Posted by: xSicKxBot - 02-21-2020, 04:56 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Skateboarding Sim Session Is Back On Board For Xbox One
After suffering a delay in October 2019 and missing its "late November or early December" release window, developer Crea-ture Studios has provided a new tentative launch period for when Session will arrive on Xbox One. The skateboarding simulator will now launch sometime this spring, according to a developer update.
Crea-ture Studios took to Steam to give an update on Session, which is currently available in Early Access on PC (and 25% off now through February 26). The team said it's targeting a "spring" release window for Session on Xbox One, which places the launch of the skateboarding game between March 19 and June 20. Further, Crea-ture has teamed up with the "local experienced studio" Illogika to make a "dedicated team [to work] on the Xbox version" of Session.
Illogika has worked on Cuphead and the various "GO" mobile versions of popular franchises like Deus Ex GO, Hitman GO, and Lara Croft GO. The team typically provides programming and quality assurance assistance.
Cocos Creator, the free Cocos2D-x powered cross platform game engine, just released version 2.3. The 2.3 release adds more 3D functionality to the previously 2D game engine including 3D physics and particle systems, as well as other improvements such as DragonBones and Spine mount point support, an upgrade to the material system and more. Cocos Creator is available as a free download for both Mac and Windows.
After a long period of development and preparation, and after a memorable Spring Festival, Cocos Creator v2.3 is officially released. v2.3 is a very important version that officially integrates support for 3D physics, collisions, and 3D particles, and is capable of developing more types of 3D games! At the same time, the material system has been upgraded from the experimental version to the official version, which can greatly improve the expressiveness of a game. It is recommended that all developers upgrade!Please perform the necessary technical evaluation and backups before upgrading.
Major new features include:
Qutoutiao (QTT) mini game support
3D physics support(rigid body, Box/Sphere collision components, trigger and collision events, physical materials, ray detection, etc)
Stardew Valley 1.4 update out on Android, iOS to follow
By Ian Boudreau19 Feb 2020
The long-awaited 1.4 update for Stardew Valley is out now on Android, and it’ll be hitting iOS devices in the near future. If you play Stardew Valley on an Android device, chances are you already have the update; if you’re on iOS, the patch is working its way through Apple’s certification process and should be available soon.
Stardew Valley version 1.4 adds a staggering amount of content to a game that’s already plenty big. There’s now a movie theatre for the late game, which comes with its own set of features and content. There are new 14-heart events for spouses, brand new events and dialogues, new fish ponds in which to breed fish, a new system for clothes tailoring and dyeing, and much more.
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Spouses you’ve divorced will no longer attend your subsequent weddings, which I personally think is a thoughtful touch.
You can check out a full list of changes in 1.4 here, but bear in mind the mobile version of Stardew Valley doesn’t support multiplayer. It’s still a massive list of new stuff and fixes even setting multiplayer aside. The experience has been polished significantly and filled out with more stuff to do across the whole game.
New Baby Yoda Merch Is Here: Funko Pops, Build-A-Bear, Legos, And More
Baby Yoda, officially known as The Child, was the biggest sensation last holiday season, but official Baby Yoda merchandise has been hard to come by. That's changing soon, as Funko Pops, plushies, figures, and even a Build-A-Bear are releasing in the next few months. Now, even more Baby Yoda products have been revealed ahead of Toy Fair 2020 this weekend, including an absolutely adorable animatronic doll that releases this fall. Animatronic Baby Yoda is joined by action figures, new plushies, a backpack, board games, Lego sets, and more. Check out all of the new Baby Yoda products below, including our first good look at the Baby Yoda Build-A-Bear.
Baby Yoda Animatronic Edition | $60
Animatronic Baby Yoda is available this fall
Animatronic Baby Yoda is activated by touching the top of his head. He has more than 25 sound and movement reactions. Baby Yoda will laugh and coo, move his ears, open and close his eyes. When you tuck him in after a long day, he'll close his eyes for a "Force nap." As you can tell, the toy comes with a cool Mandalorian pendant. An exact release date hasn't been set, but the adorable new toy is available to pre-order for $60 and releases this fall.
The 137th GalaQuiz will be LIVE soon, win up to $100 in GalaCredit!
[www.indiegala.com] The GalaQuiz will take place in less than 15 minutes from this announcement Today's GalaQuiz[www.indiegala.com] hints are up. The theme will be First Ladies.
Just two and a half months after the release of Blender 2.81, Blender 2.82 is now available. While nowhere near as massive an update as Blender 2.80, there are still a number of improvements to be found in Blender 2.82 including:
New Mantaflow powered gas and liquid physics simulation engine
Improved cloth simulations with support for internal air pressure and internal springs
UDIM tiled texturing support (learn more here and here)
PIXAR USD format export support
Cycles improvements including new nodes, faster rendering on Windows and more
AI DeNoiser support on RTX hardware powered by NVidia OptiX for faster cycles renders
Preview pass support in EEVEE renderer including ambient occlusion, mist, combined, normal and more
Transparent materials now blend properly with volumetrics
Sculpting improvements including new multi-plane scrape brush and slide relax brush as well as pose brush improvements
Grease pencil improvements including new polyline tool and multi stroke modifier
Plus several other new features and improvements
For complete details on what’s new in Blender 2.82 be sure to check out the complete release notes available here. You can also learn more and see several of the new features in action in the video below.
Red and Blue is a CCG with some new ideas about deck-building
By Ian Boudreau18 Feb 2020
The CCG space may be feeling a bit crowded these days, but Red and Blue might still be worth a look. It’s an upcoming game about building decks of powerful magical characters, equipment, and spells that incorporates a lot of the better ideas we’ve seen already, and adds a couple unique spins of its own.
Brilliant Games and Hex Entertainment announced Red and Blue last month, and it’s due out on iOS and Android devices sometime in the second quarter of 2020. Today, the companies have provided a breakdown of one of its card faces, which provides a more in-depth look at its mechanics.
As you can read over on the official blog, cards in Red and Blue have many of the familiar features we’ve come to know and love in the CCG/TCG genre. There’s a card cost, a type, values for attack and defense, and some descriptive text. Red and Blue’s cards are divided up into creatures, spells, and artifacts, and each one belongs to a particular subtype.
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The developers haven’t shared any particulars about how subtypes figure into the game, but one of the new elements you’ll see on the card face displayed is the ‘threshold.’ This is based on an interesting dynamic tied to building your deck. Each deck has three slots for elements, and each card will have some kind of elemental requirement – that’s the threshold.
In the example provided, the Prodigal Child, the threshold is two Earth elements, and so in order to include this creature in a deck, that deck has to have at least two elemental slots devoted to Earth. What this means is that you’ll be able to diversify your decks if you want, but that will prevent you from including more powerful cards – which naturally come with higher threshold requirements.
There are four elements in all, and Brilliant Games says Red and Blue will launch with 750 cards to collect. We’ll be interested to see how this approach to deck-building works in practise.
This 2019 iPad deal is courtesy of Alldayzip via Google Shopping and delivers the lowest price seen to date on the spacious 128GB Wi-Fi model. Already discounted to $365, shoppers can save an extra $45.01 with promo code EKPQZG, bringing the price down to $319.99 (compare at Amazon for $329).
At press time, the Gold finish is available for the sub-$320 price, with Silver and Space Gray ringing in at $10 more.
Free shipping is also included with the offer, which is available through Feb. 25, or while promo code redemptions last.
AppleInsider and Apple authorized resellers are also running additional exclusive savings on Apple hardware that will not only deliver the lowest prices on many of the items, but also throw in bonus discounts on AppleCare, peripherals and more. These deals are as follows:
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 02-20-2020, 12:25 PM - Forum: Windows
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Reimagining healthcare: Partnering for a better future
There has never been a more exciting time to be working in healthcare and life sciences at Microsoft. Our investments across our organization in research and development, world-class talent, and strategic partnerships reflect our CEO Satya Nadella’s vision that many of the next health breakthroughs will come from healthcare and life sciences organizations working in partnership with technology companies like Microsoft. With our partners and our customers, we are just beginning to unlock the power of technology and innovation to advance our shared understanding of human health.
This unique opportunity to make a lasting, positive impact on healthcare is one of the reasons I joined Microsoft. For decades, Microsoft has built a reputation as a trusted partner, now counting more than 168,000 healthcare organizations around the world who rely on us. As we’ve built out platforms for cloud infrastructure, productivity and collaboration, and artificial intelligence, we’ve developed an ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of partners who are building on our technologies and bringing added value to our mutual customers.
Innovation in medical imaging
Being new to Microsoft and a neuroradiologist, one of the areas I am most excited about is how we are helping our customers and partners reimagine healthcare and specifically explore the possibilities in medical imaging. In this area that is so critical to healthcare overall, we’re fortunate to work with some of the leaders in the industry.
GE Healthcare customers in the United States can take advantage of solutions running on Microsoft Azure such as the newly developed Edison™ Datalogue™ Connect, which was designed to provide secure image and data exchange to physicians working in their care settings.
Philips’ Azurion image-guided therapy platform empowers providers through image-guided minimally invasive therapies. Built for HoloLens 2, the work-in-progress Azurion mixed reality platform brings live imaging and other sources of vital data — currently displayed on large external 2D screens — into a 3D holographic environment that can be controlled by the physician.
Nuance, a leader in radiology reporting solutions with its PowerScribe platform, continues to lead the way in bringing ambient technologies to healthcare. We recently announced a strategic partnership with Nuance to accelerate that innovation, bringing together Nuance’s healthcare-optimized AI powered clinical documentation and decision support solutions and Microsoft Azure, advanced conversational AI, and natural language understanding.
Working together with researchers and industry partners, we’re also moving forward to create a broad range of cloud-based tools and solutions that touch many aspects of the development and delivery of effective care, including:
Empowering health team collaboration with Microsoft 365. Intelligent meetings and modern collaboration in a secure platform that integrates with clinical systems, from electronic health records to imaging software.
Research projects in registration and segmentation. Two of the fundamental problems that clinical researchers and practitioners are dealing with when working with 3D medical imaging modalities.
The Azure Stack Edge, a new Azure-managed appliance that brings the compute, storage, and intelligence of Azure to the edge for new healthcare scenarios including hardware acceleration with FPGA and GPU.
As part of our ongoing commitment to making health data easier to manage, in October we announced the general availability of the Azure API for FHIR. FHIR is quickly becoming the preferred standard for exchanging electronic health information and enabling the management of PHI data in the cloud. A rapidly growing number of healthcare delivery and healthcare technology companies are already using the Azure API for FHIR to improve interoperability within their own IT systems, including Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) of the NHS, Darena Solutions, Northwell Health, and Humana. With the release of the Azure API for FHIR, Microsoft now provides a fully managed, enterprise-grade service for health data in the FHIR format. Building on this announcement, a few weeks ago we announced the IoMT FHIR Connector for Azure – an open-source tool enabling our customers to more easily ingest data from health and medical devices, including a FHIR framework for Apple HealthKit.
This investment in innovation with our partners and customers puts us on a path to make a meaningful impact in medical imaging. Together we can empower providers with an enterprise imaging platform that enables reliability and security, manages growing patient data with strong controls for privacy and compliance, and provides insights from the data to improve patient care.
Learn more at RSNA
We will be engaging with more than 50,000 clinicians in radiology at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) conference in Chicago. Stop by our Microsoft Booth #10745 in the AI Showcase to learn more about our work and see how we are collaborating with partners and customers to reimagine healthcare. Our partners: Agfa HealthCare, Lunit, NucleusHealth, RamSoft, SOPHiA GENETICS, Volpara, 7 Medical and others will be on hand to share their innovative work. In a special session, I’ll be sharing Microsoft’s view on the opportunities to reimagine healthcare and specifically medical imaging. Several of our partners will join to share how they’re using technology, from the cloud to quantum computing to mixed reality and teleradiology, to help radiologists today.
Fedora at the Czech National Library of Technology
Where do you turn when you have a fleet of public workstations to manage? If you’re the Czech National Library of Technology (NTK), you turn to Fedora. Located in Prague, the NTK is the Czech Republic’s largest science and technology library. As part of its public service mission, the NTK provides 150 workstations for public use.
In 2018, the NTK moved these workstations from Microsoft Windows to Fedora. In the press release announcing this change, Director Martin Svoboda said switching to Fedora will “reduce operating system support costs by about two-thirds.” The choice to use Fedora was easy, according to NTK Linux Engineer Miroslav Brabenec. “Our entire Linux infrastructure runs on RHEL or CentOS. So for desktop systems, Fedora was the obvious choice,” he told Fedora Magazine.
User reception
Changing an operating system is always a little bit risky—it requires user training and outreach. Brabenec said that non-IT staff asked for training on the new system. Once they learned that the same (or compatible) software was available, they were fine.
The Library’s customers were on board right away. The Windows environment was based on thin client terminals, which were slow for intensive tasks like video playback and handling large office suite files. The only end-user education that the NTK needed to create was a basic usage guide and a desktop wallpaper that pointed to important UI elements.
User guidance desktop wallpaper from the National Technology Library.
Although Fedora provides development tools used by the Faculty of Information Technology at the Czech Technical University—and many of the NTK’s workstation users are CTU students—most of the application usage is what you might expect of a general-purpose workstation. Firefox dominates the application usage, followed by the Evince PDF viewer, and the LibreOffice suite.
Updates
NTK first deployed the workstations with Fedora 28. They decided to skip Fedora 29 and upgraded to Fedora 30 in early June 2019. The process was simple, according to Brabenec. “We prepared configuration, put it into Ansible. Via AWX I restarted all systems to netboot, image with kickstart, after first boot called provisioning callback on AWX, everything automatically set up via Ansible.”
Initially, they had difficulties applying updates. Now they have a process for installing security updates daily. Each system is rebooted approximately every two weeks to make sure all of the updates get applied.
Although he isn’t aware of any concrete plans for the future, Brabenec expects the NTK to continue using Fedora for public workstations. “Everyone is happy with it and I think that no one has a good reason to change it.”
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