Posted by: xSicKxBot - 06-07-2018, 09:18 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Dungeons & Dragons Sale!
Now until June 8th, save 85% on various Dungeons & Dragons content on Steam as part of the Stream of Many Eyes Dungeons & Dragons event! The Stream of Many Eyes is a three-day livestreamed extravaganza full of cosplay, crazy sets and amazing stories. The Steam Daily Deal includes discounts on great games and DLC ranging from Baldur’s Gate II Enhanced Edition to Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms!
Welcome to Next Week on Xbox, where we cover all the new games coming soon to Xbox One! Every week the team at Xbox aims to deliver quality gaming content for you to enjoy on your favorite gaming console. This coming week we can return to the arcade in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, go on a pixel art adventure in Fox n Forests, or take on the role of a flying cupcake in Birdcakes — and these are just a few of the excellent games coming soon to Xbox One! Read more below and click on each of the profiles for pre-order details (dates are subject to change).
After a picnic went horribly wrong, Pancake, the flying cupcake, will try to protect his girlfriend Cherry from hungry flies! Featuring randomly generated levels, colorful 2D art, tight shooting controls, and fluid aerial movement mechanics, you’ll be set for a wacky flight through the kitchen and beyond.
A set of ancient gates have been discovered near the small village of Rynoka that lead to different realms and dimensions providing brave and reckless adventurers with treasures beyond measure in this ARPG with rogue-lite elements.
Over 50 titles across all genres from all-time classics like Sonic and Streets of Rage 2 to deep RPGs like the Phantasy Star series. New features bring modern convenience to the classics: save your game at any time, rewind those slip-ups, or customize your controls and earn bragging rights with online multiplayer and achievements.
Celebrate 30 years Street Fighter, the series that revitalized arcade culture and paved way for the fighting game genre. This collection contains 12 arcade classics, including the iconic Street Fighter II and its highly competitive sequel Street Fighter III: Third Strike. Visit the game’s comprehensive museum to discover the vast history of the series, listen to nostalgic tunes, and learn more about the characters who have become known around the world.
An ancient Island deity is trapped in a restless sleep and it’s down to Yoku to traverse the island using a unique blend of pinball mechanics, platforming, and open-world exploration to flip and bump his way around the stunning hand-painted island.
When Quinn wakes up alone in a locked room with nothing but a computer hooked up to an internet chat room in which you’re present, you become his single ray of hope. Your choices will single-handedly shape his escape efforts… or lead him down the path to an untimely end.
Embark on a quest that will lead you through strange lands where Norse Mythology collides with Lovecraftian mythos. Die for Valhalla! is an ARPG where you hack, slash, and crush your enemies. Possess and take full control of heroes, monsters, and other things to help Vikings save their realm.
Fox n Forests is a 16-bit style action platformer with RPG and puzzle elements. Switch between seasons on the fly, shoot and slash with magic melee crossbow, collect valuable loot, and unveil the mystery of the fifth season in this pixel art fable.
Take on the roles of in-game players taking on the roles of their characters in a traditional pen and paper RPG session in the ultimate meta roleplaying experience. As both the playing characters and the game master, players can choose which battles to fight, which class to play as which character to control and take on loads of quests and monsters.
In the first chapter of The Journey Down, the search for a lost journal leads to forgotten secrets of the mysterious Underland. Follow Bwana and Kito as they puzzle their way forward and begin to uncover the true fate of their long lost father, Captain Kaonandodo in this point-and-click adventure.
A mash-up of a twin-stick shooter and a tower defense, it’s up to you and a friend (with couch co-op) as space agents to exterminate hordes of bio mutants created by a mad scientist. Mix and match turrets, powers, and traps to find your preferred style of play, from close combat to long-range destruction.
Someone wants you dead and you must use all your toughness to survive. Shoot, choke, and sneak your way through enemies and engage them in breathtaking car chases with an aesthetic inspired by the Italian crime flicks of the ’70s. Milanoir is a pixel-packed action game set in the violent city of Milan as you hunt for the truth and escape the ones who are chasing you through an unforgiving city.
A side-scrolling shooter with a monster hunting gameplay, you must search and hunt down dreadful sea monsters and explore the post-apocalyptic underwater world of Earth Atlantis. Unlock multiple ships with special weapons and abilities for your journey and become a legendary hunter!
