Runic Games Posts Status Update for Torchlight II - Still No Release Date
There are some games that have a release date set from the beginning and then others that have a general release window. Of course there are a select few that have a "when it's done" approach, but we are not talking about those titles. No, the game we are talking about is Runic Games' upcoming Torchlight II, which so far still has a vague "Summer 2012" release. Yesterday a developer at Runic posted an update concerning the progress of Torchlight II, but the team is still keeping quiet on when exactly we will be able to experience the sequel. Runic set to work on implementing changes from last month's beta, which dealt with everything from redoing the skill "tree," respecs, joining games, and plenty more.
The big change was with the skill "trees," and yes that is "trees" because how Torchlight II handles the skills is pretty different from other action-RPGs. Skills are still available for investment by level, but they no longer unlock by a set position on the tree. This allows Runic to place the skills where it wants, and also means your character gets a specific bonus at every five point mark on the tier. Skills are also now queueable and can be bound to the Function keys for easier access. Inventory sorting has been added, uniques have been made more unique, and a ton of other improvements were made from beta feedback.
Runic made all these changes to the game, but the team still needed to polish the entire thing before it can launch. Two of the simpler polish aspects involve adding a "retool" checkbox that allows you to repopulate the game world and getting a relay server set up to let players know the issue if there is a connection problem. Runic also wants to fix an issue where two players lose connection to each other but not the rest of the people in a server. Then there comes the polishing of the game's Acts.
Polishing the Acts takes the longest time as everything has to work properly. All four Acts in Torchlight II are finished, but polishing involves making sure the monsters are fun to fight, the groupings work, and there are no balance issues present. There is no saying just how long the polishing can take, but Act 2 is about 3/5 of the way done if that gives you any idea.
You can read the full blog post to get a better idea of just what is being done on Torchlight II, but suffice to say the team will try to get weekly updates posted on the progress. Runic is working on the game to get it in our hands as soon as possible, and I am sure no one will mind the team getting everything perfect.
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Get Your Ravaged Beta Codes Here!
We here at OverclockersClub have a short and sweet contest for our members that is a little different from our usual contests. This time we have some beta codes to give out for 2 Dawn Games' upcoming post-apocalyptic, vehicular first-person shooter Ravaged. The team at 2 Dawn had a Kickstarter up earlier this year, and if you happened to miss out on supporting it and securing a beta spot, you are in luck. OCC generously received 15 beta codes to give out, so what better way to do it than with a contest! You need to be a member at our site for longer than 90 days and have at least 100 posts, plus you need to be a member of the OCC Steam group to enter. Additional entries will be provided for every full year you have been a member at OCC.
The contest ends this Saturday, July 21st, at 10pm EDT. It is rather short because the developers play the beta on Sundays at 1pm or 7pm EDT, so we figure getting you into the beta before then will be for the best.
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Prolimatech Giving Away Thermal Compound Prolimatech is currently running a contest on its Facebook page and the lucky winners will receive either the PK-2 or PK-3 thermal compound. The PK-2 improves upon the performance of the PK-1 thermal compound by making it "as easy to spread as warm butter on bread." The PK-3 compound features nano particles that help make this compound the best performing offering from Prolimatech. Five first place winners will receive the PK-3 and ten second place winners will receive the PK-2. To enter, simply like the Facebook post about the contest and share the picture on your wall. The winners will be picked on Monday and if more than 1,000 people enter the amount of winners will be doubled. Read More ...
Lian-Li Announces PC-X2000FN Case Lian-Li has announced a new case to accommodate motherboards with the EATX form factor, the PC-X2000FN. The case is 27.3" tall and 9.4" wide and the brushed aluminum exterior creates a great looking case. It is split into three sections with the top holding hard drives and optical drives, the middle holds the motherboard and all that plugs into it, and the bottom has room for the power supply and an additional hard drive cage. A maximum of seven 3.5" hard drives and three 2.5" hard drives can be installed throughout the case. In addition to an EATX motherboard the middle section also has room for CPU coolers up to 7.0" tall and graphics cards up to 13.3" in length. The case also has space for up to five fans to provide airflow. All of these features will come with an MSRP of $499. Read More ...
