh calculation coefficients just enough to reduce the blue of the end result without blowing out the scene’s lighting and composition in the other direction (trump-orange).
• There is a lovely issue with the volumetrics rendering light blue light shafts if you happen to end up in an along the edge of an occluded area (this is unrelated to the sky color, as I discovered).
• This gets worse if the directional light is completely obscured, at which point the resulting composition ends up with a light blue screen area where the light would normally be (not super obvious/ugly, but it annoyed me. A lot).
• I don’t tend to update time-of-day during gameplay, but I still ran into an issue with the volumetrics and sky/cloud/light settings getting out of sync at night (meaning the moon ended up with red/brown-ish volumetrics despite a component white light color) — and time of day can make for a nice demo sometimes (and I may eventually have a very, very subtle progression of time in a mission at some point).
• The eye adaptation has issues maintaining a consistent exposure level as you go through the map.

The Nevada Scene Composition (Before)

The Iteration Process

I’ve done iterations on all of these various systems/components in the past, but generally I’ve focused on one or two aspects of the composition at a time. I wanted this iteration to focus on the entire gamut of influencing factors.

Ideally, I’d tackle each problem in that list one at a time. And, for the most part, that’s what I did. The issue is how all of these various systems exist in relation to each other. Which brings me to:

The World Simulation

The entire world state is managed by my “world simulation” — anything that related to or occurs within the environment is in some way or another related to this system. In the case of lighting, volumetrics, atmospherics, and relevantpost-processing data, the relation to the world simulation is direct: the simulation manages each of these explicitly.

• The Plus Side of This: I don’t have to jump back and forth between all sorts of entities to tweak properties.
• The Down Side of This: The world simulation is a simulation in every sense of the word. Simply changing one value can have a ripple effect that affects any number of other data that influences the final scene composition.
• I make this sound bad, but it’s actually a great thing. This design and implementation ensures internal environment consistency and, for lack of a better word, “synergy” between what could be setup as disparate entities. This will also be helpful for ensuring future environments are bound to the same rules.

The Iteration Process (Remix)

The process, basically, goes like this: start a problem (almost in the order described above, except the sky simulation and resulting coloring was the first problem I took on), work towards an acceptable result, and move on to the next problem.

By the time I started on the second problem, that process was pretty much gone. Changing the sky simulation data resulted in some dramatic composition changes that affected the overall scene exposure, the lighting intensity/colors, and the look and intensity of the haze. Really, the only thing that wasn’t affected by this was my volumetrics solution (based heavily on NVIDIA’s Volumetric Lighting research/implementation advice) as I was previously manually managing the volumetric light color/intensity.

So, obviously, I updated the world simulation’s code to ensure that the volumetric light color/intensity to also be managed by the world simulation in respect to its various light entities (a directional light and sky light). THERE. Now a single change affects ALL THE THINGS. I sure showed that what’s what. Admittedly: this also addressed the problem I was having with the volumetrics being out of sync with a dynamic time-of-day (especially at night), so that’s neat at least.

Note: Unfortunately, I didn’t properly create screenshots of each specific step along the way, but I do have a few iterations that I used to compare each tweak round. So those will appear shortly.

First Pass

With the exception of the odd issue with the “sun” showing as a large blue halo when obscured (and the volumetrics coloring when in an obscured location relative to the sun), I ended up with this first-pass result:

This is definitely a step in the right direction compared to the starting point. And I remember this first iteration being worse than it actually is (in retrospect), but looking at it now, I remember my issues with it:

• The lighting and shading is fairly flat and trends far closer to orangey-orange than I want (even the mech shading was fairly flat).
• The “sun” (which I use in quotations constantly because it’s just a directional light that is treated as an atmospheric body) is somewhat non-existent. There is a somewhat brighter spot in its place, but it’s far more understated than I want.
• The haze is over-saturated and really drowns out the shading of distant buildings more than I’d like.
• Finally, though it’s not obvious here, but if any view other than the composition I’m using throughout this post, the eye adaptation was… Not happy. The histogram for the composition shot is fairly even, but anywhere else the overall exposure trends lower (which, since the composition I’m showing is potentially in the brightest areas in the environment).

Second Pass

I really should have written this post yesterday after doing all this work because, looking at this pass’s screen shot looks, basically, like “… why did I just make everything worse?”

This pass’s goal:

• Start addressing the auto exposure so if I turned around I wasn’t blinded by the adjusted exposure for darker areas.
• This entailed lighting color/intensity (and volumetrics color/intenstiy which has its own modifiers based on the light color/intensity it gets from the directional light) adjustments. This succeeded in evening out the overall composition exposure throughout the environment, but it also made the lighting even more flat (and the composition somewhat darker).
• An attempt to change the haze distribution so it wouldn’t affect ground-level areas as intensely as it did in the first pass (also attempted, and failed, to fix the coloring).

