Pokemon Go News

• Pokemon Go: Shiny Meowth Now Available As Part Of New Team Rocket Event
• Pokemon Go Adding First Gen 5 Legendary, Cobalion, Next Week
• Pokemon Go Is Getting A Special Research Quest Featuring Team Rocket
• Pokemon Go's November 2019 Community Day Announced, Features Chimchar

OGMO is a free and open source level editor, written in Haxe by Matt Makes Games the makers of Celeste among other games.  The level editor is available on GitHub under the MIT open source license.  OGMO 3.1(.1) was just released.

Details of the new release from the changelog:

• 3.1.1
  
  • Added entity image to entity palette
  • Move broken levels to trash instead of deleting them permanently
  • Fix image previews leaking out of the popup
  • Fix a typo in the popup box-shadow
  • Don’t show the “delete” option for image popups
  • Added .ogmo file association metadata
• 3.1.0 
  
  • Improved non-json file handling in the level manager panel
  • Added the ability to use an image for Entities

If you are interested in checking out OGMO, be sure to check the documentation, which also includes instructions on how to build the Haxe code yourself.  If you would like to see OGMO in action, be sure to check out the video below.

Design GameDev News Applications Tools 2D

–>

There is definitely a right way and a wrong way to announce a game. Not just mobile games – any game, really. The context of the game, and the events around the game is important. We won’t rehash the exact hilarity around the Diablo: Immortals announcement last year, but that was definitely the ‘wrong’ way to announce a game (despite all reports indicating Immortals is quite good, for what it is).

Last Friday, Path of Exile developer Grinding Gears Games announced a mobile version of their flagship title. In case you’re not familiar with what that is (it’s not one I’ve played myself either) Path of Exile is a Diablo-like free-to-play Action RPG that was first released in PC in 2013, and was later brought to PS4 and Xbox One.

It was (and still is) unusual because there is no in-game currency, instead there is a barter-like system that uses ‘currency items’ to pay for things. The business model also bases itself on so-called “ethical” micro-transactions. Largely cosmetic-based, but here are certain late-game quality of life features (like automatic trading) and things like custom serves that are gated behind a paywall. Here’s the video that announced that sequel:

It’s quite on the nose, and definitely a commentary on how Blizzard announced Immortals. Path of Exile itself is well known to have taken a lot of inspiration from Diablo II, so the comparison is an easy one to make. Path of Exile Mobile is also being made by GGG themselves, and not someone else, and the company seek to bring their same ‘ethical’ business mentality that they brought to the free-to-play Browser/PC space in 2013 when PoE originally launched.

You could argue that the strength of this announcement wouldn’t have been as powerful had Blizzard not botched their own announcement, but then GGG also announced Path of Exile 2, AND continued support for Path of Exile 1, in the same stroke as announcing the mobile version.

Although they do use the word “Bull****” twice in the video when talking about mobile gaming. That’s a little bit harsh.

There was no release window or confirmed platforms given for Path of Exile Mobile, so we’ll keep you posted.

The way we work has changed. Today, winning in business requires constant innovation, and this innovation in turn requires collaboration across disciplines, geographies, and cultures. Prior to this seismic shift in the workplace, the atomic unit of productivity was the individual. Now it’s the team. A high-performing team brings together talented individuals and operates as more than the sum of its parts. It draws on the strengths of each member and compensates for individual limitations. But in an increasingly distributed and fast-paced world, even the perfect team chemistry isn’t enough. Today’s teams also need collaboration tools that help them put that chemistry to work. They need technology that can reach across space and time and help team members feel like they’re just a few feet away, even when they’re worlds apart.

At Microsoft, we’re on a mission to help every team become a successful team. And so, we partnered with IDEO, a global design company known for its human-centered, interdisciplinary approach. Together, we researched successful workplace teams to find out what they had in common. Then we used what we learned to create The Art of Teamwork—a new digital curriculum built around the five attributes of a successful team.

And that’s not all. We’re also using the findings from the research to refine Microsoft Teams, the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365. What’s clear from the data is that the future of workplace collaboration won’t be defined by any one technology. Instead, successful teams need collaboration tools that combine a wide range of technologies in new and innovative ways. Teams brings together chat, meetings, calling, document collaboration, and workflow into a single app—and this unique combination is catching fire.

In fact, today Teams has more than 20 million daily active users. What’s more, while these users start with simple text-based chat, they quickly move on to richer forms of communication and collaboration. For instance, last month Teams customers participated in more than 27 million voice or video meetings and performed over 220 million open, edit, or download actions on files stored in Teams.