Lithium-Sulfur Battery X-Rayed Right now I have at least ten lithium-ion batteries within arm's reach. The reason this kind of battery is used as much as it is has to do with its relatively high energy density and its ability to be recharged multiple times without failing. Unfortunately these batteries are not cheap, especially when considering larger batteries like those in electric vehicles which can represent more than half of the vehicle's total cost. A potential replacement is the lithium-sulfur battery which can store five times more energy while being cheaper, but it has one major flaw. Lithium-sulfur batteries can only be cycled 20 times or so before they completely fail. Researchers have been trying to understand why this happens, so they can prevent it. Previous studies have shown that the sulfur completely vanishes from the cathode, which makes the battery inoperable. However a new study from Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has found this is not completely true. The previous studies of the batteries used electron microscopes to examine the batteries after being cycled, disassembled, and cleaned. The Stanford researchers however used an X-ray microscope to peer into a battery while it operated and found the sulfur does not leave the cathode. So why did the previous studies report the sulfur went missing and why don't the batteries last long? The researchers suggest the washing of the battery's components before being put under the electron microscope washed away whatever sulfur was there. The reason the batteries stop functioning though is because some sulfur will occasionally leave the cathode and bond, permanently, with the lithium. It does not take many of these lithium-sulfur crystals to prevent the battery from working. Now that researchers actually known what is happening, they can focus on fixing it.
ZOTAC Announces GeForce GT 640 and 630 ZONE Editions Some people just like having a quiet computer, especially if it is for a home entertainment system. ZOTAC is taking care of HTPC users thanks to its two new GeForce GT cards. The ZOTAC GeForce GT 640 and 630 ZONE Edition cards feature a passive cooler while still delivering more than enough performance for the average user. The GeForce GT 640 can deliver smooth playback at 4K resolutions (up to 4096x2160), which should keep you satisfied for years to come. The GT 640 can also handle some video conversions and transcoding thanks to the NVEnc video encoding engine. CUDA support on the GT 640 will help speed up video editing in compatible programs, plus the NVIDIA Surround technology means you do not have to be limited to a single screen. The GeForce GT 630 ZONE Edition, on the other hand, is for the user who does not need 4K video performance but still wants to get some improvement for their dollar. Both the GT 640 and 630 have a DVI-I, DVI-D, and mini-HDMI port, DirectX 11 support, and require no external power connectors. Both the ZOTAC GeForce GT 640 and 630 ZONE Editions should be available shortly, although no price was mentioned. Read More ...
Combining Water and Paraffin to Cool Batteries Ever felt a laptop or phone get warm as the battery heats up from use? Those are small batteries so imagine how hot batteries in an electric vehicle (EV) can get. Unfortunately batteries cannot stand very high heat and those used in EVs prefer to be between 20 ºC and 35 ºC. Reaching 45 ºC will actually cuts its useable lifespan in half. To avoid this, an air cooling system is used, but like computers, a liquid cooling system would be better. Such systems are still in development though and face several hurdles including the limited amount of water that can be stored in a vehicle. In the future though, a different medium being developed at Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft may prove better than water for cooling batteries. CryoSolplus is a dispersion of water, paraffin, stabilizing tensides, and glycol, an anti-freeze. Paraffin is a phase change material (PCM) that researchers around the globe are looking at as a means to store and regulate thermal energy. When it's hot, paraffin absorbs the heat and melts, but once the temperature drops it releases the heat back to the environment as it solidifies. With the other additives, CryoSolplus has a thermal capacity three times that of regular water, which is huge when considering the limited space within a vehicle. Having already overcome the issues of the paraffin particles sticking together and the fact it is lighter than water, the researchers are now looking to optimize the dispersion further. The hope is to achieve an even better heat capacity while improving the material's heat transfer and flow capability. Eventually the researchers will also start field testing CryoSolplus in an experimental vehicle. Read More ...
Chinese Company Steals Torchlight Game Assests - Runic Responds Borrowing ideas for a creation is nothing new, but outright stealing something is a major problem. A game by the name of Armed Heroes Online has appeared on the Canadian App Store for iOS devices, and users have noticed a number of similarities between it and Torchlight. Runic Games' president Travis Baldree alleges that all of the monsters, dungeons, sound effects, and voices are ripped from Torchlight. When you look at videos and screenshots of the two games, it is pretty easy to see how nearly everything in Armed Heroes Online, developed by EGLS in China, is a direct rip of an asset from Torchlight. An EGLS employee says there has been no wrongdoing and showed a few images proving the point, but then took a strange turn for the worse. The employee said Torchlight ripped off other games, most noticeably Fate, and attacked what Baldree has done. The only problem with this is Baldree was the lead designer and programmer on Fate, so perhaps EGLS decided to not do any research before going on the attack. Hopefully Baldree and Runic can get Apple to remove the ripoff from the Canadian App Store and prevent it from appearing in the US store. Baldree says he and Runic have no problem with people being inspired by Torchlight, but blatantly ripping off assets is a different matter altogether. Read More ...
