Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-14-2018, 08:36 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Pre-Amazon Prime Day 2018 Deals Available Now
Amazon's Prime Day doesn't start until July 16, but the online retailer is already offering a number of deals to spark interest and get people talking about the retail holiday. The only hitch is that, like the deals on Prime Day, you need to be an Amazon Prime member to get the sale prices. You can sign up for Prime here, with a free one-month trial for first-time subscribers. With that out of the way, let's look at what pre-Prime Day deals are available to Amazon Prime members right now.
Free PC Games
Amazon owns the streaming platform Twitch, and each month Amazon/Twitch Prime members get free PC games. The difference this month is that Prime Day is coming up. To celebrate, Twitch Prime members will get 21 free games in July, including Brutal Legend and Tacoma. You can find the full details here.
Amazon Echo owners know how convenient it is to ask Alexa to play a song or inquire what the weather will be like on a given day. The Echo Show is an Alexa-enabled device with one big difference--it has a screen. It can do everything a standard Echo can do (including playing Skyrim), while also allowing you to view Amazon Video content, see music lyrics, security cameras, photos, weather forecasts, to-do and shopping lists, and make video calls to others with an Echo Show.
Kindle Unlimited is Amazon's subscription service that offers unlimited access to over a million books. It also comes with a rotating selection of magazines and thousands of books with Audible narration. You can access all the Kindle Unlimited content on any device with the Kindle app. The service normally costs $30 for three months, but Prime members can get it now for just $1.
You can also enter to win a number of prizes without spending any money at all. The prizes include $50,000 in cash, a 2019 Lexus ES with Alexa, a trip for two to Seattle, and more. To enter, you can visit this page and click links to find out more about Amazon's offerings. Alternatively, if you have an Alexa-enabled device, you can ask the AI assistant a number of questions that count as entries as well. Questions like, "Alexa, what is the news?" and "Alexa, what is Prime Day?" qualify.
More deals are coming for Prime members in the lead-up to Prime Day. We'll continue covering the best deals, so be sure to check back later.
Experience the job of a bus driver in a vast and freely drivable urban area. Drive original licensed city buses from the great brands: Mercedes-Benz, Setra, MAN, and IVECO BUS. Transport your passengers safely and punctually, either solo in single player mode, or in multiplayer mode.
Become an Icon! Icons: Combat Arena is a fast-paced platform fighting game offering players tight controls, powerful special attacks, online multiplayer, and the chance to become an iconic hero. All for free! Frequent game updates, customization, tournaments, and new characters keep the fight fresh.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-14-2018, 02:35 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Don’t Miss: What went right (and wrong) during the development of Persona 4
[In this Gamasutra-exclusive postmortem, the Atlus team behind Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 — most of which continued on from Persona 3 — discusses its experience creating the acclaimed RPG, including a development overview as well as specific “What Went Right” and “What Went Wrong” highlights.]
Our goal with Persona 4 was to create a title for young adults in a modern day school setting, but with appeal for a wide audience. For players who became fans of the series with the previous game, Persona 3, we retained gameplay basics that had proved successful, while adding an element of suspense. We hoped that a murder mystery plot in which a group of high school students pursued the culprit would connect with the players.
Many of the core members of the Persona 4 project were from the internal development team led by the director, Katsura Hashino. Their previous titles included Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, the Digital Devil Saga series, and Persona 3. The art director, Shigenori Soejima, joined the team during Persona 3. However, the rest of the staff, including composer Shoji Meguro, had been working together for about ten years.
Except for the animation, the game was done entirely in-house by the team. Our primary asset creation tools included 3ds Max 8, Adobe Photoshop, PaintTool SAI, and Adobe After Effects 6.5J, while design and effects were handled with our own internal tools.
(As a side note, the surgical action game Trauma Center: Under the Knife was also designed and produced by Katsura Hashino. A few members of that game’s staff were assigned to form a new team, and since then, they have been handling the development of the Trauma Center titles.)
What Went Right
1. Critical acclaim:Persona 4 received high praise from both the media and the consumers. Our primary consideration when deciding what to change and what aspects of development to examine was the commitment to making this game better than the last. The players were generally satisfied with the game, and we feel confident as we move on to our next project.
2. Budget: The development cost was set at about the same level as that of Persona 3. To satisfy the consumers, we spent the majority of our resources on increasing the volume of features that the players liked, improving the game systems, and working on the story and characters (the two key components of an RPG). In the end, we were able to keep the number of omitted features to a minimum, while incorporating many changes and additions to reflect the opinions gathered toward the end of development.
