The idea of porting The Wonderful 101 to Switch seems to be brought up surprisingly often. Indeed, it was only a couple of weeks ago when we last heard about it, as PlatinumGames executive director Atsushi Inaba said that he was “glad” he has spoken about it in the past and asked fans to be patient.

This has been going on for some time, too. There was a tease for a Switch port back in July 2017, then it was brought up in an official manner in April 2018; this February Inaba even confessed he’d love to “secretly” announce the game for Switch. Nintendo technically owns The Wonderful 101 IP, but it’s clear Platinum at least would like to rerelease it.

Now, speaking to VGC at E3, Inaba has once again commented on the game. When asked about the game’s port progress, he said “The Wonderful 101 is obviously something that we hold near and dear to our hearts. And so we’ve talked to a lot of different people about what it is and what it means”.

Interestingly, he elaborated on this a little further, once again mentioning that he’s “glad” about the current situation.

“We’ve done a lot of intel gathering and the only thing that I can say right now is that I’m glad we did. I’m glad that we talked to a lot of different people.”

It certainly sounds like some pretty exciting things are going on behind-the-scenes at Platinum, but we’ll have to keep waiting for any official confirmation, it seems. If you didn’t pick this one up on Wii U a few years back, here’s hoping you’re in for a treat on your shiny new Switch.

What does it take to make a Linux distribution like Fedora 30? As you might expect, it’s not a simple process.

Changes in Fedora 30

Although Fedora 29 released on October 30, 2018, work on Fedora 30 began long before that. The first change proposal was submitted in late August. By my count, contributors made nine separate change proposals for Fedora 30 before Fedora 29 shipped.

Some of these proposals come early because they have a big impact, like mass removal of Python 2 packages. By the time the proposal deadline arrived in early January, the community had submitted 50 change proposals.

Of course, not all change proposals make it into the shipped release. Some of them are more focused on how we build the release instead of what we release. Others don’t get done in time. System-wide changes must have a contingency plan. These changes are generally evaluated at one of three points in the schedule: when packages branch from Rawhide, at the beginning of the Beta freeze, and at the beginning of the Final freeze. For Fedora 30, 45 Change proposals were still active for the release.

Fedora has a calendar-based release schedule, but that doesn’t mean we ship whatever exists on a given date. We have a set of release criteria that we test against, and we don’t put out a release until all the blockers are resolved. This sometimes means a release is delayed, but it’s important that we ship reliable software.

For the Fedora 30 development cycle, we accepted 22 proposed blocker bugs and rejected 6. We also granted 33 freeze exceptions — bugs that can be fixed during the freeze because they impact the released artifacts or are otherwise important enough to include in the release.

Other contributions

Of course, there’s more to making a release than writing or packaging the code, testing it, and building the images. As with every release, the Fedora Design team created a new desktop background along with several supplemental wallpapers. The Fedora Marketing team wrote release announcements and put together talking points for the Ambassadors and Advocates to use when talking to the broader community.

If you’ve looked at our new website, that was the work of the Websites team in preparation for the Fedora 30 release:

The Documentation Team wrote Release Notes and updated other documentation. Translators provided translations to dozens of languages.

Many other people made contributions to the release of Fedora 30 in some way. It’s not easy to count everyone who has a hand in producing a Linux distribution, but we appreciate every one of our contributors. If you would like to join the Fedora Community but aren’t sure where to start, check out What Can I Do For Fedora?

Photo by Robin Sommer on Unsplash.

The Pathfinder update for MapleStory is Now Available on Steam!

Prepare for the adventure of your life as new class Pathfinder arrives in Maple World! This update brings tons of thrilling events including the return of Tera Burning Project and fun-filled Adventure Island. With the addition of system revamps and a new theme dungeon, you’ll find lots to explore!

Amazon have just released beta 1.19 of their game engine Lumberyard.  Sharing a common code base with CryEngine, CryTek and Amazon have taken their game engines in very different directions the last few years.  Lumberyard is free to use, so long as you host your own multiplayer services or use Amazon technologies.

