After 72 hours of intense battles, the final Splatoon 2 Splatfest results have now been tallied up. Chaos reigns supreme as Pearl takes out the victory, with a 3-0 win over Marina’s Team Order. Below is the full breakdown:

In the video below, courtesy of Nintendo Life contributor Gonçalo Lopes (Team Order), you can see how the aftermath unfolds.

The outcome is not necessarily as bad as Marina was expecting – with Pearl announcing the duo should break into new musical genres…at least until her solo career gets off the ground.

If you participated in the final Splatfest, be sure to collect your Super Sea Snail prizes in the main square. And if you’re wondering about the future of Splatoon series, check out our previous post from earlier this week.

Did your side win? Leave a comment below!

In the beginning there was dual boot, it was the only way to have more than one operating system on the same laptop. At the time, it was difficult for these operating systems to be run simultaneously or interact with each other. Many years passed before it was possible, on common PCs, to run an operating system inside another through virtualization.

Recent PCs or laptops, including moderately-priced ones, have the hardware features to run virtual machines with performance close to the physical host machine.

Virtualization has therefore become normal, to test operating systems, as a playground for learning new techniques, to create your own home cloud, to create your own test environment and much more. This article walks you through using Virt Manager on Fedora to setup virtual machines.

Introducing QEMU/KVM and Libvirt

Fedora, like all other Linux systems, comes with native support for virtualization extensions. This support is given by KVM (Kernel based Virtual Machine) currently available as a kernel module.

QEMU is a complete system emulator that works together with KVM and allows you to create virtual machines with hardware and peripherals.

Finally libvirt is the API layer that allows you to administer the infrastructure, ie create and run virtual machines.

The set of these three technologies, all open source, is what we’re going to install on our Fedora Workstation.

Installation

Step 1: install packages

Installation is a fairly simple operation. The Fedora repository provides the “virtualization” package group that contains everything you need.

 
sudo dnf install @virtualization
 

Step 2: edit the libvirtd configuration

By default the system administration is limited to the root user, if you want to enable a regular user you have to proceed as follows.

Open the /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf file for editing

 
sudo vi /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf
 

Set the domain socket group ownership to libvirt

 
unix_sock_group = "libvirt"
 

Adjust the UNIX socket permissions for the R/W socket

 
unix_sock_rw_perms = "0770"
 

Step 3: start and enable the libvirtd service

 
sudo systemctl start libvirtd

sudo systemctl enable libvirtd
 

Step 4: add user to group

In order to administer libvirt with the regular user you must add the user to the libvirt group, otherwise every time you start virtual-manager you will be asked for the password for sudo.

 
sudo usermod -a -G libvirt $(whoami)
 

This adds the current user to the group. You must log out and log in to apply the changes.

Getting started with virt-manager

The libvirt system can be managed either from the command line (virsh) or via the virt-manager graphical interface. The command line can be very useful if you want to do automated provisioning of virtual machines, for example with Ansible, but in this article we will concentrate on the user-friendly graphical interface.

The virt-manager interface is simple. The main form shows the list of connections including the local system connection.

The connection settings include virtual networks and storage definition. it is possible to define multiple virtual networks and these networks can be used to communicate between guest systems and between the guest systems and the host.

Creating your first virtual machine

To start creating a new virtual machine, press the button at the top left of the main form:

The first step of the wizard requires the installation mode. You can choose between a local installation media, network boot / installation or an existing virtual disk import:

Choosing the local installation media the next step will require the ISO image path:

The subsequent two steps will allow you to size the CPU, memory and disk of the new virtual machine. The last step will ask you to choose network preferences: choose the default network if you want the virtual machine to be separated from the outside world by a NAT, or bridged if you want it to be reachable from the outside. Note that if you choose bridged the virtual machine cannot communicate with the host machine.

Check “Customize configuration before install” if you want to review or change the configuration before starting the setup:

The virtual machine configuration form allows you to review and modify the hardware configuration. You can add disks, network interfaces, change boot options and so on. Press “Begin installation” when satisfied:

At this point you will be redirected to the console where to proceed with the installation of the operating system. Once the operation is complete, you will have the working virtual machine that you can access from the console:

The virtual machine just created will appear in the list of the main form, where you will also have a graph of the CPU and memory occupation:

libvirt and virt-manager is a powerful tool that allows great customization to your virtual machines with enterprise level management. If something even simpler is desired, note that Fedora Workstation comes with GNOME Boxes pre-installed and can be sufficient for basic virtualization needs.