3. Player feedback: We were able to carefully select many of the new features by internally evaluating the previous title and examining player feedback. By doing so, we could concentrate on making adjustments to the areas that were most crucial to the game’s quality.
4. Team stability: We didn’t make many changes to the roles of the development team members who continued on from the previous title. This gave each person a clear understanding of what issues needed to be addressed, allowing us to operate smoothly during development. It also allowed the various staff members to communicate effectively with the director.
5. New hires: Some of the new staff members who joined the Persona 4 development team were fans of Persona 3. They did a great job gathering feedback on the previous title and evaluating the content of the new game.
What Went Wrong
1. Storytelling challenges: It took a tremendous amount of time and effort to finish the intense, suspenseful story with as many twists as it has, as well as integrating the game’s theme of “how one accepts information from the media.” While it was fun creating the mystery novel-like scenario, we had no previous experience in working on such a plot, so we were making adjustments to the storyline until the very end.
Also, one of the villain characters changed in the middle of development; since the character design was done before the story change, the design did not reflect the fact that he was a villain.
2. Real-time weather design: Unlike in the previous title, Persona 4‘s time limit for each dungeon was affected by the in-game weather. We did this with the belief that such a system would create the feeling of urgency, since the player didn’t know when damage-causing fog would appear.
However, when we implemented it in the game, players were inclined to make dungeon investigation their first priority. Their mentality was, “If I don’t know when the fog appears, I should finish the dungeon as soon as possible.” As a result, dungeon crawling and working on the inter-character Social Links, which are equally important, became completely separate and imbalanced.
We tried to compensate by adjusting the weather, in-game messages and story progression, but that created an unexpected workload. A huge amount of data could not be finalized until the weather was set, but the weather kept changing due to our design adjustments.
3. Urban misconceptions: When we decided that the story took place in a rural town, we found out that each staff member had their own image of a rural town that was completely different from the others’. So we immediately held a meeting to discuss what the most typical rural town was like, and the entire team went out to various places for location hunting. This was the first time the development team conducted such a large-scale location hunt.
4. The QA time sink: We end up having this issue every development cycle, but doing QA for an RPG takes a significant amount of time. For example, it takes more than a month for the director to go through the entire game once, checking the content and giving feedback to the team.
We kept playing the game over and over again, as many times as possible, until the game went gold. The more time we spent on debugging, the harder it became for us to put ourselves in the mindset of how gamers would feel when playing the game for the first time. In the end, we all wish for our next project to be an action game.
5. Horizontal feedback process: About two months before finalizing the code, we had the entire team post comments and criticisms about the game on our internal development website. For Persona 4, the new staff members (most of whom were Persona 3 fans) made the biggest contributions to this process, and we ended up with close to 2,000 posts — anything from fundamental problems to personal tastes.
We addressed more than 1,500 of those concerns in some way or another, but the staff kept making comments like “This should be changed like this,” or “This part is no good.” The design director who decided how to fix the issues and the staff members who implemented the fixes were on the verge of a nervous breakdown, begging, “Please… No more…”
Nevertheless, the game’s quality increased and the consumer satisfaction was high, partially as a result of that internal feedback process, so we’re glad that we did it — but the thought of having to do it again for another project gives us chills.
Darwin Project is Free to Play on Xbox One Starting July 4
Hey, Xbox players! Scavengers Studio here to tell you about some big news. Starting tomorrow, anyone can play Darwin Project, our highly interactive and survival-injected battle royale, for free! No time limit or excluded modes. Just hit the download button and you’re all set to explore everything that Darwin Project has to offer — which, we like to add, will only keep getting better and better.
If you’ve already purchased Darwin Project, don’t worry. Check your in-game inventory and you’ll see a lovely Founder’s Pack chock-full of cosmetic items: two legendary sets each containing shirt, pants, armor, helmet, and boots, three legendary axes, three legendary bows, a full jumpsuit collection, and 10 fan gifts to further stock up your dressing room with a variety of styles for your clothes and weapons.
Can’t get enough of Darwin Project fashion? You can earn more fan gifts by leveling up! And for a limited time, you can collect soccer-themed sportswear by opening fan gifts or purchasing these new styles with ramen (our in-game currency) in the item shop. Show your support for your favorite team or mix and match the new items with your go-to pieces for fresh, workout-ready styles. The items will only be available until July 12. Learn more about the customization system in Darwin Project here.