Switching Molecular Handedness with Light There are more differences between left-handed and right-handed people than just their handedness. By having a dominant hand a person will also develop a dominant half of their body and even a dominant half of their brain, which can affect how we move and think. Though called chirality, molecules can also be right or left handed, which results in different properties, and these different versions of the same molecule are called enantiomers. The differences between enantiomers can be quite extraordinary. Take limonene which smells like lemons with one chirality and like oranges with the other. Switching between enantiomers is normally a slow process because it requires actually changing the structure of the molecule, but researchers at Berkeley Lab have developed a material which not only quickly switches but does so when exposed to the correct frequency of light. Researchers have been looking for this ability for some time as it could open up many possibilities for data processing, security, and ultrahigh-speed communications. The material the researchers created is actually a metamaterial, consisting of two meta-atoms. These meta-atoms are designed to be opposite enantiomers and can be switched on and off with a flash of light. By always having one of the pair active, the researchers can switch between the effects of the enantiomers, which in this case change how it polarizes terahertz light. As polarization affects how a material or molecule interacts with the light that hits it, the ability to quickly switch between polarizations could allow for a non-invasive means to detect different compounds. Read More ...
GTA IV's 75% Summer Steam Discount Complemented by iCEnhancer's Sleek Version 2.1 Mod The PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV has been both loved and loathed by many gamers as a complex city sandbox title that put even high-end circa 2008 rigs to their proverbial knees. Several performance patches from Rockstar and a few other mods have made the world of Liberty City a stabler experience, with the game becoming even more spectacular-looking thanks to the efforts of 21-year-old coder Hayssam Keilany, among others. Keilany's GTA IV project comes to an end with his last mod, iCEnhancer Version 2.1. Reinstall that dusty copy of GTA IV you've got lying around to see just how amazing Rockstar's virtual crooked city looks under iCEnhancer's sheen. Don't have a copy? Get GTA IV from Steam for just a measly $4.99 today.
Replacing Graphite with Silicon Sponges in Batteries A key part of lithium-ion batteries is the component which interfaces the ions to the electrodes. Normally this is a piece of graphite, but researchers have been looking to replace it with some other material that reacts better. Silicon is such a material, but is more fragile than graphite, which poses a problem. Now researchers at Rice University have devised a new form the silicon can take which improves its effectiveness while also allowing it to survive longer. The reason silicon being fragile is an issue in lithium-ion batteries is that the material expands as it absorbs the ions. This expansion causes stresses which can break pieces of the silicon off that have the potential to destroy the battery. In 2010 it was demonstrated that silicon can be given a sponge-like shape with pores one micron wide and 12 microns deep (one micron is a millionth of a meter). The silicon sponges were made on a substrate which, at the time, could not be removed from the sponge, and impaired performance. Now the Rice researchers have found a way to detach the substrate from the sponge using the same process that creates the pores. The researchers also found a way to enhance the conductivity of the sponges by soaking them in a polymer binder and they can deepen the pores to 50 microns, which allows for more ions to be held in the sponge. When tested to see how the polymer treatment affected the sponges performance, the researchers saw the discharge capacity of 757 milliamp-hours per gram increase to 1,260 mAh/gm, and a longer life to the sponge. The untreated sponge survived only 15 charge-discharge cycles while the treated version kept a constant discharge rate through 20 cycles. Hopefully the researchers can find a way to greatly increase the number of cycles the sponges can survive, as batteries need to last for years. Read More ...
CD Projekt RED Co-founder Says Companies 'Over-Exploit' Gamers If you start counting the number of games that have paid downloadable content, you may be going for a little while. Paid DLC exists for many games, and while some of the content adds new levels, quests, and areas, there are others that simply add something cosmetic. Gamers have been getting nickeled and dimed for ages, but CD Projekt RED co-founder Marcin Iwinski says the practice has to stop. Constantly asking gamers for more money will "drive publishers into the ground," according to Iwinski, and he may be on to something. Gamers want the $60 product to contain everything they need to enjoy it and not have to shell out another five dollars for some characters already on the disc. That kind of stuff will drive gamers away and publishers do not seem to notice the "over-exploiting" of the customers. Free is always better, which is something CD Projekt RED found out with The Witcher 1. Iwinski said the studio went to Atari, the publisher at the time, and explained all the extra content it wanted to give gamers for free. The Atari executives balked at the idea and said it should be $10, but CD Projekt disagreed. Free DLC was released for The Witcher 1, which in turn helped to drive sales of the Enhanced Edition pretty far. I wish more companies would follow the lead of CD Projekt RED and release content for free, but the publishers typically have a different idea. Maybe one day we will not have that problem, but until then, we have to cherish the companies that buck the trend. You can read Marcin Iwinski's full interview with Gamasutra here. Read More ...
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