In a land filled with Penguin Vikings, Wurst Zombies, and Hipster Ice Giants, survival is an art. Fortunately, an ancient champion with an elegant weapon has been summoned to please the Gods and restore balance to the universe. Grab your lightspear and traverse lands straight out of Germanic myths in this spear-throwing arcade game.
Hop into your mine cart and drive at high speed along the railway track, getting through the mine to the exit and down to the valley. The track is steep, the curves tight, and forces will try to take your vehicle out of the bend. A good pilot knows how to shift the weight, tilt the cart, and manage every tricky part of the track.
Play as one of many famous – but for legal purposes, slightly different – pop culture icons and verbally spar with other Hollywood elitists using a deep battle system. Oh…Sir! The Hollywood Roast is a spin-off to the surprise indie hit, Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator. This time around the game is taking tinsel town down a few notches.
Recently there’s been a bunch of community discussion around what kind of games we’re allowing onto the Steam Store. As is often the case, the discussion caused us to spend some time examining what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we could be doing it better. Decision making in this space is particularly challenging, and one that we’ve really struggled with. Contrary to many assumptions, this isn’t a space we’ve automated – humans at Valve are very involved, with groups of people looking at the contents of every controversial title submitted to us. Similarly, people have falsely assumed these decisions are heavily affected by our payment processors, or outside interest groups. Nope, it’s just us grappling with a really hard problem.
Unfortunately, our struggling has resulted in a bunch of confusion among our customers, developer partners, and even our own employees. So we’ve spent some time thinking about where we want to be on this, and we’d like to talk about it now. But we also think it’s critical to talk about how we’ve arrived at our position, so you can understand the trade-offs we’re making.
The challenge is that this problem is not simply about whether or not the Steam Store should contain games with adult or violent content. Instead, it’s about whether the Store contains games within an entire range of controversial topics – politics, sexuality, racism, gender, violence, identity, and so on. In addition, there are controversial topics that are particular to games – like what even constitutes a “game”, or what level of quality is appropriate before something can be released.
Common questions we ask ourselves when trying to make decisions didn’t help in this space. What do players wish we would do? What would make them most happy? What’s considered acceptable discussion / behavior / imagery varies significantly around the world, socially and legally. Even when we pick a single country or state, the legal definitions around these topics can be too broad or vague to allow us to avoid making subjective and interpretive decisions. The harsh reality of this space, that lies at the root of our dilemma, is that there is absolutely no way we can navigate it without making some of our players really mad.
In addition, Valve is not a small company – we’re not a homogeneous group. The online debates around these topics play out inside Valve as well. We don’t all agree on what deserves to be on the Store. So when we say there’s no way to avoid making a bunch of people mad when making decisions in this space, we’re including our own employees, their families and their communities in that.
So we ended up going back to one of the principles in the forefront of our minds when we started Steam, and more recently as we worked on Steam Direct to open up the Store to many more developers: Valve shouldn’t be the ones deciding this. If you’re a player, we shouldn’t be choosing for you what content you can or can’t buy. If you’re a developer, we shouldn’t be choosing what content you’re allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make. Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable.
With that principle in mind, we’ve decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling. Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see. We already have some tools, but they’re too hidden and not nearly comprehensive enough. We are going to enable you to override our recommendation algorithms and hide games containing the topics you’re not interested in. So if you don’t want to see anime games on your Store, you’ll be able to make that choice. If you want more options to control exactly what kinds of games your kids see when they browse the Store, you’ll be able to do that. And it’s not just players that need better tools either – developers who build controversial content shouldn’t have to deal with harassment because their game exists, and we’ll be building tools and options to support them too.
As we mentioned earlier, laws vary around the world, so we’re going to need to handle this on a case-by-case basis. As a result, we will almost certainly continue to struggle with this one for a while. Our current thinking is that we’re going to push developers to further disclose any potentially problematic content in their games during the submission process, and cease doing business with any of them that refuse to do so honestly. We’ll still continue to perform technical evaluations of submissions, rejecting games that don’t pass until their issues have been resolved.
So what does this mean? It means that the Steam Store is going to contain something that you hate, and don’t think should exist. Unless you don’t have any opinions, that’s guaranteed to happen. But you’re also going to see something on the Store that you believe should be there, and some other people will hate it and want it not to exist.