Santorini is an incredible abstract strategy game. Yes, it rehashes the old truism ‘easy to learn, hard to master’ as its tagline, and its artstyle is rife with chibi-style Greco-Roman mythical figures, but trust me, every part of this syncretic approach works. Abstracts have a habit of punching well above their weight, and this one will twist your brain in knots. On a 5×5 grid, players take turns moving figures and placing buildings, step by step, the iconic ivory-and-azur builds of the island Santorini. It is a skillful game with a rich, cutesy presentation.

The core ruleset is wicked simple, but also stays true to abstraction as a genre by offering a robust challenge. Santorini’s masterstroke is to offer an additional layer that gives each player a unique power which breaks the normal scheme of things. Gaia has extra pieces for example, and Artemis can move twice. The game is satisfying even in its powerless, vanilla form, so mixing in these variations makes for a truly infinite challenge. In this, it reminds me of Cosmic Encounter as much as Chess. Both are helter-skelter in its variety, regimental in core procedure. Each turn a piece must move (either adjacently or orthogonally) and then build nearby. A piece can move at most one step up but can ‘jump’ any steps down. The game ends when one player advances their piece to the third level from a lower level. It can also, more rarely, end because the other player cannot make a legal move with either of their pieces. That’s the gist of it, barring certain edge-cases and power interactions.

I had forgotten how rusty I’d become and upon firing up the app for the first time I proceeded to lose to the temptingly-named ‘novice’ AI. A few times. This game has teeth, folks, and its bots will trounce the unwary. Re-learning good play was like revisiting Chess, or perhaps Cinco Paus. Certain patterns and rules of thumb emerge. The center is vitally important, one generally seeks the upper ground to gain the upper hand, and initial placements are almost never around the periphery of the board. It’s difficult to generalize beyond this, but after just a few thoughtful short play sessions, Santorini creates something like a flow state: pure challenge, effortless concentration. Can’t say I’m a grandmaster or that these bouts of time spent were filled with earth-shattering insights, but I can vouch that the flow means it’s an inviting game to lose yourself in.

It’s also an inviting game to learn. The system and rules are so simple as to appear plain, indeed many people bounce off abstracts because they seem ‘dull’, but Santorini has plenty of spirit and style. It’s a good game for kids to pick up, because it has a low barrier to entry and some whimsy to its presentation. Said whimsy belies an absolutely ironclad, zero-variance mental slugfest. ‘For kids’ means the highest praise, cool enough to attract fickle attention but clever enough to hold up over ages. There’s a metagame and deeper level of nuance behind power matchups, but the standard ruleset is extremely refined and punishing. The game has opted for a series of short videos to illustrate bite-sized examples of the game. There’s a mother-lode one for how to play, and a bunch of spin-offs which each explain a specific character’s power. The game also has really clean-cut iconography, with suggestive visual icons for a power above the ruletext and an eminently readable board. The color saturation and architecturally distinct levels make parsing the field at a glance a breeze. So, yeah, it’s polished.

It also has a decent online multiplayer, though here some features are lacking. You find matches either through random pair-ups, or by invitation only with a code. There is an ELO-based ranking system but no official ranked mode. Last but not least, all online multiplayer uses a 45 second turn timer. Usually that’s enough to speed things along without undue pressure, but one would hope that exceptions for particularly vexing turns were possible.

The single player ‘Odyssey’ mode is very fun, structured as a series of God-specific challenges with optional trophies to unlock. Your playstyle and strategic headspace probably has favorite gods and least favorite foes, so if nothing else, Odyssey is a nice way to sample the field. It’s kinda like Splendor’s challenge mode, creating artificial constraints the player has to solve creatively. The game isn’t drowning in content but it is dripping with replayability. Do note that more than a few of the gods are premium DLC, and that their respective parts of ‘Odyssey’ are also locked.

