Crytek has just released a half-hour video which shows Crysis Remastered running on Switch, and has also confirmed the resolutions that the game runs at in both docked and handheld modes.

According to the developers, the game hovers around the 720p-900p mark when played docked. In handheld mode, it’s hitting between 540p-720p. It was also noted that while the PS4 and Xbox One editions will have software-based ray tracing, that’s not going to be present on the Switch version.

Check out the video and let us know what you think of Crysis Remastered on Switch by leaving a comment below.

Crysis Remastered launches on Switch on July 23rd.

Japanese developer Qureate has confirmed that it is bringing its visual novel KukkoroDays to the Switch later this year.

The game places you in the role of a young man who happens to find a “lady knight from another world” has arrived in his bedroom. Very much like Qureate’s thematically-similar NinNinDays, the story revolves around keeping your new friend happy in a world which is totally unfamiliar to her.

Qureate’s E-mote system delivers smooth animation, and you’ll need to play through the game several times to experience every possible outcome.

Here’s some PR:

The appearance of a lady knight reincarnated from another world turns a mundane everyday life upside down!In this love-adventure game set in Akihabara, you can enjoy living together with a lady knight.
It’s a little serious, a little sad, and a little sexy, but most of all, it’s fun!

The “E-mote” engine that can move illustrations smoothly and three-dimensionally is used for standing pictures in the game. The characters displayed on the screen move as if they were alive.

The main character’s mundane daily life is turned upside down when a certain woman appears in his life.

One day, a magic circle suddenly appears in the main character’s room, out of which materializes an injured woman holding a sword and clothed in knight’s armor.

This woman’s name is “Cattleya”.
She claims to have been reincarnated from another world.
Until she finds a way to return to her own world, she will be an unexpected guest in the main character’s home…

Will Cattleya be able to safely return to her own world? Or could her fate take another turn…

KukkoroDays arrives on August 6th, according to the game’s eShop page.

Launching today on Nintendo Switch is Rock of Ages 3: Make & Break, a slightly bonkers take on tower-defence from Modus Games and developers ACE Team and Giant Monkey Robot.

It’s actually described as competitive tower-defence and arcade action all rolled into one. It brings back everything we liked about its predecessor, but adds a brand new level creator to take things one step further. With this, players can design their own courses and share them with others, potentially opening the door for endless creations.

Here’s a feature list:

Key Features:
– Make & Break Worlds: Design and build your own levels in the easy-to-use editor and share your creations with players from all over the world for nearly limitless creative fun!
– Competitive Tower Defense: Build defenses and race to destroy your opponents’ in up to 4-player online multiplayer, or head-to-head in 2-player split-screen action.
– Boulder-Smashing Arcade Action: Crash your way through everything in your path as fast as you can in six distinct and arcadey game modes with over 20 zany boulders!
– Absurdly Funny: Take a ride on the wild side with ACE Team’s hilarious story – everyone from Caesar and Moctezuma to Krampus and the Spaghetti Monster make an appearance in an expansive campaign across history and beyond.
– Game Modes Galore: Defend your base in the new Boulder Avalanche, perfect your rolling skills in the fragile Humpty-Dumpty Mode, race the clock in Time Trials, or create your own unique gameplay with the creator for hundreds of hours of fun!

You can go ahead and grab it from the eShop for £24.99, or you can also pick up a physical copy from select retailers. We’ll have a review of this one for you as soon as we can, so feel free to keep an eye on the site if you want to read our thoughts before diving in.

Have you played past Rock of Ages games? Will you be giving this one a go? Let us know with a comment.

My new fam ??? #TWD #TWDFamily https://t.co/Jv8TaHLWay

— Margot Bingham (@MargotBingham) July 20, 2020

Com2uS has announced a team-up with Skybound comics to create a spin-off of Summoners War, its popular RPG. Summoners War: Legacy was revealed during a panel at the Skybound Xpo and acts as a prequel to the main game. Set 35 years before the climactic events of the original, Legacy explores new characters such as Abuus, Rai, and Tomas, delves further into the land Alea, and looks more closely at the fate of Durand’s parents. Legacy also represents an opportunity to expand the lore of the original, while also giving fans a new story experience.

“Summoners War is one of the world’s top mobile games thanks to its rabid fanbase, roaring esports community, and a rich in-game universe,” says John Nam, VP of Summoners War’s IP strategy department. “We’re expanding the IP into new frontiers by partnering with Skybound Entertainment on our first official comic book series, Summoners War: Legacy. Our friends at Skybound are a powerhouse of imagination and a perfect partner for helping Com2uS grow Summoners War in new directions.”

