WARRIORS OROCHI 4 – 無双OROCHI３ is Now Available on Steam and is 10% off!*

WARRIORS OROCHI 4 stars heroes from the DYNASTY WARRIORS and SAMURAI WARRIORS series. 170 playable characters, new magic elements and an all new story enhance the latest entry in this exciting tactical action series.

*Offer ends October 22 at 10AM Pacific Time

Unleash is Now Available on Steam and is 10% off!*

Unleash is a Tower Wars game, set in a dystopian future, where gifted children known as Dreamers are exploited by ruthless fighters to unleash hordes of monsters into arenas filled with massive guns.

*Offer ends October 23 at 10AM Pacific Time

Starting at 2:00 p.m. PDT today, members of the Xbox One Preview Alpha, Beta, Delta and Omega Rings will begin receiving the latest 1810 Xbox One system update (181005-1705). Read on for more about the fixes and known issues in the latest 1810 system update.

Fixes:

Audio

• We have fixed an issue when users experienced audio to stop playback or hang entirely when a headset was attached or detached during media playback with such apps as YouTube, Hulu, Twitch Beta, Spotify.

Known Issues:

Avatars

• It can take up to 10 seconds to view an Avatar on the profile screen after creating a new Avatar.

My Games & Apps

• We are aware that some users are experiencing crashing of a game or the Youtube app when you are either launching or resuming the Youtube app.
• If you are in the Youtube app and then Resume to a Game the app/game and console may hang or crash.
• We are aware that some users are experiencing challenges navigating the Ready to Install Filter options in My Games and Apps. Some users are unable to select the filter options at all and we are investigating.

Power

• We are tracking an issue in which the console is fully powering off when it is placed into Instant On mode.

Profile Color

• Sometimes users may encounter the incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.

If you, like many others, are a fan of farming sim and general time-thief Stardew Valley, then you’ll no doubt love this piano rendition album of the game’s soundtrack.

Featuring the very same compositions heard in the game, created by the game’s developer ConcernedApe, the album contains 22 tracks transformed into gentle piano pieces that are sure to soothe your soul – and remind of you of your time with the game, too. Each piece has been arranged by Matthew Bridgham and performed by Augustine Mayuga Gonzales.

Bridgham has shared a quick insight into the album’s production, noting the excitement of the game’s creator himself.

“Three bonus tracks were added after getting official approval from the man himself, Eric Barone (ConcernedApe). He was so excited for this album that one night he sent us the then-unreleased music from the update. I was of course happy to oblige, arranging these three the same evening. But my job felt easy. Nearly every piece from Stardew fit the hands beautifully, hitting close to home.”

If you want to take a quick listen for yourself, check out the album’s opening track, ‘Overture’ below.

You can get your hands on the album right now via iTunes, Spotify, and Bandcamp, with the latter also hosting a limited edition physical CD (set to ship in November) and PDFs of the sheet music.

Are you a big Stardew Valley fan? Does a piano album of the game’s songs sound like a dreamy collaboration to you? Let us know with a comment.

We wanted to give you a heads up about some exciting language options coming to Steam.

Starting today, we are adding two new languages (Vietnamese and Latin American Spanish) to the list of 26 languages officially supported by Steam. This means the Steam desktop client, the Steam store, and the Steam Community, are all translated to make it easier for Vietnamese or Latin American Spanish speakers to interact with Steam, find games, and chat with friends. It also means that game developers can now provide translations of their game in those languages through Steam.

Why Vietnamese?

Vietnamese is the sole national language of the country Vietnam, but is also widely used in other countries, including the United States, Australia, and France. There are over 75 million Vietnamese speakers worldwide. In November of 2017, we added Steam support for the national currency of Vietnam, the Vietnamese Dong, along with a number of payment methods that make it easier for players in Vietnam to make purchases on Steam. While supporting payments methods and currencies is important for making Steam accessible to global audiences, we realized our mistake in not also supporting the national language too so that players can more easily find their way around Steam and be able to get games in their native language, when available.

Why Latin American Spanish?