Here at Pocket Tactics, we’re deeply fond of our board game adaptations. Usually they’re a long time coming, and when they arrive they breathe new life into an older, august title. Well, even among these, Santorini is special. For one, its history stretches back a little further than most. It had pretty much become an obscure collector’s item, praised but unknown, from its 2004 self-published version until its 2016 Kickstarter gave it a new art style and high production values, along with widespread, cost-efficient distribution. The game has always been very good, only lately to have been given the just distinction of becoming well-known. It’s even better than most other adaptations, partially because the game is simple, so plenty of attention has been given to bells-and-whistles. There are sophisticated animations, unique effects for each god power, and a full-throated soundtrack.

Santorini is a picturesque dream of an island, and the game with its namesake is as good as it gets. It marries perfectly two distinct brands of appeal, the wildly imaginative to the coldly analytical. Enough beauty and wit are in this one to keep Santorini on a gamer’s homepage and daily rotation for a good while. Great for abstract die-hards, excellent for those just getting their toes wet. The DLC pricing is a smidge high, and the lack of asynchronous multiplayer a little disheartening, but these are trifling drawbacks to a paragon of what abstract board games can be.

The cross platform open source Java based game framework libGDX just released version 1.9.10.  If you are interested in learning libGDX we have a comprehensive tutorial series available here and a video series available here.  While the tutorials are a few years old, libGDX is a mature framework that has stayed relatively stable over time, so they should still be perfectly valid.  This release updates several of the dependencies to newer versions as well as an update to the Gradle build system.

Highlight details of the release include:

• GWT update to 2.8.2
• MobiVM release 2.3.7
• Lwjgl 3.2.1
• Lots of QOL and bug fixes for GWT backend
• Better iOS backend customization
• PixmapPacker features like NinePatch and whitespace stripping
• InstancedRendering support via Mesh and InstanceBufferObjects
• SCENE2D (Standard tweaks and improvements across the board)
• Gradle updates to latest

Full release notes and details are available here.

GameDev News LibGDX

Sega is always happy to experiment with Sonic the Hedgehog, and early next month on 4th August, Sonic and Miles “Tails” Prower will be appearing in Cartoon Network’s animated series, OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes.

The news was revealed at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con. Below is the official Twitter announcement:

As you can see in the video above, the brief clip is filled with plenty of Sonic references – ranging from iconic poses and hand gestures to music straight out of the video game series. The episode is titled “Let’s Meet Sonic,” and will see the blue hedgehog and two-tailed fox visit the plaza and team up with KO to save the day! This episode will also be available on the Cartoon Network app.

If you’re unfamiliar with OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes, it’s about an enthusiastic young boy who earns a job at a hero supply store and trains to become the greatest hero ever.

Will you be tuning in to see Sonic and Tails? Are you a regular viewer of this animated series? Leave a comment below.

This month, Insomniac Games and Sony released Marvel’s Spider-Man, a fluid, polished, and surprisingly grounded take on the web-slinging hero that’s drawn wide praise and sold millions of copies.

And while it’s easy to credit the wall-crawler’s worldwide fame as a big part of that success, the work Insomniac Games has done polishing every minute of Spider-Man’s adventure is worth remembering as well.

Recently, we were lucky enough to be joined by Insomniac Games game director Ryan Smith to talk about the development of Marvel’s Spider-Man, and learn more about the process in making Spidey feel like a genuine superhero.

Whether it’s the incredibly dynamic wall-crawling or building a New York in need of a champion, we wanted to know what Insomniac did to fuel their Spider-Man with great powers, and an even greater responsibility.

The swing is the thing

Smith’s perspective on Marvel’s Spider-Man starts from the fact that, no matter where the story goes or what villains Spidey squares off with, players will spend most of their time in this game doing one activity: swinging. Spider-Man’s unique traversal system has long been a draw in the various Spider-Man games made over the years, but for Smith and his colleagues, this pendulum-like movement would be the root of all their work.

Smith starts our conversation by explaining that the pendulum movement came first and foremost. As players hold down the right trigger, Spidey looks for an object nearby to shoot a web at, then swings down, then up to continue his forward movement. Right away, Smith says this flow creates visual and spatial differences that set the game apart from Insomniac’s last open-world title Sunset Overdrive. 

