The RISC-V Foundation will be hosting a free, Getting Started with RISC-V event in Irvine. This 1 day event will showcase innovative RISC-V implementations from members of the Foundation.
The half-day Irvine event on April 3 will feature engaging presentations, demos and networking opportunities.
Digital card games can be a tough genre to get into. If you haven’t been playing Hearthstone regularly, you may feel lost within the confines of its lore-rich world. And if you’re not willing to invest hours to practice, you may find yourself left out of the fun everyone else is having. Knights of the Card Table easily subverts these issues, combining the fun of dungeon crawling with quickfire card battles with plenty of unique layers to its gameplay. Wrapped up in a fun aesthetic and playful motif, it’s one of the best card battlers to hit mobile devices in some time – though it’s not without its unique frustrations.
Knights of the Card Table has you exploring various “dungeons” at the behest of a kooky dungeon master as a plucky young adventurer of your choice. You have a male player first, and the second unlockable character is a female you can swap to, if you so choose. Exploring dungeons and completing them is done solely via selecting a stage on a map, and then taking part in card battles that span several “floors”.
You’ll find that most decks are full of enemies, like spiders, beehives, and even jerky mailmen and bullies. Typically, five cards will be drawn from the deck and displayed to you (though sometimes some will remain unflipped, leaving them a mystery). When you clear one card out, another will appear. You’re in control here, however, of the card order you play in. So if you have three enemies on the play field followed by two restorative items, you can play the restorative items as needed, rather than having to wait to get to them.
Health Dranks will restore hearts (you start out with three), while Power Milk will give you a damage bonus. You’ll want to avoid the Poison, of course. Meanwhile, Spell Tomes like Fireball and Freeze can tear through enemy cards and give you an extra edge against them. In terms of power you’re facing off against, you can check the top left and right ratings on each card. The orange shape represents the enemy’s power, while the heart is their HP. Your dungeon explorer’s card shows this information as well.
One of the most useful game mechanics that requires you to think ahead a bit and strategize is the concept of card streaks. If you use three of the same card type in a row, you’ll get some pretty decent bonuses, buffs, or a selection of additional treasure. These card streaks largely rely on luck for you to trigger them, since you can’t see every card coming up in the deck, but when you can pull them off, they can do some staggering amounts of damage.
When you run out of hearts, you can opt to bring your character back to life by spending one of your “pops” to revive them, but after that it’s game over and you’ll have to start over. You’ll typically have plenty of pops to bring you back, but you don’t earn them as readily as gold,
Enemies don’t attack in a turn-based manner, either, unless you attack them first. You don’t even have to arrange the cards on the “table,” so to speak, in the order you want to play them. You can simply tap on the one you want to activate. This doesn’t apply anymore, however, when you run across “locked” cards that have a chain around them. This means you can’t swap them out with other cards or change position with them, and tapping them to move them ahead won’t work. You’ll have to get to them when they come up, which can be frustrating, but it does add a satisfying amount of challenge to the game.
As the game wears on, there are additional elements introduced as you rank up higher. There are trap cards, such as explosive dynamite, that you must tap and activate to get out of the way, because in order to continue on to the next dungeon floor you must complete the deck, whether you use all of the Health Dranks or Power Milks or have to succumb to dynamite damage.
Unfortunately, sometimes that means each dungeon floor can become extremely repetitive. You might get four Health Dranks in a row, or perhaps you’ll get Power Milk over and over again, with four enemies right behind one another at the end. This leaves you with no health options, and no way to recover if you don’t happen to roll the dice that can knock out the enemies before you.
After you complete a dungeon, you can head out and purchase additional gear. You get gold pieces and pops as a reward for killing off enemies and stacking items you don’t need like Health Dranks, but some items need an inordinate amount of pops for you to purchase them. Considering you get only a handful when you complete dungeons, it can take quite a long time to unlock certain items. Gold takes a much shorter time to accrue, but you need gold and pops for many of the items on offer. This is one huge frustration. You get your first few weapons quickly, since they’re decently affordable, but you’ll find yourself playing for quite a while if you dare desire an additional character to play as. This will undoubtedly be a turnoff for players looking to try out some of the various personalities.
