Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse Out Now On Netflix
While it's the Marvel Cinematic Universe that garners so much attention, one of the best Marvel movies in recent years--and arguably ever--was last year's animated film, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Sort of like the movie itself, Into the Spider-Verse has hopped from screen to screen, delighting fans worldwide. After a strong showing during awards season and grossing $375.5 million, the Oscar-winning animated film has hopped to another screen--the home streaming screen. Ahead of the theatrical release of Spider-Man: Far From Home, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has finally landed on Netflix.
Miles Morales, a socially-awkward teenager, is the lead in Into The Spider-Verse. What starts as a narrative about love and acceptance slowly opens into grander scope as Miles is bit by a radioactive spider, granting him spider-like abilities and impressive physical prowess. The movie then transitions into an endearing story about hope and faith and confidence as an older Peter Parker involuntarily mentors the hapless teen.
Into The Spider-Verse walked away with a few trophies in hand earlier this year, winning both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature, and many others. It was no surprise that producer Amy Pascal confirmed a sequel with the film's smashing success, saying her team is "definitely hard at work on the sequel." No further details were provided, including a release window, but we do know the sequel will likely contain more dimension-hopping Spideys.
In our Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse review, we said, "It manages to blow right past the dangers of sinking into after school special territory by believing wholeheartedly in its own message and delivering it with appropriately genuine stakes. The end result is an instant animated classic, and, with any luck, the first of many of its kind."
Netflix has a stacked month ahead. The releases for July look to fulfill a wide range of binging desires, with Cloverfield (July 1), Stranger Things 3 Season 3 (July 4), The Princess and the Frog (July 16), Inglourious Basterds (July 22), and more, all showing up for America's birthday month.
A Premium Gamer’s Take on Harry Potter: Wizard’s Unite
By Michael Coffer27 Jun 2019
The Harry Potter universe has been gifted with a vast lore and sundry cast of characters. Its magical world is already half-ensconced in everyone’s hearts. So it comes as no surprise that such a beloved franchise would be reincarnated as a real-time, real-world global phenomenon in the form of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. I’m plainly not among its intended audience, but despite this handicap, Wizards Unite already found itself a place in my daily life, which is a tough feat.
If you want some beginner tips to get you started in Wizards Unite, check out this guide!
For the hardcore tactical crowd, real-world Harry Potter might seem at first blush to be a hard sell, yet the game is surprisingly nuanced (though not especially complicated). Basically its interlocking system of stats and ever-revolving timers mean that success pretty much requires a strategic mindset.
I won’t list ad nauseum the tips and tricks to maximize your experience churn or battle effectiveness, but I will tell you that within days I felt a pure and relentless drive to gain those competitive advantages for myself. ‘Competitive’ is a relative term, of course, because in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite everything is co-operative, with the ultimate goal being to marshal each wizard’s powers to mitigate a Calamity. Retrieving ‘Foundables’ means snatching all those precious magical characters and items and rescuing them. So the while game’s co-op, though there’s plenty to do and brag about.
It has a tasteful take on timers. Namely, perhaps the most important resource of all, spell energy, does not replenish automatically. This choice seems gross, nasty, limiting, *superficially*, but the constraint is actually brilliant. It encourages thoughtful planning and means the urge to ‘always be playing’ is a little less omnipresent. You get energy from inns and occasionally other spots, so energy is regained by going out into the world. Once more unto the breach, as it were.
And these trips are quite economically packed into an ordinary day, honestly, which is another refreshing surprise. Yes, certain thresholds ought to be reached daily (*ahem daily quests*) to get the most bang for your time investment, but even in short bursts the game just flows. Though I will say that accurate spellcasting, in which the player should rapidly and precisely trace the on-screen glyph, does not go well with even a slow amble. Better spell-sketching does appear to mean marginally better experience rewards, so it’s generally worth doing well.
Magical Realism
There are a million small quirks and tricks like these, and the fun part is that they can be discovered organically through play. A good game teaches you how to learn its systems, and Wizards Unite does this through more than overly-chummy, voice-acted tutorials. Its interface is clearly delineated into the overworld and resource management portions, for example. A few quality-of-life tips. First, you probably want power saver mode, because this one is a battery guzzler. Secondly, in the interest of conserving data roaming and bypassing asset loading hiccups, go under options and download everything on a fast network.