It also means that the games we allow onto the Store will not be a reflection of Valve’s values, beyond a simple belief that you all have the right to create & consume the content you choose. The two points above apply to all of us at Valve as well. If you see something on Steam that you think should not exist, it’s almost certain that someone at Valve is right there with you.
To be explicit about that – if we allow your game onto the Store, it does not mean we approve or agree with anything you’re trying to say with it. If you’re a developer of offensive games, this isn’t us siding with you against all the people you’re offending. There will be people throughout the Steam community who hate your games, and hope you fail to find an audience, and there will be people here at Valve who feel exactly the same way. However, offending someone shouldn’t take away your game’s voice. We believe you should be able to express yourself like everyone else, and to find others who want to play your game. But that’s it.
In the short term, we won’t be making significant changes to what’s arriving on Steam until we’ve finished some of the tools we’ve described in this post. As we’ve hopefully managed to convey, navigating these issues is messy and complicated. Countries and societies change their laws and cultural norms over time. We’ll be working on this for the foreseeable future, both in terms of what products we’re allowing, what guidelines we communicate, and the tools we’re providing to developers and players.
Now, I’ve liked Chromebooks since the experimental Cr-48rolled out in late 2010. And, when Google released its first high-end Chromebook, 2013’s Pixel, I was sold. I slowly but surely put away my Linux-powered Lenovo ThinkPads and started replacing them with Google’s high-end Chromebooks. Why? Because they’re better than any other laptop out there.
A Penny Saved is a Ton of Serverless Compute Earned
Scott Guthrie recently shared one of my favorite anecdotes on his Azure Red Shirt Tour. A Microsoft customer regularly invokes 1 billion (yes, that’s with a “B”) Azure Functions per day. The customer reached out to support after the first month thinking there was a bug in the billing system, only to find out that the $72 was in fact correct. How is that possible? Azure Functions is a serverless compute platform that allows you to focus on code that only executes when triggered by events, and you only pay for CPU time and memory used during execution (versus a traditional web server where you are paying a fee even if your app is idle). This is called micro-billing, and is one key reason serverless computing is so powerful.
Curious about Azure Functions? Follow the link https://aka.ms/go-funcs to get up and running with your first function in minutes.
Scott Guthrie on the Azure Red Shirt Tour
In fact, micro-billing is so important, it’s one of three rules I use to verify if a service is serverless. There is not an official set of rules and there is no standard for serverless. The closest thing to a standard is the whitepaper published by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation titled CNCF WG-Serverless Whitepaper v1.0 (PDF). The paper describes serverless computing as “building and running applications that do not require server management.” The paper continues to state they are “executed, scaled, and billed in response to the exact demand needed at the moment.”
It’s easy to label almost everything serverless, but there is a difference between managed and serverless. A managed service takes care of responsibilities for you, such as standing up a website or hosting a Docker container. Serverless is a managed service but requires a bit more. Here is Jeremy’s Serverless Rules.
The service should be capable of running entirely in the cloud. Running locally is fine and often preferred for developing, testing, and debugging, but ultimately it should end up in the cloud.
You don’t have to configure a virtual machine or cluster. Docker is great, but containers require a Docker host to run. That host typically means setting up a VM and, for resiliency and scale, using an orchestrator like Kubernetes to scale the solution. There are also services like Azure Web Apps that provide a fully managed experience for running web apps and containers, but I don’t consider them serverless because they break the next rule.
You only pay for active invocations and never for idle time. This rule is important, and the essence of micro-billing. ACI is a great way to run a container, but I pay for it even when it’s not being used. A function, on the other hand, only bills when it’s called.
These rules are why I stopped calling managed databases “serverless.” So, what, then, does qualify as serverless?
The Azure serverless platform includes Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and Event Grid. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at Azure Functions.
Azure Functions
Azure Functions allows you to write code that is executed based on an event, or trigger. Triggers may include an HTTP request, a timer, a message in a queue, or any other number of important events. The code is passed details of the trigger but can also access bindings that make it easier to connect to resources like databases and storage. The serverless Azure Functions model is based on two parameters: invocations and gigabyte seconds.
Invocations are the number of times the function is invoked based on its trigger. Gigabyte seconds is a function of memory usage. Image a graph that shows time on the x-axis and memory consumption on the y-axis. Plot the memory usage of your function over time. Gigabyte seconds represent the area under the curve.
