Open-World Cyberpunk RPG Dex Comes To Nintendo Switch This July
Qubic Games has announced that Dex, a cyberpunk RPG set in a 2D open world, will be launching on Nintendo Switch on 24th July.
Combining that open-world design with 2D side-scrolling, this new action RPG has you playing as the titular Dex, a “mysterious blue-haired girl on a mission to take down the powerful and enigmatic organisation that rules the city of Harbour Prime”.
As you’ll spot in the new trailer above, you’ll find fully-voiced characters and branching storylines and quests waiting for you, as well as multiple endings and a wide spectrum of upgrades and skills to discover. It’s said to play out like “classic Metroidvania titles”, so if that’s your thing, you should be in luck here. Here’s a feature list:
Game Features – Deep RPG mechanics mixed with side-scrolling 2D action – Non-linear gameplay set in a cyberpunk open-world – Intriguing and mature plot in a neo-noir atmosphere – Multiple dialogue choices with branching outcomes – Full English voice over – Multiple playstyles – stealth, open combat, diplomat, hacker or a mix of the above – Various customization options – choose your equipment, skills and even cybernetic implant skills to open up new paths in the city – Unique hacking mechanic that lets you dive into Cyberspace
The game’s set to launch at $19.99, with pre-orders going live today. If you already own any other Qubic Games title, you’ll benefit from a 25% discount.
What do you think? Liking what you see? Share your thoughts with us down below.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-01-2020, 02:45 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Escape From Tarkov Reserve Map Just Got Bigger With Patch 0.12.6.2
Escape From Tarkov’s new June 29 update, officially called patch 0.12.6.2 by developer Battlestate Games, is live. The update adds two quests that involve a new expansion to the Reserve map, along with a handful of bug fixes and technical improvements.
The new quests are available through Prapor after level 10, titled The Bunker - Part 1 and The Bunker - Part 2. Both are set in the underground bunker below Reserve, which has been expanded with previously sealed doors now open, providing new entrances to the bunker and linking up several existing routes and locations. Scav Raiders now spawn in the bunker and a new extraction point called D-2 has been added, which requires players to restore power in another part of the bunker before it can be accessed.
Below you'll find the requirements for both bunker quests and the rewards, plus full patch notes for the update, detailing some of the aforementioned bug fixes.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-01-2020, 02:14 AM - Forum: Minecraft
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Bedrock: 1.16.1
Custom skins work again in multiplayer! Hopefully, those who have been experiencing crashes can enjoy their worlds again with their friends uninterrupted once again.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-01-2020, 02:13 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Report: Latest Xbox Lockhart rumors point towards an August announce
The (yet unconfirmed) idea that Xbox’s next-generation debut would take the form of a multi-console family of systems has circulated for some time now, but even with the Series X mostly unveiled those rumors haven’t died down.
The latest rumblings suggest that Xbox is looking to reveal a sister system for the Series X via online showcase in August. According to Eurogamer, those in the know say the system once codenamed Lockhart is likely to be the Xbox Series S, and was originally planned to be announced alongside the Series X before the global pandemic complicated those plans.
At the end of last year, and before the Series X was officially unveiled, insiders confirmed to Kotaku that a dual console approach was still in the cards for Xbox’s next generation. Just last week, security researcher TitleOS (via WindowsCentral) found mention of Lockhart in the release notes for the June Xbox Development Kit, particularly of a profiling mode that’ll let developers target different specs depending on the system.
As with earlier mentions of Lockhart, these latest reports bill the console as a lower-powered (and likely more affordable once next gen prices are revealed) alternative to the full Series X, similar to how the Xbox One X compares to the Xbox One S but launching all at once rather than over the span of years.
On the other side of the next-gen console watch, no such rumors exist for PlayStation’s PlayStation 5 line. Instead, the competing console maker has opted to announce two versions of the PlayStation 5 with only one key difference: the option to buy an system without a disc drive and leave all concerns of physical media behind.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-01-2020, 02:13 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Don’t Miss: Blizzard’s postmortem of Diablo II
The original Diablo went gold on the day after Christmas in 1996, after a grueling four-month crunch period. We hadn’t put any thought into what game to do next, but as most developers can probably relate to, we were pretty certain we weren’t ready to return to the Diablo world after such a long development cycle. The only thing we were certain of was that we wanted to avoid another crunch like we had just experienced. Diablo II went gold on June 15, 2000, after a grueling 12-month crunch period.
After Diablo shipped, we spent about three months recovering and kicking around game ideas for our next project, but nothing really stuck. The idea of returning to Diablo began to creep into the discussions, and after a couple of months of recuperation, we suddenly realized we weren’t burned out on Diablo anymore. We dusted off the reams of wish-list items we had remaining from the original, compiled criticisms from reviews and customers, and began brainstorming how we could make Diablo II bigger and better in every way.
Diablo II never had an official, complete design document. Of course, we had a rough plan, but for the most part we just started off making up new stuff: four towns instead of the original game’s one; five character classes, all different from the previous three; and many new dungeons, vast wilderness tile-sets, and greatly expanded lists of items, magic, and skills. We wanted to improve upon every aspect of the original. Where Diablo had three different armor “looks” for each character, Diablo II would use a component system to generate hundreds of variations. Where Diablo had “unique” boss monsters with special abilities, Diablo II would have a system for randomly generating thousands of them. We would improve the graphics with true transparency, colored light sources, and a quasi-3D perspective mode. Level loads would be a thing of the past. The story would be factored in from the beginning and actually have some bearing on the quests. We knew creating this opus would be a big job. Because we had the gameplay basics already polished, we figured we would hire some new employees, create some good tools, and essentially make four times the original game doing only two times the work. We estimated a two-year development schedule.