In the past, Steam has only supported a single definition of Spanish-language. But our customers and game developers have been reminding us of the stylistic differences among Spanish spoken in different locales, and requested that Steam support that difference. As a result, we now have a definition of both Castilian (European) Spanish and Latin American (LatAm) Spanish, translating the Steam desktop client, store, and community into both variants of Spanish.

As a practical example, this is how we already treat Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, where customers can choose one, the other, or both for their language preferences, and game developers can indicate whichever variants their game supports.

Changing Your Language Preferences in Steam

Whether your native language is Vietnamese, Castilian Spanish, or any of the 26 other languages supported by Steam, you can specify your language preferences in the Steam desktop client by clicking “Steam>settings>interface”.

Additionally, you can specify more than one language within the Steam store to help you find more games available in languages you may speak. For example, you may want to run Steam in Vietnamese, but you also speak English and want to make sure you can find games that are available with English language audio. You can visit your store preferences to select multiple languages for games that you wish to discover in the Steam store.

FAQ for Game Developers

Language support can be pretty important for the enjoyment of games. If you are making a game on Steam, here are some questions we thought you might have and some answers. Of course if you have additional question, please let us know through the Steamworks contact form.

Q: What do I need to do if my game already supports Spanish?
A: If you want to add another language support option, you can provide Spanish support in both Castilian and Latin American varieties. If you don’t plan to add additional support, that’s OK: Steam will assume that your existing Spanish language content is Castilian and automatically provide that content to customers that have indicated either Castilian or Latin American Spanish. If your existing translation is actually Latin American Spanish, you can update your definition within Steamworks by visiting your app landing page and clicking “Edit Steamworks Settings” and selecting “Depots” from the “SteamPipe” drop-down.

For more information on translating your game into different languages, and a list of supported languages, please see https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/localization

Q: What if my game doesn’t support Spanish at all?
A: That’s okay, and you don’t need to make any changes. But just so you know: nearly 2 million of our 45 million daily active users view the store in Spanish, and platform revenue in Latin America increased 35% over the previous year… so now might be a good time to consider adding support!

Q: What’s the difference, anyway? Why does this matter?
A: There are some substantial differences in vocabulary and colloquial choices between these two varieties of Spanish. By supporting the difference on the Steam store and UI, we can make it more welcoming and easy to use. By supporting the difference in your game, you can provide the best possible experience to any customers who want to play your game in Spanish. Historically, customer improvements to localization and regional support have helped grow the overall pie of platform opportunity for developers, and we think this will be one more improvement for people who play and make PC games.

Q: Do I get any benefit if my game supports additional languages on Steam?
A: Definitely! In addition to making your game more accessible to more customers, language preference is one of the things the store takes into account when making recommendations. That means a customer is more likely to see your game in the store if it supports the language preferences the customer selected. For example, Vietnamese is the fifth most spoken language in the United States, at around 1.5 million speakers.

Q: Where can I learn more about adding language support?
A: We’re so glad you asked! The documentation here provides a rundown on localization, and some best practices and advice. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/localization

What’s this? A spooky surprise 1.13.2 pre-release? We didn’t even snapshot them! This is a very small pre-release to address a few performance issues and upgrade issues left over from 1.13.1. If all goes well with this pre-release, we will do the full release on Thursday.  Don’t worry though, snapshots for 1.14 will be starting really soon!

A full changelog for this pre-release can be found on Minecraft.net.

CHANGES IN 1.13.2-PRE1

• Improved performance of upgrading worlds
• Improved startup time
• Improved performance of turtle pathfinding
• Improved mob spawning performance
• General other performance improvements
• MC-134115 – Containers next to chunk borders can lose items when upgrading
• MC-91621 – Mobs repetitively despawn and respawn rapidly at high Y coordinates (causing lag)

To get pre-releases, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).

Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.

Pre-releases can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds. 

Share your thoughts on how 1.13.2 is shaping up in the comments below!