The Wizard Challenges are kinda like raids or perhaps dungeons, and they are such fun because of how easy it is for friends to just pop in and assist matters. Right now, there is a class system, ‘Professions’ that very roughly breaks down into the Holy MMO Trinity of DPS-Tank-Support, which is nice. It’s not Naxxramas but it is interactive and free-wheeling.
There are hints of a larger mystery and story afoot, and I can’t say when I’ll pierce the veil, for it looks like this is the endgame content for maxed accounts. Most games like this strive to make the present status quo all-important through laser-like focus on factions and territory struggles. Wizards Unite wants its players to excavate the past. In a personal sense of the pure nostalgia trip, in a gamer sense of finding every last Foundable, and most curiously, in a plot sense by retracing the lives and tragedies of some new characters who created the present Calamity. This is Cool Stuff™, and I can only hope that player’s actions will guide how future story installments unfold.
Veritaserum with a Dash of Felix Felicis
Now, it isn’t all roses. Lest this writeup seem hyperbolic by setting a low bar, do keep in mind that this game is relentless. It follows certain evergreen rules of free-to-play. There is always something valuable to do, which in a way makes the monetisation feel less predatory, but the flipside means the whole contraption risks feeling like a magical fusion of a Skinner Box and hamster wheel. I will say that its sense of place and timing is quite gracile, and that the game is relatively low-variance. Its payouts and reward systems are fair, if only when compared to hideous cousins. And I can tell already this game has legs, so early adopters will be able to cruise through any later story or content expansions. To sum it up: the game is binge-worthy but it really isn’t binge-able.
So it’s fully intended to become part of your life, and on that front there’s naturally community, social media integration and cosmetic options. Wizards have customized wands, sure, but accessorized selfies? So be it. Still, any game that encourages meeting up with others and romping around town is going to encourage some fresh air and friendly faces, guaranteeing mild exercise of body and mind. And that’s why my impressions have been peppered with uplifting phrases and themes like ‘refreshing’ and ‘tasteful’. It’s so easy to be jaded and cynical when it comes to massive launches of blue-chip IP like this. But if you take it without preconceptions, on its own terms, the results behind this game will be gratifying. I urge one and all to try to see with fresh eyes and give it a shot.
And if Harry Potter isn’t your thing, there’s always the Minecraft one due later this year-ED.
At last year’s E3, Techland introduced Dying Light 2 to the world with the help of a new lead writer: Chris Avellone. The former Obsidian writer was on hand to explain that not only was he working on Dying Light 2, but the game would also be adding an incredible amount of choice-based divergence.
Instead of following a linear adventure like the first game, players will be constantly making choices that will reshape the zombie-filled city they’re parkouring around in. At E3 this year, Techland showed off a demo behind closed doors that established how far these decisions will go. Small decisions can open or close quest paths in a way that will be familiar to many RPG developers, but Techland also showed off a prominent divergence that literally impacted the physical level design of Dying Light 2.
At the end of the demo, Dying Light 2 protagonist Aiden Caldwell must choose whether to open the pumps to give water to the whole city, or practice restraint and listen a the Colonel Kurtz-like NPC who has another plan for the city. It’s a (complicated) moral choice, but more importantly, it’s a decision that will impact the actual game geography.
Lower the pumps, and a new section of the city becomes available, filled with a new type of zombie. Keep the pumps raised, and the player will never see that section of the city, or those enemies, in the rest of their playthrough.
After the demo, lead game designer Tymone Smektala was on hand to chat about the game design process of Dying Light 2, and how Techland is taking inspiration from Avellone’s choice-driven storytelling to make a more emergent game experience.
What have you learned in a year as a game designer since you got to show Dying Light 2 to the world?
What I learned is how complex it is to work with narratives that are nonlinear, and with sandbox space that can have a lot of variation and variance in it. You need to support every possible combination of these too. This is really stressful, and we had to come up with some internal methodologies for how we wanted to handle this.
