Xbox Insider Release Notes – Alpha Skip Ahead Ring (2004.191205-2300)
Hey Alpha Skip Ahead ring users! Today’s Xbox Insider Release Notes highlight the latest fixes, known issues, and features coming to your console. Starting at 6:00 p.m. PT today, users will receive the latest 2004 Xbox One system update (build: RS_XBOX_RELEASE_2004\19037.1207.191205-2300). Keep reading for more details.
System Update Details:
OS version released: RS_XBOX_RELEASE_2004\19037.1207.191205-2300
Available: 6:00 p.m. PT – December 7, 2019
Mandatory: 3:00 a.m. PT – December 8, 2019
Fixes for Alpha Skip Ahead
We’ve heard your feedback, and we’re happy to announce the following fixes have been implemented for this 2004 build:
Audio
Fixed an issue where audio would change from Dolby Atmos to 7.1.
Disney+ App
Fixed an issue where audio/video could get out of sync with Dolby Atmos.
Home
We’ve fixed an issue where some users dashboard would not load.
Fixed an issue where users were unable to select items in content blocks.
Fixed an issue where the dashboard was not loading except for the My Games & Apps tile.
My Games & Apps
Fixed an issue where users would not see the Disney+ app in their Ready to Install section.
Party Chat
Fixed an issue with random disconnects in party chat.
Store
We’ve fixed an issue where the Store would not launch for some users.
System
Various updates to properly reflect local languages across the console.
Known Issues for Alpha Skip Ahead
We understand some issues have been listed in previous Xbox Insider Release Notes. These issues aren’t being ignored, but it will take Xbox engineers more time to find a solution. We appreciate your patience at this time!
Audio
Users who have Dolby Atmos enabled and console display settings set to 120hz with 36 bits per pixel (12-bit) are experiencing loss of Dolby Atmos audio in some situations.
Workaround: Disable 120hz or set Video Fidelity to 30 bits per pixel (10-bit) or lower.
Home (Experiment)
Users may see the images for ads on the dashboard looking cropped or cutoff.
Messaging
Users are reporting being unable to send a voice messages while in Parties.
Workaround: Send the message while not currently in party chat.
Plex App
Users have reported playback is buffering constantly while streaming content.
Note: Please ensure you are running the latest version of the app before submitting feedback.
Rock Band 4
The game may take an extensive time to load for users with a large amount of DLC installed.
Settings
Some users have reported that 3D display mode is not working with supported content.
Profile Color
Sometimes users may encounter the incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.
Are you not seeing your issue listed above? Make sure to use Report a problem to keep us informed of your issue. We may not be able to respond to everyone, but the data we’ll gather is crucial to finding a resolution.
Learn more about feedback and how each ring is differentiated in the following links:
For more information regarding the Xbox Insider Program follow us on Twitter and join the community subreddit for support and updates. Keep an eye on future Xbox Insider Release Notes for more information regarding your Xbox One Update Preview ring!
Twitch facing $2.9 billion lawsuit over broadcast of pirated soccer streams
A Russian internet company has filed a sizable lawsuit against Twitch over livestreams of the English Premier League that popped up on the streaming platform.
That group, Rambler Group, is suing the company for 180 billion roubles, roughly $2.9 billion, and seeking to have Twitch banned in Russia which, according to the BBC, is Twitch’s third most popular country.
Rambler alleges Twitch facilitated a breach of the group’s exclusive broadcasting rights to the English Premier League by giving would-be-pirates a platform on which to broadcast matches. By its count, those rights were violated more than 36,000 times in just a couple of months.
In response to the suit, legal representation for Twitch notes that such streams are against Twitch’s terms without permission from the copyright owner, and that the company did take action against infringing streams of the English Premier League.
Humble have just launched another bundle of interest to game developers, this one is the Humble Software Bundle: Filmmakers. The star of the show here is HitFilm Pro, a non linear video editing and special effects software, but it also comes loaded with special effects, stock footage and other applications. As with all bundles it is split into tiers, you buy a higher dollar value tier you get all of the tiers below it.
