This week at Bungie, we’re on final countdown for launch.

It’s been a long summer of reveals, travels, interviews, and updates. Now we find ourselves in that old familiar clearing at the end of the path. This is the final weekly update that we’ll have before we blast off on another adventure.

Our new launch trailer is making the rounds. Here it is if you haven’t had a chance to watch yet.

Today, you’ll find us ticking all the boxes on the pre-flight checklist. There are some final items we want to cover before you set out to investigate the mysteries of the Moon. Here’s what you’ll find during a lengthy final scroll:

Let’s start the clock.

Combat Changes

PvE Damage Numbers Display

Goal: To provide players with useful and legible feedback for damage dealt to enemy combatants across many years of Power progression.

PvE Difficulty Tuning

Goals: Widen the sweet spot where fighting higher-level combatants provides a fun, challenging, and rewarding combat experience for a more enjoyable Power climb. Also, allow players looking for even greater challenges to confront much higher-level enemies.

Progression and Economy Changes

Rewards Power and Progression

Bright Dust

Eververse

Glimmer

Spider’s Exchange

Xûr

Patch Note Preview

We’ll have a bunch of bullet points for you to peruse next week. Here’s something to tide you over until then.

Ritual Weapons and Perk Changes

In Season of the Undying, pinnacle weapons will become ritual weapons. They will no longer have special perks and will instead be curated rolls. A previous article incorrectly showed two new pinnacle weapons. The good news is you will be getting three ritual weapons for each of the ritual activities: Crucible, Vanguard, and Gambit. Here’s the Destiny Dev Team on why we made this difficult decision and some information on upcoming perk changes.

Destiny Dev Team: The decision to stop creating extremely powerful pinnacle weapons was made for a variety of reasons. The first was that the band in which “pinnacle” perk can exist is actually quite small, and most of them far exceeded the efficacy they should have been at. Another issue is that they cause problems in the player ecosystem, particularly in the case of the Crucible pinnacle weapons. Due to the nature of PvP and PvE, anything that works well in PvP is likely going be extremely effective in PvE as well. This forces players into the Crucible if they want the “best” loadouts. Even the title of “pinnacle” set a variety of unrealistic expectations. Rather than being the absolute height of Legendary power, they were supposed to be interesting novelties to chase.

These problems became more pronounced the more of them we produced. In the end, we decided to move away from pinnacle weapons. If you managed to collect them all, we hope you enjoy them!

While we’re on the subject of weapons, here are a few important notes on changes to how perks will work.

Reduced the effectiveness of the following perks in PvE:

• Rampage, Kill Clip, Swashbuckler, Multikill Clip, Desperado, Surrounded, Master of Arms, Onslaught
• In general, these perks use the same damage multipliers for PvE that they did in PvP
• The change to Rampage does not affect the Huckleberry
• Onslaught and Desperado now change bullet impact values while active in PvE
• Surrounded no longer multiplies precision damage on top of base damage, as it was benefiting some weapon types more than others as a result

Legendary weapons have become too powerful overall. In many cases, they even outclass Exotic Primary weapons, so we’re walking them all back a bit. All the way back in original Destiny, we had a perk named Crowd Control, which was Rampage’s predecessor. Crowd Control capped out at a bonus of +15% extra damage. At this point in Destiny 2, Rampage caps out at about +67%. That’s a 447% increase from the original iteration. Legendary damage perks have become so powerful, they simply invalidate non-damage related perks.

Here’s a quick preview of the three ritual weapons you can earn in Season of the Undying. Because these weapons are no longer pinnacle weapons, the quest required to earn them is not as in depth as previous seasons.

Vanguard—Edgewise

Crucible—Randy’s Throwing Knife

Gambit—Exit Strategy

Set It Straight

During the run up to launch, we’ve been dropping videos, articles, interviews, and information all over the internets. Along the way, the fact-checkers called us out a few times. Today, we’re issuing some corrections to previous transmissions.

1. There was a shot of Trials of the Nine armor in the launch trailer by mistake. We wanted to clear up any confusion and let players know that the Trials of the Nine set will not obtainable in Season of the Undying.