Let’s assume you have a microservice that is called every minute and takes one second to scan and aggregate data. It uses a steady 128 megabytes of memory during the run. Using the Azure Pricing Calculator, you’ll find that the cost is free. That’s because the first 400,000 Gigabyte seconds and 1 million invocations are free every month. Running every second (there are 2,628,000 seconds in a month) with double memory (256 megabytes), the entire monthly cost is estimated at $4.51.
Pricing calculator for Azure Functions
Recently I tweeted about my own experience with serverless cost (or lack thereof). I wrote a link-shortening tool. It uses a function to take long URLs and turn them into a shorter code I can easily share. I also have a function that takes the short code and performs the redirect, then stores the data in a queue. Another microservice processes items in the queue and stores metadata that I can analyze for later. I have tens of thousands of invocations per month and my total cost is less than a dollar.
A tweet about cost of running serverless code in Azure
Do I have your attention?
In future posts I will explore the cost model for Logic Apps and Event Grid. In the meantime…
Learn about and get started with your first Azure Function by following this link: https://aka.ms/go-funcs
I have never been good at pool, partly because I was never in reliable proximity of a pool table in my formative years. As I got older, it became easier to get a rack going as there seems to be one stuffed in the corner of every bar in America. These days, though, my pool agnosticism is a choice. Ultimately, I find easier ways to embarrass myself for the cost of any given game.
But Pocket-Run Pool has me rethinking my entire relationship with billiards. Since it graced my iPhone, I’ve YouTubed pool competitions. I’ve watched trick shot exhibitions. Zach Gage developed this game because he couldn’t find a pool app he liked. Unbeknownst to him, he introduced me to a new hobby.
I’m setting myself up for failure, because there’s something wholly unique about this pool experience. Gage has developed this knack for turning the puzzles in the back of your Sunday papers and those games that come pre-installed on your computer into this unbelievable concept that no one knew they needed.
Pocket-Run doesn’t dramatically change the concept of eight-ball, just as Flipflop Solitaire didn’t completely overhaul the classic procedures of Patience. You still rack up a triangle of balls and use a cue ball to knock them into pockets. Good players still think shots ahead, computing both how they will sink what’s in front of them, and where their cue will end up post shot to sink what’s left.
From there, the liberties start. Firstly, there are only ten balls with numbers spanning from 2 to 13, omitting 5 and 11. There’s no required order to sink these in, nor are there solid or stripe restrictions. Everything on the table, save for your cue ball, needs to find a pocket to call home. Maybe the biggest, most “a ha!” of changes, that make pool suddenly the most infatuating single player game ever, is that each pocket has a score multiplier.
When you sink a ball, it’ll get multiplied by the number the pocket shows, from a measly 1x to a mighty 10x. Every time you sink a ball, the pockets rotate clockwise. Now, not only are you trying to control the board based on ball contact, but also based on how you can anticipate the most valuable scores will be.
Every time you ‘scratch’ the cue ball, you’ll lose one of your three lives. Altogether, pool stops looking like an indoor sport, and takes more the form of a puzzle. It seems strange, considering his gameography, that he’d dabble in a parlour room game until you realize it’s just another way to sneak a brain-teaser into an unassuming entertainment staple.
The actual act of aiming and shooting is its own meta version of borrowing an established concept and tweaking it into something that makes too much sense. You rotate your cue by dragging your finger around the ball. An outline of your shot will project itself forward. When the ghostly ball makes contact with another ball, a smaller line will predict its path to a lesser degree. This secondary line gets bigger and smaller the most solid the impact with the cue ball, making your aim more or less accurate depending on the angle you choose to play it.
When it’s time to shoot, you tap one of the arrows and a cue pops in from the side. With a swipe of your finger, the cue thrusts, and the ball is let loose. How fast you swipe will determine how hard of a shot you produce. There’s no minute details like cue ball English to speak of here, which is a good and bad thing. You don’t have a great deal of control of how your cue ball moves after you shoot. You can’t reliably get it to stop on contact or manipulate it in different directions. Its absence does take the pressure off of you when shooting though. Not having to worry about all that stuff means you really just get to swipe and move on, letting the balls fall as they may.