The five attributes

Partnering with IDEO, we researched diverse workplace teams—including astronauts, chefs, television producers, and nurses—to understand what high-performing collaborators have in common. With a variety of workplace teams as our subjects, we used in-context observation, expert interviews, secondary research, and prototype activities to identify the specific dynamics that high-performing teams had in common. We found that successful teams shared five attributes:

1. Team purpose—Keeps teams focused, fulfilled, and aligned on achieving their objectives.
2. Collective identity—Fosters a sense of belonging and helps team members work together as a unit.
3. Awareness and inclusion—Enables teams to navigate interpersonal dynamics and value everyone’s perspective.
4. Trust and vulnerability—Encourages interpersonal risk-taking in teams.
5. Constructive tension—Serves as a generative force for new ideas, driving better outcomes.

To learn more about the framework, check out the video below:

Teams customer success stories

With Teams, our customers are breaking through the artificial boundaries created by standalone or loosely coupled collaboration tools and working together in new ways. Their stories bring the five attributes of successful teams to life and paint a picture of what is possible.

Bold beauty: L’Oreal

At L’Oreal, the global beauty company, Chief Technology and Operations Officer, Barbara Lavernos explains, “Our momentum is driven by people interacting, putting ideas on the table, and jumping on them through spontaneous discussion. The new technology that allows for personality, contributions, and real innovation is Microsoft Teams.” With Teams, L’Oreal employees have a space to be creative while moving at the speed and scale needed to deliver over 7 billion products to customers annually.

From the factory floor to the C-Suite: Alcoa

Firstline Workers at Alcoa, a global leader in bauxite, alumina, and aluminum production, have embraced Teams to access business information on their own mobile devices while working at their remote Iceland facility. Before using Teams, when managers needed someone to come in for a shift, they had to call them, often late at night. Now with Teams, managers schedule plant employees using Shifts, which they can access on their mobile devices. With Shifts, the problem of workers missing scheduled assignments has resolved, with the absentee rate falling to nearly zero. “Shifts in Teams is much more efficient for organizing people,” says Friopjófur Tómasson, a plant supervisor. “If I had to use one word to tell you what Teams means to me, it’s ‘efficiency.’ Shifts saves me at least an hour a day.”

Simplified collaboration: Telefónica

At telecommunications company Telefonica, employees conduct business-building projects in Teams. An offsite meeting of executives can now be coordinated in a highly secure, centralized hub. This simple meeting used to be a coordination nightmare, with up to 20 colleagues from several departments focusing on various workstreams. “Before Teams, we had to integrate different aspects of a project that had been created in isolation from each other. Now, a group of colleagues can build on the documents in a collaborative way and edit the project directly. This process used to take four weeks, now we can accomplish it in a matter of days,” says Jamie Rodriguez-Ramos Fernandez, Director of Strategic Analysis at Telefónica.

Putting patient care first: St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN)

St. Luke’s University Health Network providers are replacing different third-party collaboration apps with Teams, simplifying their lives with a single workspace for anytime, anywhere conversations about patients. “Even as we look to secure text messaging as one of the advantages of the ubiquitous cellphone, we still have to comply with HIPAA and other privacy requirements,” says Dr. James Balshi, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer and Vascular Surgeon at SLUHN. “But we don’t have to worry about that with Teams. It’s equally functional on the smartphone, tablet, and desktop computer. I use the camera technology on the phone to share patient information in a more secure and HIPAA-compliant manner with colleagues during a Teams video call. I’ve also shared EMR notes and X-ray images.”

Connecting across the globe: Trek

Trek is a leading bicycle designer, manufacturer, and retailer that is adapting quickly to a fast-changing environment. Some U.S.-based employees work in locations other than the company’s Waterloo, Wisconsin, headquarters, including at other facilities, home, or retail locations. Trek’s international business has also grown quickly with the company expanding its operations to 17 established offices around the world. “Having good connectivity and digital meeting experiences is critical in making the way we work a success,” says Nathan Pieper, IT Business Applications and Collaboration Manager at Trek. The meetings capabilities in Teams “was the carrot that got people in,” says Pieper. “Teams adoption grew because people used it, told other people to use it, and invited them to online meetings on it.”

A high-performing team can do what otherwise would be impossible. And with Teams, there’s no limit to what you and your team can achieve at work. To improve teamwork in your organization, check out the digital teamwork guide at the Art of Teamwork home page. And if you’re not using Teams yet, get started today!

Note: Customers are ultimately responsible for their own HIPAA compliance.