With our switch to free-to-play, we want to take care to specify that cosmetics in the item shop grant no competitive advantage, and Darwin Project will never become pay-to-win. These items are for looking good; only skill helps you win!
Dropping the price tag is a big change, but we remain committed to the same vision that has guided the development for over three years, and that means providing the best experience we can for all Darwin Project inmates. We hope that by switching to a free-to-play model, both early adopters and newcomers will be able to get the most out of Darwin Project.
If you played Darwin Project at the Xbox Game Preview launch but haven’t stepped into the arena recently, there’s lots you might have missed. We’ve added Duo mode (as well as the invite friend option), private matches, the Glider tool, skill-based matchmaking, five new Show Director powers, and more! You can now also play Darwin Project in eight new languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Japanese, and Korean with three additional languages Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, and Turkish coming soon (note that this localization is a work-in-progress).
Follow us on Facebook or Twitter for the latest updates, and join our Discord to find new friends to lure into your bear traps and pummel with your axe. See you in the arena!
Review: Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! (Switch eShop)
Published by Rising Star Games and developed by Daylight Studios, Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! is the first entry in the trilogy series to come to the Nintendo Switch. Originally released in 2015 on PC and later on mobile, the title has been inspired by games such as Weapon Shop De Omasse and Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale. Basically, it’s a wacky-themed simulation game, where you manage your very own weapon shop whilst expanding the business across a potato universe.
If you’ve ever played this type of game before, the concept of it shouldn’t be too difficult to comprehend. You start out as an inexperienced potato who has inherited less than one percent of a weapon shop. Despite the odds, your shady business partner is more than willing to let you run day-to-day operations. This is where you – as the player – come in. It’s your job to build the business from ground-up to make it the most famous potato weapon shop of all-time.
With the help of a couple of ‘potato smiths’ who are ready to forge weapons and sell them to heroes, your responsibility is to micro-manage the business by dishing out a bunch of commands. Embracing the daily grind is the first step to success. With more than 70 potato heroes to sell to and around 200 weapons to forge, most of your time will be spent gathering supplies, crafting and then selling to your clientele for fame and cash (known as $tarch). Your business can be expanded across 20 different areas over time and there are 30 different blacksmiths that can be managed. There are even 20 legendary pop culture heroes to discover and a potato dog to adopt – which fits nicely with the overall humour of the game, as excessive as the puns may be at times.
The more time you invest in the business, the more opportunities pop-up. The game expands upon its foundations implementing more complicated management tasks that will put your business at risk if you don’t balance your finances correctly. Like the majority of other weapon shop games, whatever you do comes at a price. This could be in the form of a monetary transaction, or even at the expense of your business reputation. If you do fail to keep an eye on your funds, expect a visit from the weapon shop guild who are happy reimburse you a few times over before eventually shutting the shop.
Each potato smith has a salary and for items to be made you must assign one of them to travel to other areas within the potato world and purchase specific crafting supplies. The weapons range from anything you would want to equip a hero within a traditional role-playing game. These can be swords, bows and even axes. Every time a weapon is forged you must name it. This gives you a personal connection and a sense of control over the business, which you must also name at the start of the game. As you go, you’ll be required to expand your shop in order to craft bigger and better weapons, and so you can house more blacksmith.
The depth lies within the forging, selling, buying, and research system. How you build your fame and fortunes of your business from here is up to you. Every hero and potato smith has levels attached to them, which in return benefit your business and reputation. Every time you send out a blacksmith to sell weapons, there’ll be a range of heroes who will offer a certain amount of coin. For the sake of your shop’s fame, it’s important to assign the right weapon to the right hero so they can reach their maximum level. If you’re out for a quick cash grab, though, you can always take a risk and sell a particular weapon to a potato that doesn’t necessarily specialise in a certain area – for example, giving a fighter a bow instead of an axe. Each customer has specific needs, with each weapon catering to different primary skills. Different types of blacksmiths can also boost weapons in certain areas including attack, speed, and accuracy. Sales may also impact how your employees operate, with effects that change their performance for brief periods of time.