The randomness doesn’t stop there. You have no control over the rack position during breaks. When your scratch, you have no control over where the ball goes. The latter can be devastating when you’re deep in a round of Standard Run, the game’s main mode. One scratch can put you out of position for a big score, and without the ability to try to influence your cue ball during your shot, any given exchange becomes a crap shoot. It’s possible to work around, if some of the outrageous scores on the leaderboard are to be trusted. A novice may have a hard time coping with that fact.
There are other, even more puzzle-y modes to try your hands at. The Break of the Week gives players a table of already arranged balls and tasks them with making the highest score possible with them. The static features and the endless re-playabilty make this one of the most engrossing parts of Pocket-Run. After a set a score, I’m always returning to try and find a new sequence to try and push it to the next level. Experimentation can lead to breakthroughs in your technique that can travel back to Standard Run.
Insta-Tournaments are like hyper versions of BotW. It begins with a pre-set break, but you only have one attempt to set your best score. Once you sink all balls, or run out of lives, that is your contribution to that rack. New Insta-Tournament racks spawn every few minutes, so you’ll always have a new chance to make a mark.
They spiciest mode in Pocket-Run is High Stakes, where you bet tokens that you’ll win your game. Your pay-out multiplier varies based on your score. Score less than 500 pts on the 1000 token table, and you’ll actually lose money. The variation doesn’t end there. After your break, you take a spin on a wheel that will further modify your game with crazy variables. Adding a time limit or randomly changing the sizes of your balls even further creases the game of pool into some happy perversion of it that I’m all in for.
Ironically, Pocket-Run Pool’s greatest trick is that it makes me wish I could regurgitate this in the physical world. I want to run down to my local watering hole, take the cues out of patrons hands, and show them that there’s been a better way to play this game the whole time, and it was right under our noses.
Epic have officially launched the first preview of the upcoming Unreal Engine 4.20. Of course this is Unreal Engine so you can expect a swath of graphical improvements, but there are several other new features as well. On of the key features of this release is Beta 1 of Niagra, their next generation programmable particle FX system. There are multiple new LOD tools, blueprint bookmark support, the ability to export sequencer data in Final Cut Pro XML format and a switch to Visual Studio 2017 for the default C++ projects.
Included in Preview 1 are improvements to the proxy LOD tool, as highlighted in the May 17th livestream, many mobile improvements and optimizations we’ve made for Fortnite on iOS and Android, and early access to mixed reality capture. Niagara will be rolling out in early access, and you’ll also see a number of our GDC features, including the new cinematic depth of field and improved rendering features for digital humans at your disposal.
You can learn a great deal more about the specifics of this release on the Unreal forums, or watching the video below. One of the major features in this release, Niagara, was heavily featured in this GDC talk, if you like me cannot get it to run but want to learn more. As always this update is available in the Epic game launcher. Also be forewarned, this is a preview release so don’t even think about using it in production!
Meet the CHAOSS community and the tools used by several open source projects, communities, and engineering teams to track and analyze their development activities, communities health, diversity, risk, and value.
This conference will show CHAOSS updates, use cases, and hands-on workshops for developers, community managers, project managers, and anyone interested in measuring open source project health.
When recording sounds on a laptop — say for a simple first screencast — many users typically use the built-in microphone. However, these small microphones also capture a lot of background noise. In this quick tip, learn how to use Audacity in Fedora to quickly remove the background noise from audio files.
Installing Audacity
Audacity is an application in Fedora for mixing, cutting, and editing audio files. It supports a wide range of formats out of the box on Fedora — including MP3 and OGG. Install Audacity from the Software application.
If the terminal is more your speed, use the command:
sudo dnf install audacity
Import your Audio, sample background noise
After installing Audacity, open the application, and import your sound using the File > Import menu item. This example uses a sound bite from freesound.org to which noise was added:
Next, take a sample of the background noise to be filtered out. With the tracks imported, select an area of the track that contains only the background noise. Then choose Effect > Noise Reduction from the menu, and press the Get Noise Profile button.
Filter the Noise
Next, select the area of the track you want to filter the noise from. Do this either by selecting with the mouse, or Ctrl + a to select the entire track. Finally, open the Effect > Noise Reduction dialog again, and click OK to apply the filter.
Additionally, play around with the settings until your tracks sound better. Here is the original file again, followed by the noise reduced track for comparison (using the default settings):
Games