2. We also had to revise our gameplay calendar for Season of the Undying. The menu of action is the same, but we are adjusting the timing of the Nightmare Hunts. The new schedule looks like this:

3. Back when we were first talking about finishers and some of the mods that go with them, we talked about how one of the mods enabled you to spawn Heavy ammo for your fireteam when you executed a finisher. That was still in flux at the time, and for balance reasons we ended up making a mod that will spawn Heavy ammo for yourself and a mod that will spawn Special ammo for your fireteam.

Wear It With Pride

At Bungie, our mission is to build worlds the inspire friendship. Our games become places where people—all kinds of people—can gather to share meaningful experiences. One of the most important aspects of friendship is acceptance. Earlier this year, we took to the streets as part of the Seattle Pride Parade. We also offered up a Pride Pin via the Bungie Store that was rumored to have an emblem that would come with it. The rumors are true, and we’ve chosen International Coming Out Day as the advent to deploy the in-game expression of acceptance.

For the details, along with a personal story to capture the spirit of that day, here is one of our own…

Hi Y’all,

My name’s Nigel. You may know me from things like the Shattered Throne Ride Along, or this wonderful fan video made during our St. Jude’s charity stream. This is my first TWAB post and I’m a little nervous, so I’m going to use one of my favorite TV shows, Golden Girls, as a crutch.

Picture it. Tempe, Arizona 2009.  A sophomore in college. At this point in my life, I’d never really had a girlfriend or really found myself attracted to a woman. I refused to believe I was gay. Having seen so many coming-out stories go poorly, with family and friends abandoning people they loved, I didn’t want that for myself. So I ignored it by playing video games.

Dragon Age: Origins had just released, and my twin brother had been bugging me for a good week to buy it and play it. Quickly I found myself wrapped in magic and steel for an untold, but probably perfectly healthy, amount of time. During this time, I found myself conversing with one of the male party members, simply trying to raise his approval.

That’s when it appeared. The option to flirt with this character. I was as the kids say, “shooketh.” I sat for what must have been twenty minutes before deciding to click on it. He flirted back. My heart skipped. I was a ball of nerves and anxiety as the conversation continued with another chance to confess romantic feelings to the character. I thought I was going to vomit all over a simple choice in a video game. I debated with myself, what did it mean that I wanted to flirt with this character? Why did I suddenly feel like my entire existence would be changed with this one conversation? I clicked it.

And that’s when I learned about rejection. From a digital character. He wasn’t gay, and my heart sunk. But his next words were something I didn’t know I needed. “There’s nothing wrong with who you love. You are my friend no matter what.” I spent the next two hours on the floor crying, finally feeling that it was okay to be gay. I felt more comfortable than I’d ever felt in my life. I vowed, if I ever got the opportunity to pay it forward, I would.

Well I’m helping to pay it forward. I’ve spent a lot of my time at Bungie helping to make sure Destiny is a welcoming place. I have marched in the Seattle Pride Parade. I have helped set up the Trevor Foundation and other LGBTIQA+ charities. Most recently, I helped create those wonderful Bungie Pride Pins you keep seeing on our streams. I’m happy to announce that, on October 11, International Coming Out Day, we’ll be releasing a Pride emblem for your Guardian if you’ve purchased this pin. If you missed the chance to buy the pin back in June, mark your calendars, because we’ll be restocking our supply on the Bungie Store.

Destiny and Bungie are places where we can foster community and work together, no matter your background. We at Bungie want to make sure no matter who you love, or who you are, that everyone belongs in the Tower. Or the Farm, if you’re into that.

Nigel speaks true. Thanks for being excellent to each other. Any players who previously purchased the Pride Pin will be receiving codes for the emblems through email.

Bungie Rewards

Last week, we showed off a preview of the World’s First belt and some of the emblems you can earn in our upcoming pinnacle PvE activity. We weren’t quite ready to show off the awesome jacket Bungie Rewards will be offering, but the design is ready for the runway.

Any player who beats the “Garden of Salvation” raid and claims their code before the weekly reset on 10/15 will be eligible to purchase the raid jacket through Bungie Rewards. We are giving you some extra time to Power up this time. We know many of you don’t enjoy rushing through content, so even if you aren’t ready to take on the raid before 10/15, any player who completes “Garden of Salvation” during Season of the Undying will be eligible to purchase a special raid T-shirt through Bungie Rewards.

So… the shirt has some spoilers on it, but we’ll share out what it looks like after the raid is completed.