Beyond the daily routines are a bunch of objectives you can fulfil like buying a number of materials and crafting supplies or selling a particular weapon to a specific customer. There are also timed tasks where you must craft weapons with unique stats and the ability to search the world for relics and enchantments. All of this adds some excitement to the job. In addition to this are randomised encounters with customers who will enter your shop and request certain items for a large amount of cash. It’s in your best interest to sort these individuals out as soon as possible. Regardless of how exactly you do decide to grow the business, there’s definitely a noticeable rhythm to the daily happenings, with plenty of unexpected challenges to overcome along the way.
What undoes Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! is how poorly it’s been adapted to the Switch. While it performs reasonably well, it feels slightly inferior to existing iterations due to the clunky and confusing user interface. It doesn’t feel compatible with the Joy-Cons and even with the touchscreen, it can be difficult to move about menus. Speaking of which, the menus take up too much space on the screen, and if you’re playing in handheld mode the text and stats can look incredibly small at times. The tutorial isn’t exactly user-friendly, either. It sort of bombards you with a stack of text and information about how to run the shop all in one go, and continues to do so for a prolonged period of time. Despite how simple the day-to-day operations actually are, this alone may deter newcomers.
In saying this, there is some welcomed quality of life features such as the ability to fast forward and pause time – making the title great for quick sessions when you’re out and about or only have so much time to spare. A bonus themed adventure titled ‘Spud Tales: Journey To Olympus’ has also been thrown in. One other aspect that can be commended is the music composed by the legendary Kimura Masahiko, who worked on the original score for the Castlevania series. The music throughout the game provides a relaxing vibe and goes well with the cartoon graphics.
Conclusion
Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! isn’t anything we haven’t already seen before. Forging and selling weapons is fun once you get into the rhythm of it, and there’s plenty within the potato world to work towards. This is a game that can be played for a few minutes or hours per day, depending on how much you enjoy the genre. What’s frustrating is how this title has been adapted to the Switch. It’s got a clunky user interface that doesn’t really feel compatible with the Joy-Cons and even if you opt with the system by itself as a touchpad it still feels difficult to complete the most basic of tasks. All up, this makes it the hardest version of the game to play. Overlooking these problems, it’s still worth checking out if you’re looking for a game of this type and one with plenty of humour – it’s just far from spud-tacular.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-14-2018, 02:35 AM - Forum: Minecraft
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Minecraft 1.13 Pre-Release 8
We’re now on pre-release 8 and we expect there to be a couple of more pre-releases before the full release. That said, unless any major show stopper pops up after the upcoming pre-releases, we aim to release Update Aquatic for Minecraft: Java Edition on Wednesday, July 18th.
A full changelog for this Pre-Release can be found on Minecraft.net.
Added dead coral fans
Changed which blocks show dripping liquids
Team names & objective names are now text components, not raw strings
More bugfixes!
FIXED BUGS IN 1.13-PRE8
MC-133325 – Double chests becoming invisible or separating with redstone
MC-133277 – Texts sometimes error if the language is Chinese
MC-133233 – Sticky pistons do not update blocks they cannot pull
MC-133216 – Water dripping from transparent blocks
To get pre-releases, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).
Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.
Pre-releases can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds.
Share your thoughts on how 1.13 is shaping up in the comments below!
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-14-2018, 02:35 AM - Forum: Lounge
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This Week At Bungie – 07/12/2018
This week at Bungie, Lord Saladin is ornamenting the Guardians again.
Iron Banner is back, and not even for the last time in Season 3. There are matches to be won, ranks to earn, and rewards to collect. This is also your one and only chance to enjoy some 6v6 combat in the Destiny 2 Crucible – for one more week, at least.
Update 1.2.3 lands on Tuesday. With it, Quickplay will evolve to become a 6v6 engagement. Between now and then, our old friend the Iron Lord is the only one with the hookup.
That’s great, Bungie, but what about us solo players?
Rumble is also coming back in Update 1.2.3!
What about those of us who aren’t Crucible warriors, Bungie?
We have other news to report for those of you who prefer to focus your fire on the enemies of humanity.
Let’s dig in and take a look at everything in our immediate future.
Bountiful Harvest
When you light out into the wild in search of action and adventure, the fighting is all the sweeter when you have more ways to reap the rewards. In Update 1.2.3, we’re expanding on that experience with new bounties for Destiny 2. Senior Design Lead Tyson Green, who some suspect is actually the Cryptarch in his spare time, has some thoughts on what we want to accomplish with this addition to the player experience.
