Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-09-2019, 05:07 AM - Forum: Windows
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Meet team EasyGlucose, the 2019 Imagine Cup World Champion
The 17th annual Imagine Cup brought together thousands of students from across the globe over eight months of coding, collaboration, and competition. Through hackathons, online semifinals, and in-person Regional Final events, the 2019 competition season all built up to one moment—the World Championship stage live from Microsoft Build. For the first time, our finalist teams pitched their projects to kick off Microsoft’s premier developer conference.
Congratulations to team EasyGlucose from the United States, who took home the 2019 Imagine Cup trophy for his deep learning, low-cost, and non-invasive blood glucose level monitor for diabetics. He won USD100,000, a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, USD50,000 in Azure grants, and ongoing mentoring from M12.
Imagine Cup aims to empower future innovators with the tools and resources to bring their technology solutions to life with Azure. This year’s competition saw many teams developing inspiring and game-changing projects focused on solving key business and societal issues. Teams Caeli from Asia, Finderr from the UK, and EasyGlucose from the USA each won their Regional Final round to advance to the final stage of the competition. They gave a live pitch of their original Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Machine projects encompassing solutions in healthcare and accessibility to a panel of three expert judges at Microsoft Build, who selected the most comprehensive idea.
Watch the show and relive the moment of Team EasyGlucose winning the trophy:
Meet the top 3 teams and recap their journey to the World Championship:
2019 Imagine Cup World Champion: Team EasyGlucose, United States
EasyGlucose is a cloud-powered, non-invasive, and cost-effective method of blood glucose monitoring for diabetic patients. A deep learning computer vision framework using convolutional neural networks developed with Azure Virtual Machines analyzes iris morphological variation in an eye image to predict a patient’s blood glucose level. Recap their journey through the Americas Regional Final.
“I want to make cost-effective and painless blood glucose monitoring to all diabetic patients around the globe, and Imagine Cup enables me not only to share my idea and get invaluable public feedback, but also to obtain funding and keep validating and improving EasyGlucose.” – Bryan, EasyGlucose
2nd place: Team Caeli, India
Caeli is a smart automated anti-pollution and drug delivery mask specifically designed for asthmatic and chronic respiratory patients. It implements breakthrough features and Azure Machine Learning in a portable format to improve the quality of life for respiratory patients living in polluted areas. Recap their journey through the Asia Regional Final.
“Caeli wanted to build something that could help our society in surviving…here in Imagine Cup we found it suitable to showcase the possibilities and draw industry attention towards this global issue.” – Team Caeli
3rd place: Team Finderr, United Kingdom
The team won the Azure Champ Challenge at OxfordHack, which inspired them to submit their project to Imagine Cup. They created an app solution which uses Cognitive Services and Virtual Machines to help make finding lost objects accessible to visually impaired individuals through their phones.Recap their journey through the EMEA Regional Final.
“We’re really, really excited to have the chance to be able to bring our project to fruition to help the visually impaired users.” – Team Finderr
Registration for the 2020 competition is now open. Join over two million student competitors worldwide in creating purpose from your passion and sign up for Imagine Cup today!
LG UltraFine 5K display sold out on online Apple store
By Mikey Campbell Wednesday, May 08, 2019, 04:56 pm PT (07:56 pm ET)
Apple this week appears to have halted sales of the LG UltraFine 5K display, potentially signaling a near future launch for a branded high-resolution monitor expected to launch alongside a new modular Mac Pro.
The LG display is now listed as sold out on Apple.com, while in-store supply is exhausted at many U.S. brick-and-mortar locations.
A similar situation occurred late last year when domestic Apple stores, as well as a few international locales, showed wide unavailability of the 5K display. At the time, however, the monitor could still be ordered for delivery.
The UltraFine 5K stockout follows Apple’s discontinuation of the LG UltraFine 4K display in April. With both LG UltraFine models no longer available from Apple, it can be speculated that the tech giant is readying a successor device for launch.
LG’s UltraFine 4K and 5K displays were introduced in October 2016, designed as part of a collaborative effort with Apple to complement then-new MacBook Pro models.
Apple announced work on a professional-grade standalone monitor in 2017, initially promising release alongside an all-new Mac Pro in 2018. The company later pushed back the Mac debut into 2019, but failed to offer a release timeline for its new monitor, leaving some to believe it would see unveiling at an earlier date.
While Apple has yet to detail hardware specifications, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo in February said the device will measure 31.6 inches on the diagonal and house a 6K3K panel boasting “outstanding picture quality thanks to its adoption of the Mini LED-like backlight design.” Kuo in a separate note to investors issued in April predicted Apple to launch the display in the next few months.
Most recently, a report this week claims Apple might preview both the Mac Pro and display at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June. AppleInsider will be covering the event live.
Though the LG UltraFine 5K is no longer available from Apple’s online store, those in the market can still find the display at various retailers like B&H Photo.
Roguelikes and card battlers have been having a ‘moment’ for years now. Early classics like Hoplite and Dream Quest were ground-breaking in their canny mix of challenge and simplicity. Anything halfway decent becomes common, and these sort of games were something truly special. Lose sight of the lineage, forget the forefathers, though, and you’ll be pleasantly shocked by the quality of recent roguelikes.
Chief among these is the recently-released Dimension of Dreams, standing apart like a very good fusion of the aforementioned games. It takes some familiar mechanics while totally inventing its own card pool and class system, and while the progression is slow and the difficulty perhaps slightly over-tuned, it is great and by all signs will only get better.
Don’t let the 3D art style fool you; this game’s action unfolds within turn-based battles interspersed with overland travel on a 2D grid. Three levels filled with shops, mystery events, treasure chests and monsters. After every battle, you gain experience, gold and most crucially, the chance to add a new card to your deck. That’s the big picture, macro-level strategy of managing health and coins as long-term resources, but the game’s chief challenge lay within those battles. Each turn, the player draws two (or sometimes more) cards and has a few actions to spend playing those cards. There are four color-coded categories of cards: red for offense, blue for defense, green for utility and purple for status effects.
The game’s combos and effects largely revolve around these colorful card types. For now the game has three classes, roughly corresponding to that holy trinity of warrior, rogue and mage. (With the ‘mage’ being more of a ‘holy cleric’ sort). As an example, the rogue-type Demon Samurai has plenty of dodge, critical and poison-based keyword effects.
If all this sounds curiously parallel to Slay the Spire, that is quite accurate and, moreover, quite deliberate. But the variety and detail of both class mechanics and enemy traits are unique to this game and reminiscent of Dream Quest’s utter ex nihilo creativity. In lieu of attributes or spells, player characters have equipment and relics, the former selected from a fixed pool of options every third level, the latter purchased from shops or awarded after boss battles. The synergy between these relics and the deck’s own archetypes becomes a delicate chance for the player to apply their wits. So it possesses the requisite opportunity for a first-rate mind to distinguish itself.
The game’s not a dreamy playpen, though, and has plenty of practical constraints to limit theoretical min-maxing. This tension is necessary because roguelikes are also about building the most elegant, efficient machine out of whatever scraps are available. On this front, the game is a wee bit scanty with its options, I’d say, a little bit beyond the norm of what’s ‘fair’ to make the average run winnable through wise decisions alone. There are so many different viable deck archetypes, but only a few of them thrive in the early stages of the game where it is most crucial to build momentum. So there’s a bit of false richness here, insofar as things like a Parry-based warrior archetype simply isn’t going to cut it at max difficulty, barring some exceptional events.
One more criticism is about those same ‘events’ and the unusually high-variance nature of the level-up rewards. When landing on an event space, a short vignette of text spells out a situation then presents the player with two possible reactions. Some of them are totally binary outcomes, with one ‘right’ choice giving a pure reward and the other pure punishment. This is titillating storytelling but bad gameplay, to present an opaque risk with zero information and no trade-off decisions. And the quality of these boons also varies wildly, from trivial passive boosts to a free level-up. Oh, and upon levelling up, your character can very rarely gain extra draws or energy, which are x10 more effective and useful than, say, three extra max HP. So the game’s not as finely tuned as it should be in these edge cases. Best fix would be to tell the player possible odds upfront for random events and lessen either the swingy wide-ranging level-up options or somehow make them more uniform.