Sandbox

Abilities

• Titan
• Now Throwing Hammers can be picked only if your own Throwing Hammer ability is not fully charged
• Fixed an issue in which Burning Maul’s slam attack was unintentionally triggering melee-based perks
• Banner Shield can no longer be overpenetrated by weapons with perks such as Armor-Piercing Rounds
• Resupply can now also benefit allies behind obstacles
• Hunter
• Fixed an issue in which Kill Clip would not trigger if players reloaded their weapon using Marksman’s Dodge while having the Dragon’s Shadow Exotic chest armor equipped
• Warlock
• Fixed an issue where Healing Rift and Well of Radiance could prevent weapon perks such as White Nail and Magnificent Howl from working properly
• Note: This introduced a bug where White Nail may occasionally activate after 2 hits. This will be addressed in a future update.
• Fixed an issue where Handheld Supernova could deal damage to allies
• Fixed an issue where Handheld Supernova kills would sometime appear as “Killed by the Architects” in the obituary and where the ability was inconsistent in triggering the Dark Matter perk
• Players will no longer perform the Atomic Breach melee ability when using the heavy attack of the Escalation Protocol Sword
• Fixed an issue in which using the Phoenix Protocol Exotic chest with Well of Radiance could result in weapons not rendering
• Casting Chaos Reach with your back up against a wall will no longer block the beam
• Fixed an issue in which Chaos Reach was dealing less damage at lower framerates; as a result, players may now notice an increase in total damage output

Armor

• Lucky Pants will no longer reload Hand Cannons that are not stowed
• Fixed an issue where ammo scavenger perks would give certain weapons less ammo than intended
• Prodigal Grasps and Dragonfly Regalia Grasps will no longer block the player’s view when they are using a Bow

Weapons

• Increased Scout Rifle damage against combatants
• Repositioned the scope on the Fighting Lion’s Lupus Visage ornament for better visibility while players are aiming down sights
• Decreased Fighting Lion damage to be brought in line with other breach-load Grenade Launchers 
• Reduced aim assist on Sleeper Simulant
• Buffed aim assist on Linear Fusion Rifles (not including Sleeper Simulant)
• Fixed an issue where Dynamic Sway Reduction and Zen Moment perks would not function properly when combined with Lunafaction Boots or Rally Barricade
• Fixed an issue where the Taken Spec mod description was displayed twice in weapon tooltips
• Fixed an issue where the Between Breaths ornament for Whisper of the Worm would not display properly
• The charge bar on compound Bows now fills in two stages to directly reflect the two stages of the drawing animation
• Fixed an issue where visual effects on some weapons were sometimes still visible next to a character using Super abilities
• Fixed an issue where being shot by an allied Guardian’s Telesto could result in a crash
• Fixed an issue where One Thousand Voices would sometimes speak at the volume of One Hundred Thousand Voices
• Fixed an issue where Bows were not equipped properly when characters were sprinting
• Fixed an issue where the Badlander Shotgun was missing reload audio
• Updated the ATC Rex Häkke scope to align with other weapon scopes
• Fixed an issue where parts of Borealis did not display the correct element
• Fixed excessive perk activation audio for Redrix’s Broadsword when players activated the Desperado perk
• Fixed excessive perk audio for Trinity Ghoul’s Lightning Rod perk when the weapon is stowed
• Updated the draw animation on Trinity Ghoul
• Updated the description of Ionic Return on Borealis to more accurately reflect its bonus damage behavior

Gambit

General

• Fixed an issue where Gambit clan engrams were not functioning properly
• Fixed an issue where shield walls would not spawn at the beginning of a match
• Fixed an issue where matchmaking for Gambit would sometimes take longer than intended, sometimes resulting in players being removed from the match
• Gambit Quitter Penalties have been reenabled
• Fixed an issue where the invasion portal would sometimes not open throughout the match

Crucible

Iron Banner

• Fixed an issue where Iron Engram displayed a higher Power level than intended
• Fixed an issue where Iron Banner token rewards from matches were doubled
• All Iron Banner bounties will now reward powerful gear
• Iron Banner bounty requirements have been reduced:
• Lightbearer: Super kills reduced to 20 from 25
• Iron in the Blood: Match completions reduced to 15 from 30
• Shine On: Orbs generated reduced to 50 from 100
• Iron Victory: Match wins reduced to 7 from 10
• To Be Precise: Precision kills reduced to 50 from 100
• All in a Week’s Work: Kills reduced to 150 from 250