Full Steam Ahead

Player Support is waiting in the wings to support our next launch.

This is their report.

Upcoming 24-Hour Maintenance

This upcoming Monday, September 30, Destiny 1 and Destiny 2 will be taken offline for extended maintenance on all platforms.

This maintenance will last for approximately 24 hours, starting at 10 AM PDT (1700 UTC), ending with the launch of Destiny 2: Shadowkeep on October 1. During this downtime, players will be unable to log in to Bungie.net or access Destiny API features.

For the latest information on this maintenance as it occurs, including download availability and emergent issues, players should follow @BungieHelp on Twitter or monitor our support feed on help.bungie.net.

Pre-loading Destiny 2: Shadowkeep and Update 2.6.0

Existing console players will be able to pre-load Update 2.6.0 during the maintenance leading up to launch. The moment we confirm that downloads are available, we’ll sound off from the support links provided above.

FOLLOW UP: Delay in Forsaken License Transfers for Migrating PC Players

Last week, we discussed the likely delay of Forsaken license transfers for migrated PC players on Steam. With the announcement of our upcoming 24-hour maintenance, we hope to mitigate any possible delay in Forsaken license transfers following the launch of Shadowkeep on October 1. If any such delays occur, we’ll be sure to sound off from the support links provided above.

PC Migration and New Characters on Steam

Following the launch of Shadowkeep and Destiny 2 Update 2.6.0 on October 1, players who link their Steam account to their Bungie.net profile will be able to manually trigger PC Migration.

Players should be aware, however, that any new characters created on Steam before performing PC migration will be overwritten when players migrate from Battle.net. This will result in the potential loss of new characters and gear, as well as Silver, Eververse items, and Season Passes—if purchased on these new characters before performing PC migration.

To make things as simple as possible, here’s the recommended order of operations for players who perform PC migration to Steam after Shadowkeep launches on October 1:

2. If desired, enable Cross Save so your preferred characters are available when you log in to Destiny 2 on Steam. PC Migration will still transfer your Battle.net characters to Steam, even if another set of characters is selected for Cross Save. This also determines which characters receive any Silver or Season Passes purchased on Steam before logging in.

4. Log in to Destiny 2.

5. Your Battle.net characters, licenses, and Silver will already be migrated to your Steam account, however your Cross Saved characters will appear if Cross Save is enabled.

IMPORTANT: Since purchased Silver and Season Passes are applied to the first character set that players log in with after purchase, we strongly recommend that players enable Cross Save before logging in to Destiny 2 on Steam. This will ensure that your desired characters are receiving your Silver and Season Passes on the Steam platform. Cross Save-enabled characters will be able to bring their Season Passes with them to any platform after they have been applied.

REMINDER: Destiny 2 and Silver Purchases on Battle.net

This week, we’d like to remind PC players that Destiny 2 game content and Destiny 2 Silver can no longer be purchased from the Battle.net Shop.

Existing PC players can continue to play on Battle.net until Destiny 2 undergoes maintenance for Steam launch. Players should also be aware that in order for recent Silver purchases to successfully transfer to Steam, players MUST log in to Destiny 2 on Battle.net before 10 AM PDT (1700 UTC) on September 30, 2019 to claim their purchased Silver.

REMINDER: Battle.net Code Redemption for Destiny 2

As another reminder, players should be aware that any Battle.net code they possess for Destiny 2 content MUST be redeemed on their Battle.net account before they perform PC Migration. Players who have already prepared for PC Migration have until the start of Destiny 2 maintenance on September 30 to redeem any unused Battle.net codes—to have that license transfer to their Steam account.

Players who migrate to Steam after our October 1 maintenance must also ensure that their Battle.net code is redeemed before they link their Steam account. Once a Steam account is linked, their Guardians, Silver, and game licenses will be migrated from Battle.net to Steam. This is a one-time process that cannot be repeated for new licenses. For information on Battle.net code redemption, players should visit Blizzard’s How to Claim a Code knowledgebase article.

It’s worth noting that all content previously included in the base Destiny 2 game, Curse of Osiris, or Warmind, will be available to all players for free through the launch of Destiny 2: New Light on October 1.

Steam Limited User Accounts

Next week, Destiny 2 officially launches on Steam. Before it does, we’d like to make players aware of Steam’s Limited User Accounts.