Tyson: With the original launch of Destiny, bounties provided a set of daily objectives that players could use to advance faction reputation or earn XP to level up their gear. These were removed to streamline the activity experience in Destiny 2 and reduce the number of “chores” that players felt compelled to complete every day. In retrospect, we realized that was an over-correction, and optional daily objectives to achieve specific goals are something we want to restore.
The bounties returning to Destiny 2 in Update 1.2.3 are a return to most of the properties of bounties in The Taken King. They will be obtained from a variety of vendors, they will generally award XP and faction reputation (though some will offer even better rewards), and can be redeemed “in the field” to immediately claim your rewards. In Forsaken, you may also see some bounties drop in the wild.
There are two new mechanics. Bounties will expire if left uncompleted, and acquiring them will cost a small amount of Glimmer. We wanted to avoid the “grab every bounty you see until your inventory is packed and sort them out later” experience without constraining players to the tiny inventory they found in previous iterations of the game.
In Forsaken, more vendors will have more bounties on offer, and some will provide Legendary (or better) rewards for completing them.
It’s fair to observe that we didn’t answer every question you might ask about the return of bounties. What would be the fun in that? You’ll discover exactly how they work and where you can find them next week, and in all the weeks that will follow.
For the Kids
At the time of this posting, one storm is dissipating online while another one gathers in real life. The GuardianCon fundraising stream is over, with millions of dollars raised for charity. Once again, we are left stunned by the passion and goodwill exhibited by the community. Congratulations to everyone who pitched in and ran their leg of the marathon.
Tomorrow, the after party begins inside the Tampa Convention Center, and the celebration is shaping up to be thunderous. We’ll be on hand to commit all challengers to teams of four to battle each other in Gambit. This is your final blog reminder that we’re also hosting an epic clash of content creators you may know on their mainstage.
Gambit Exhibition Tournament
July 13, 6 p.m. EDT
At this very moment, our away team is building our booth. They’re hanging the art, building the network, and arranging all the velvet ropes. If you’re in attendance, they can’t wait to meet you.
Breaking News
Are you current with all the Forsaken field intel that Game Informer has been serving up?
SUPERS!
FLASHPOINTS!
TANGLED SHORE!
EXOTICS!
In today’s Destiny 2: Forsaken feature, we take a look at the Exotic Auto Rifle Cerberus +1, which harnesses the power of Contra’s Spread Gun (and four separate barrels) to deliver devastating damage in seconds. https://t.co/guj5sqozqYpic.twitter.com/uUQbO3JuAJ
Keep an eye on ’em. They’re not done showing off what awaits you this September.
Coming Attractions
Update 1.2.3 will deploy on Tuesday, July 17. Destiny Player Support will have more information concerning deployment times and download sizes here, but we have a quick preview of what to expect next week:
Misc Quality of Life Changes
PC Clan Chat: Adds a new in-game text chat channel that allows online Destiny 2 clan members to communicate.
Once all Mercury Forge weapons have been obtained, they become available for direct purchase from Brother Vance in the Lighthouse (on the second vendor page).
Removed momentum from Heroic Adventures.
The Pursuits inventory bucket has been moved to the top of the inventory categories.
Commas have been added to large numbers as separators on the IGCR and PGCR.
Exotic Armor Fixes
Fixed an issue that was causing targets marked by Sanguine Alchemy to produce orbs when defeated.
Fixed an issue that caused Starfire Protocol to not work with Dawnblade’s Attunement of Sky ability path.
Fixed an issue that prevented Warlock melee attack damage when using the Ophidian Aspect Exotic and the Hive Swords or orb carry objects.
Additionally, some Heroic Strike Modifiers will be given slight adjustments in response to player feedback. Test Engineer Drew Martineau has a quick round of developer commentary on the goal of these changes:
Hey all,
Since the release of Update 1.1.3, we’ve been collecting player feedback concerning Heroic strike modifiers. On Tuesday, three of the more punishing modifiers will receive some adjustments. Ultimately, we want your Power, stats, and armor modifications to matter, and we realized that our debuff modifiers were a little too powerful to allow players to see their impact. Here’s what you can expect:
Blackout: We wanted to ensure that enemy melees are threatening, but this shouldn’t dismiss a player’s Power progression or the stats they chose to invest in with their armor. As such, this modifier is changing somewhat: it still increases enemy melee damage significantly, but it’s now no longer a guarantee of players being defeated by a single melee from many enemies. Be careful, though! If you’re not at the recommended Power for the Heroic Strikes playlist, your enemies will be more powerful and pack a harder punch.
