New Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Details Emerge; Separate Studio Working on Last-Gen Version
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was officially announced yesterday with a reveal trailer featuring Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey, and now details on the game are slowly trickling in. According to a press release from publisher Activision, "this is the first iteration of [its] expanded three-year development cycle allowing the debut lead title from Sledgehammer Games an added year of studio development." The extra development time has allowed Sledgehammer to "create a near photorealistic world unlike any Call of Duty before," and employ new performance capture and facial animation techniques. It also helps that Advanced Warfare is being developed specifically for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, while GameSpot is reporting that a separate unnamed studio is handling the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions.
According to Activision, Advanced Warfare is set in the year 2054, where "a private military corporation (PMC) has emerged with the power to rescue humanity from a devastated world struggling to rebuild after a global attack on its military and infrastructure." Players take on the role of an advanced soldier empowered by cutting-edge exoskeleton abilities, technological advancements, and high-tech gear. The aforementioned exoskeleton abilities include such things as boost jumps, cloaking, and enhanced strength or speed – in other words, Sledgehammer is borrowing heavily from Crysis. Players will also have access to directed-energy weapons, which would presumably disable such abilities and/or vehicles.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is scheduled to release on November 4 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. It is unclear at this time whether the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions will release on that same date.
Source: Press Release and GameSpot
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Google Now Provides Offline Compatibility
Google Now has been displayed as a remarkable tool for Android users since its initial release. The service, which is a part of Google Search, provides various personalized information such as weather, sports scores, and drive times directly to users. One issue that has plagued Google Now for quite some time however has been that it was unable to deliver the aforementioned information through Google Now cards if no data was available. Google has pushed an update to the service which remedies this issue, and now, users of the service provided by Google can read information from Google Now cards while their smartphone is offline.
To receive the new offline capability, users simply need to ensure that the Google Search application successfully updates.
Source: Google+
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NZXT Hosting Case Design Competition
Shortly after announcing a trio of new color combinations for the H440 case series, NZXT has announced a competition to create new color combinations for the Phantom 240 case line. Five different areas of the case can be customized on the NZXT website and a total of three designs will be chosen to be made into real cases. The three winners will receive a prize pack including a laser etched Phantom 240 in their color scheme, an NZXT Kraken CPU cooler, a Shine 3 mechanical keyboard, a HALE82 V2 700W PSU, and one Sentry 3 fan controller. The contest runs until June 1, 2014.
Source: Press Release
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CCP Unveils Project Legion, a Re-imagining of PS3 Shooter Dust 514 for PC
Icelandic video game developer and publisher CCP Games announced last month that it canceled production of vampire MMO World of Darkness, instead turning all its focus on "developing games within the Eve universe." One such game is Dust 514, which is a free-to-play first-person shooter on the PlayStation 3 where player actions can impact Eve Online and vice versa. It always seemed a bit odd that Dust 514 was only available on PS3, despite Eve Online being only available on PC, but that finally seems to be changing.
CCP is currently holding its annual FanFest, and today, executive producer Jean-Charles Gaudechon presented a world-exclusive live demo of the studio's newest project, a re-imagining of Dust 514 for PC. Entitled Project Legion, CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson told Eurogamer that it's "a new approach to being a mercenary on the ground" and that "it's almost more a revolution than an evolution, and that's why wer're calling it Project Legion, because it's, frankly, more like a new game." Pétursson said it's the same team that worked on Dust 514, so they're very experienced now, which has allowed them to work much quicker on the game than they did on Dust, helped by the fact that "much of the world already exists on PC, in Eve."
The live demo started in a player's hub with a view of a nearby planet and spaceships buzzing around. From the hub, players access a star map, which zooms down to a planet view where you can select tournaments, missions, and scavenging grounds. Scavenging grounds apparently mixes PvE and PvP, where the lines become "blurrier the deeper into space you get." Like Eve, players will be able to betray each other, which apparently got a cheer from the audience. The planet shown in the demo was a volcanic one, with top notch lighting and particle effects thanks to the power PC exclusivity provides.
According to Eurogamer, the fighting was sporadic due to the massive size of the map, encouraging more of a sandbox experience rather than the intense combat you'd typically expect from an online shooter. At this time it's hard to tell how appealing that would be for a shooter, but it does seem right up the alley for Eve Online fans. That being said, Gaudechon told the crowd that "it's early stuff" so not to get their expectations up. No estimated release date was given, nor was it stated whether it'll be free-to-play like Dust 514 is. Sadly, there's no trailer yet, but Eurogamer did manage to gather three environmental screenshots.