The tiers for this bundle are:
1$ Tier
Smart REKT 3.1
ControlIt
Smoke Stock Footage
Debris & Impact Footage
16$ Tier
Action Pro
Particles
Cinematic LUTS v4
Modular Lower Third Kit – Corporate Styles
smartL3RD
30$ Tier
HitFilm Pro
Ignite Pro
Filmstro Pro – One Year Subscription
Fire Stock Footage
Explosion Stock Footage
Gun FX FX Pack
Muzzle Flash FX Pack
Energy FX Stock FX Pack
Electric FX FX Pack
Bullet Trails FX Pack
Impacts FX Pack
Blood & Gore FX Pack
Modular Lower Third Kit – Flat Style
As with all Humble Bundles you get to decide how your money is allocated, between Humble, the publisher, charity or if you so choose (and thanks a ton if you do!) to GFS using this link. You can learn more about this bundle in the video below.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 12-18-2019, 05:19 PM - Forum: Windows
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3 core ideas for empowering citizens, societies and governments
Promote citizen well-being, influence positive societal change, and enhance your government services
Exponential change is happening in the world around us and within governments. This change is being driven by one core idea, expectations of governments are changing. Modern technology is causing a shift in societal behavior. Citizens and residents expect their governments to adapt to the ways in which companies interact with their customers. They expect to be able to access services quickly, efficiently, and in any location that is convenient for them.
From the thousands of digital transformation journeys Microsoft has taken with local, regional, and national governments around the globe, we’ve learned that governments are constantly having to juggle this shift while managing a variety of challenges both internal and external. How do we provide quality services to our citizens as budgets either remain flat or are reduced? How do we address major societal problems such as aging and retiring workforces and education and labor gaps? How do we connect agencies across cities, regions, and borders, while making sure our data, and more importantly our citizen’s data, is secure? And how do we keep our citizens, communities, and countries safe and protected?
That juggling act can be exhausting, confusing, and overwhelming, but it can also be exciting. Government organizations have the ability to become more efficient and to better optimize existing resources leveraging modern technology, to deeply connect with citizens in powerful ways, and to empower government employees to be more efficient and effective and give them time back to focus on their agency mission.
Governments are changing, adapting, and evolving, just like the world around us. And while the challenges are real, so are the opportunities. Addressing the challenges governments are facing can be tied back to three, core ideas:
Engage and connect with citizens. Citizen engagement is core to every government’s mission. Today’s citizens want to have access to government services 24/7/365 on their terms and when convenient to them.
Modernize the government workplace. Governments must provide their employees with the tools they need to do their jobs as efficiently, and as securely as possible. This is where governments can address things like labor and re-skilling gaps and promote safety and security.
Enhance government services. Governments are constantly under pressure to become more efficient, which means finding ways to optimize their operations and transform their processes. It’s here that governments can connect those siloed legacy systems and utilize innovative applications such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and machine learning.
Sniper Elite Spin-Off Zombie Army Trilogy Fires Onto Switch Next Year
UK developer and publisher Rebellion has revealed that it’s bringing Zombie Army Trilogy to Nintendo Switch in 2020.
The game, which originally launched on PC, PS4 and Xbox One back in 2015, has players taking part in “frenzied undead-shooting action” across three story campaigns and an unforgiving Horde mode. It features some similarities to Rebellion’s Sniper Elite series but has a more action-focused feel, and is playable either alone or in co-op for up to four players.
The Switch version of the game will come with “everything” previously released on other consoles, as well as two-to-four player local wireless play, motion controls, Pro Controller and HD Rumble support, and even support for Switch’s friend invite system. Here’s some PR:
In the dying flames of World War II, Hitler has unleashed one final, unholy gamble – a legion of undead super soldiers that threatens to overwhelm the whole of Europe! Take on unrelenting hordes of harrowing enemies, from zombie soldiers to armoured skeletons, and fire demons to chainsaw-wielding elites – before facing the demonic dictator himself!