This is really a headache, especially if you’re doing this for the first time. But thankfully we have support from Chris Avellone, who’s basically a master of nonlinear narratives. He has been supporting us very much, first of us he shares his knowledge with us, he shares his experience with us, he helped us build the world that Dying Light 2 takes place in.
The city, the factions, the whole lore is either made by Chris himself or with support from Chris. But I think the most important thing we benefit from right now is the fact that he also as I said shared with his knowledge with his internal team of writers.
So he did a lot of nonlinear games where you have choices and those choices have some kind of consequences, of course these games never really offer the opportunity to change the actual game space, but still this helps out. He knows how to do it, he knows how to approach it, so it’s manageable.
You said a great word in there, methodologies. We’re seeing a lot of procedural games this year at E3, would you be able to share anything about the procedural methodologies developed for Dying Light 2?
If you are pushing this in that direction, the biggest tool for us in that regard is something we are calling CityBuilder. It’s not the fanciest of names…
It’s a good name!
This is our internal tool that lets us create a city like you have in Dying Light 2 with a lot less effort than we would need to have if it was all done manually. There’s a guy outside who is the architect of this system…our engineering programmer, he could answer more questions about it. This is our tool that allows us to build whole cities from prefabs, small pieces.
When I say small pieces, I don’t mean like building stuff, basically each part of the city, of the geometry you see, every ledge, every window, every door opening, everything is one brick that’s used by CityBuilder to create various city parts which doesn’t require that much input from our level designers. It understands our game, it understands what works in parkour, so it’s a great tool that lets us create something quite quickly, and iterate quickly.
Emergent gameplay is a promise that everything you do has a consequence. What have you found is a way to let your team make very emergent gameplay without it explode out of control and break your game?
So I think there are two questions in one. The first one is actually about emergence itself. We have to introduce a lot of different solutions for that. One of the biggest – and it always works – is basically physics. We have so many cool emergent moments because of the physics and how it plays with things like our AI behaviors, with our destruction models.
For example, we had one presentation today early where in the first scene of the demo, we want you to see that emergence so we try to cut off the head of the first guy. The player did that, and the head flew off. But the head hit another guy in the face, and it broke his nose! So suddenly he started bleeding from his nose because he got hit by that head cut off by another guy.
So that’s emergence. When we talk about the number of variance not blowing out of proportions, you have to put a limit somewhere. Because the limit is either your capabilities as a developer or even the limits of the Blu-Ray disc you have to ship the game on.
We decided what’s important, what kind of changes are important to us. The goal is to create a game where each player can feel that they were able to shape the city by their own decisions, and we look at things that really support that. Things that let you activate or deactivate. Reveal or destroy, heat or unheat interactive elements of the sandbox space.
This is how we kept our head cool, let’s say, and how we were able to wrap our heads around it.
You’re working with a custom engine, right?
Yes it’s our in-house engine, it’s called C-engine. It’s something we’ve built purposefully for the games we’re making. Techland said internally it wants to make open-world first-person games, and this is an engine that supports that with a lot of different things, how it streams data, how it streams spaces with the high fidelity of graphics you see in the scene. All of those things, we have built in the engine on purpose because we know what kind of games we want to make.
What are some other things you found that emergent gameplay system rewards you in terms of making interesting moments for the player? How do you create a sense of triumph, or partnership with the NPCs?
When we talk about partnership with NPCs, this is an important part of our game. This might not be that visible here in the demo, but there’s a theme to Dying Light 2 which asks you to look at the selfish needs of the player character and the collective needs of the NPCs around you. When you first start thinking about it, you may think “screw the NPCs, they’re just computer people on my monitor, I don’t really care about them, I want all of the good stuff for me as a player character.”
But there’s a theme in our game where you will have to choose between the needs of your player character and the needs of those computer people. But when you finish the game, you start thinking “maybe I shouldn’t be so insensitive. Maybe I should think about the NPCs more. Maybe there’s something those guys are trying to tell me. Maybe it’s not always about thinking about yourself. Maybe we should sometimes think about other people as well.”
Is there anything in the gameplay about letting players see those consequences that you think has emerged?
This is something we knew by gut instinct, but it’s clear in playtesting it’s really empowering for players that they feel their decision made some kind of a change. The bigger the change, the bigger the scale of it, the bigger the feeling of empowerment.
We had a lot of people leaving our playtests saying “wow, this was amazing when I climbed to the highest building, the shape of the city, what’s in it, is because of my decisions.” maybe this is not a new finding but it really solidified in our heads and experience and knowledge knowing it makes a difference and knowing that it excites people and they know they can impact what’s happening in the game they’re playing.
A lot of devs talk about their willingness to let the player miss content a lot. You mentioned that the player will miss 50% of the content in the game, because they’re going to make binary choices and content will be locked off. As a person who makes games and loves seeing people play your stuff, how does it feel to put a lot of work of something and only a few people see it?
No! But I still believe people will see it. We had a very high number of players who completed Dying Light. So we had 50 percent of people completing the first game—
A 50 percent completion rate?
That’s crazy if you compare it to other games, if you think about it.
That’s incredible.
We had also about 35 percent of people playing co-op in a game which wasn’t really about co-op, it was just a mode we added. 35 percent of people were playing co-op. We had guys really going crazy with it, the guys who played 4,500 hours. I believe they will go back to the game even when they finish it, this is something they will really experience, and this will really get them interested.
I think also we did some artistic choices that we hope will really engage people, like the modern dark ages thing. You see things from the modern times but we’ll say they’re medieval-ized. This is something that really interests players, because this is kind of familiar, but also alien, so you want to explore that. So I think people would want to stay in our game for a long, long time.
Valve launches VR Portal spinoff Aperture Hand Lab
(Update: An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to Aperture Hand Lab as the “flagship” title Valve teased alongside the Valve Index reveal, and has since been corrected.)
Valve and Cloudhead Games have launched Aperture Hand Lab, a VR-based spinoff of Valve’s Portal series intended to teach VR newbies the ins and outs of the Index’s offerings.
The company took a similar approach with the short Portal-themed VR game The Lab it launched alongside the HTC Vive in 2016 as well. This time around, Aperture Hand Lab was developed by Call of the Starseed dev Cloudhead Games, with Valve credited as its publisher.
The VR title can be played with any SteamVR compatible headset, including the Valve Index and the HTC Vive, though, as pointed out by UploadVR, Valve Index controllers are required to play since they offer additional finger tracking over other SteamVR friendly controllers.
Stay Silent is Now Available on Steam Early Access!
Stay Silent is a western-themed multiplayer online FPS game for virtual reality (VR). You will become the sheriff of an American town in the Wild West of the 1880s. Fight against stealthy bandits and brutal aliens on dark, silent nights using traditional firearms and powerful alien weapons!
The combat update from 1.9 has been a controversial topic for many. Some loved the changes, while others hated it and refused to move on from 1.8.
Mojang has been hard at work trying to make it the best experience possible to the needs of PC players while also making sure those that play on phones or tablets have a good experience.
To this end, jeb has posted on Reddit a new custom snapshot which contains several large changes to combat.
This is a summary of those changes, as explained by jeb:
This “manually installed Java snapshot” is the first experiment of the new direction of combat mechanics. It’s based upon the current Java Edition system, but with the following major changes:
Overall much faster attacks
Attacks only happen when fully charged, even if you spam click
You can hold to attack
Weapons have different reach (attack range)
When you stop attacking, the attack timer will continue charging to 200%
At 200% you can perform special attacks (crits, sweeping, knockback) and these attacks have longer reach
Sweeping only occurs on swords with the Sweeping enchantment
Critical attacks (jump attacks) bypass shields
Shields have no warm-up delay
Shields also activate when crouching/sneaking
If you hit something, the target’s “invulnerability timer” will be shorter if you have a quick weapon
Installation instructions:
Finding the Minecraft application folder:
Windows: Press Ctrl+R and type %appdata%/.minecraft and press Ok
Mac OS X: In Finder, in the Go menu, select “Go to Folder” and enter ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft
Linux: ~/.minecraft or /home/<your username>/.minecraft/
Once you have the launcher set up you can download the server files from there as well.
If you have any comments, issues, or other criticisms, then leave a comment over on Reddit so that jeb will see it.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 06-27-2019, 06:41 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
How To Win Free Games In Steam Summer Sale's Grand Prix Minigame
The Steam Summer Sale has revved up its engines, offering a truckload of discounts on PC games. The store has paired its annual promotion with another minigame this year, and if you're on one of the winning teams you could score some free games.
The Steam Grand Prix pits players from different teams in a virtual race. You build up your "Boost Meter" and then you can hit the boost to help your team. Teams are split into Pig, Hare, Corgi, Cockatiel, and Tortoise. At the conclusion of each day's race, random members of the three winning teams will earn free games. Steam notes that you should make sure to update your wish list, since that will determine the free games.
The maximum size of your Boost Meter can be increased by making purchases during the sale; each $1 you spend grants 100 points of capacity to your bar. (You might have started out with a larger Boost Meter due to purchases you've made previously.) The Boost Meter is filled by both earning Steam Achievements and completing special quests, such as one that tasks you with playing 30 minutes of a game that includes Steam Achievements.
Aside from free games, you can also trade in your race tokens for personal prizes at the "Pit Stop." Those include cosmetics like emoticons, profile backgrounds, as well as store coupons for further discounts. If you're busy during the sale and can't participate in the Grand Prix, there will be a period on July 7 where everyone can spend leftovers tokens at the Pit Stop.
Limited accounts aren't locked out of this event altogether, although they don't add anything to their team's speed. They can, however, redeem tokens at the Pit Stop.
Random: Rare’s Logo Is Actually A Golden Toilet Roll
Despite being gobbled up by Microsoft back in 2002, Rare remains one of the most important and loved developers in the Nintendo scene to this day. For years, the studio created classic after classic – games like Battletoads, Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye 007 and Banjo-Kazooie instantly spring to mind – and the company logo was commonly found gracing our screens as we loaded up our favourite titles.
Amazingly, though, we never realised just what the logo actually was. We assumed, as we’re sure many of you reading this would have done, that the logo is simply a letter ‘R’, but it turns out that it’s actually a “golden toilet roll” created by ex-Rare artist Kevin Bayliss.
You can see the old “toilet paper” logo and the newer ‘R’ logo below.
Rare’s old logo (on the left), and the newer logo (on the right)
The video below shows the cinematic intro for Conker: Live & Reloaded which released on Xbox in 2005. If you watch from around the 40 second mark, you’ll notice that the Rare logo actually fades into a toilet roll on screen. We can already sense comments flying in saying “well duh, this was obvious”, but we’re sure there are plenty of people out there who never made the connection.
If there was ever an interesting bit of gaming trivia worth showing off to your friends, we’d say this is probably it.
You’ll find several different options depending on your location below. We’ll be updating this page with other options, too – expect to find sites like the official Nintendo Store and more appearing as they go live – so make sure to bookmark this page and keep checking back if you’re hoping to pick it up elsewhere.
Please note that some of the links on this page are affiliate links. If you click them and make a purchase we may receive a small percentage of the sale which helps support the site. Please read our FTC Disclosure for more information.
As a reminder, the game is also being treated to a lovely limited edition release with slight variations across Europe and North America.
Are you planning on buying this amiibo? Is this the cutest amiibo to ever grace our presence? Let your thoughts be heard in the comments below.
Perhaps the best known way the Fedora community pursues its mission of promoting free and open source software and content is by developing the Fedora software distribution. So it’s not a surprise at all that a very large proportion of our community resources are spent on this task. This post summarizes how this software is “packaged” and the underlying tools such as rpm that make it all possible.
RPM: the smallest unit of software
The editions and flavors (spins/labs/silverblue) that users get to choose from are all very similar. They’re all composed of various software that is mixed and matched to work well together. What differs between them is the exact list of tools that goes into each. That choice depends on the use case that they target. The basic unit of all of these is an RPM package file.