Source: Eurogamer
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Record Cold Star Discovered Nearby
Typically when one pictures a star, they imagine a large and very hot ball of gas. Stars come in many varieties though, and some do not fit that description. Researchers at Penn State University have recently found one such star using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescope.
The Sun is a fairly middle-of-the-road star, with many stars coming in heavier and hotter, and many being lighter and cooler. Brown dwarfs definitely fall into the latter category as it has to be decided if each example is indeed a star or just a large gas giant. They are so lacking in mass that when the gas collapsed to form them, the gravity was not intense enough to initiate nuclear fusion, which makes them very cold. The recently discovered WISE J085510.83-071442.5 brown dwarf is actually as cold as Earth's North Pole, with temperatures between -48 and -13 ºC. The researchers do believe it is a star though, and not just a gas giant, like Jupiter, but three to ten times larger.
As the researchers analyzed it, they determined it is only 7.2 light years away, which puts it at the fourth-nearest system to our own. Even though it is very close, its cold temperatures mean we will likely never try to send anything to it, or any planets that may be orbiting it.
Source: EurekAlert!
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Five Companions Detailed in New Bound by Flame Screenshots
Two weeks ago, publisher Focus Home Interactive released five screenshots for Spiders' fantasy RPG Bound by Flame that focused on the game's hero. But you're not alone in your quest against the seven Ice Lords and their undead army. As the official Combat Trailer showed us, Bound by Flame also features various companions for you to take along with you. Today, Focus released five new screenshots featuring five different companions. In order of their appearance in the images below and in Focus' own words:
- Sybil, the young mage, provides excellent long-distance back-up and uses a special skill that enables her to heal you during combat.
- Randval the warrior excels at hand-to-hand combat and will divert the attention of your opponents, leaving you free to attack safely and to cast your devastating fire spells!
- Rhelmar the elf is an expert in ranged combat and will rain arrows down on your enemies while you charge into the heat of the melee.
- The witch, Edwen, has mastered certain hitherto unknown dark and mystical arts. She is able to devastate adversaries at long range with powerful magic spells, and can temporarily take control of an enemy's mind and turn it against their allies.
- Last, but not least, Mathras is no ordinary undead... more ancient than the Ice Lords themselves, Mathras has perfected the art of swordsmanship and melee combat over the last several thousand years. Like Edwen, he can also reverse the allegiance of an opponent for a short period using his willpower alone!
Source: Press Release
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Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Arriving November 4, Starring Kevin Spacey
A new Call of Duty game released within the first two weeks of November each year has become an inevitability for almost a decade now, so why would 2014 be any different? It has been known for awhile that Sledgehammer Games was working on the next Call of Duty game, but the official announcement and title was unveiled today via a reveal trailer, starring none other than Kevin Spacey! The trailer, captured on Xbox One, shows cloaked airships, hoverbikes, spider-tanks, heavily armored suits, drones, deployable cover, wall-climbing via special gloves, and of course, lots of gun play.
Source: Press Release
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Cox Will Soon Provide Gigabit Internet to Residential Customers
While Google has recently announced its plans to bring fiber to more cities across the United States, Cox Communications is now laying out its own roadmap in direct competition. Pat Esser, the president and chief executive officer of Cox, noted in an interview that the company plans to bring gigabit cable Internet to residential customers by the end of this year. Eventually, the company plans to be able to offer every subscriber gigabit Internet, and Esser even remarked on how the availability of gigabit Internet to residential customers is a natural extension of the services it already provides to businesses.
Cox will begin announcing which markets the rollout will be coming to within the next two to three weeks.
Source: PCWorld
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NVIDIA Sponsoring Charity Auction
NVIDIA has partnered with Falcon Northwest to create a one-of-a-kind gaming PC to auction with proceeds going to benefit the Philip Scholz Memorial Foundation. The Foundation was created in honor of an NVIDIA employee that was killed when saving someone from train tracks and "provides scholarships to needs-based youth and promotes outdoor physical activities involving his favorite pastime, baseball." The PC is loaded with all of the latest technology including the GeForce GTX Titan Black, Intel i7 4770k, ASUS Z87 Maximus motherboard, and two 1TB Corsair M50 solid state drives. People interested in bidding can do so through eBay.