General

• Fixed an issue where the kill feed would no longer display under certain circumstances
• Capture Zone waypoints no longer pulse when progress state changes or when in a Power Play in Iron Banner
• Fixed an issue that prevented audio cues from playing when players are revived in Countdown

Medals

• In Breakthrough, fixed an issue where the “Quick Strike” medal could be awarded for a short time after deploying the Breaker
• Fixed an issue where the Survival medal “Lone Gun” was firing for all players when winning a round
• Corrected an issue where the new “Perimeter Control” medal in Control did not properly replace the deprecated “I Live Here Now” medal

Quests

• Updated quest step “The Candidate” in “Forging the Broadsword” to new requirements: “In the Crucible, rapidly defeat opponents in groups of two or more.” 
• This step will now track individual players defeated in a multikill instead of counting only “Double Play” medals 
• Before, “Triple Play” rewarded +1 progress for 1 Double Play. Now, “Triple Play” will award +2 progress for “Double Play” and +1 for “Triple Play.”

---

Items and Economy

General

• Fixed an issue where powerful gear could sometimes drop at the same Power level as a character or below
• Raised the low end of powerful gear, which slightly increases the average Power upgrade per powerful drop
• Edge Transit has some company; added Through Fire and Flood, Zenobia D, and Crooked Fang-4fr to world Legendary pool
• Fixed an issue where Prime Engrams were going straight to the postmaster at the end of Crucible matches; they will now show alongside other end-of-match rewards
• Fixed an issue where the Cataloguer emblem was repeatedly sent to postmaster for some players
• Fixed an issue where Offering to the Oracle was not being properly consumed on use for some players
• Fixed an issue where the Last Wish Ghost and Sparrow were not dropping at the intended drop rates
• Fixed an issue where some weapons did not dismantle into the proper materials

Triumphs

• Removed “Trace Rifle Mastery” Crucible Triumph for players on all platforms
• Added Triumphs for completing Exotic badges in Collections
• “Trusted Right Hand” Triumph is now possible to complete
• It no longer requires more weekly bounties than are available in a week
• Triumphs to find all Ascendant chests in the Dreaming City no longer lose progress on the weekly reset if players have completed, but not yet claimed them

Collections

• Transmat effects added to Collections, under the Flair category
• Transmat effects gained (inventory or postmaster), used, or dismantled after September 4, 2018 will be unlocked in Collections
• Transmat effects are unlocked when added to player inventory, NOT when gaining ships that have them pre-socketed
• Added event Ghosts to Collections
• Added Forsaken emblem variants to Collections
• Added missing emblems to Collections
• Source updated for the Grenade Launcher Through Fire and Flood: Obtained through Legendary drops and rank-up packages

Bounties

• Fixed an issue where bounties could expire in a players Post Master and cause WEASEL errors
• Fixed an issue where Korean IGR bounties did not have an Abandon option
• Added a recovery state for players who abandoned IGR bounties to acquire a weekly rotating IGR bounty for 250 Glimmer
• This recovery state persists until the next weekly reset
• Fixed an issue where the Eververse Bounty “Rise to the Challenge” did not have an Abandon option
• Players who Abandon “Rise to the Challenge” will be able to recover it from Eververse for 250 Glimmer until the weekly reset.

General

• Fixed an issue where boosted players could not receive Destiny 2 achievements for the boosted class
• Players will now receive the achievement when unlocking the first node of a new subclass
• Fixed an issue where players could not receive credit for the Destiny 2 achievement for completing the weekly Flashpoint
• Sturm quest will now increment when picking up Legendary and Exotic engrams
• Pinnacle wanted bounties from Spider will now complete for all members of the fireteam
• Bakken, the Relentless can now be summoned in the Divalian Mists
• Fixed an issue where the Blind Well could become locked if multiple players tried to activate it at once
• Heroic completion on the Rift Generator public event now consistently grants the appropriate rewards and properly counts toward Heroic public event completions
• Fixed an issue where some players were unable to access the Strike playlist
• Fixed an issue where enemies would not spawn during Kalli, the Corrupted raid encounter