The 1.19 release brings over 150 improvements, but there are two highlight features:

• New Dynamic Vegetation System. Procedurally generate a diverse and detailed biome in minutes instead of manually placing and painting in vegetation. Lumberyard’s new vegetation components support a wide range of artistic expressions and fine-grained control over the scale, density, and distribution in your biomes. You can also improve runtime performance by configuring segments of vegetation to be placed or removed at runtime based on player location and gameplay events.
• Major updates to Script Canvas. Create even more dynamic behaviors and gameplay without having to code or rely on expert engineers. We’ve made major improvements to Script Canvas, introducing support for containers such as arrays and maps, new Script Events that enable you to send events between graphs and scripts, and new graph validation and debugger features so you can find, diagnose, and fix invalid graphs more quickly. We’ve also made workflow improvements to make it even easier add, configure, and organize nodes in your graphs.

View the full release notes for complete details of this release.  Check out the video below to see the new vegetation system and script canvas improvements in action.  Lumberyard is available for download here, be aware however if you zoom the web page in, the download link goes away…  not the best UX there.

GameDev News Engine CryEngine

Watch Dogs: Legion is coming to Xbox One on March 6, 2020, taking you to a near-future London torn between sinister factions working to keep citizens meek and controlled. Organized criminals vie with a sinister private military for control of the streets, all under the watchful eye of an oppressive surveillance state. The citizens need something to rally around if they’re going to take back the city, and that something is the hacker collective DedSec.

In Watch Dogs: Legion, your mission is to pull together a resistance from the people around you, and use their innate traits to build a group of effective operatives who can hack, fight, and sneak their way through the powerful forces holding London in their grip. You can recruit any character you see in the open world, from former spies to street toughs to panhandlers to sweet old grannies. Everyone around you is a persistent character with a distinct daily schedule, backstory, voice, and personality, with the latter two coming across loud and clear in the game’s cutscenes. They also have specific problems, and if you work to solve them, you can raise their opinion of DedSec and make them more open to joining your ranks.

Once they do, you’ll be able to control them directly, as well as swap between them and any other operatives on your team. You’ll also be able assign them into one of three classes; characters who can deal bonus shotgun damage, for example, might make good Enforcers, tough fighters who can handle heavy firepower. Those who like to stay hidden, meanwhile, can make excellent sneaky Infiltrators, while the technically inclined can manipulate systems and control drones as Hackers. It’s up to you to decide how best to use these skills, and to choose the characters you think would make the best additions to your team.

Whatever role you decide for them, you’ll want to approach dangerous situations carefully, because if a character under your control dies – whether in a firefight or a car accident – they’re gone for good. You can minimize risk through your approach to conflict; opt for hand-to-hand combat instead of pulling a weapon, for example, and your enemies will try to arrest or take you down nonlethally. Pull a gun, however – even a nonlethal one – and your enemies will start shooting, which can have dire consequences for your operative.

Operatives who stay alive can level up, unlocking new abilities and tools that can give your team a diverse set of skills to draw from. And you’ll be able to use those skills in concert with those of your friends in four-player co-op, with persistent progression for your operatives whether you’re playing solo or via Xbox Live.

Watch Dogs: Legion is available now for preorder on Xbox One from the Microsoft Store. Preordering any version of Watch Dogs: Legion will net you the Golden King Pack, which includes three in-game items: the Lux car skin, the Uneasy Lies Mask skin, and the Serpent Sisters pistol skin. You can also grab the Gold Edition, which includes the base game and the Season Pass; the Ultimate Edition, which packs in the Gold Edition’s content plus additional digital content, including four weeks of VIP status to earn experience and currency more quickly; or the Collector’s Edition, which combines the Ultimate content with physical items including an LED Ded Coronet Mask Replica (and instant access to its in-game equivalent), a Steelbook case, stickers, and a propaganda poster. Preordering the Gold, Ultimate, or Collector’s Edition also gets you three-day early access to the game, starting March 3, 2020.

Keep an eye on Xbox Wire and Ubisoft News for much more on Watch Dogs: Legion in very near future.

They Are Billions is Now Available on Steam and is 10% off!*

They Are Billions is a Steampunk strategy game set on a post-apocalyptic planet. Build and defend colonies to survive against the billions of the infected that seek to annihilate the few remaining living humans. Can humanity survive after the zombie apocalypse?

*Offer ends June 25 at 10AM Pacific Time