In short, any player whose account has spent less than $5.00 USD on the Steam Store will have limited access to community and social features that are commonly used for spamming, phishing, and other abuse.

This will also apply to any Destiny 2 player new to the Steam platform who migrates from Battle.net. For more information, please see Valve’s Limited User Accounts support article.

Premonition Legendary Pulse Rifle

Following the launch of Shadowkeep next week, players will be able to view new items added to Destiny 2 using the in-game Collections. Before then, we’d like to make players aware of a known issue with one particular weapon listing.

Following the launch of Shadowkeep, the Collection listing for the Premonition Legendary Pulse Rifle will state that it is “found by exploring the Moon.” This weapon’s specific source is actually the new dungeon, which will become available sometime after Shadowkeep’s launch.

Players who encounter other issues following the launch of New Light, Shadowkeep, and Steam PC should report them to the #Help forum.

MOTW

All right, let’s see what we got. More movies on the field. Here are our favorites this week.

Movie of the Week: Embrace your fears

Honorable Mention: The Duke

This is it. The last TWAB before launch. Are you ready?

<3 Cozmo

Mojang has released 1.14.3. This release includes many bug fixes and some feature changes to make your lives easier… or harder depending on what they are.

A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net.

• Items can now be repaired by crafting them together again

• Reverted the enchanting system to how it was before 1.14

• Torches, lanterns and pressure plates can now be placed on glass panes and iron bars

• Lanterns can now be attached below iron bars and glass panes

• Saturation is no longer required for the “How did we get here?” advancement

• You can now turn off raids with ‘/gamerule disableRaids true’

• Patrol changes:

  • Vindicators are no longer part of patrols

  • Doubled the minimum time to spawn from 5 + (up to 1) minutes to 10 + (up to 1) minutes

  • Patrols no longer spawns if the block light level disallows monster spawning

  • Patrols are now allowed to spawn in any biome except mushroom biomes

• Villagers that are panicking now have a bigger chance of spawning Iron Golems, assuming they can occasionally work and sleep

• “Last slept” and “last worked” is now saved properly for Villagers

• Farmers now spend more time farming when they are working

• Farmers can now always give away food even if other villagers don’t need it

• Improved performance

• Fixed bugs

• MC-47699 – Blazes are able to see a player through blocks

• MC-72390 – Rcon is not thread-safe

• MC-74407 – Villager inventories can get into a state where villagers cannot do anything useful

• MC-93892 – Fire/Flame arrows and fireballs set player on fire even when blocking with shield

• MC-110004 – Enderman/blaze don’t drop experience when hit with splash/lingering potion

• MC-123836 – Double blocks aren’t loaded in structures

• MC-124170 – Performance issue with particles causing lag

• MC-129491 – Advancement location trigger works inconsistently for structures added in 1.9 or later

• MC-138053 – Gamerule spectatorsGenerateChunks being false prevents chunks from being loaded

• MC-139257 – Server crash on reload when worldborder is modified.

• MC-141301 – Illager patrols spawning on blocks mobs shouldn’t spawn on, such as slabs, carpets, stairs, etc.

• MC-142360 – Pillagers patrols can spawn pillagers on top of trees inside a leaf block

• MC-143369 – Wandering trader text implies trades refresh

• MC-144107 – Miscalculation of camera position in windowed mode on Linux

• MC-144507 – The legs on cats clip through to the top of the model

• MC-144929 – When there is water above a water source, other water sources adjacent to the water source flow outwards

• MC-145863 – Villagers breed even if there are not enough beds

• MC-146433 – Double Chest does not display custom name

• MC-146835 – Illager captain spawned from raids will still give the bad omen effect to its killer, causing raids to never end

• MC-147619 – Foxes that trust a player will still avoid wolves and other players they’re angry towards instead pursuing them

• MC-147851 – Villagers frequently run right into mobs they’re “trying” to avoid

• MC-148600 – Zombie pigmen will spread their anger forever if they can continously respawn

• MC-148610 – Hostile mobs spawning on top Trapdoors, Glowstone and Sea Lanterns

• MC-148986 – Low-tier enchants from lv.30 standard enchanting setups

• MC-149372 – Game crashes when opening a 1.13.2 world

• MC-149443 – Iron golems spawn too often

• MC-149518 – Skylight appearing under blocks

• MC-149877 – Baby foxes suffocate when jumping under blocks

• MC-150319 – I can’t load up my minecraft world after doing /kill

• MC-150401 – Chickens suffocate if jumping while under a solid block

• MC-150954 – Pillager Patrol spawn is way off. Spawning too close to each other, in odd biomes, and too frequent.