The criticism above sounds harsh & dire, but these deficiencies only stand out because the rest of the game is so nice and polished. There are ten levels of difficulty, with each one throwing a new monkey wrench into things. The scaling here is pretty much ideal; so far, the best I’ve managed is the eighth. (The scalable challenge mode is also pretty much a direct call back to Slay the Spire). There are already three classes to start, with another three in the pipeline and two others coming later down the road. The game is only a dollar because these other classes are locked behind either ‘loot boxes’ or instant payment unlocks.
Fortunately even the ‘box’-based reward system is tastefully implemented. Each class has exactly 50 boxes available for purchase for in-game currency earned after each run, and each box will contain one of those 50 things to reveal. So what is random is the order in which things become available for the player, but everything is guaranteed to become available after the whole lot is purchased. Because the game is excruciatingly difficult right now, this might still mean a 10-hour crusade to unlock the next class without shelling out more cash, but any roguelike worth its salt ought to make 10-hours (5 runs or so) melt away in light of the player’s focus and enjoyment. Flow-state, basically.
Honestly, aside from the wonky difficulty in early stages, the wacky random events & level-ups and rather generic 3D models (which make the game a battery-chugger), the game is a treasure, and one that’s only bound to improve with further balance tweaks and content. Needs a few bugfixes, too. It’s neither wholly derivative nor original but remains a roguelike to watch and try if you’ve the slightest interest, and for this price it’s a steal.
Humble Bundle are running another bundle of interest to game developers… this time, for the writers among us. The Write like a Writer bundle is a collection of e-books about all facets of writing from the publisher Adams Media. As always, the bundle is organized into tiers. If you buy a tier you get all the books at that price point and all tiers below it.
The tiers of this bundle include:
1$ Tier
Script Tease
The Tao of Writing
Write. 10 Days to Overcome Writer’s Block
Grammar Sucks
Screen-Writing
A Cup of Comfort for Writers
The Everything Guide to Writing a Book Proposal
The Everything Guide to Writing Nonfiction
A Writer’s Space
8$ Tier
The Call of the Writer’s Craft
The Everything Creative Writing Book
The Everything Guide To Writing Children’s Books
Write that Book Already
The Everything Improve Your Writing Book
Screenwriting in the Land of OZ
15$ Tier
Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction
Plot Whisperer
1-Minute Writer
The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need
The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts
Hire Me, Hollywood!
The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists
The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screen Writers
1001 Letters for All Occasions
The Everything Guide to Comedy Writing
The Everything Guide to Writing Your First Novel
Wow… that is a lot of books on books! Buying this bundle also helps supporting charity, NCAC and First Book are the selected charities for this bundle. In addition you can also direct some of the proceeds to support GFS, in which case, thank you!
All-Digital Xbox One Launches Today, Kicking Off A New Era Of Xbox
Microsoft is expected to announce a next-generation Xbox at E3 next month, but ahead of that, the company today launched the brand-new all-digital Xbox One S. Called the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition, the system costs $250 / £200 / AU $350, and it's available anywhere you buy consoles.
The new model is the same form factor and size, but it has no disc drive. It sports a 1 TB hard drive and it comes with three games: Forza Horizon 3, Minecraft, and Sea of Thieves.
The release of the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition is noteworthy because it's the first major home console to offer a disc-free version. Microsoft announced the system in April, at which time it said "consumer appetite for digital content and experiences are stronger today than ever before."
Indeed. Just today, Electronic Arts reported that a whopping 49 percent of all of its full-game sales on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One over the past 12 months were digital. The share of digital sales at other publishers is expected to be rising as well.
The new all-digital Xbox One S is not replacing the standard Xbox One S or the Xbox One X, both of which have disc drives. The new digital version is only an option for people who want it.
The lack of a disc drive means the console doesn't support DVDs or Blu-ray discs, but Microsoft says people can still experience 4K content through Netflix, Amazon, and other destinations. The form factor is the same, and the all-digital Xbox One has the same functionality as the standard Xbox One S. It just cannot play game discs or disc-based media.
Random: The Detective Pikachu Full Movie “Leak” Is Better Than We Expected
Ryan Reynolds and everyone else involved in the production of the live-action Pokémon movie Detective Pikachu have done a tremendous job promoting the film in the lead-up to its release. Unfortunately, though, it looks like someone on the internet might have leaked the entire movie already. Yep, even the voice of Pikachu has spotted this “leak” online:
Anyway, you better stop reading right now and view the full movie in the above tweet, courtesy of the Twitter account @InspectrPikachu.
Done? If you made it past the minute mark, you’ve probably realised by now this is simply a joke and perhaps the best marketing stunt so far for this movie. As you can see, the “leak” tricks you into thinking it’s the real deal and before you know it, Detective Pikachu is doing a cheery dance workout for nearly two hours straight.
What do you think of this amusing marketing stunt? Will you be heading to your local cinema to see Detective Pikachu? Tell us below.
Thanks to the official PR, we now have a bit more information about each of these classic games:
Donkey Kong Jr. – Based on the popular arcade game, Donkey Kong Jr. is the sequel to the immensely successful Donkey Kong™game. Play as Donkey Kong’s son, and rescue your dad who has been kidnapped and imprisoned in a cage by Mario. Use jumping and climbing abilities to clamber up vines and chains, gather vital fruit and keys, and open the cage to free your father. Make sure you avoid the pesky birds, nasty electric sparks and creepy chompers. Four different worlds filled with numerous climbing and jumping puzzles await you in this timeless classic.
VS. Excitebike – Fans love the Excitebike™ game for its frenetic races, high stakes and sweet jumps. With this game, you can take it to the next level with the Famicom™ disk version of VS. Excitebike – complete with two-player split screen. Create tracks from 20 classic Excitebike track parts, and go for a best time or take on friends. Racing is even more exciting when the rivalries are real. You can also try out the single-player mode in VS. Excitebike. It adds tracks, music and the ability to save your high score.
Clu Clu Land – The greedy Sea Urchins have stolen all of Clu Clu Land’s gold bars and buried them in a series of mazes. As Bubbles, a brave bubble fish, you’ll set out to uncover all of the gold bars in each maze. With 20 stages to complete and increasingly complex conditions (like having to pass over the gold bars twice to uncover them), you might just want to bring along a friend for help.
For the second month in a row, Japan will receive the exact same line-up as the west. Below is a trailer of what you can expect:
This brings the total number of games available on the Switch Online NES library to more than 40.
Are you looking forward to any of the releases this month? Tell us down in the comments.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-08-2019, 10:21 PM - Forum: Windows
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ID@Xbox Game Fest brings a month of games for everyone
We’re excited to kick off the fourth annual ID@Xbox Game Fest this week, where we celebrate the diverse range of games and experiences offered by independent developers on Xbox One.
From May 7-27, we’ll be unearthing some of the ID@Xbox program’s hidden gems for players to discover. Beginning this week until May 20, we will focus on Gaming for Everyone and feature diverse stories, voices, creators, and characters across 31 participating titles. We’ll wrap up the month (May 21-27) with an ID@Xbox Super Sale highlighting even more games that have released through the ID@Xbox program.
As a Game Fest tradition, we talked with the developers behind some of these games to learn more about what Gaming for Everyone means to them as well as how their own personal stories have impacted the experience and creative processes for their games.
1979 Revolution: Black Friday– “Diversity of experience is one facet of the Gaming for Everyone ethos, and an interactive drama set against the turbulent backdrop of Middle Eastern politics and civil unrest certainly isn’t your typical video game. 1979 Revolution: Black Friday not only demonstrates the medium as a unique platform for powerful story-telling, but also how it can be used as an engaging and entertaining means to inform and educate on a complex, real-world subject that, normally, would fall beyond the interests and/or awareness of many people.” – Matt Cundy, Digerati community manager
“Our goal was to breathe life into a piece of history that few understand intimately. By engaging with a diverse cast of characters and engaging with narrative choices, we were able to blend the forms of gaming and documentary to capture a digital recreation of Iran in 1979 for a whole new generation to discover.” – Navid Khonsari, creator of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday and iNK Stories co-founder
Dandara– “Even after many rewrites and inspirations, I think Dandara is always going to be a statement about Brazilian culture and history. It’s an outsider’s scream telling you that inspiration can be found by looking out of your own window, or even closer, on your own story. Better yet if it is able to touch you through those inspirations, with stories and people you have not stopped to think about.” – Luke Icenhower, marketing manager
Firewatch – “Firewatch is single player, first-person mystery. We love games that transport you to a faraway, unusual place and tell you a gripping story, but we don’t so much love games that trap you in impossible combat scenarios or esoteric puzzles along the way. So, we made Firewatch a mystery for everybody – where the game design isn’t about how good you are with a gun but what it feels like to be alone in the woods with (almost) no one to trust.” – Sean Vanaman, writer/designer
In Between– “In Between started out as part of my bachelor’s thesis back in university dealing with with the taboo topics of death and dying within a video game. In the end, our mission with In Between was to tell a story, that follows along a specific theme but that would still allow players their own interpretations and provide different possibilities for self-identification. We hope to try and give an insight into/make it easier for other people to relate to the thoughts and emotions of family members, friends or anyone else who finds him-/herself in these seemingly hopeless situations.” – Daniel, art director, co-founder
Night in the Woods – “Night in the Woods was an interesting project to write code and music for because, while we had an overall outline in mind, we left a lot of things open for ‘improvisation.’ I had to stay on my toes to make sure we could adapt the code to whatever new ideas might come up. It’s really cool that Night in the Woods has meant a lot to a bunch of folks, because it originated from this very odd and personal process.” – Alec Holowka, programmer, composer and game designer
The Path of Motus – “I think the game deals with issues that most people face daily. I know many people that had big dreams as a kid, but as they get older society beats those ideas out of their head and they settle for less than what they want in life. I hope this game speaks to those people and shows them that it’s never too late to pursue your dreams in life. I know some people are stuck in their situation due to monetary problems, so I also released a free educational video series showing people how to program games on our website (pathofmotus.com) to help folks that are interested in game development. I hope The Path of Motus can have some type of positive impact on everyone that plays.” – Michael Hicks, designer
Where the Bees Make Honey – “I make games to express myself and to communicate with others. Through the power of interactivity, games offer experiences from different cultures and communities.” – Brian Wilson, developer
See below for the rest of the games included in Game Fest this week:
This is just a taste of all the great games included in ID@Xbox Game Fest. The Gaming for Everyone theme will run from May 2 through to May 20, so jump in and start discovering the games behind these exceptional stories.
To see all titles included in the first week of Game Fest visit Xbox.com.
.NET Core 3.0 Preview 5 is now available. This iteration was brief for the team and primarily includes bug fixes and improvements to the more significant updates in Preview 4. This post summarizes the important points in this release.
Please see the release notes for additional details and known issues.
To upgrade an existing ASP.NET Core 3.0 Preview 4 project to Preview 5:
Update Microsoft.AspNetCore.* package references to 3.0.0-preview5-19227-01
Update Microsoft.Extensions.* package references to 3.0.0-preview5.19227.01
That’s it! You should be good to go with this latest preview release.
New JSON Serialization
In 3.0-preview5, ASP.NET Core MVC adds supports for reading and writing JSON using System.Text.Json. The System.Text.Json serializer can read and write JSON asynchronously, and is optimized for UTF-8 text making it ideal for REST APIs and backend applications.
This is available for you to try out in Preview 5, but is not yet the default in the templates. You can use the new serializer by removing the call to add Newtonsoft.Json formatters:
public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{ ... services.AddControllers() .AddNewtonsoftJson() ...
}
In the future this will be default for all new ASP.NET Core applications. We hope that you will try it in these earlier previews and log any issues you find here.