RPM files are archives that are similar to ZIP files or tarballs. In fact, they uses compression to reduce the size of the archive. However, along with files, RPM archives also contain metadata about the package. This can be queried using the rpm tool:
$ rpm -q fpaste
fpaste-0.3.9.2-2.fc30.noarch
$ rpm -qi fpaste
Name : fpaste
Version : 0.3.9.2
Release : 2.fc30
Architecture: noarch
Install Date: Tue 26 Mar 2019 08:49:10 GMT
Group : Unspecified
Size : 64144
License : GPLv3+
Signature : RSA/SHA256, Thu 07 Feb 2019 15:46:11 GMT, Key ID ef3c111fcfc659b9
Source RPM : fpaste-0.3.9.2-2.fc30.src.rpm
Build Date : Thu 31 Jan 2019 20:06:01 GMT
Build Host : buildhw-07.phx2.fedoraproject.org
Relocations : (not relocatable)
Packager : Fedora Project
Vendor : Fedora Project
URL : https://pagure.io/fpaste
Bug URL : https://bugz.fedoraproject.org/fpaste
Summary : A simple tool for pasting info onto sticky notes instances
Description :
It is often useful to be able to easily paste text to the Fedora
Pastebin at http://paste.fedoraproject.org and this simple script
will do that and return the resulting URL so that people may
examine the output. This can hopefully help folks who are for
some reason stuck without X, working remotely, or any other
reason they may be unable to paste something into the pastebin
When an RPM package is installed, the rpm tools know exactly what files were added to the system. So, removing a package also removes these files, and leaves the system in a consistent state. This is why installing software using rpm is preferred over installing software from source whenever possible.
Dependencies
Nowadays, it is quite rare for software to be completely self-contained. Even fpaste, a simple one file Python script, requires that the Python interpreter be installed. So, if the system does not have Python installed (highly unlikely, but possible), fpaste cannot be used. In packager jargon, we say that “Python is a run-time dependency of fpaste“.
When RPM packages are built (the process of building RPMs is not discussed in this post), the generated archive includes all of this metadata. That way, the tools interacting with the RPM package archive know what else must must be installed so that fpaste works correctly:
$ rpm -qi python3
Name : python3
Version : 3.7.3
Release : 3.fc30
Architecture: x86_64
Install Date: Thu 16 May 2019 18:51:41 BST
Group : Unspecified
Size : 46139
License : Python
Signature : RSA/SHA256, Sat 11 May 2019 17:02:44 BST, Key ID ef3c111fcfc659b9
Source RPM : python3-3.7.3-3.fc30.src.rpm
Build Date : Sat 11 May 2019 01:47:35 BST
Build Host : buildhw-05.phx2.fedoraproject.org
Relocations : (not relocatable)
Packager : Fedora Project
Vendor : Fedora Project
URL : https://www.python.org/
Bug URL : https://bugz.fedoraproject.org/python3
Summary : Interpreter of the Python programming language
Description :
Python is an accessible, high-level, dynamically typed, interpreted programming
language, designed with an emphasis on code readability.
It includes an extensive standard library, and has a vast ecosystem of
third-party libraries.
The python3 package provides the "python3" executable: the reference
interpreter for the Python language, version 3.
The majority of its standard library is provided in the python3-libs package,
which should be installed automatically along with python3.
The remaining parts of the Python standard library are broken out into the
python3-tkinter and python3-test packages, which may need to be installed
separately.
Documentation for Python is provided in the python3-docs package.
Packages containing additional libraries for Python are generally named with
the "python3-" prefix.
While rpm knows the required dependencies for each archive, it does not know where to find them. This is by design: rpm only works on local files and must be told exactly where they are. So, if you try to install a single RPM package, you get an error if rpm cannot find the package’s run-time dependencies. This example tries to install a package downloaded from the Fedora package set:
$ ls
python3-elephant-0.6.2-3.fc30.noarch.rpm
$ rpm -qpi python3-elephant-0.6.2-3.fc30.noarch.rpm
Name : python3-elephant
Version : 0.6.2
Release : 3.fc30
Architecture: noarch
Install Date: (not installed)
Group : Unspecified
Size : 2574456
License : BSD
Signature : (none)
Source RPM : python-elephant-0.6.2-3.fc30.src.rpm
Build Date : Fri 14 Jun 2019 17:23:48 BST
Build Host : buildhw-02.phx2.fedoraproject.org
Relocations : (not relocatable)
Packager : Fedora Project
Vendor : Fedora Project
URL : http://neuralensemble.org/elephant
Bug URL : https://bugz.fedoraproject.org/python-elephant
Summary : Elephant is a package for analysis of electrophysiology data in Python
Description :
Elephant - Electrophysiology Analysis Toolkit Elephant is a package for the
analysis of neurophysiology data, based on Neo.