Summoners War: Legacy runs to around 40 pages, and you can pre-order it right now on the Skybound site.

If you want a look at the actual game, here’s a trailer for Summoner’s War:

For those that don’t know, Summoner’s War is a fantasy RPG that sees you enter the Sky Arena and face off against a variety of monstrous foes. Summoner’s War is also one of the most popular games on mobile with over a 100 million players, and over a billion dollars in lifetime revenue.

If you want to play Summoner’s War for yourself, you can find it on Google Play and the App Store. If you’re looking for some similar games, be sure to check out our list of the best mobile RPGs!

Sourabh

.NET 5 Preview 7 is now available and is ready for evaluation. Here’s what’s new in this release:

• Blazor WebAssembly apps now target .NET 5
• Updated debugging requirements for Blazor WebAssembly
• Blazor accessibility improvements
• Blazor performance improvements
• Certificate authentication performance improvements
• Sending HTTP/2 PING frames
• Support for additional endpoints types in the Kestrel sockets transport
• Custom header decoding in Kestrel
• Other minor improvements

Get started

To get started with ASP.NET Core in .NET 5 Preview 7 install the .NET 5 SDK.

You need to use Visual Studio 2019 16.7 Preview 5 or newer to use .NET 5 Preview 7. .NET 5 is also supported with the latest preview of Visual Studio for Mac. To use .NET 5 with Visual Studio Code, install the latest version of the C# extension.

Upgrade an existing project

To upgrade an existing ASP.NET Core app from .NET 5 Preview 6 to .NET 5 Preview 7:

• Update all Microsoft.AspNetCore.* package references to 5.0.0-preview.7.*.
• Update all Microsoft.Extensions.* package references to 5.0.0-preview.7.*.
• Update System.Net.Http.Json package references to 5.0.0-preview.7.*.

See the full list of breaking changes in ASP.NET Core for .NET 5.

Upgrade existing Blazor WebAssembly projects

To upgrade an existing Blazor WebAssembly project, update the following properties:

From

<TargetFramework>netstandard2.1</TargetFramework>

<RazorLangVersoin>3.0</RazorLangVersion>

To

<TargetFramework>net5.0</TargetFramework>

<RuntimeIdentifier>browser-wasm</RuntimeIdentifier>

<UseBlazorWebAssembly>true</UseBlazorWebAssembly>

Also, remove any package references to Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.Build, as it is no longer needed.

What’s new?

Blazor WebAssembly apps now target .NET 5

Blazor WebAssembly 3.2 apps have access only to the .NET Standard 2.1 API set. With this release, Blazor WebAssembly projects now target .NET 5 (net5.0) and have access to a much wider set of APIs. Implementing Blazor WebAssembly support for the APIs in .NET 5 is a work in progress, so some APIs may throw a PlatformNotSupportedException at runtime. We’d love to hear from you if you’re blocked by the lack of support for specific APIs.

Updated debugging requirements for Blazor WebAssembly

To enable debugging of Blazor WebAssembly apps in Visual Studio Code, you previously needed to install the JavaScript Debugger (Nightly) extension. This is no longer required as the JavaScript debugger extension is now shipped as part of VS Code. If you’ve previously installed the JavaScript Debugger (Nightly) extension you can now uninstall it. Enabling the preview version of the JavaScript debugger through the Visual Studio Code settings is still required.

Blazor accessibility improvements

The built-in Blazor input components that derive from InputBase now render aria-invalid automatically when the validation fails.

Blazor performance improvements

One of the major areas of investment for Blazor WebAssembly in .NET 5 is improving runtime performance. This is a multifaceted effort. Below are some of the high-level areas being optimized:

• .NET runtime execution
• JSON serialization
• JavaScript interop
• Blazor component rendering

Improving Blazor WebAssembly runtime performance for .NET 5 in an ongoing effort. This release contains some initial performance improvements, and we expect to share more details on the results of this performance work for future .NET 5 updates.

Certificate authentication performance improvements

We have added caching to certificate authentication in ASP.NET Core. Caching certificate validation significantly improves the performance of certificate authentication. Our benchmarks show a 400% improvement in requests per second once caching was enabled.

You don’t need to make any changes to your app to take advantage of performance improvements; caching is on by default. There are options to tune or disable caching if you wish.

Find out more about certificate authentication in ASP.NET Core in the docs.