Disruption/Insults/Disrespect

Disruption/Insults/Disrespect

Harassment/Personal Attacks/Privacy Violation

Gory Violence/Explicit Sexuality

Illegal Activity

Hacking/Cheating

Spoilers/Stolen Content

Soliciting/Phishing/Impersonation

If you work within the world of software development, you’ll find yourself bouncing back and forth between a few tools. You’ll most likely use GitHub to host your code, but find yourself needing some task/priority software. This could be GitHub itself or other ones like Jira. Of course, you may also find yourself collaborating on several tools, like Slack, and several projects. Considering that it’s already hard to keep track of the progress on one of your projects, working across several of them becomes a struggle. This problem gets worse as you move up the ranks of management where it becomes increasingly difficult to assimilate and rationalize all of this information. To help combat this, Anaxi was created to help give you all the information on the state and progress of your projects in one single interface.

Why measure dev progress?

According to LinkedIn data, there are currently over 3,000 software engineers employed on average at Fortune 4,000 companies. So, how do those companies measure the progress of their software projects and the performance of their teams? After all, you can’t manage what you don’t measure, so the best of them will manually compute portions of this data on a weekly basis. This turns into a tedious and time-consuming task. In fact, this directly impacts your bottom line. Anaxi cuts out this task and may significantly improve software development efficiency within organizations. Teams will know the impact of any process change, which task they should focus on, and whether or not to anticipate any bottlenecks. This also helps reduce the loss in revenue due to shipping critical issues. According to Tricentis, there was a total of $1.7T loss in revenue in 2017 alone due to software failures and poor bug prioritization.

What is Anaxi?

Anaxi currently offers a free iPhone app that provides the full picture of your GitHub projects to help you understand and manage them better. Anaxi has a lot of features based on what they call reports. Reports are lists of issues or pull requests that you can filter as you see fit using labels, state, milestone, authors, assignees, and more. This allows you to monitor those critical bugs or see the progress of your team’s work. For each project, you can select the people on your team so you can easily see what each person is doing and help where help is needed most. It can also be used to keep track of your own work and priorities, and because it’s an iPhone app, it grants quick access to issues and pull requests that have been assigned. There’s also a customizable color indicator for report deadlines that will help you prioritize what to work on.

How to set up the app

First, you’ll need an iPhone and access to the app store. Go into the App Store and download it. Once you open the app, the landing page will appear.

To get started, press on the Connect GitHub button on the bottom of the screen and enter your GitHub credentials. Next, you’ll be asked to select projects that you want to monitor. Anaxi will automatically select some projects. There is a button you can press to edit this list at the bottom that allows you to add or remove projects from this list. If you forget a project, or realize that you don’t want to monitor a project anymore, you can change it once the initial setup is over.

When you have your projects selected, hit the Next button. It’s time to select your team. Anaxi will start by automatically selecting people that you interact with the most with for the projects you selected. Just like the previous step, you can edit this list by pressing the button at the bottom and you can add or remove team members later.

Next, you will be prompted to help set up the reports for your projects. Anaxi will also start by automatically choosing labels that are most used, but you can customize which labels you want to monitor by clicking the button at the bottom of each project. Later on, you can create more tailored reports by adding issue or pull request reports when inside of a project folder.

Now, Anaxi is set up and a view of reports appears. Mine are all green because I don’t have any activity on my selected projects. From this menu, you can see which projects have pull requests at the top. Clicking on these will pull up open tickets on these projects. If you scroll down, you can see all the pull requests and issues that are assigned to you and your team. Then you can see individual views near the bottom for all of your projects. The order of these can be changed at any time by hitting the edit button in the top right and dragging the folders around.

Let’s choose an open-source project and see what it looks like when more people are working together and there are more issues and pull requests. For this example, let’s use kubernetes/kubernetes. As you can see below, Anaxi created a report for the new project, and added it to the current full report that already existed. Now that there is a more active GitHub project present in my reports, we can see the full extent of Anaxi in action.

To edit any part of the reports, simply click on that section, and then click on the edit button in the top right. Once there, you can change filters and if you scroll to the bottom, you can change the values for when an aspect of a report displays green, yellow or red.