That’s annoying, because Knights of the Card Table has a fun, silly Adventure Time vibe, and wouldn’t feel out of place in terms of its visuals on a channel like Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network. So not being able to see everything the game has to offer in a decent period of time feels like a slight to the player. With the game already costing $5, it would have made much more sense to ditch the semi-premium currency and opt for a fairer way to hand out new characters, weapons, and shields.
If you’re not looking to jump into any sort of difficult card battler with multiple novels’ worth of lore or want to try something without the need for learning an entire rulebook, Knights of the Card Table is a fantastic place to start. It’s light, humorous, and perfect for newcomers to the genre, especially with its quirky exterior, which will no doubt attract fans looking to explore. You can play with one hand, start and stop at your leisure, and collect a wide variety of kooky characters and accessories eventually, and it’s well worth settling in to play. Just don’t expect to unlock things left and right – it will undoubtedly take patience, but it will keep a smile on your face the entire time.
Note: This is a premium game on iOS, however the Android version is free-to-play and there are IAPs for the in-game currencies. At the time of writing, current IAP options include:
Various ‘big’ bundles that come with varying combinations of new heroes, Ad removal, Gold and Pops (£9.49 – £10.99)
Gold-only bundles (£4.59-£8.99)
Pop-only Bundles (£4.59 – £37.99)
You can also watch ads for small amounts of Gold/Pops.
Microsoft Considered Ending The Halo Series After Bungie Split Off
After Bungie split off of Microsoft, the Halo series was at something of a crossroads. Veteran Microsoft developer Bonnie Ross recalls in a fascinating new interview that at this time, some at Microsoft questioned whether or not the series would live on.
"When we spun Bungie out, the future of Halo was uncertain," Ross said in an interview with IGN. "We weren't actually sure [if] Halo 3 was going to be the last game."
As fans may recall, Halo 3's story ended in ambiguous fashion. Master Chief could have been dead. He wasn't of course, and his story would go on to be continued in Halo 4 and Halo 5. Those games were developed by 343 Industries, Microsoft's internal Halo development studio that Ross founded.
She recalled pitching the idea for an internal Halo development studio, and the reaction wasn't entirely positive. Ross said she remembers then-Xbox boss Shane Kim advising against it. He warned her that people at Microsoft might try to convince her to do things with the franchise that aren't right for it. Another former Xbox boss, Robbie Bach, also said it might not be a smart move to continue the Halo series with Bungie out of the picture, Ross said.
"Robbie Bach and Shane Kim were like, 'Hey, Halo's great, Bungie doesn't want to do it anymore.' Robbie and Shane were not people who were thinking just for the money but it was basically like, 'Hey, I think it's maybe good for another game or two and [then] let's just cut our losses and tell another story.'"
So the idea became to potentially tell a four-game series of Master Chief-focused Halo games and then "wrap it up," Ross said. With that in mind, Microsoft considered potentially bringing on an outside studio to make potentially "one or two other [Halo] games" after Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST. Those titles, which were developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft after the split, do not feature Master Chief as the main character. But the new titles presumably would.
The leading name to take on the job was Gearbox, the studio behind Borderlands. The studio has a history with Halo, as it developed the PC edition of Halo: Combat Evolved. However, Ross said she thought it was "blasphemy" to have an outside studio make a Halo game.
As for why Ross believed in Halo as a franchise so much, she pointed out that the entirety of Halo 1-3's story takes place in only three months of time, fictionally, so there are many more stories to be told. Indeed, the story of Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians went in new directions. The next Halo game, Halo Infinite, puts more of an emphasis on Chief than Halo 5, but nothing else is known about the story. A recent report from Brad Sams claims Halo Infinite will be a launch title for a new Xbox releasing in 2020.
Ross was recently inducted into the AIAS Hall of Fame. The first woman in the AIAS Hall of Fame, Ross joins other industry legends like Bethesda's Todd Howard, along with Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, Metal Gear designer Hideo Kojima, and Valve founder Gabe Newell.