Sending HTTP/2 PING frames

HTTP/2 has a mechanism for sending PING frames as a way of ensuring whether an idle connection is still functional. This is especially useful to have when working with long-lived streams that are often idle but only intermittently see activity (for example, gRPC streams). We have added the ability to send periodic PING frames in Kestrel by setting limits on KestrelServerOptions.

public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) => Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args) .ConfigureWebHostDefaults(webBuilder => { webBuilder.ConfigureKestrel(options => { options.Limits.Http2.KeepAlivePingInterval = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10); options.Limits.Http2.KeepAlivePingTimeout = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1); }); webBuilder.UseStartup<Startup>(); });

Support for additional endpoints types in the Kestrel sockets transport

Building upon new API introduced in System.Net.Sockets, the sockets transport (default) in Kestrel now allows you to bind to both existing file handles and unix domain sockets. Support for binding to existing file handles enables using the existing Systemd integration without requiring you to use the libuv transport.

Custom header decoding in Kestrel

We added the ability to specify which System.Text.Encoding to use to interpret incoming headers based on the header name instead of defaulting to UTF-8. You can set the RequestHeaderEncodingSelector property on KestrelServerOptions to specify which encoding to use.

public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) => Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args) .ConfigureWebHostDefaults(webBuilder => { webBuilder.ConfigureKestrel(options => { options.RequestHeaderEncodingSelector = encoding => { switch (encoding) { case "Host": return System.Text.Encoding.Latin1; default: return System.Text.Encoding.UTF8; } }; }); webBuilder.UseStartup<Startup>(); });

Other improvements

• For preview 7, we’ve started applying nullable annotations to ASP.NET Core assemblies. We intend on annotating most of the common public API surface of the framework during the 5.0 release.
• CompareAttribute can now be applied to properties on Razor Page model.
• Parameters and properties bound from the body are considered required by default.
• We’ve started applying nullable annotations to ASP.NET Core assemblies. We intend to annotate most of the common public API surface of the framework during the .NET 5 release.
• Authorization when using endpoint routing now receives the HttpContext rather than the endpoint instance. This allows the authorization middleware to access the RouteData and other properties of the HttpContext that were not accessible though the Endpoint class. The endpoint can be fetched from the context using context.GetEndpoint().
• The default format for System.Diagnostics.Activity now defaults to the W3C format. This makes distributed tracing support in ASP.NET Core interoperable with more frameworks by default.
• CompareAttribute can now be applied to properties on a Razor Page model.

• FromBodyAttribute now supports configuring an option that allows these parameters or properties to be considered optional:

  C# public IActionResult Post([FromBody(EmptyBodyBehavior = EmptyBodyBehavior.Allow)] MyModel model) { ... }

Give feedback

We hope you enjoy this release of ASP.NET Core in .NET 5! We are eager to hear about your experiences with this latest .NET 5 release. Let us know what you think by filing issues on GitHub.

Thanks for trying out ASP.NET Core!

Jenova Chen is one of the original indie game development stalwarts, having co-founded Journey developer thatgamecompany with Kellee Santiago in 2006.

Chen and his studio have been proponents of making games that bring about more subtle emotions than fear or excitement. On the latest episode of the GDC Podcast, he explained why he’s drawn to designing games like Flower, Journey, and the studio’s latest game Sky: Children of the Light.

Listen now on iTunes, Google Play Music, and Spotify

“My goal has changed over time even though the mission is the same,” Chen said. “The mission of the company is to help promote video games and let the people around the world that the game industry and games as a media is not all negative like people think. It could be positive, have a good influence on peoples’ lives and it could be considered as a form of art.”

Chen said at first with games like Flower, thatgamecompany simply wanted to make games that were counter to the game industry status quo. And Journey was a response to games that centered on killing, instead focusing on emotions and working together.

“We wanted to make you feel small, we wanted to make you feel in awe, not knowing all the answers,” he said.

But Chen said that even though Journey gained an audience, attention in the art world, and critical acclaim, that one effort wasn’t enough to tilt the scales in favor of more evocative games across the game industry.

“After Flower and Journey, just proving a game can touch people does not change the industry,” he said. “It doesn’t even change society’s view on games as much…nobody cared.”

“For a while I was very disappointed,” Chen said. “I thought that if games could be accepted by the mainstream as art, then people would respect the industry, but they didn’t.”

He said at one point he spoke with his mentor, long-time game industry figure-turned-investor Bing Gordon, and asked him when society might treat games the same way as cinema and literature; as a form of art.

“Bing just said, ‘don’t worry, these people are all going to die, the people who didn’t grow up with games will die very soon,'” Chen recounted, “‘and the ones who grew up with games will already automatically consider them as an artform.'”

“And I said, ‘well in how many years?'” (laughs) But Chen said as years have moved on, he’s realized it’s not about just sitting around and waiting for older people to be replaced by younger people. “We actually have to push for the content itself [so] people who are older will still think games are relevant,” he said.

GDC Podcast music by Mike Meehan

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