Because of recent technological advances with game hardware, sound designers have become able to apply real-time audio processing to their games in more creative ways.

In this GDC 2018 talk, PlatinumGames’ Shuji Kohata explains the spatial audio techniques used in NieR: Automata’s desolate landscapes and natural environments, and the noise and retro effects used to augment its mechanical themes.

It’s an insightful talk that’s definitely worth watching, so developers shouldn’t miss the opportunity to do so now that it’s freely available on the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas.

Jump into an ever-evolving cooperative experience

In this free-to-play, third-person, looter-shooter, play solo or with a squad of up to four players to complete objectives, explore the Plains of Eidolon open-world environment, play through Cinematic Quests, and much, much, more!

Story:

After generations in cryostasis, the Tenno wake to find a solar system devastated by war and greed. The Grineer, clones twisted by genetic degeneration, and the Corpus, credit-obsessed scavengers, fight for control of the Origin System.

Your task is to assemble an Arsenal of powerful Warframes, ancient armors equipped with the power of the fallen Orokin Empire. Master the Warframes, and none will be able to stand against you.

If would like to download the game for free, please visit https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/warframe-switch.

Nintendo Account required for online play.

Blood and Gore
Violence
Users Interact
In-Game Purchases

Starting at 2:00 p.m. PDT today, members of the Xbox One Preview Beta, Delta and Omega Rings will begin receiving a new 1811 Xbox One system update (181109-1527). Read on for more about the fixes and known issues in the latest 1811 system update.

Fixes:

System

• Fixes to improve the stability of the console to fix the issue that some users were seeing consoles shutting down after taking a system update.
• Fixes to stop the console freezing when accessing the console Settings menu.  Users will no longer see the Settings menu freeze or fail to load.

Known Issues:

Audio

• We are tracking audio issues in which some games have audio that cuts in and out
• Audio settings reverting to a previous settings after taking an update – Workaround is to please turn on your Audio Receiver prior to turning your Xbox One and the settings will not revert.

 Profile Color

• Sometimes users may encounter the incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.

killer7 is Now Available on Steam and is 10% off!*

Step into the stylish and sinister world of killer7, the cult classic from Grasshopper Manufacture, Ltd., available for the first time in 13 years. Renowned for its unique gameplay and legendary storytelling from SUDA51, Hiroyuki Kobayashi, and Shinji Mikami, arrives on Steam for the first time.

*Offer ends November 22 at 10AM Pacific Time

Click Here!

Whether you’re interested in using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to drive better health outcomes, reduce your operational costs, or improve fraud detection, one way you can better unlock these capabilities is through leveraging blockchain.

In my last blog, “Improving Patient Care through AI and Blockchain – Part 1,” I discussed several opportunities for blockchain to help advance AI in healthcare, from sourcing more training data from across a consortium, to tracking provenance of data, improving the quality of AI with auditing, and protecting the integrity of AI using blockchain. In this second blog, take a look at four more reasons to consider blockchain for advancing AI in healthcare.

1. Shared models
   In cases where constraints exist that preclude the sharing of raw training data from across a consortium of healthcare organizations, for legal or other reasons, it may be possible to incrementally train shared models, enabled by the blockchain. In this approach the AI / ML models themselves can be shared across the network of healthcare organizations in the consortium, rather than the raw training data, and these shared models can be incrementally trained by each organization using its training data, and within its firewall. Blockchain can then be used to share the models as well as metadata about training data, results, validations, audit trails, and so forth.
2. Incentivizing collaboration using cryptocurrencies and tokens
   Cryptocurrencies and tokens on blockchain can be used to incent and catalyze collaboration to advance AI / ML in healthcare. From sharing of training data, to collaboration on shared models, results, validations, and so forth, healthcare organizations can be rewarded with cryptocurrencies or tokens proportional to their participation and contribution. Depending on how the blockchain is setup these cryptocurrencies or tokens could be redeemed by participating healthcare organizations for meaningful rewards, or monetized. This can be useful in any AI / ML blockchain initiative both as an accelerant, and could also be critical to overcome potential impediments and reservations to collaboration that can arise where the size / value of contributions from organizations across the consortium are asymmetrical.
3. Validating inference results and building trust fasterBefore AI / ML models can be used for patient care they must be validated to ensure safety and efficacy. A single organization validating a model alone will take more time to achieve an acceptable level of trust than would be the case for a consortium of healthcare organizations concurrently collaborating to validate a shared model. Blockchain can be used to coordinate and collaborate around such validation to increase synergy, minimize redundant efforts, accelerate validation, and establish trust in a new model faster.
4. Automation through smart contracts and DAOsExecutable code for processing transactions associated with AI / ML, whether procurement of training data or otherwise, can be implemented on blockchains in the form of smart contracts. DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) such as non-profits can also be built using smart contracts to automate whole enterprises that can facilitate advancing AI / ML in healthcare at scale.

Keep the conversation going

If you’re interested in using AI, ML, or blockchain for healthcare, you know that new opportunities are constantly surfacing and with it come a whole host of new questions. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter to get updates on these topics as well as cloud computing, security, privacy, and compliance. If you would like to explore a partnership as you work to implement AI and/or blockchain for your healthcare organization, we’d love to hear from you.

For more resources and tips on blockchain for healthcare, take a look at part 1 of this series here.

Living in the south of England, just outside London, I’m naturally a Manchester United fan. Supporting this Red Devils in the post-Fergie era is not easy. The current manager is world-class, they’ve got plenty of high-calibre international players at the club and at times they still play some excellent football, but at the same time their style of play can be very frustrating to watch, their form is inconsistent and they keep failing to seriously challenge for the major honours again. It hasn’t yet started getting any better from one season to the next.