Grounded: There are many times players are considered “airborne” when they’re not actually jumping. To account for that, we are reducing the damage threshold so players aren’t punished for things outside of their control. Additionally, we’re looking to prevent players from falling to their demise from a height of 2 meters, just as they happen to land on a rock or some other small object.
Glass: This modifier reduces a Guardian’s shields and health while increasing recovery. We slightly reduced the impact of this modifier to better enable players to see the effects of their overall Power progression over time.
Stay tuned to bungie.net next week for the full patch notes, expected to become available at 9 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, July 17, 2018.
Matrix Reloaded
Over the past few months, we’ve been testing a new feature called the Prismatic Matrix. When we first announced this new reward system, we stated our goals for the experiment:
Give players more control over how they earn Eververse items
Offer a more predictable path each week that guarantees access to specific items
Drop fewer duplicate items
This week, the user interface calls specific attention to the limited time of the feature. To explain our previous objectives and future plans, here are some thoughts from the design team:
The original intent of the Prismatic Matrix was for it to be a special event—something to help players round out their collections, as the odds of earning the items that were eluding them improved as they continued to earn Bright Engrams. We had a limited number of weeks scheduled, designed to keep repetition to a minimum. That schedule of curated offerings is coming to an end, so the feature will be going on temporary hiatus starting next week. Thanks to some good feedback about this new feature, we’ve learned how we can make it better, so we’ll continue to support it in Forsaken. We look forward to your continued feedback and are excited to relaunch the Prismatic Matrix in the next season of Destiny 2.
There will be more on this topic soon. Before the launch in September, we’ll update this conversation with a full preview for how the Eververse Trading Company will be evolving to better serve you.
The Player Support Report
Community management involves a lot more than going to conventions and posing for pictures. Serving the Guardians is a team effort, and some of us are more tactical than others. The specialists on the Player Support Team are experts on how the game evolves over time.
This is their report.
Moments of Triumph
On July 7, we launched Moments of Triumph on Bungie.net and the Destiny Companion. Destiny 2 players can now track their Triumphs online before they go live in-game with the Solstice of Heroes live event. The following is vital information that players should be aware of for Moments of Triumph:
Progress toward Triumphs and event rewards may be lost if players delete any characters on their account. For the best experience, it is recommended that players do not delete any characters until all desired rewards have been redeemed and Solstice of Heroes concludes on August 28, 2018.
Players will not be able to redeem completed Triumphs for points or rewards until Solstice of Heroes goes live in Destiny 2 on July 31, 2018.
Starting Lines for World First
Next Tuesday, July 17, at 10 a.m. PDT, Destiny 2 Update 1.2.3 will become available to players. To allow players to download and install this update and prepare for the launch of Prestige raid lairs, “Leviathan, Eater of Worlds” and “Leviathan, Spire of Stars” will be temporarily disabled. These activities will become available for players to compete for World First at the following times:
“Leviathan, Eater of Worlds” Prestige, 11 a.m. PDT on July 17
“Leviathan, Spire of Stars” Prestige, 10 a.m. PDT on July 18
Last week, we conducted the Destiny 2 free trial weekend on Battle.net. While players who participated can choose to keep Destiny 2 installed on their PC for use in future free trial weekends, they will receive SAXOPHONE errors if they do not own Destiny 2 when they attempt to launch the game outside of promotional periods.
For more information regarding trial access, players should visit our Destiny 2 Trial help article.
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
People ask us a lot of questions about how we choose these weekly honors. The hunt begins when we look at our Creations page for entries. The #MOTW tag helps us know you’re submitting for competition. From there, we pick something that catches our eye. With the usual judges hosting sweaties in Tampa (Florida is so hot right now), I thought I’d assemble an alternate panel that includes some of my favorite community artists. Since each them leveraged their artistic expertise to lend a hand in celebrating excellence in multimedia, there are no points for second place.
Get ready to thank the academy. Here are your Movies of the Week.
Congratulations to all the winners. Please hold until next week before you start to ask dmg04 and Cozmo when you can expect to find your prize emblems. In my infinite wisdom, I put them on the road, and I never learned how to do that thing.