• MC-151079 – An employed villager quickly becomes unemployed and employed when he works, even if his workstation has not been deleted.

• MC-151084 – Chunk rendering is slow and random in 1.14.1 (pre 1)

• MC-151144 – Hostile mobs in lazy chunks no longer count towards mob cap, breaking mob switches

• MC-151185 – Game crash after breaking villager point of interest

• MC-151337 – Mob spawn rate too high

• MC-151346 – Crash while F3 menu tries to access tags while /reload-ing

• MC-151395 – Farmers create Bread ONLY when they pick up at least 3 wheat AT ONCE

• MC-151566 – Pillagers patrols can spawn outside world border

• MC-151710 – Enties not functioning in forceloaded chunks

• MC-151753 – More than one raid can happen in a village

• MC-151771 – Villagers don’t try to run away from zombie villagers

• MC-151772 – Mob cap in the hundreds to over 1000 per player.

• MC-151802 – Spawning causes massive TPS CPU load on a flat world.

• MC-151989 – Players in Survival do not get Dolphins Grace effect if Dolphin cannot path to Player

• MC-151995 – Patrol Leaders spawning without banner

• MC-152044 – Baby trader llamas disappear immediately

• MC-152053 – High client-side lag when pistons activate

• MC-152228 – Can not /summon trader llama

• MC-152542 – Resource Warning “Codepoint ‘1ed0’ declared multiple times in minecraft:textures/font/accented.png”

• MC-152638 – Villager trade GUI does not close when a major change happens to the Villager, leading to free trades and quick stock refreshing

• MC-152810 – Cat’s natural spawning causes Null Pointer Exception

• MC-153221 – dragon fireball causes FPS to crash

• MC-153222 – Broken/Incorrect recipe files cause a data pack not to load with nothing in log

• MC-153470 – Language map does not close internal ‘en_us.json’ file after reading

• MC-154000 – When dispenser places shulkerbox it decreases its stack twice.

• MC-154080 – Wandering Trader trade GUI does not close when the Wandering Trader changes dimensions allowing you to trade infinitely

• MC-154081 – Opening survival inventory when opening world crashes game

• MC-154092 – Zombie Pigmen lose aggro even when they’re in range and have a line of sight

• MC-154239 – NPE server crash when painting entities spawned with mob spawn eggs are saved

• MC-154328 – The Village Siege (Zombie Siege) never happens

To install the release, open up the Minecraft Launcher and click play.

Cross-platform server jar:

Report bugs here:

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.

GameDev News Applications

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.

Details of the 0.6 release from the Itch.io news page:

• 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.

GameDev News Tools Godot

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.

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Luna Display is a combination of a hardware and software product. The hardware aspect is a dongle that you plug into the main Mac, and comes in versions for either USB-C or Mini DisplayPort.

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.

Luna Display costs $69 direct from the developer, and there is a launch discount of 25%.

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.

Here’s how some grantees from Microsoft’s AI for Earth program are trying to help

[READ MORE: How clean water data is helping to protect Brazil’s precious ecosystems] 

Monitoring drinking water supplies

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.

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.

[READ MORE: A shift in perspective: Taking a new view on water security through technology]

Better understanding of the weather

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.

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.

[READ MORE: How scientists are confronting environmental challenges with the help of AI]

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.

For more on AI, visit AI for Earth. And follow @MSFTIssues on Twitter.  

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:

find ~ \( -iname '*jpeg' -o -iname '*jpg' \) -type f

Or maybe you’d like to find those oddly named directories so you can rename them later:

find ~ \( -iname '*jpeg' -o -iname '*jpg' \) -type d

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.

find ~ \( -iname '*jpeg' -o -iname '*jpg' \) -type f -mtime -7

Taking action with xargs

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.

find ~ \( -iname '*jpeg' -o -iname '*jpg' \) -type f -mtime -7 -print0 | xargs -0 cp -t /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.

Portions of this article were previously published on Opensource.com. Photo by Warren Wong on Unsplash.

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 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 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.