Linux clothes specialist HELLOTUX from Europe recently signed an agreement with Red Hat to make embroidered Fedora t-shirts, polo shirts and sweatshirts. They have been making Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, and other Linux shirts for more than a decade and now the collection is extended to Fedora.

Instead of printing, they use programmable embroidery machines to make the Fedora embroidery. All of the design work is made exclusively with Linux; this is a matter of principle.

Some photos of the embroidering process for a Fedora sweatshirt:

You can get Fedora polos and t-shirts in blue or black and the sweatshirt in gray here.

Oh, “just one more thing,” as Columbo used to say: Now, HELLOTUX pays the shipping fee for the purchase of two or more items, worldwide, if you order within a week from now. Order on the HELLOTUX website.

One of Sonic Mania’s most unique gameplay features was the addition of a ‘drop dash’ move which allows characters to roll into a wrecking ball the moment they hit the ground – but it turns out we almost had this move in Sonic 3, which was released decades earlier.

A prototype version of the third Sonic game has appeared online and appears to come from a time just before the title was split in two to create Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles.

Originally planned to be a much grander 3D title that used the same chip that powered the Mega Drive / Genesis port of Virtua Racing, Sonic 3 would endure a difficult development before eventually making it to market. Back in the day, very little was shown off of the game before release; it is believed this prototype was a preview copy sent out to the official Sega magazine in the UK.

Let us know what you think of this discovery by posting a comment below.

The Bungie Foundation’s first Game2give pledge drive raised $1.6 million for charity, funds that MCV says the organization plans to use to support Children’s Miracle Network and its own iPads for Kids program.

Starting on October 24, members of the Destiny community could donate for the Game2give drive and unlock in-game rewards, with some donation tiers offering a chance at receiving physical goods for participating.

Streamers that opted to participate in the drive likewise could earn in-game and physical rewards for how much they were able to raise between that start date and November 10.

“At Bungie, our purpose is to create worlds that inspire friendship, and we are so very grateful for our community to embrace this so strongly,” said Bungie Foundation senior manager Christine Edwards in a comment shared by MCV.

“We see this play out each and every day as lifelong friendships are forged, Guardians support their fellow Guardians both inside and outside of our game, and when our community rallies together for incredible causes such as supporting kids in hospitals.”

Sources speaking to Kotaku say that BioWare and parent company EA haven’t given up on Anthem, the studio’s ambitious online shooter that launched with little fanfare earlier this year.

If those sources are to be believed, the company is looking to revitalize interest in its live game through a hefty update down the line, a potentially risky stunt but one that other studios like Ubisoft and Hello Games have pulled off to breathe new life into their own games after tepid launches.

Kotaku notes that there’s no official timeline for what’s internally being called Anthem 2.0 or Anthem Next, and EA declined to comment on any of the rumored plans. In fact, beyond tentative plans to overhaul the game, nothing about Anthem 2.0 is set in stone. Kotaku’s sources teams know the game’s core systems will see significant change, but the exact form those will take is unknown.

Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson said as recently as June that the company had no plans to cut its losses on Anthem after its rocky launch and, while these reports are yet unconfirmed, tentative talk of Anthem 2.0 would mean that EA plans to back up those earlier claims.

James

ASP.NET Core now enables developers to build gRPC services. gRPC is an opinionated contract-first remote procedure call framework, with a focus on performance and developer productivity. gRPC integrates with ASP.NET Core 3.0, so you can use your existing ASP.NET Core logging, configuration, authentication patterns to build new gRPC services.

This blog post compares gRPC to JSON HTTP APIs, discusses gRPC’s strengths and weaknesses, and when you could use gRPC to build your apps.

gRPC strengths

Developer productivity

With gRPC services, a client application can directly call methods on a server app on a different machine as if it was a local object. gRPC is based around the idea of defining a service, specifying the methods that can be called remotely with their parameters and return types. The server implements this interface and runs a gRPC server to handle client calls. On the client, a strongly-typed gRPC client is available that provides the same methods as the server.

gRPC is able to achieve this through first-class support for code generation. A core file to gRPC development is the .proto file, which defines the contract of gRPC services and messages using Protobuf interface definition language (IDL):

Greet.proto

// The greeting service definition.

service Greeter { // Sends a greeting rpc SayHello (HelloRequest) returns (HelloReply);

} // The request message containing the user's name.

message HelloRequest { string name = 1;

} // The response message containing the greetings

message HelloReply { string message = 1;