When your rightful community managers are back in the saddle, there will be patch notes and deployment status updates and all the hard work that gets done by the real heroes. It’s been my pleasure to return to my roots while they put on their show. Hope I wasn’t overly verbose. Old habits die harder than raid bosses.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-14-2018, 02:35 AM - Forum: Windows
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Dell debuts ‘world’s most powerful 1U rack workstation’
Dell delivers compact solutions that pack a punch, including a 1U rack workstation and towers starting at $649.
Companies of all sizes and budgets looking for powerful, affordable, compact industry-leading workstations now have new choices for their needs from Dell, including the world’s most powerful 1U rack workstation.¹
The Dell Precision 3930 Rack delivers powerful performance in a compact industrial footprint. Its 1U rack height delivers better rack density and extended operating temperatures, while features such as its short depth, dust filters, and legacy ports allow it to integrate seamlessly into complex medical imaging and industrial automation solutions.
Other features include:
The rack workstation provides up to 64 GB of 2666MHz DDR4 memory thanks to the introduction of Intel Xeon E processors and an 8th Generation Intel Core CPU.
The Intel Xeon E processor supports Error Correcting Code (ECC) for increased reliability.
The rack workstation offers best-in-class workstation performance and provides the flexibility of up to 250W of doublewide GPUs, and scalability with up to 24 TB of storage.
With 3 PCIe slots, including an optional PCI slot, this workstation can tackle complex tasks with ease.
A range of NVIDIA Quadro professional GPUs are available. With the Quadro P6000, users benefit from 24GB of GDDR5X and powerful ultra-high-end graphics performance.
In addition, customers have the option to choose AMD Radeon Pro graphics.
If your company is looking for versatile, secure, and fast remote 1:1 user access, you can add optional Teradici PCOIP technology. The rack workstation effortlessly integrates into the datacenter, which helps reduce clutter at your desk.
A smaller footprint that doesn’t skimp on performance
Going small can lead to big things, so Dell has built these new entry-level workstations to fuel the future of innovation across engineering design, science, mathematics, and other data- and graphics-intensive fields. Running a highly powerful machine no longer requires having a large work space or a large budget, making this level of performance available to many companies and workers for the first time.
“Customers across Engineering & Manufacturing, Media & Entertainment, and beyond have come to rely on Dell workstations to deliver the highest performing systems for their critical workload. But as we enter the next era of workstations, the conversation is accelerating to immersive workflows utilizing even smaller footprints. Dell is leading the way in this evolution with these new entry-level workstations designed to deliver the ultimate in performance with a substantially smaller footprint,” says Rahul Tikoo, vice president and general manager of Dell Precision. “When access to leading technology improves, innovation flourishes. Sometimes something as simple as a smaller form factor can unleash new ideas and capabilities that have the power to reshape an industry.”
The Dell Precision 3630 Tower is 23 percent smaller² than the previous generation with more expandability, so workers can get the precise solution they need regardless of workspace constraints. It features a range of easy-to-reach ports that make it possible to connect to external data sources, storage devices, and more. It offers scalable storage featuring SATA and PCIe NVMe SSDs, which can be configured for up to 14 TB with RAID support.
As workstation users often create intellectual property, Dell will also offer an optional Smart Card (CAC/PIV) reader to make secure data management easier.
If you’re interested in creating or enjoying VR experiences and other resource-intensive tasks, this workstation is a good choice, thanks to an 8th Generation Intel Core i and new professional-grade Xeon E processors with faster memory speeds up to 2666MHz 64 GB. It also offers up to 225W of NVIDIA Quadro and AMD Radeon Pro graphics support.
The new Dell Precision 3430 Small Form Factor Tower is a great fit for many workstation users, offering many of the same benefits as the Precision 3630, but in an even smaller form factor and up to 55W of graphics support. It’s also expandable with up to 6TB of storage with RAID support.
Dell also introduced support for Intel Core X–series processors in addition to the Intel Xeon W processor options already available on the Dell Precision 5820 Tower. These new processor options bring the enhanced performance and reliability of a workstation at a more affordable price point for customers.
Adding Intel Optane memory keeps responsiveness high and high-capacity storage costs lower on all these new Dell Precision 3000 series workstations. Customers can expect the same build quality and reliability of the Dell Precision line.
¹When equipped with Intel Xeon E-2186G processor, available 64GB of 2666MHz memory capacity, NVIDIA P6000 graphics and 2xM.2PCIe storage. Based on Dell internal analysis of competitive workstation products as of July 2018.
²Gen-over-Gen claim based on internal testing, July 2018.