“There’s also a difference in feel in terms of the speed that this character moves, the grand motions you make when you swing,” says Smith. “So you actually look at the city in a very different way: you’re looking at it a little further off in the distance.”

Insomniac Games’ Sunset Overdrive, released in 2014

“Sunset Overdrive, [the player sees] very rapid-fire changes. This one, we had a smoother motion that you’re looking at and you’re looking at bigger picture city changes.”

From there, the gameplay team needed to determine what would happen with each point in the parabolic arc where players could release the rope. “We looked at, on the swing, not just how does it feel to be on the line, but where are those right points to let yourself off the line and how can we make that a little bit of a game mechanic?” explains Smith.

This led to a decision to give players more decisions to make in traversal. Pressing jump at the end of a swing can launch them forward, but choosing to release earlier in the swing can send the player’s vector downward, changing direction toward street level.

Next, Smith pointed out the importance of “speed cues” in this crafting process. Examples include the motion blur from a straight dive down, or the slow-moving buildings in the distance while players zip through the foreground.

All the while, these movement systems (which include a handful of non-swinging moves like zip-lines and leaping systems), are fueled by hand-crafted interactions in the Insomniac Engine. To Smith, game physics are useful for collision tests, but when Spidey takes wing, it’s more important that “custom hero states” drive the swinging and moves.

An Empire State of Mind

The open world of Marvel’s Spider-Man might be better described as an open metropolis. It’s a scaled-down version of New York City that mushes together notable landmarks like Wall Street and Trinity Church (which is detailed so finely you can swing by the grave of Alexander Hamilton, as seen below). Unlike a lot of recent open-world adventures, Marvel’s Spider-Man doesn’t confine its hero to specific zones and then shuffle them along into new areas as the story progresses.

Instead, it keeps the city open, and uses a district system not only to organize its quests and activities, but also unique flavors of gameplay that keep the swinging from becoming stale.

“Also if things are always consistently—‘I can just press one button and just drive through the whole city,’ then that takes away some of that player engagement and that sense of flow and involvement,” Smith says. He compares three of the game’s districts and their architecture next. “The Financial District has really tall skyscrapers, Hell’s Kitchen is maybe a little bit lower…we looked at real spaces, actually Central Park is a great example.”

To build on Smith’s point, a quick spin through the city of Marvel’s Spider-Man shows the kind of detail he’s talking about. In the Financial District, it’s easier to get a higher altitude and make wide, sweeping swings between skyscrapers over the smaller buildings below. But when heading into Hell’s Kitchen, the player is now caught more in the local grid of the city. When making navigational changes, they either need to follow that grid’s path, or hoof it over the buildings and use more lateral traversal moves to move in the desired direction.

And when it comes to Central Park, it’s a wonder Spider-Man can even swing through there at all. But Smith says getting New York’s biggest natural landmark down was a big priority for Insomniac Games.

“You actually can swing through Central Park but we looked at those sections of the game that aren’t as natural as swinging off skyscrapers,” says Smith.” And we asked ourselves what feels right? Central Park, its central right? It defines the overall size of the island, it relates very directly to the whole shape and feel of it.”

“We did multiple tests with like a smaller Central Park, a bigger Central Park, and so we wanted to know both that if I’m swinging along side of it, what’s the right size, what’s the right distance where it feels like what’s the right size, what’s the right distance where it feels like ‘Wow, that is a Big Central Park, it feels right.’ But at the same time how can we find those opportunities in the middle to let you swing off the trees or the lamp posts that are in there?”

If this be Insomniac’s destiny

During our discussion with Smith, one surprising caveat to our conversation was how much of Spider-Man’s feel comes from all the games the company’s produced in the past, along with its proprietary Insomniac Engine.

Smith points to two specific titles whose DNA can be felt in Marvel’s Spider-Man in particular. The first is Sunset Overdrive, which is where Smith says the company learned about open-world traversal and shaping cities to improve gameplay. The second though, is the Ratchet and Clank series that Insomniac was previously most famous for.

In particular, Smith discussed how the myriad weapons and gadgets that players touted in Ratchet and Clank drove the gadgets and powers that players pick up during the course of Marvel’s Spider-Man. “That was something where we were able to leverage the experience we had building [Ratchet and Clank] weapons and awesome gadgets in previous games to integrate that into combat.”

“We knew that was a way that we could have players could express themselves and they’re gonna be still hopefully discovering different ways gadgets combined together and different strategies for taking guys down.”

Smith describes working with the company’s proprietary engine as “part of the Insomniac DNA,” and says using the engine helps his team set audacious goals for the game’s streaming budget and graphics. He adds that it also affords his team the ability to create custom workflows and tools that best fit their workflow.

 

“We were able to leverage the experience we had building [Ratchet and Clank] weapons and awesome gadgets in previous games to integrate that into combat.”

Unlike the development process for Sunset Overdrive, Smith says that Insomniac Games didn’t rely on internal game jams this time around to prototype dramatic new ideas. But he does say that a lot of the game’s niche features, like a photography mechanic and subway station-based fast travel system, came from a similar instinct of random team members pairing up to implement a unique design idea.

Per Smith, both systems solved problems that were occupying the design team at other levels. They knew even with a fun traversal system, players would still want to zip around the map, and even though exploring the city was meant to be fun, Smith and his colleagues wanted ways for exploration to feed back into the combat system.

Thanks to team members collaborating together though, both the subway system and the “landmark photo” mechanic were hashed out, letting Insomniac put a Spider-Man-flavored spin on traditional open-world systems.

“It takes a village,” Smith told us as we closed out a conversation. But if the success of Marvel’s Spider-Man is any indication, it’s helpful when that village has a history, elders, specialists, and a known tool as well.

We know you’re busy and might miss out on all the exciting things we’re talking about on Xbox Wire every week. If you’ve got a few minutes, we can help remedy that. We’ve pared down the past week’s news into one easy-to-digest article for all things Xbox! Or, if you’d rather watch than read, you can feast your eyes on our weekly video show above. Be sure to come back every Friday to find out what’s happening This Week on Xbox!

Read the Final Chapter of The Sinking City’s Hero Origin Story
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FromSoftware’s Legendary Mech Game Metal Wolf Chaos Coming to Xbox One August 6
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The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Arrives August 30, Pre-order Today on Xbox One
Hey, Xbox fans! It’s great to speak to you all on this big day for us here at Supermassive Games. Along with our publishing partner Bandai Namco, we’re excited to announce that not only is Man of Medan releasing on August 30… Read more

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Free-to-Play Fishing Planet Available Now as Xbox Play Anywhere Title
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July 2019 Xbox Update Delivers New Features for Xbox Game Pass, and Xbox Skill for Alexa
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Digital Extremes Eclipses Past Updates with Deep Space Combat Demo at TennoCon 2019
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Free Play Days: Rocket League
Start your engines, prepare your Rocket Boosts, and don’t forget to bring your friends. Rocket League, the hit sports/action hybrid and recipient of more than 150 Game of the Year nominations, will be available for free this weekend… Read more

Coming to You in Full Color and Cine-Sound: The Cuphead Show!
Hi, everyone! Chad Moldenhauer from Studio MDHR coming to you with an announcement so surreal I can honestly say I never thought I’d be making it… Cuphead will be coming to life as an original Netflix series, “The Cuphead Show!”… Read more

Xbox and Rockstar Energy Drink Unveil Second and Third Gears 5 Collector’s Series Cans
At E3 2019, Rockstar Energy Drink and Xbox unveiled plans to launch the largest fan inspired game promotion to date to support the upcoming launch of Gears 5. Today, ahead of the Gears Esports Invitational presented by ELEAGUE… Read more

The Bard’s Tale IV: Director’s Cut Arrives Digitally on August 27 and at Retail on September 6
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Gears 5 Multiplayer Debuts at This Weekend’s ELEAGUE Gears Summer Invitational
In April 2019, Xbox and Turner Broadcasting announced that ELEAGUE, the premium esports content and live event brand from Turner and IMG, would produce the “ELEAGUE Gears Summer Series,” a six-part linear series… Read more

All the Details for Gears of War at San Diego Comic-Con
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Next Week on Xbox: New Games for July 16 to 19
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