}

Protobuf IDL is a language neutral syntax, so it can be shared between gRPC services and clients implemented in different languages. gRPC frameworks use the .proto file to code generate a service base class, messages, and a complete client. Using the generated strongly-typed Greeter client to call the service:

Program.cs

var channel = GrpcChannel.ForAddress("https://localhost:5001")

var client = new Greeter.GreeterClient(channel); var reply = await client.SayHelloAsync(new HelloRequest { Name = "World" });

Console.WriteLine("Greeting: " + reply.Message);

By sharing the .proto file between the server and client, messages and client code can be generated from end to end. Code generation of the client eliminates duplication of messages on the client and server, and creates a strongly-typed client for you. Not having to write a client saves significant development time in applications with many services.

Performance

gRPC messages are serialized using Protobuf, an efficient binary message format. Protobuf serializes very quickly on the server and client. Protobuf serialization results in small message payloads, important in limited bandwidth scenarios like mobile apps.

gRPC requires HTTP/2, a major revision of HTTP that provides significant performance benefits over HTTP 1.x:

• Binary framing and compression. HTTP/2 protocol is compact and efficient both in sending and receiving.
• Multiplexing of multiple HTTP/2 calls over a single TCP connection. Multiplexing eliminates head-of-line blocking at the application layer.

Real-time services

HTTP/2 provides a foundation for long-lived, real-time communication streams. gRPC provides first-class support for streaming through HTTP/2.

A gRPC service supports all streaming combinations:

• Unary (no streaming)
• Server to client streaming
• Client to server streaming
• Bidirectional streaming

Note that the concept of broadcasting a message out to multiple connections doesn’t exist natively in gRPC. For example, in a chat room where new chat messages should be sent to all clients in the chat room, each gRPC call is required to individually stream new chat messages to the client. SignalR is a useful framework for this scenario. SignalR has the concept of persistent connections and built-in support for broadcasting messages.

Deadline/timeouts and cancellation

gRPC allows clients to specify how long they are willing to wait for an RPC to complete. The deadline is sent to the server, and the server can decide what action to take if it exceeds the deadline. For example, the server might cancel in-progress gRPC/HTTP/database requests on timeout.

Propagating the deadline and cancellation through child gRPC calls helps enforce resource usage limits.

gRPC weaknesses

Limited browser support

gRPC has excellent cross-platform support! gRPC implementations are available for every programming language in common usage today. However one place you can’t call a gRPC service from is a browser. gRPC heavily uses HTTP/2 features and no browser provides the level of control required over web requests to support a gRPC client. For example, browsers do not allow a caller to require that HTTP/2 be used, or provide access to underlying HTTP/2 frames.

gRPC-Web is an additional technology from the gRPC team that provides limited gRPC support in the browser. gRPC-Web consists of two parts: a JavaScript client that supports all modern browsers, and a gRPC-Web proxy on the server. The gRPC-Web client calls the proxy and the proxy will forward on the gRPC requests to the gRPC server.

Not all of gRPC’s features are supported by gRPC-Web. Client and bidirectional streaming isn’t supported, and there is limited support for server streaming.

Not human readable

HTTP API requests using JSON are sent as text and can be read and created by humans.

gRPC messages are encoded with Protobuf by default. While Protobuf is efficient to send and receive, its binary format isn’t human readable. Protobuf requires the message’s interface description specified in the .proto file to properly deserialize. Additional tooling is required to analyze Protobuf payloads on the wire and to compose requests by hand.

Features such as server reflection and the gRPC command line tool exist to assist with binary Protobuf messages. Also, Protobuf messages support conversion to and from JSON. The built-in JSON conversion provides an efficient way to convert Protobuf messages to and from human readable form when debugging.

gRPC recommended scenarios

gRPC is well suited to the following scenarios:

• Microservices – gRPC is designed for low latency and high throughput communication. gRPC is great for lightweight microservices where efficiency is critical.
• Point-to-point real-time communication – gRPC has excellent support for bidirectional streaming. gRPC services can push messages in real-time without polling.
• Polyglot environments – gRPC tooling supports all popular development languages, making gRPC a good choice for multi-language environments.
• Network constrained environments – gRPC messages are serialized with Protobuf, a lightweight message format. A gRPC message is always smaller than an equivalent JSON message.

Conclusion

gRPC is a powerful new tool for ASP.NET Core developers. While gRPC is not a complete replacement for HTTP APIs, it offers improved productivity and performance benefits in some scenarios.

gRPC on ASP.NET Core is available now! If you are interested in learning more about gRPC, check out these resources: