Versus: Unfriendly Frenzy has a rhythmic name that just rolls off the tongue, and its gameplay is every bit as dynamic. The presentation and play experience are zippy, the theme is zany if a little vacuous, but the strategy is ultimately flat. This ain’t Civ 5, folks, and it was never meant to be. As a series of rapid-fire tactical skirmishes, Versus shines, as it also does with local multiplayer. It has clearly been well-polished and is quite fun, but the lack of depth in decision-making and interactions makes the overall experience middling.
It’s real time strategy in a lightweight sense: two commanders duke it out on a single-screen map by spawning units down the lanes of the map. These forces march to the other side of the battlefield, fighting any enemies they come across and ultimately damaging the base if left unopposed. Every one of these units costs energy, which regenerates automatically over time. Your leader can be re-positioned and becomes the spawn point for any or all new units. Honestly that’s 90% of the game, so it is practically pick-up-and-play accessible.
I suppose because Starcraft & Warcraft cast long shadows, there are three factions. There’s some notional asymmetry amongst them: the Circus, Muscle Faeries, and Junkyard. Each one has a roster of six units, three (or rarely four) of which must be selected as a squad. Some are area-of-effect attackers, others demolish buildings quickly. There are tanks and glass cannons alike. It’s a bit like throwing rock-paper-scissors to finagle an advantage in a match, for the melee/ranged/flying matchups serve as soft counters to each other. Standard stuff, nothing fancy or wrong with it really, just a tad uninspired. To be fair, the visual and thematic design is kitschy and eclectic, so at least the aesthetics are colorful.
The extensive single-player campaign does a thorough job parcelling out how everything works in stages. It give tutorials on different units, win conditions, terrain effects and power ups, and moreover separates these new elements into their own missions. A generous interpretation to this campaign structure would be to say it onboards the player gently and has a leisurely difficulty curve. The cynical take is that there’s more padding here than mechanically unique challenges. As ever, the truth is somewhere in the middle. While the campaign storyline does follow the quest to steal and use the Pixie Protein Powder to revive ‘dark magicks’ it is constantly jumping around point-of-view and setting. New cartoon characters are introduced and dismissed rapid-fire, and the missions are generally beaten using the exact same operating procedure. It’s a fever dream, yet also dreary at times.
Seize power ups early, increasing your force’s power level and consistently turning the tide of battle in your favor. That’s it. The specifics of faction matchups and squad composition are only of trifling concern. If ‘strategy’ means long-term planning to you, implying some overarching ambition and design, then Versus is a weakling in terms of strategy. It is, however, tactically intense. Because of the obstacles and unpredictable spawn behaviour of those power ups, timing and quick wits are crucial. A flurry of micro-skirmishes between forces proves pivotal, so to master those, you have to position your leader correctly and tap the right mixture of units in the right window of opportunity. Unfortunately there is no real way to micro-manage the flow of battle beyond this. Contrast that with, say, Iron Marines, and you have a weird hybrid where battles are set into motion without much additional oversight or fine control. In this respect it strongly resembles a lane-pushing or tower-defense game.
The single game element that keeps Versus from getting totally stale is the power-ups. There are ones which beef up a unit type’s health, speed or attack, but there are also one-off ones, which can freeze the enemy commander or create a super-unit. Power-ups have to be used manually, and while the unit stat upgrades have the longest tail of influence, the short-term ones are no joke, either. They are decisive and unpredictable, so they keep the game from becoming a tedious overlong tug-of-war match. It’s a mid-range objective to give additional momentum, and the trick works.
The theme of the game, as well as it’s overall presentation were clearly going for Saturday morning cartoon, and they hit that aim. Each faction has a few key players and personalities, all of which bicker and quibble over every little thing, just as a way to generate dialogue to break up the battles. Heavy dialects drive home how unsubtle the whole affair is. The story, much like the gameplay, is best digested by kids.
Some good news: the multiplayer is a standout and somewhat redeems the rest of the game’s weaknesses. Finally all of the simplicity in design and inputs makes perfect sense: how else can you manage local multiplayer without split screen? It’s about as good as it gets in this limited format, though the strategy fiends would be infinitely better served by a pass-and-play game, and this feels more like an RTS game for parties.
‘It’s a bit rubbish, but I can’t stop myself from playing’. This phrase is a tidy bit of unfair rationalization, used as a preface to diminish every single so-called guilty pleasure. It leapt to mind several times while playing Versus: Unfriendly Frenzy, and though the game is well-made, it quickly runs out of interesting things to say or do. The guilty pleasure here is that of an easy, familiar challenge, and it is easy for any gamer to simply enjoy Versus, which for all its faults is at least well-executed. As a routine or background action, the battles are pleasurable enough, but the game demonstrates how difficult it is to straddle that fine line between simple and simplistic. For someone just looking to blaze through the game in a few hours and leave it behind with only dimly pleasurable hazy memories, it is perfectly adequate, but for long-term play it isn’t a keeper.
LowRes NX is a cross platform and open source fantasy console. Fantasy consoles are designed to create a virtual game console as well as providing all the tools you need to create games for the console. It’s a way of harkening back to a simpler time in game development and is an excellent way of introducing game programming while keeping the complexities down, as well as teaching more experienced programmers how to deal with more constrained environments.
LowRes NX is described as follows:
Virtual Game Console
Imagine LowRes NX as a handheld game console with a d-pad, two action buttons and a little rubber keyboard below a slidable touchscreen. LowRes NX was inspired by real 8- and 16-bit systems and simulates chips for graphics, sound and I/O, which actually work like classic hardware. It supports hardware sprites as well as hardware parallax scrolling, and even offers vertical blank and raster interrupts to create authentic retro effects.
Old-School Programming
The programming language of LowRes NX is based on second-generation, structured BASIC. It offers all the classic commands, but with labels, loops and subprograms instead of line numbers. Graphics and sound are supported by additional commands and you can even access the virtual hardware directly using PEEK and POKE. You have complete control over the program flow, there is no standard update function to implement.
Creative Tools
LowRes NX includes all the tools you need: The Character Designer for editing sprites, tiles and fonts, the Background Designer for tile maps and screen layouts, as well as the Sound Composer for music and sound effects. All of these are just normal BASIC programs. You can change and improve them or even create your own custom editors.
Share and Play
Send your games directly to other users or share them via the website. All programs are open source, so you can play them, learn from them and edit them. Do you prefer making just art or music? Share your creations as assets and let other programmers use them in their projects.
One of the most interesting aspects of LowRes NX is there is a completely free iOS implementation available on the Apple App Store enabling game development on the go. There is also a community of games you can learn from. The source code is available on GitHub under the LGPL v3 open source license. You can check out LowRes NX in action in the video below.
Material Maker is a free and open source MIT licensed procedural texture generation tool built using (and that can run within) the Godot game engine. Material Maker 0.6 was just released.
Material Maker is now a lot more generic and nearly all generators are based on GLSL shaders that can be edited. To test this feature, just drag one from the library to the graph editor, selected the newly created node and hit Ctrl+F. The node becomes editable, and hitting the pencil button will show the shader editor that can be used to define the node’s parameters, inputs, outputs, and GLSL functions that will be used to generate textures. For now it lacks diagnostic tools, so you’d better start with code you already tested (in shadertoy for example). Since images described in GLSL are math functions, all those generators are resolution independent.
It is now possible to create a group of interconnected generators using Ctrl+G. This will create a new node that contains the previously selected ones, while keeping all connectivity with other nodes of the graph. To edit the new subgraph, click on the pencil button of the newly created node ; and to get back to the parent graph, use the Up button in the top left corner of the view. If a Remote node was selected, it will be used to define the new node’s parameters.
All nodes now have embedded previews. Just click on the closed eye left of each node output to open it.
The 3d preview can now be moved manually, and the “O” button in its top right corner will show the preview as background of the graph view.
the library pane now has icons for many generators and a filter.
There are quite a few new generators: truchet, weave, runes, mirror and kaleidoscope.
The source code for Material Maker is hosted on GitHub, although the 0.6 code doesn’t seem to have been made an official release yet. Material Maker can also be downloaded from within the Godot Engine, in which case it will directly create a Spatial Material ready for use in your Godot game. The standalone release instead exports a series of PNG textures for use in whatever engine or application you wish to use.
You can learn more about Material Maker in the video below.
Extend your Mac display to another Mac with Luna Display 4.0
By William Gallagher Thursday, October 17, 2019, 10:00 am PT (01:00 pm ET)
You can now extend or mirror your main Mac’s screen onto a second Mac as easily as you can with Sidecar and an iPad with Luna Display 4.0.
Extending a single desktop across an iMac and a MacBook Pro. (Photo: Luna Display.)
Before Apple introduced Sidecar in macOS Catalina, firms including Luna Display provided the same ability to use an iPad as a second display. Now the latest version of Luna Display 4.0 lets you do the same thing, but with either an iPad or a spare Mac.
The company calls it Mac-to-Mac-Mode and says that the aim is to make the most out of multiple Apple devices at once.
“Apple has always marketed its products to be standalone, never intended to be used at the same time.” says the firm in a statement. “While you can connect devices through AirDrop, or pick up where you left off in Safari and the Messages app, the idea remains the same: it is all about picking up one product, and setting the other down.”
“Where we differ from Apple is that, instead of limiting ourselves to using each product individually, we see the potential that comes from a combination of products that is greater than the sum of its parts,” it continues.
Apple’s Sidecar requires macOS Catalina to work with an iPad, but is also limited to certain newer Macs. Luna Display 4.0 brings the feature to older models, with the main Mac needing 2015’s macOS El Capitan or later.
The secondary Mac, the one used as an extra display, can be running an even older OS, going back to 2012’s macOS Mountain Lion.
The software element is an app that must be run on both machines. Luna Display works only wirelessly, and the two devices must be on the same Wi-Fi network.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 10-22-2019, 08:39 PM - Forum: Windows
- No Replies
How AI is helping secure water for your future
Last year, Cape Town, South Africa, came within days of running out of water. This summer, Chennai, India, ran dry, with residents standing in line for hours for government water supplies.
Global demand for water is rapidly growing – but it is becoming increasingly scarce. Almost a third of the world’s population is estimated to be living in water-scarce areas, according to the World Data Lab.
With an increase in shortages driven by climate change and a growing global population, better management of this resource is crucial.
A team of researchers at Stanford University’s Natural Capital Project is combining remote-sensing data with machine learning to detect smaller dams and reservoirs. These structures deliver drinking water and generate hydropower, but they can also risk threatening ecosystems if not built and managed carefully.
Developed using Microsoft Azure, the algorithm will be made freely available to the sustainable development community.
Dr. Simmhan is part of an interdisciplinary team applying its experience with IoT to the challenge of water management in megacities
Managing water in megacities
The rapidly growing demand for water in India will soon significantly outpace its supply. Dr. Yogesh Simmhan is using the Internet of Things (IoT) to help ensure people have access to an affordable, safe water supply. This can be an issue in areas with dense populations, particularly megacities (those with populations over 10 million), many of which experience water scarcity and inequitable access.
As part of his work with the EqWater project, Dr. Simmhan is using data analytics and machine learning to understand the causes of variations in access to water for individual neighborhoods; algorithms can be used to better manage supplies, such as improved water scheduling or detecting leaks.
Pooling data on areas such as flow from reservoirs, seasonal weather and residential use, the team can predict peak demand and identify shortfalls.
Improved forecasting of droughts and floods will become increasingly important as climate change drives more extreme weather events. The Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes project, based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, is working to increase its understanding of some of the less well-recognized weather phenomena affecting the western U.S.
Such phenomenon is atmospheric rivers – large bodies of water vapor in the sky. Although little is understood about them, they are known to trigger intense storms and flooding, and are major contributors to water supplies. Equally, droughts can occur if they fail to arrive at the expected time or place. Deep learning is helping the team predict their behavior.
Conservation Science Partners wood supply model
Investigating the effect of tree loss
Drought, climate change, wildfires and insect infestation have all contributed to an increase in tree loss in the western U.S., where forest health is a major concern. Trees help prevent flooding by absorbing rain and slowing run-off; they contribute to drinking water supplies by helping replenish aquifers and purifying water; and they play a vital role in carbon capture.
Tony Chang and a team at the research nonprofit Conservation Science Partners are using cloud computing and machine learning to assess tree health and biomass, using images from NASA, the U.S. Geological Society, the National Agricultural Imagery Program and others. This data is linked to information about regional water sources in order to uncover the connections between forest conservation and management and water supplies.
The analysis is initially being applied in California before being rolled out to rest of the western U.S.
Africa Flores, research scientist at the Earth System Science Center in the University of Alabama
Predicting armful algae blooms
Africa Flores, a research scientist at the University of Alabama’s Earth System Science Center, and her team are using AI to analyze satellite images and weather models to help predict harmful algal blooms. These out-of-control colonies of algae deplete oxygen in the water and make it potentially toxic to humans and wildlife.
Working on Lake Atitlán in the Guatemalan Highlands, she uses machine learning to analyze data on variables such as rainfall, temperature and cloud cover. She hopes deeper insight into the conditions that may lead to such blooms will help authorities take preventive measures and potentially improve agricultural practices. Her plan is to use her algorithm in other freshwater bodies in Central and South America.
Command line quick tips: Locate and process files with find and xargs
find is one of the more powerful and flexible command-line programs in the daily toolbox. It does what the name suggests: it finds files and directories that match the conditions you specify. And with arguments like -exec or -delete, you can have find take action on what it… finds.
In this installment of the Command Line Quick Tips series, you’ll get an introduction to the find command and learn how to use it to process files with built-in commands or the xargs command.
Finding files
At a minimum, find takes a path to find things in. For example, this command will find (and print) every file on the system:
find /
And since everything is a file, you will get a lot of output to sort through. This probably doesn’t help you locate what you’re looking for. You can change the path argument to narrow things down a bit, but it’s still not really any more helpful than using the ls command. So you need to think about what you’re trying to locate.
Perhaps you want to find all the JPEG files in your home directory. The -name argument allows you to restrict your results to files that match the given pattern.
find ~ -name '*jpg'
But wait! What if some of them have an uppercase extension? -iname is like -name, but it is case-insensitive:
find ~ -iname '*jpg'
Great! But the 8.3 name scheme is so 1985. Some of the pictures might have a .jpeg extension. Fortunately, we can combine patterns with an “or,” represented by -o. The parentheses are escaped so that the shell doesn’t try to interpret them instead of the find command.
find ~ \( -iname 'jpeg' -o -iname 'jpg' \)
We’re getting closer. But what if you have some directories that end in jpg? (Why you named a directory bucketofjpg instead of pictures is beyond me.) We can modify our command with the -type argument to look only for files:
It turns out you’ve been taking a lot of pictures lately, so narrow this down to files that have changed in the last week with -mtime (modification time). The -7 means all files modified in 7 days or fewer.
The xargs command takes arguments from the standard input stream and executes a command based on them. Sticking with the example in the previous section, let’s say you want to copy all of the JPEG files in your home directory that have been modified in the last week to a thumb drive that you’ll attach to a digital photo display. Assume you already have the thumb drive mounted as /media/photo_display.
The find command is slightly modified from the previous version. The -print0 command makes a subtle change on how the output is written: instead of using a newline, it adds a null character. The -0 (zero) option to xargs adjusts the parsing to expect this. This is important because otherwise actions on file names that contain spaces, quotes, or other special characters may not work as expected. You should use these options whenever you’re taking action on files.
The -t argument to cp is important because cp normally expects the destination to come last. You can do this without xargs using find‘s -exec command, but the xargs method will be faster, especially with a large number of files, because it will run as a single invocation of cp.
Find out more
This post only scratches the surface of what find can do. find supports testing based on permissions, ownership, access time, and much more. It can even compare the files in the search path to other files. Combining tests with Boolean logic can give you incredible flexibility to find exactly the files you’re looking for. With build in commands or piping to xargs, you can quickly process a large set of files.
Random: Japan’s Favourite Nintendo Character Devours The Competition Once More
Nintendo Dream is the name of Japan’s official Nintendo publication, a magazine that began in 1996 and last year overtook the mighty Nintendo Power in terms of issues published. It’s still going strong, too, with the latest issue being December 2019. Yes, we know it’s still October. Ah, how we miss the steady acceleration of print magazines throughout the year – gotta squeeze in that 13th issue!