HoloLens 2, Azure Kinect and UE4 Support Announced
Today at MWC 19 in Barcelona, Microsoft announced the second release of their HoloLens augment reality headset. Costing an eye watering $3,500 or $150/month, the HoloLens is not a mass market or consumer device. The HoloLens 2 includes improved sensors, a better display, improved ergonomics and more. The Microsoft blog describes the 3 pillars of HoloLens 2 development:
Immersion is greatly enhanced by advancements across the board, including in the visual display system, making holograms even more vibrant and realistic. We have more than doubled the field of view in HoloLens 2, while maintaining the industry-leading holographic density of 47 pixels per degree of sight. HoloLens 2 contains a new display system that enables us to achieve these significant advances in performance at low power. We have also completely refreshed the way you interact with holograms in HoloLens 2. Taking advantage of our new time-of-flight depth sensor, combined with built-in AI and semantic understanding, HoloLens 2 enables direct manipulation of holograms with the same instinctual interactions you’d use with physical objects in the real world. In addition to the improvements in the display engine and direct manipulation of holograms, HoloLens 2 contains eye-tracking sensors that make interacting with holograms even more natural. You can log in with Windows Hello enterprise-grade authentication through iris recognition, making it easy for multiple people to quickly and securely share the device.
Comfort is enhanced by a more balanced center of gravity, the use of light carbon-fiber material and a new mechanism for donning the device without readjusting. We’ve improved the thermal management with new vapor chamber technology and accounted for the wide physiological variability in the size and shape of human heads by designing HoloLens 2 to comfortably adjust and fit almost anyone. The new dial-in fit system makes it comfortable to wear for hours on end, and you can keep your glasses on because HoloLens 2 adapts to you by sliding right over them. When it’s time to step out of mixed reality, flip the visor up and switch tasks in seconds. Together, these enhancements have more than tripled the measured comfort and ergonomics of the device.
Time-to-value is accelerated by Microsoft mixed reality applications like Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 Layout and the new Dynamics 365 Guides applications. In addition to the in-box value, our ecosystem of mixed reality partners provides a broad range of offerings built on HoloLens that deliver value across a range of industries and use cases. This partner ecosystem is being supplemented by a new wave of mixed reality entrepreneurs who are realizing the potential of devices like HoloLens 2 and the Azure services that give them the spatial, speech and vision intelligence needed for mixed reality, plus battle-tested cloud services for storage, security and application insights.
Building on the unique capabilities of the original HoloLens, HoloLens 2 is the ultimate intelligent edge device. And when coupled with existing and new Azure services, HoloLens 2 becomes even more capable, right out of the box.
HoloLens 2 will be available this year at a price of $3,500. Bundles including Dynamics 365 Remote Assist start at $125/month. HoloLens 2 will be initially available in the United States, Japan, China, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Australia and New Zealand. Customers can preorder HoloLens 2 starting today at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/buy.
In addition to the HoloLens 2, Microsoft also announced the release of Azure Kinect, an updated and more powerful version of the Kinect motion sensor previously bundled with the XBox 360/One.
The Azure Kinect DK is a developer kit that combines our industry-leading AI sensors in a single device. At its core is the time-of-flight depth sensor we developed for HoloLens 2, high-def RGB camera and a 7-microphone circular array that will enable development of advanced computer vision and speech solutions with Azure. It enables solutions that don’t just sense but understand the world — people, places, things around it. A good example of such a solution in the healthcare space is Ocuvera, which is using this technology to prevent patients from falling in hospitals. Every year in the U.S. alone, over 1 million hospital patients fall each year, and 11,000 of those falls are fatal. With Azure Kinect, the environmental precursors to a fall can be determined and a nurse notified to get to patients before they fall. Initially available in the U.S. and China, the Azure Kinect DK is available for preorder today at $399. Visit Azure.com/Kinect for more info.
Epic Games today announced that support for Microsoft HoloLens 2 will be coming to Unreal Engine 4 starting in May 2019. The announcement was made during an onstage presentation by Epic Games Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney during the Microsoft keynote at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. This development has been highly anticipated by augmented reality (AR) communities across entertainment, visualization, manufacturing, design, and education. In a future release, Unreal Engine will fully support HoloLens 2 with streaming and native platform integration. Unreal Engine support for HoloLens 1 currently enables streaming to the device.
Riot’s story began with Leonard Menchiari who experienced the rioting first-hand in Italy during the NoTav protests, (the NoTav protests opposed the building of a high-speed railway from Turin in Italy, to Lyon in France). Protestors were opposed to the destruction of the landscape, the potential pollution and the overall cost of this project. Leonard spoke with both protestors and police, discovering what drove people to take a stand and how officers empathized (and in some cases agreed), with protestors but had to maintain order and safety. Leonard decided to use his background in filmmaking and love of video games to tell these stories through an interactive experience and Riot: Civil Unrest was born.
We’re all incredibly proud of all the work that has gone into Riot and we’re particularly proud of the jaw-dropping pixel-art. One of the major challenges we faced was to make the crowd look genuine; many games that feature crowds have a lot of identical characters repeated over and over again. We wanted to create a genuine crowd of unique individuals. To achieve this, the team came up with a clever algorithm which chose from the vast range of trousers, tops and accessory options to create a 100% unique crowd of people. Not only do our crowds look genuine but their movement is excellent too. Using clever AI, our developers made it so that instead of moving as blocks they move in a far more fluid way. Individuals use space as real people would, filling gaps as they appear and resisting movement when it is blocked. They can swarm around an objective or flee from danger.
Sound is another area that had an incredible amount of work put into it. Our sound designer, Michele Postpischi, (who lives near the NoTav valley), went to impressive lengths to capture the realism and chaos Riot wanted to convey. Michele would travel to abandoned and disused buildings and record the sounds of things being broken, such as a pane of glass being struck with a piece of 2×4.
By their very nature, riots are an emotive subject. That is why we try to be extremely careful in our portrayal of these stories. We are aware that people’s opinions will differ, so we decided to take a neutral and non-political stance. Although we set up each of Riot’s scenarios, we always advise the user to research these subjects themselves and encourage them to form their own opinion. Riot has four main campaigns to play through and understand; NoTav (Italy), Indignados (Spain), the Arab Spring (Egypt) and Keratea (Greece). We’ve also included over thirty single scenarios which include the Oakland shooting riots, as well as the Paris and London riots.
I along with my team genuinely hope you enjoy the experience Riot: Civil Unrest has to offer, we’ve worked on this for some time and are absolutely amazed at the level of love shown for this title. If I were to leave you with one tip it would be to consider your strategy wisely. Aggressive tactics may yield results early on but may harm you in the long run; if you’re aggressive, aggression may be expected from you next time, making success more difficult to achieve. Or public opinion could turn on you, giving your opponents a heightened sense of alertness.
Twitch’s Pokémon TV And Movie Marathon Returns Tomorrow
Pokémon anime fans, rejoice! Twitch’s mega-marathon of movie madness is set to return tomorrow, giving fans the chance to sit back and join the chat as viewers simultaneously watch the show.
Returning for a third run, the Twitch Pokémon marathon has previously aired numerous episodes from the TV show as well as some of the franchise’s movies, sometimes letting viewers interact with the scenes on screen. While not available during every showing, a Pokémon Badge Collector extension has previously allowed viewers to catch Pokémon on-screen to earn stream points.
This third run will reportedly feature episodes from the Diamond & Pearl, Best Wishes, and XY series, kicking off tomorrow, 27th February, from 10am PT (6pm GMT). It’ll air from tomorrow until 5th May, so you’ll have just over two months of Pokémon content being beamed into your eyeballs. There are definitely worse ways to spend your time.
You can join in and watch the stream on the Twitch Presents channel. Make sure to let us know if you’ll be tuning in by leaving a comment below.
The RISC-V Foundation will be hosting a free, Getting Started with RISC-V event in Austin. This 1 day event will showcase innovative RISC-V implementations from members of the Foundation.
The half-day Austin event on April 2 will feature engaging presentations, demos and networking opportunities.
HoloLens 2, high-def RGB camera and a 7-microphone circular array that will enable development of advanced computer vision and speech solutions with Azure. It enables solutions that don’t just sense but understand the world — people, places, things around it. A good example of such a solution in the healthcare space is Ocuvera, which is using this technology to prevent patients from falling in hospitals. Every year in the U.S. alone, over 1 million hospital patients fall each year, and 11,000 of those falls are fatal. With Azure Kinect, the environmental precursors to a fall can be determined and a nurse notified to get to patients before they fall. Initially available in the U.S. and China, the Azure Kinect DK is available for preorder today at $399. Visit Azure.com/Kinect for more info.
