The news reorganization is available now, starting with mobile devices for English speakers in the US. It’ll reach other countries and languages in the “coming months.”
Google’s shuffle comes as part of a larger effort to promote quality news and otherwise burnish its search engine’s reputation amid mounting concerns about misinformation. This isn’t just about improving your experience, in that light. It’s also meant to please governments worried about political meddling and publishers who have a less-than-friendly relationship with Google.
They include messaging with your Oculus pals, along with photo and video sharing and livestreaming to Facebook. You can create events to set up a time to play games with your buddies or arrange meetups, and form parties that all your Oculus friends can join (parties were invite-only until now). Your Facebook friends will also be able to group up with you in VR when you send them links via Messenger.
Oculus says to use these features — and existing ones such as joining parties, adding friends and visiting people’s Homes — it’ll ask you to sign in with Facebook, which powers the social interactions. Facebook has updated the Oculus Privacy Policy to clarify that.
You won’t have to log in with Facebook to use the VR platform. If you do, you’ll still keep your existing Oculus friends, username and profile. You can decide to display your real name (as per your Facebook profile) on Oculus and whether to automatically add your Facebook friends as Oculus contacts. You’ll have control over what you share from Oculus to Facebook as well, along with who can see those posts.
It’s worth noting that if you do sign into Facebook on the VR platform, the former will tap into your Oculus data to power the social features, as well as recommendations and ad targeting. It might suggest things like VR events you might be interested in and ads for apps on the Oculus Store. The privacy policy changes won’t affect third-party apps and games. An FAQ spells out the types of data Oculus and Facebook will share if you connect the accounts.
The ties between Oculus and Facebook services will deepen over time, with new features such as Facebook Group sharing options and watch parties on Quest on the way. A beta for the Facebook Horizon social VR world is also slated for next year.
If you are playing at home, you’ll notice some big differences. It now sports a revamped interface that serves as a central hub for launching games, streaming to social sites, checking for driver updates and other common tasks. You can even browse the web, and the software is context-sensitive to ensure you’re getting relevant controls.
Other additions include dynamic resolution scaling (aka Radeon Boost) to keep frame rates high, wider hardware support for Image Sharpening and Anti-Lag as well as integer scaling that gives your older games a crisp look on modern displays. This isn’t so much a classic driver update as it is an expansion of what AMD’s GPUs can do — it’s likely worth a go if there’s an eligible Radeon sitting inside your machine.
Rather than forming equally-sized teams, players choose any of the four teams they want to join. To compensate for lopsided teams, smaller groups get a boost in attack power. The group of the last player standing wins. As players get knocked out, they go into spectator mode and have to wait until the game wraps up to receive XP. If you want to play with buddies — whether in Team Battle Mode or the standard Tetris 99 mode — you can set up a password-protected game. That said, it would be nice if Nintendo finally figured out how to handle a system-wide friends list like Microsoft and Sony did over a decade ago.
Playing the new Team Battle Mode will also earn players points toward Tetris 99‘s 10th Maximus Cup, which runs from 11 PM PT on December 12th to 10:59 PM PT on December 16th. The 999 players with the most points will win 999 Gold Points, which can be used toward buying Nintendo eShop downloads.
It’s very difficult to win a match of Tetris 99, so by adding a team-based mode, more players will be able to get a taste of victory. The fact that the new mode is free makes it an even better proposition.
We’ve asked BMW about support for wired Android Auto as well as the possibility of upgrading older vehicles.
This won’t be ideal if you’re driving a slightly older BMW or prefer a phone that simply won’t get support. Nonetheless, it’s good news if you’d rather not switch to an iPhone just to avoid BMW’s media and navigation features. It also reflects a growing trend among automakers to offer both Android Auto and CarPlay — they’re acknowledging that customers would rather not declare allegiance to a particular brand just to use a phone-based interface in their cars.
To say the Ad Library bugged out at the worst possible time would be an understatement. On Thursday, people in the UK will vote in what will likely go down as one of the most important elections in the country’s history. Who they decide to lead their parliament will have major implications on Brexit, as well as a whole host of other issues that stem from the decision to leave the European Union.
Facebook told CNN Business and several other publications, “We have fixed the bug and all of the impacted ads in the UK are now back in the Ads Library.” The company didn’t say what caused the issue in the first place, nor did it comment on exactly how many ads disappeared.
The issue was first spotted by researchers from Who Target Me?, a non-profit organization that advocates for political ad transparency. The group told Sky News, the first publication to report on the issue, “tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands” of ads went missing from Facebook’s database.
Due to the bug, the platform couldn’t provide accurate spending figures. It said, for example, that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party spent less than £200 on advertising on Facebook since November 8, instead of the more than £100,000 previous data had shown. In effect, the Ad Library couldn’t do what it was designed to do, which is provide a clear accounting of how politicians advertise on Facebook.