No specific date has been set just yet, but we do know that this one’s planned to launch in the first half of the new year. Hopefully we won’t have too long to wait.
Looking forward to this one? Have you played it already on other systems? Tell us below.
Pokémon GO’s New Buddy Adventure Update Brings Your Favourite Partner To Life
Pokémon GO developer Niantic has revealed a brand new feature for the game called ‘Buddy Adventure’, alongside a mushy trailer that’s sure to get nostalgic fans a little teary.
This new update will give players the ability to interact with their Buddy Pokémon in all-new ways, bringing them to life in a way that we haven’t seen before. If you enable the AR+ mode, you’ll be able to play with and feed your Buddy Pokémon to level up your friendship and even earn powerful boosts to their CP. Your friendship levels will rise as follows:
– Good Buddy: Your buddy will join you on your map, and appear on the new Buddy Profile page. – Great Buddy: Your buddy can also appear in Pokémon encounters and bring you items. – Ultra Buddy: Your buddy will point out “interesting places” nearby and bring you Souvenirs – new items found on the Buddy Profile page. – Best Buddy: Your buddy will sport a Best Buddy Ribbon and gain a CP boost in combat while still assigned as your buddy.
In a lovely touch, the Pokémon will also walk around with you on the map, similar to the fan-favourite feature found in mainline games like Pokémon HeartGold & SoulSilver and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee!. If your chosen Pokémon doesn’t walk, they can fly, too. Take a look at the Lugia in the screenshots below.
Not enough? Here’s a Wailord swimming about, presumably destroying your local town in the process:
We don’t have an exact release date for the update yet, but Niantic promises that it’ll arrive by next year. Sometime after its initial launch, a Shared AR mode will also allow up to three players to take a group photo of their buddies together – expect social media to see the full force of that with immediate effect when it drops.
A nice update? Do you have a Buddy Pokémon that’ll be perfect for this? Let us know in the comments below.
In a USG interview, LCG Entertainment founder Jamie Ottilie confirmed that the relaunched Telltale studio has opted to redo everything on the forthcoming The Wolf Among Us sequel. "We have completely restarted the development of the game," Ottilie told USG. "We felt it best to give the new creative team a clean slate to start with."
LCG Entertainment acquired the Telltale Games moniker in August 2019 and is now the name the company operates under. Only a few original Telltale developers are employed at the newly-reformed Telltale studio, with Ottilie telling USG that "several others [are] on a freelance basis." The Wolf Among Us 2 is being developed by Telltale and the brand-new AdHoc Studio--a team composed of former key members from the old Telltale, including individuals who worked on the original The Wolf Among Us.
According to USG, Adam Harrington (Bigby Wolf) and Erin Yvette (Snow White) are returning to reprise their roles in The Wolf Among Us 2. Further, series composer Jared Emerson-Johnson will return as well.
The Wolf Among Us 2 was announced just before San Diego Comic-Con in July 2017. At the time, the hotly-anticipated sequel was expected to launch in the second half of 2018. However, the title was delayed to 2019 "as the result of a few fundamental changes" at Telltale. The Wolf Among Us 2 will launch on PC via the Epic Games Store and consoles at some unspecified date.
Although it has a misleading name, Godot Game Tools is a very cool Blender addon that makes working with Mixamo animations in Blender 2.8x extremely easy. This includes the ability to easily import and merge multiple animations from Mixamo, an otherwise frustrating task. Features of Godot Game Tools include:
– Batch Animations Bake In A Single File
– Character Armature Clean and Fixes for Better Export
– Animations Testing
– Add Automatic Root Motion For Model Export
– Automated NLA Tracks Insertion
– Animation Rename
Godot Game Tools is available as a free download on itch.io. See GGT in action, including how to install, in the video below.