$ sudo rpm -i ./python3-elephant-0.6.2-3.fc30.noarch.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
python3.7dist(neo) >= 0.7.1 is needed by python3-elephant-0.6.2-3.fc30.noarch
python3.7dist(quantities) >= 0.10.1 is needed by python3-elephant-0.6.2-3.fc30.noarch
In theory, one could download all the packages that are required for python3-elephant, and tell rpm where they all are, but that isn’t convenient. What if python3-neo and python3-quantities have other run-time requirements and so on? Very quickly, the dependency chain can get quite complicated.
Repositories
Luckily, dnf and friends exist to help with this issue. Unlike rpm, dnf is aware of repositories. Repositories are collections of packages, with metadata that tells dnf what these repositories contain. All Fedora systems come with the default Fedora repositories enabled by default:
dnf can be used to query repositories for information on the packages they contain. It can also search them for software, or install/uninstall/upgrade packages from them:
$ sudo dnf search elephant
Last metadata expiration check: 0:05:21 ago on Sun 23 Jun 2019 14:33:38 BST.
============================================================================== Name & Summary Matched: elephant ==============================================================================
python3-elephant.noarch : Elephant is a package for analysis of electrophysiology data in Python
python3-elephant.noarch : Elephant is a package for analysis of electrophysiology data in Python
$ sudo dnf list \*elephant\*
Last metadata expiration check: 0:05:26 ago on Sun 23 Jun 2019 14:33:38 BST.
Available Packages
python3-elephant.noarch 0.6.2-3.fc30 updates-testing
python3-elephant.noarch 0.6.2-3.fc30 updates
Installing dependencies
When installing the package using dnf now, it resolves all the required dependencies, then calls rpm to carry out the transaction:
$ sudo dnf install python3-elephant
Last metadata expiration check: 0:06:17 ago on Sun 23 Jun 2019 14:33:38 BST.
Dependencies resolved.
==============================================================================================================================================================================================
Package Architecture Version Repository Size
==============================================================================================================================================================================================
Installing:
python3-elephant noarch 0.6.2-3.fc30 updates-testing 456 k
Installing dependencies:
python3-neo noarch 0.8.0-0.1.20190215git49b6041.fc30 fedora 753 k
python3-quantities noarch 0.12.2-4.fc30 fedora 163 k
Installing weak dependencies:
python3-igor noarch 0.3-5.20150408git2c2a79d.fc30 fedora 63 k
Notice how dnf even installed python3-igor, which isn’t a direct dependency of python3-elephant.
DnfDragora: a graphical interface to DNF
While technical users may find dnf straightforward to use, it isn’t for everyone. Dnfdragora addresses this issue by providing a graphical front end to dnf.
dnfdragora (version 1.1.1-2 on Fedora 30) listing all the packages installed on a system.
From a quick look, dnfdragora appears to provide all of dnf‘s main functions.
There are other tools in Fedora that also manage packages. GNOME Software, and Discover are two examples. GNOME Software is focused on graphical applications only. You can’t use the graphical front end to install command line or terminal tools such as htop or weechat. However, GNOME Software does support the installation of Flatpaks and Snap applications which dnf does not. So, they are different tools with different target audiences, and so provide different functions.
This post only touches the tip of the iceberg that is the life cycle of software in Fedora. This article explained what RPM packages are, and the main differences between using rpm and using dnf.
In future posts, we’ll speak more about:
The processes that are needed to create these packages
How the community tests them to ensure that they are built correctly
The infrastructure that the community uses to get them to community users in future posts.
There are a million small quirks and tricks like these, and the fun part is that they can be discovered organically through play. A good game teaches you how to learn its systems, and Wizards Unite does this through more than overly-chummy, voice-acted tutorials. Its interface is clearly delineated into the overworld and resource management portions, for example. A few quality-of-life tips. First, you probably want power saver mode, because this one is a battery guzzler. Secondly, in the interest of conserving data roaming and bypassing asset loading hiccups, go under options and download everything on a fast network. 