For Facebook, whatever caused the bug, the company will likely come under more pressure to change its political ad policies. There are already calls for the social media giant to follow Twitter in banning political advertising from its platform, and this latest misstep doesn’t make Facebook look adept at handling sensitive issues.
For now, only a handful of stages are available in P-06.
According to Moris, only “very small snippets of pseudo-code” can be accessed or seen in Sonic 06‘s files. These digital tidbits include values, formulas and parameters for core character attributes, such as running speed and jumping height. They also provide some insight into the game’s levels, including objects and enemies. “But that is a very small fragment of what makes the game,” Moris said.
The closed-off nature of Sonic 06‘s programming isn’t unusual. Most games, Moris explained, have scripts and code that are inaccessible unless you’re the owner or creator of the game. Thankfully, some knowledgeable users online have managed to crack open Sonic 06 files that explain the three-dimensional placement and rotation of each object in the level. It’s often not obvious, though, what these values relate to and the additional code that’s required to make them work. “A lot of the time, whether an object works correctly or not, compared to the original game, depends on if I manage to code it to work exactly, or at least similarly to its original counterpart,” he explained.
With those small code snippets, as well as minimal models, textures, videos and sounds, Moris started to piece the original game back together. At first, he simply tried to recreate each level while hiding or removing the most obvious “broken stuff.”
“I have to go through every spring, jump ramp and launcher.”
The developer had a good sense of how the game looked and played just by watching and analyzing YouTube videos. He also created a folder that now has “gigabytes” of reference material, including beta footage and fan-recorded gameplay. “It wasn’t too hard to figure out how it controlled originally,” he said. A larger problem was making sure every piece of the environment behaved properly. “The way [the original] Sonic 06 controls objects is very unpredictable,” he explained. “I have to go through every spring, jump ramp and launcher and see if they even make the character land where they’re supposed to.”
There was also a ton of assets that Moris had to create himself, including textures, character animations, typefaces and “most of the shaders,” in the game. He used some asset packs from the Unity store and, where possible, tried to improve the ones that shipped with the original game.
P-06 includes reworked character models.
Such a large project required some collaborators. In the original game, for instance, Sonic is portrayed using six different character model files. These cover Sonic’s complete body, an alternate body with gem shoes, Super Sonic’s body and then three faces used in standard gameplay, cutscenes and while playing as Super Sonic. A Scottish modder called Gotta Play Fast used Autodesk 3ds Max, a professional application for 3D modeling and animation, to combine these pieces in a way that would be easier to use inside Unity. After “quite a few tries,” Gotta Play Fast told Engadget he ended up with five complete meshes for the game: Sonic and Super Sonic, as well as standard, gem and Super Sonic’s gem shoes.
Another modder called Beatz helped with textures, increasing the resolution of the original Sonic 06 assets, some model work that included rigging and collision fixes and eventual beta testing. Daguar, meanwhile, helped with beta testing, researching the original game and creating a loading screen template that emulated the E3 2006 demo. The latest P-06 read-me file also credits Volcano the Bat for helping with assets and various reverse engineering challenges and gives special thanks to users Wiz Genesis, Hero, Sajid, LuRodSil, HyperPolygon64, KnuxFan24, Thomas James Baker and BrianuuuSonic.
Many of these users describe their contributions as “minor,” though. “Especially considering that the actual development and coding is currently only being made by one person, ChaosX,” Daguar said. “He’s really talented and hard-working and I’m sure he’s going to have a bright future in game development.” Moris added: “Everything has to go through me in the end, the only owner of the project files, putting everything together.”
Look at that water!
The first P-06 demo, which only contained the Wave Ocean and Kingdom Valley stages, was released last April. The announcement video has roughly 150,000 views on YouTube and, more importantly, a deluge of comments praising its visuals and bug fixes. “You are a god,” one user wrote. “This looks gorgeous,” another viewer named The Bone said. “This dude is literally fixing a game that was supposed to be the best Sonic game ever, all while adding extras to the game to make it better,” a user called Batbudd commented. “Bravo.”
Version 1.5 was released the following month with bug fixes, gameplay tweaks and small quality of life updates, such as improved widescreen support and a farther back camera position. Moris then released a second demo — the one with five stages — in October. A user called Raze commented on the announcement video: “You’re a god. Thank you so much for remastering this game, it looks so good!” Another, called Saikuran, said: “Bless you, for real. I have a huge soft spot for ’06, and I’m loving all the effort you’re putting in to make it the game it could have been if it wasn’t for the multitude of development issues.”
“It’s been two years working full-time on this project. It’s about time for [me to have] some vacation.”
The demo was followed up with a “v2.5” bug fix update last month. In that video, Moris revealed that he would be taking a short break from P-06 so he can focus on other passions and get some fresh air. “It’s been two years working full-time on this project, and it’s about time for some vacation,” the developer said.
ChaosX’s latest bug fix video.
The P-06 demos are further evidence that Sonic isn’t finished as a pop culture icon. The blue blur can’t compete with Mario in the 3D-platformer genre, but he’s found some success in smaller projects like the wonderful Sonic Mania and the enjoyable if hardly ambitious Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. A computer-animated version of the hedgehog is also starring in a movie next year alongside James Marsden (X-Men) and Jim Carrey (The Mask). Fans hated his appearance in the first teaser — the human teeth and strangely muscular legs were a bit much — and pressured Paramount Pictures to change it. His redesign, shown off in a “new official trailer” last month, was a massive improvement.
Unsurprisingly, Moris doesn’t know when P-06 will be finished. Some demos take longer than others to complete, and he can’t predict when he’ll be “happy” with the game or how long it’ll take to eradicate every conceivable bug. “I have no idea when it will be finished,” he admitted. “A wild guess would probably be in two years, but I’m very unsure about that.”
Moris has modest expectations for the project, too. He knows that many parts of Sonic 06 — including its reputation and impact on the larger franchise — can’t be changed or fixed. The developer also expects P-06 to remain an “underground” project for Sonic fans and those who can appreciate what Sega was trying to achieve with the original release. “Hopefully one day this game can be liked as much as any other Sonic game,” Moris said. At the very least, P-06 will broaden access to a game that — while generally disliked — is an important part of Sonic’s history and necessary to understanding his place in the industry today.
The eBeaver is a highly modified version of de Havilland’s legendary DCH-2 Beaver, equipped with a 750 horsepower electric motor from Redmond, Washington-based Magnix. Harbour Air announced its partnership with Magnix earlier this year and said it planned to build the world’s first “completely electric commercial seaplane fleet.”
So far, electric planes have failed to make much of a dent. Quite a number have been built, tested and even sold, but none are close to being ready to take paying passengers. “This is real,” Magnix CEO Roei Ganzarski told Fortune. “This is an airline flying their own aircraft.”
Harbour currently has 14 six-passenger DHC-2 Beaver aircraft, many of which are equipped with Pratt & Whitney PT-6A turbine engines that burn about $300 worth of jet A fuel per hour. By contrast, the eBeaver packs enough battery life to fly about 100 miles at a cost of around $10 to $20 worth of electricity.
E-planes have a very limited range compared to ICE-powered models because lithium-ion batteries have less than 5 percent the energy density of gasoline or jet fuel. However, 100 miles is enough for many of the short seaplane hops around Vancouver’s lower mainland. The distance between Vancouver and British Columbia capital Victoria (downtown to downtown) is 58 miles and takes about 30 minutes by plane, while the same trip on a ferry can run over four hours including driving time and waiting. (Also, as your author can attest from brutal experience, the flight is a lot less boring.)
Despite the range challenges, electric planes have big advantages over ICE-powered models. That includes lower maintenance and operating costs, no need for fueling infrastructure (other than chargers) and easier boarding on local routes. “We are proving that low-cost, environmentally friendly, commercial electric air travel can be a reality in the very near future,” said Ganzarski.
The company has previous in pushing the envelope in this area, partnering with Snapchat and then launching its own video platform. Now, as Varietyreports, Giphy Video will feature content with audio — although initially only a number of pre-selected media partners will be involved. Content will come from the likes of Universal Pictures, Geffen Records and BBC America, designed to pique interest in and get people talking about upcoming movies and TV shows. Clips will be capped at 30 seconds, although Giphy is recommending a limit of 15 seconds because… attention spans.
At this juncture, the move is certainly revenue-driven, but the success of audio GIFs will undoubtedly lie in user-generated content — Imgur did something in this vein last year. As Giphy CEO Alex Chung tells Variety, “It took years for GIFs to be popular.” And when they did eventually hit the mainstream, it was meme culture and the Extremely Online types that got them there — not corporations. But, Chung says, the company has no plans yet to open up the platform to the general population. Still, if the format exists, it won’t be long before someone gets it into the hands of regular users — whether or not that’s Giphy remains to be seen.
If you're already struggling with the idea of entering a whole new decade in a couple weeks' time, here's something that's going to make you feel even older: Angry Birds is 10 years old today. In kid terms, it's on the cusp of middle school and it's…
If you're already struggling with the idea of entering a whole new decade in a couple weeks' time, here's something that's going to make you feel even older: Angry Birds is 10 years old today. In kid terms, it's on the cusp of middle school and it's…