Football Manager Touch has followed a similar pattern in the few years that it’s been around. Like with watching Man United these days, Sports Interactive’s sports simulation for tablets has a lot of quality running through it and is truly great at times but it leaves you feeling slightly underwhelmed and wanting more. This year’s edition, FM19 Touch, leaves the same impression.

I’ll return to this later for my conclusion – but for now, let’s go over some basics and some positives.

Football Manager Touch is the more advanced, and expensive at £20, of the two handheld versions of the premier football management sim. It’s somewhere in-between the streamlined Mobile game and the full-blooded PC game. This is the fifth tablet instalment of FM Touch, which started in 2015 as FM Classic in reference to how it offered a retro-inspired, stripped-back and speedier experience compared to the desktop game while still offering a good amount of the depth and complexity.

I’m not going to go all the way back to the beginning and explain what type of game Football Manager is because I’m going to assume you know already. If you are here reading this and don’t know what it’s all about then that’s weirder than Paul Pogba’s penalty run-ups. Suffice to say, in the main career mode you take charge of a real-world football club and then manage them through seasons as you pick the team, sign new players, choose tactics for matches and hopefully lead them to glory rather than get the sack from your virtual employer.

FM Touch is designed to give wannabe bosses who are ‘bursting with ambition but short on time’ an on-the-go management experience that dispenses of distractions like the ‘media circus’ and offers instant results on match days to help blast through fixtures. It’s a streamlined format with less micro-managing compared to the bigger, bulkier main title but it still provides a weighty, immersive and addictive game.
Sports Interactive has settled into a routine of annual releases of its three Football Manager, including Touch. Like with other franchises, players are expected to pay out again for the ‘new’ game which is basically the same as the previous year save for updated rules and rosters along with a few tweaks and added features.

One change for this year is the presentation has been given a bit of a revamp, with a fresher and brighter new look. Like when your team unveils a new kit, this doesn’t make much difference to how the game plays but it looks nice. The user interface and screen layout are much the same as before, being intuitive and easy to use for the most part. It can occasionally be slightly fiddly to tap on the correct part of the screen and there’s a minor new annoyance this time in how information in certain text boxes is cut short.

A more significant addition for FM19 is tactical styles which put another layer on top of the already immense range of option for setting up your team. You can now choose from a selection of pre-set systems such as high-intensity gegenpress, the Spanish-flavoured tiki-taka or the more rudimentary route one, which serve as the overall philosophy for how your team plays. There is a vast amount of customisations for each of these structures as you put plans in place across the three phases of possession, transition and not-in-possession. Then on top of this you can choose from numerous formations, or create your own, while also assigning roles and detailed instructions to individual players. 

The tactical possibilities are insane and overwhelming, but they are also a big part of the game’s appeal. One small gripe is there is sometimes a lack of information easily available in the game to explain what all the options mean. The new inductions (tutorials on certain parts of the job) are useful, but having a more easily accessible glossary at your fingertip on particular screens would be handy.

As well as enhancements to the tactical side of the game, training has also been given something of a revamp. You now get a rating of 1 to 10 for each player showing well are they performing in training, and you can also set several aspects of each player’s training routine. You can dictate which position, role and duty each player trains on, which areas they will have additional focus on, such as strength or speed, and what intensity they will train at. Beyond this, you can encourage certain traits in players across various categories including movement, passing and technique.

I suspect most people will still leave the training to their in-game assistant manager because it does remain one of drier more number-driven parts of the game, but it does provide plenty of scope to get hands-on with the development of your squad should you want to. The rest of the game remains much the same as last year, and the year before. Further changes are either unnoticeable or insignificant.

I called the 2018 version of FM Touch a “magnificent game in many ways” and the 2019 edition is every bit as worthy of this description. There is still so much to like about it and it continues to be a huge, absorbing and generally enjoyable game, with the new features I’ve described only adding to its authenticity and complexity. But … there has to be a but as I swing back around to my opening when I compared FM Touch to Man United and said it can leave you feeling slightly underwhelmed and wanting more.

Another thing I said in my review of last year’s game was that it needed to deliver more next time to stop the series going stale. Sadly, it hasn’t really delivered more, and the series is starting to go stale. The game hasn’t evolved very far from when it first arrived in 2015. There have been improvements around the edges, including this year’s tactics and training alterations, but none of these have been very big steps forward.

Whether through picking a new coach and plotting a different direction or signing players who bring extra quality, football teams are constantly looking to better themselves – at least those teams that want to get to the top or stay there. This is what Sports Interactive should be doing with FM Touch; always looking to make each new game distinct and distinctly superior to the previous one. But they don’t seem to do that – each new game is at best an incremental improvement on the previous year.

Whether it’s a lack of ambition (perhaps evidenced by the addition of the German league being one of the main new features this year – big whoop), a lack of resource or just not prioritising this version, it feels like the effort is rather half-hearted. The two big things I’ve been calling for are media work such as press conferences and staff interactions such as being able to talk to your players. Both of these features are again absent in FM19 Touch, and that’s to the game’s detriment. It means there is no opportunity to show any personality or stamp your identity on anything.

Sports Interactive continues to boast that its games “skips the pre-match proceedings and media circus to focus your attention on the best bits – squad building and match day”. I respectfully disagree with them about these being the best bits and about leaving out the other bits. I don’t want the Touch game to become as bloated and time-consuming as the PC version, but there needs to be something better than a few adjustments to justify charging people £20 (a massive amount in mobile game terms) for essentially the same game again next year.

For now, FM19 Touch is easily top of the league because there are no other similar games that even come close to it – but, like my Old Trafford outfit, you feel it could and possibly should be doing better.