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Razer Taipan Now Available in White
Razer has announced that its ambidextrous mouse, the Taipan, is now available in a bright white finish. In addition to the white finish, white lighting is included in the scroll wheel and logo. The Taipan joins the Kraken Pro gaming headset as the two Razer products available in white. The Taipan is compatible with PC and Mac and is configurable using the Razer Synapse software.
Source: Press Release
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Combining Research to Improve Understanding of Thermal Conductivity
Whether it is our cars or computers, we are all familiar with systems that waste energy as heat. Depending on the specific system, the amount of energy lost can be significant so researchers are working on thermoelectric materials to capture some of that energy. There has been a mystery about some of these materials, and other materials that researchers at MIT may have finally solved.
One would expect that similar materials would have similar properties, but in reality, this may not be the case. For some time researchers have been vexed about why one material may be a good thermal insulator, while a similar material is not. The answer the MIT researchers have found has not come from thermoelectric research though, but from research into phase-change materials. These materials can significantly change their properties in response to a change in temperature because of resonant bonding. Resonant bonds have electrons that flip between several adjacent atoms and while their impacts on electrical and optical properties have been studied, thermal properties have not been. The researchers have found that it is in fact long-range interactions of these flipping bonds that causes the varying thermal conductivity in similar materials.
Thermoelectric devices work by producing a voltage across a material, when there is a heat differential, so a low thermal conductivity is needed to maintain the differential. By better understanding what affects a material's thermal conductivity, we can better predict and design materials for specific applications.
Source: MIT
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New Means for Building Lab-On-a-Chip Devices
According to movies and televisions, laboratories are filled with beakers, test tubes, and Bunsen burners, connected by a maze of tubing. In the future though, labs may be the size of a chip and capable of running specialized experiments very quickly. Researchers at the University of New South Wales have recently found a way to build lab-on-a-chips (LOCs) that overcomes some important challenges.
One form an LOC can take is for the channels on it to be comprised of a liquid solvent, placed on the chip in a specific pattern. While printing tiny droplets of a solvent into a pattern is not too difficult, there is the problem of the solvents evaporating. The New South Wales researchers found a way to overcome this by using ionic liquids. These are actually salts that are liquid at room temperature, which removes the evaporation risk. They are also designer materials, so they can be given the special properties an application requires.
The most obvious use of lab-on-a-chips is to perform chemical tests with them, especially medical tests, quickly and cheaply, but this ionic liquid design could have some other uses as well. These include fabricating integrated circuits as metal salts dissolved in the ionic liquids can electrically triggered to deposit onto a substrate.
Source: University of New South Wales
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Hardware Roundup: Thursday Edition
May is upon us, and we have some reviews to welcome the new month. There's a look at the CyberPower Zeus Mini-I 780 gaming PC, which packs an Intel i7 4770K, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780, and 16GB of DDR3 RAM into a fairly small case. Speaking of small cases, we have a review on the Cooler Master Elite 130 mini-ITX case. Despite its small size, it certainly doesn't seem to be lacking in features, so be sure to hit up the review to see what all it can bring. Lastly there's a look at the Sentey Phoenix gaming keyboard, with its seven dedicated macro keys and blue LED backlighting to hopefully offer something enticing for gamers.
Cases
Cooler Master Elite 130 @ LanOC Reviews
Prebuilts
CyberPower Zeus Mini-I 780 Gaming System @ ThinkComputers
Keyboards/Mice
Sentey Phoenix Gaming Keyboard @ Neoseeker
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Bing Smart Search Receives Improvements
The Bing Relevance Team has unveiled new and improved ways to use Smart Search powered by Bing in Windows 8.1, which has already provided the ability for users to find photos, documents, websites, and other information locally or within the cloud. Smart Search, which is built specifically for touch and was introduced by Bing in October of last year, is now able to identify common questions typed into the search bar by users. Some examples include installing a printer, retrieving new applications for windows, changing screen brightness, and even deleting an application. Users can simply type a question into Smart Search powered by Bing and receive a relevant Windows 8.1 style answer.
Bing Smart Search has also received improvements in recognizing common spelling mistakes, as well as making sure that more specific and applicable solutions are provided for user generated questions.
Source: Bing Blog
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