We used this WeatherForecast model when we profiled JSON read/writer performance using Newtonsoft.Json, our previous serializer.
public class WeatherForecast
{ public DateTime Date { get; set; } public int TemperatureC { get; set; } public string Summary { get; set; }
}
JSON deserialization (input)
Description
RPS
CPU (%)
Memory (MB)
Newtonsoft.Json – 500 bytes
136,435
95
172
System.Text.Json – 500 bytes
167,861
94
169
Newtonsoft.Json – 2.4 kbytes
97,137
97
174
System.Text.Json – 2.4 kbytes
132,026
96
169
Newtonsoft.Json – 40 kbytes
7,712
88
212
System.Text.Json – 40 kbytes
16,625
96
193
JSON serialization (output)
Description
RPS
CPU (%)
Memory (MB)
Newtonsoft.Json – 500 bytes
120,273
94
174
System.Text.Json – 500 bytes
145,631
94
173
Newtonsoft.Json – 8 Kbytes
35,408
98
187
System.Text.Json – 8 Kbytes
56,424
97
184
Newtonsoft.Json – 40 Kbytes
8,416
99
202
System.Text.Json – 40 Kbytes
14,848
98
197
For the most common payload sizes, System.Text.Json offers about 20% throughput increase during input and output formatting with a smaller memory footprint.
Options for the serializer can be configured using MvcOptions:
System.Text.Json is now the default Hub Protocol used by SignalR clients and servers starting in ASP.NET Core 3.0-preview5. Please try it out and file issues if you find anything not working as expected.
Switching back to Newtonsoft.Json
If you would like to switch back to the previous default of using Newtonsoft.Json then you can do so on both the client and server.
Install the Microsoft.AspNetCore.SignalR.Protocols.NewtonsoftJson NuGet package.
On the client add .AddNewtonsoftJsonProtocol() to the HubConnectionBuilder:
new HubConnectionBuilder()
.WithUrl("/chatHub")
.AddNewtonsoftJsonProtocol()
.Build();
On the server add .AddNewtonsoftJsonProtocol() to the AddSignalR() call:
Motion Twin has released a new trailer announcing that Dead Cells is coming to mobile. The new trailer can be watched below.
Dead Cells is coming to iOS devices first, but an exact date has not yet been provided. The trailer only mentions the iPhone and iPad versions of the game are coming "soon," and that the Android version is coming "later." In a press release, Motion Twin said the mobile version of Dead Cells will feature a "revamped interface" and have two games modes: original and auto-hit. You'll also be able to customize the position and sizes of the buttons, as well as switch between using touch controls and a physical controller. The game will cost €10 (roughly $11 USD), but you get the full experience with one purchase. There are no ads or free-to-play transactions.
An indie roguelike platformer game, Dead Cells is one of our favorite titles from last year, and we included it in our list of best games of 2018. In our Dead Cell review, Daniel Starkey wrote, "[Dead Cells] gives you a sense of constant progress, even when you bomb a run. In fact, the only real issue with the adventure is that some of the better upgrades can take substantially longer than they should. It stalls progress in the mid-game a bit and can lead to a feeling of grinding your wheels. Besides that, though, Dead Cells is a phenomenal effort to blend together some very disparate genres into a tight, cohesive whole. It's one of the better examples of how to remix ideas without losing their individual strengths."
In Dead Cells, you play as a lump of undead cells that repeatedly infests host bodies and journeys out into a world that has suffered a terrible plague and is now infested by monsters and the remnants of a fallen kingdom. All weapons and items you collect are lost upon death, but certain power-ups hidden throughout the world stay with you even after you've fallen in battle. These power-ups allow you to traverse the environment in new ways and get to previously unreachable areas and bosses. As you journey further, you'll learn more about the world and what transpired to cause the collapse of civilization.
Dead Cells is one of the games featured in our new Audio Logs videos as well. In this series, we talk with the lead designers behind certain games to learn what transpired behind the scenes that make these titles as successful as they are. The Dead Cells Audio Log features game designer Sebastian Benard, who discusses hidden features within the game that ensure you die less often while playing. The video is embedded at the top of this article. Be sure to check out our other episodes as well, such as God of War director Cory Barlog explaining the process behind the PS4 exclusive's most memorable scene or Studio MDHR's Jared Moldenhauer breaking down the design of Cuphead's Dice Palace level.