My experience

After using Anaxi for a little while, scrolling through my GitHub Projects doesn’t feel like a chore anymore. It’s easy to choose one project and see everything that I want to see. One thing that was slightly bothersome is every time you click on a project, it has to read the GitHub API instead of holding on to it. This results in some wait time when you are trying to switch back and forth between multiple projects in quick succession, but that’s the only downside I’ve seen so far. Changing the colors or filters on aspects of reports is surprisingly easy and intuitive. Another thing I like is that you can create a due date for a certain issue or pull request. This is great when you want to build in dates into your projects. I feel like this would really help me when I want to prioritize certain things, instead of creating Google Calendar notifications, I can do this on the project directly.

So far, I haven’t worked on any project that’s been bigger than 4 people, so it hasn’t helped me that much… yet. As I move forward in my career and work on projects with more and more people and deadlines, I feel like Anaxi will become a go-to product for me. The ability to see everything so easily and the customizability really draws me in and makes me love the product and see myself using it in the future.

What’s coming next

Anaxi currently offers an iPhone app, but don’t fret if you are a web user. The plan for Anaxi is to work on integration with Jira next to help with the technology gap between managing project and managing code. After that is completed, they are planning on creating a web app, followed by Android, and ending with native desktop apps.

This article was produced in partnership with Holberton School.

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month, and Microsoft Store is committed to helping small business owners understand the dangers of cyberattacks and the actionable steps they can take to mitigate cyber threats.

Getting hacked is a scary threat, yet most small business owners don’t think they’re at risk.

Nearly 82 percent[1] of small business owners think their business does not have data that hackers would be interested in stealing, yet 61 percent[2] have suffered a cyberattack and over half[3] have had a data breach.

What’s even scarier than not knowing your business is vulnerable to a cyberattack is finding out your business has been hacked.

Identifying Vulnerabilities

Small business owners may not know the appropriate steps to protect themselves, and others may find the topic can be daunting.

This was the case for Quants Bakery, a six-employee catering and subscription-based vegan bakery in Glendora, California. Sean Etesham, CEO, started the online-based business in September 2017 after he saw a need for more vegan options at his local coffee shops. Like so many first-time small business owners who are strapped for resources, he launched the business and operated it without a dedicated IT person or cybersecurity software.

“Our worst nightmare would be if someone broke into the back end …and took all of the customer credit card information…and posted it online,” shared Sean.

Microsoft Store recently teamed up with a Microsoft cybersecurity expert to take Sean and his now CIO, Richard Idigo, through a lifelike simulation of a common phishing scam, giving them a firsthand look at the damage that can be done in mere minutes. Sean and Richard were shocked at how easily a hacker can create a false site to access passwords and compromise their data.

“I’ve made a lot of sacrifices in terms of my time and energy that could’ve been spent elsewhere,” explained Sean about starting his business. “I cashed out my retirement accounts, and my investment accounts, and put all that money towards the business.”

Any small business owner can attest that success and health of their business is of utmost importance, so addressing cybersecurity vulnerabilities should be a top concern.

The simulation helped Sean to understand the type of security protections and other actions he needed to have in place to safeguard his business and avoid phishing attacks. He worked with a business solutions specialist at Microsoft Store to decide on Microsoft 365 Business as the right solution for their productivity, collaboration, and security needs.

By understanding cybersecurity risk factors, every small business owner can put an affordable, actionable plan in place to mitigate risk and save time and money it takes to recover from a breach.

Addressing Vulnerabilities

Many small business owners do not have IT departments to turn to in the case of a cybersecurity emergency. During National Cyber Security Awareness Month, Microsoft Store is offering small business owners the opportunity to understand the risks of cyberattacks and will be the go-to destination for personalized guidance from in-store business solutions specialists.

If you’re a small business owner, visit Microsoft Store and online to discover cybersecurity solutions like Microsoft 365 Business that are customized for the needs of small businesses to more effectively navigate the cybersecurity landscape and mitigate cyber risks.

[1] SMEs and Cyber Attacks, by Towergate Insurance

[2] 2017 State of Cybersecurity In Small & Medium Sized Businesses, 2017 by The Ponemon Institue

[3] SMBs Are Vulnerable To Cyber Attacks, 2016 by The Ponemon Institute

[4] HACKED: Just Because It’s in the Cloud, Doesn’t Mean Bad Guys Can’t Reach It, 2017 by UPS Capital