Third Pass

I call this pass “lighting, volumetrics, and composition exposure adjustments that made everything worse”.

Which is mostly true; I can’t remember the specifics of what I did in this pass, but I was focused primarily on getting the lighting in the final composition to be more complex (not flat).

AND I SUCCEEDED. If you ignore the fact that the entire scene is now grim-dark and the mech details are basically completely lost.

Fourth Pass

I focused primarily on light intensity values, the brightness of the trueSKYbrightness levels (which were pushing the composition’s exposure histogram far outside the range of the rest of the scene), and getting the haze to cooperate.

Problems now:

• The composition’s contrast was way too heavy — even for me (and that’s saying something. I knew this wasn’t an issue with the post-processing stack, so I blamed the auto exposure. And turning off auto-exposure confirmed that… To some extent.
• The lighting intensity adjustments worked for most of the scene, but the smaller-scale details of the mech (which, by the way, is why I like this composition; it has foliage, large-scale meshes, and detailed smaller-scale meshes) weren’t benefitting from any changes to the intensity. Meaning that while most of the scene benefitted, shadowed areas were still suffering a bit.
• The haze was getting even more exaggerated from adjustments to the auto exposure. Which is neat.
• The “sun” still had an underwhelming compositional presence (and you can see the out-of-place blue halo here more clearly than in other images, despite not being occluded).

Fifth Pass

I did another round of light intensity modifications in conjunction with the trueSKY light wavelengths and yet-again-more haze tweaks. AND THIS TIME: THEY WORKED.

Oh, and I changed the entire volumetrics simulation settings from being Mie-based scattering to using a Henyey-Greenstein phase function for scattering. This iteration, in particular, took the most time to really get right-ish because it so dramatically impacted the entire composition

Note: I’ll show some debug shots of what the volumetrics themselves look like in the final composition later.

The overall composition still hasn’t quite hit the overall exposure level I’d like and the “sun” still had no strong presence in the composition. And so I decided: unacceptable. The “sun” must bend to my will.

The End Result

After more volumetrics, eye adaptation, color grading, and light intensity passes, I ended up at a result that I’m pretty happy with. It’s still leaning a bit too close to orangey-orangyness-orannnnge, but at the moment I’m not entirely convinced that’s a bit thing for this environment (especially since, once I started adding VFX to the scene, that will have a pretty dramatic effect on color variation).

AND THE SUN BENT TO MY WILL.

And since I promised some debug screen shots, here is the resulting composition exposure:

And a debug visualization of what the volumetrics look like on their own (you can probably tell where I went to give the “sun” a bit of help in the prominence department):

Conclusion

I really enjoy doing iterations like this. And this was fun enough to help me maintain sanity in the twelve hours of camera system work that followed.

Fun Fact: The Steel Hunters “announce” trailer release date is not too far away.

Addendum

By reader demand, here’s a quick-and-dirty slideshow GIF of the progress (it loops so the beginning/end are, uh, hopefully recognizable):

A recent update to Google Chrome had the unfortunate side effect of muting audio for a vast array of web-based games and interactive projects.

Developers have taken to Twitter to call Google out for the sudden and unprompted change, noting in some cases that their HTML-5 based projects are essentially dead in the water with audio forcibly muted.

While it’s unlikely that Google will let these changes remain in the face of such backlash, the fact that a major web browser has all at once muted audio for the many, many projects that fall outside of top websites that feature audio elements understandably has many developers concerned.

Developers like VVVVV and Super Hexagon creator Terry Cavanagh and Stephen’s Sausage Roll creator Stephen Lavelle are some of the people that have already noticed that their content has been affected by the change, while numerous other web developers and artists have spoken out against the ill effects of the new policy as well.

The issue itself looks to be rooted in a policy change that came with the most recent update to Google Chrome. Earlier this year, Google rolled out a Chrome update that allowed users to mute audio based on individual websites, aiming to counteract the minor annoyance of unwanted, auto-playing videos. The latest policy update takes that one step further by automatically blocking audio and video from being played on most websites, save for those on Google’s list of 1,000 or so sites where a high percentage of videos opt to play media with sound. 

Chrome additionally doesn’t display any sort of notification to a user that the page they’re viewing has had its audio muted, something developers have also taken issue with in the wake of this change.

Ah fuuck sake. I had just in the last year started to begin to trust that I could reliably use audio in the browser (after years of reticence). So much for that…looks like the chrome update broke all of the audio in my html5 games as well. https://t.co/gT6n9pz0VT

— Stephen Lavelle (@increpare) May 7, 2018