The mag regularly features a poll of the most popular Nintendo characters according to readers, and every time it’s dominated by just one character. And no, if that big moustachioed sad face above didn’t clue you in, it’s not the company’s mascot plumber. This month it’s once again pink puffball Kirby who takes the top spot. In fact, he took the last one, too. And the one before that. And the one before that. Here’s this month’s ranking courtesy of Japanese Nintendo:
1. Kirby – 189pt 2. Mario – 111pt 3. Link – 96pt 4. Pikachu 5. Luigi 6 Isabelle 7. Zelda 8. Dimitri 9. Yoshi 10. Peach
The toppermost of the poppermost. Again.
The rest of the list shuffles around every month, but Kirby is a regular fixture at the very top. Good for him! We’ve got nothing against the little guy – after all, he is the saviour of the entire world according to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – but it’s tough to imagine him getting that sort of love in the west.
Then again, we don’t get those incredible pop-up cafes over here. Just thinking about them gives us a face like the plumber up top. Perhaps if Nintendo gave us a taste of that delicious merch then Kirby would enjoy this sort of popularity outside his homeland. Chance’d be a fine thing.
Reckon we’ve got it wrong and we’re underestimating the Kirbmeister’s popularity in the west? Who do you think would top the same poll in the west? Let us know your candidates below – we wouldn’t be surprised to see Waluigi break the top 5.
Reggie Calls Wii U A “Failure Forward” Because It Led To Switch
Reggie Fils-Aimé may no longer be the president of Nintendo, but he’s forever in our hearts – and, if he keeps giving lectures on his time with the Japanese company like the one he did yesterday at Cornell University, that’s going to be the case for a long time.
During the lecture, Reggie – who is now the university’s inaugural Leader in Residence – spoke about a wide range of topics, including the ill-fated Wii U. The successor to the insanely popular Wii, this system aimed to introduce the concept of asymmetrical gameplay to a whole new generation of players, but consumers didn’t respond and it has gone down as one of Nintendo’s most costly hardware flops – despite playing host to some stunning games.
The lecture isn’t available online at the moment (it’s coming, though), but ResetEra user Theorymon has posted up some brief impressions and notes. During one section, Reggie admitted that the Wii U was a bust, but called it a “failure forward”, since it led directly to the creation of the Switch. As we all know, Switch is anything but a failure, and has put Nintendo back at the forefront of the games industry.
Do you think the Wii U was a mistake worth enduring in the light of it leading to the Switch, or are you of the opinion that Reggie’s outlook is a little too positive? Let us know with a comment.
Verizon Is Giving Customers Free Disney+ Subscriptions
With Disney Plus only a few weeks away, millions of folks are undoubtedly gearing up to add another streaming service to their carousel of subscriptions. If you're a Verizon customer, you may be eligible for a free 12-month subscription of Disney Plus. All Verizon customers with unlimited plans will get a year of the highly anticipated service on the house come launch day.
The promotion is for both new and existing customers, so if you currently have a Verizon family plan, you're going to get all the Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar content free of charge for your first year.
New 5G home internet and Verizon Fios home internet customers are also eligible for the Disney Plus promotion. The difference here is that existing home internet customers will not get Disney Plus, unless of course you have an unlimited family plan, too.
The Mandalorian, the first live-action Star Wars show, leads the charge for new content on Disney Plus, but there's a ton of existing content to look forward to, including nine Star Wars movies, some of the best Pixar animated films, and a close-to-comprehensive back catalogue of Disney movies.
Google added virtual machine (VM) types on Google Compute Engine including second-generation Intel Xeon scalable processor machines and new VMs for compute- and memory-heavy applications. The former, available in beta, are general-purpose VMs. They provide greater than 20% price-performance improvement for many workloads and support up to 25% more memory per virtual CPU compared with first-generation machines, according to Google. These N2 VMs offer a balance of compute, memory, storage, and network resources for general-purpose workloads such as web and application servers, enterprise applications, gaming servers, content and collaboration systems, and most databases. They are available in Google’s U.S.-Central, Europe-West, and Asia-Southeast region now and will be available in most Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions in the next few months. (Source: SDX Central)