Fixed an issue where Dynamo mods were granting more Super energy than expected
Fixed an issue where swapping between Hand Cannons with Explosive Rounds could result in higher damage than intended
The fixed-roll of Pyroclastic Flow no longer has Tap the Trigger as a perk
Fixed an issue where Symmetry’s arc seekers would unintentionally stagger Unstoppable Champions
Note: this perk is meant for an Exotic weapon that is coming out later in the Season
Fixed an issue where finishers could yeet bosses off the map and cause other shenanigans
Activities
Fixed an issue where attempting to launch Forsaken Baron adventures would cause a Honeydew error
Rewards
Resonate Stems, Escalation Protocol chests, and other impacted rewards will now be granted properly
Fixed and issue where some Sundial rewards could be infused without dismantling the item
Eververse
Fixed an issue where the Sunbreaker Titan armor ornament bundle could still be purchased at full price even if some items where owned
PC
PC video settings now save correctly and do not get reset when launching the game
Disruption/Insults/Disrespect
Disruption/Insults/Disrespect
Harassment/Personal Attacks/Privacy Violation
Gory Violence/Explicit Sexuality
Illegal Activity
Hacking/Cheating
Spoilers/Stolen Content
Soliciting/Phishing/Impersonation
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We think these games offer something truly special, from a fast-paced multiplayer battle game to a grand, sweeping single-player adventure
On December 10, Shovel Knight Showdown and King of Cards will launch as free updates for owners of Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove on Xbox One. We think these games offer something truly special, from a fast-paced multiplayer battle game to a grand, sweeping single-player adventure. We can’t wait to share them with all of you.
The Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove package, made up of five complete games made over the course of five years, will finally be complete! We’ve had quite a few adventures with Xbox over the course of those five years — even the Battletoads paid a visit to Shovel Knight’s world. King of Cards and Showdown really are the cherries on top, and we hope you enjoy both!
Building Single-Player
Our desire for Shovel Knight Showdown on Xbox One was
to create a big, standalone game with tons of variety that you could play
again and again. Part of that “full game” feeling needed to come from Showdown
having its own adventure! It needed a way to delve deeper when multiplayer
wasn’t an option. The story and characters needed to make meaningful strides.
And if you did have a partner around and you still wanted an adventure…we
wanted you to be able to play, too! We began putting our core pillars in place
to develop a great story mode, as well as other single player content, too.
Crafting Story Mode
So, what is a story mode? We obviously wanted to convey some kind of story, encourage you to play through the game as all the characters, and entice you to play repeatedly. Additionally, it’d be ideal if it helped you see the full breadth of content in the game, so you knew exactly what was available in the multiplayer. But how would we show so much content in a fun and surprising way? That led us to brainstorming about how we could combine a standard “fighting game arcade ladder” with our randomized game mode, Chester’s Choice!
Many fighting games like Mortal Kombat feature arcade ladders, but they rarely feature interesting or unique setups. We like arcade ladders and think they work well, but since Shovel Knight Showdown is so focused on gems and platforming, we figured that mixing the platforming gameplay up was critical.
We liked the approach to arcade ladders found in games like Super Smash Bros’ Classic Mode that are set across a long series of stages with each tier presented as a fun encounter that mixed up modes, settings, stages, and characters along the way.
We decided to randomize our story mode: battles, settings,
and modes would be shuffled, though they’d start from a handcrafted base rule
set, like Chester’s Choice. This way, we could ensure the battles were fun
setups that emphasized the story and characters, while also creating replay
value.
While our story mode gameplay could carry some story in
terms of the scenarios you encountered, we knew that wasn’t enough. Each
character’s story needed to be like its own little story episode! We won’t go
into detail about how we designed the intertwining narratives in Shovel
Knight Showdown — that’s a tale for another day! But once we were done, we
had lots of story points that we wanted to get across!
First, we gave each character an intro and outro cutscene
using in-game graphics. These scenes would set up the story and pay it off at
the end. The outro cinematic would also work as a reward for finishing the story
for that character.
We spent great efforts to ensure that each character had a
worthwhile story. During the story battles themselves, each character was
assigned unique rival or impact character that you’d encounter several times.
These impact characters were hand-chosen for each character to try and make the
most interesting story possible. Through the cutscenes and rival encounters,
each adventure would have its own little story arc. Best of all, as you played story
mode as each of the unlockable characters, the fully intertwined story would
become clear. Taken as an aggregate, these stories made Showdown feel
like a grand adventure worthy of its own title.
But there’s more- Two
players can play the story cooperatively! Because Showdown is
primarily a multiplayer experience, we wanted the single-player content to have
the option of being played with a friend. Sometimes you want a change of pace
from battling one other, and cooperative story mode is a great alternative! The
battles can be quite different in single player or coop- we hope you try them
both!
Story mode is crammed full of special events, unique rule
sets, boss battles, and finally, a cool new minigame: Targets Mode, which we’ll
discuss next.
Targets Mode
In addition to story mode, we thought it would be important (and fun!) to have a mode that let players practice the characters in a different, non-threatening setting. A target or scoring mode seemed like a good fit.
We like how target modes in games like Super Smash Bros. can encourage players to use the full breadth and depth of each characters’ moves that would lead to a new realization about how to execute their abilities. But Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove already has hundreds of single-player challenges and stages…adding more just felt uninteresting. We also wanted our target mode to train the player for an unlimited time period.
We felt that a classic arcade-style score attack might do
the trick. We’d put the targets on randomized paths that made interesting
navigational challenges, and we’d group them up to test your attack ranges.
The idea is simple enough: break the targets entering on the tracks for points! If you break a group of targets in a row, a bonus will be added for completing the “chain”, along with two extra seconds of playtime. Once you run out of time, the game ends! In this way, the game could potentially last forever.
If Target mode was going to last a variable amount of time, we had to ensure that the gameplay didn’t feel static! Like one of our favorite single screen sore attack games, Bird and Beans, we focused on having dynamic elements. In Birds and Beans, as the game progresses, the floor gets destroyed and you have to play differently! In our Target mode the stage will change layout, a hazardous bomb (or helpful smart bomb!) can appear, and even the emcee Percy will engage in various antics. We ramped all these behaviors to a crescendo!
Targets can get wild as the score increases. The targets
start moving faster, there are new types of targets, and the ground can drop
out. We tried to keep in mind Bird and Beans’ simplicity. We spent a lot of
time trying to reduce the number of elements in the game while creating an
experience that could potentially last an hour (though Target mode runs rarely
exceed a couple minutes). The dynamic elements in the mode emphasized your need
to intuit your chosen character’s abilities and figure out how to best reach
all the targets on screen.
(The Target Mode combo meter rewards players for breaking
chains of targets without making a mistake.)
You may have noticed one more thing in the HUD: a combo
meter! After we had implemented the targets moving and chaining together in an
appealing way, we found we needed something that encouraged the player to move
quickly and avoid mistakes. The combo meter we implemented increases when
targets are chained but degrades quickly, essentially telling the player to
“hurry up!” It provides much-needed tension… making a mistake and it goes to 0.
Losing that combo can really set you back!
Target mode can be encountered in story mode with the
objective being to reach a score goal, but it can also be played solo. It’s a
rite of passage to try and achieve a great Targets score with your chosen
character, as it displays your mastery.
Practice Mode
While we could add modes forever, we didn’t want to overload Showdown! But from the beginning, we figured a training mode or Practice
Mode would be required. We tried to make it as streamlined as possible.
All Mode-d Out!
From single-player to multiplayer, there are a wealth of ways to play Shovel Knight Showdown. All in all, we learned that when developing a multiplayer game, making content is only half the battle! It must be presented in a variety of modes that showcase it best.
We think Showdown and its various modes are a blast
to play! The game should be simple to pick up and understand, but there’s lots
to explore and master with every mode. We hope you enjoy playing and replaying
to uncover Shovel Knight Showdown’s secrets!