While the player characters are only seen in the game as 75 pixels tall, all were modeled and rendered in high resolution for use on the character selection screen and in promotional materials. Here, the Paladin stands tall.
The Diablo II team comprised three main groups: programming, character art (everything that moves), and background art (everything that doesn’t move), with roughly a dozen members each. Design was a largely open process, with members of all teams contributing. Blizzard Irvine helped out with network code and Battle.net support. The Blizzard film department (also in Irvine) contributed the cinematic sequences that bracket each of Diablo‘s acts, and collaborated on the story line.
Almost all of Diablo II‘s in-game and cinematic art was constructed and rendered in 3D Studio Max, while textures and 2D interface elements were created primarily with Photoshop. The programmers wrote in C and some C++, using Visual Studio and SourceSafe for version control.
Creating detailed sketches of settings, such as this hut in the Act III dock town of Kurast, preceded the actual modeling of background art.
Blizzard North started out as Condor Games in September 1993. The first contracts we landed were ports of Acclaim’s Quarterback Club football games for handheld systems and, more significantly, a Sega Genesis version of Justice League Task Force for Sunsoft. Silicon and Synapse, a developer that would later change its name to Blizzard Entertainment, was developing a Super Nintendo version of Justice League Task Force. Condor ended up pitching the idea for Diablo to Blizzard, and halfway through the resulting development process Blizzard’s parent company acquired Condor, renaming us Blizzard North. Throughout a tangled history of corporate juggling and ownership changes, Blizzard North has remained a very independent group. Our staff has grown steadily from about 12 at the start of Diablo to 24 at the start of Diablo II, and finally to our current group of more than 40. We concentrate 100 percent of our efforts on game development. To help keep this focus, Blizzard’s headquarters in Irvine manages other functions, such as quality assurance, marketing, public relations, technical and customer support, as well as the operation of the Battle.net servers. Our parent company, Havas Interactive, deals with business functions such as sales, manufacturing, and accounting.
Much time was spent perfecting Act I since it would likely be used in a beta test or demo. The Amazon was the first character to be completed.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 06-30-2020, 08:18 PM - Forum: Windows
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Universities tackle big challenges with Microsoft Power Platform
Today’s unprecedented public health and educational crisis is creating enormous challenges for institutions of higher education. Chief among these are campus closures and the need to switch to remote or hybrid learning, concerns over the health and well-being of students, faculty, and the community, and the need to understand the impacts on academic research.
As higher education institutions prepare for the upcoming academic year, they will have to address the needs of their communities, while meeting operational requirements across the university. Some solutions can be found in new, agile low-code tools, which are helping institutions quickly meet specific challenges they face. Microsoft’s Power Platform allows users to address challenges and streamline processes across an institution through low-to-no-code apps, bots, and the automation of backend processes—all integrating withMicrosoft Teams as a single hub for students, faculty, and staff.
We’re hearing incredible stories about how institutions are addressing challenges like student engagement and well-being, back-to-school requirements, and research in real-time with the Power Platform, including low-code apps with Power Apps, automated processes with Power Automate, powerful chatbots with Power Virtual Agents, and up-to-the-minute analytics with Power BI. That’s all happening without the need for developers or data scientists.
The Upstate Medical University story
Upstate Medical University serves 17 counties and nearly 1.8 million constituents in New York State. The institution recently released a back-to-school solution to ensure a safe return to campus. With limited staff to deploy as screeners, Upstate and Microsoft introduced a new, self-screening assessment tool to ensure the safe return of faculty, staff, students, and medical residents to campus.
To keep the campus safe early in the COVID-19 pandemic many staff members worked from home and campus buildings had only limited access. Individuals who did report to campus were screened for symptoms by an Upstate staff member.
However, with the use of the new tool, since June 8, Upstate has completed more than 8,500 screenings with more than 2,000 screenings completed on the first full day the tool was launched. As the campus begins to reopen, Upstate will need to provide symptom screening at more campus locations. This self-assessment tool assists Upstate in these screenings through allowing daily symptom checking online in accordance with CDC guidelines
Upstate Medical responds quickly to community during pandemic
At the outset of the pandemic this spring, Upstate Medical University launched a COVID telephone hotline on behalf of Onondaga County to provide information on COVID-19 to the public and to help triage symptomatic patients to the right location for follow-up care and possible testing. As the hotline call volume increased significantly, Upstate recognized the need to provide an additional method to address the public’s questions.
Working with Microsoft, Upstate quickly developed an online coronavirus assessment tool to enable users to assess their symptoms and determine whether they should seek testing. The health bot solution allowed for a quick remedy to the high call volume of the telephone hotline while continuing to provide the public with information. The assessment tool logged 8,000 users in its first week of operation. The success of the tool enabled Upstate to scale back hours for its telephone hot line, enabling the staff who volunteered to answer calls to return to their normal positions. Upstate Medical was able to reduce call center and testing center volumes optimizing human capital, resources, and facilities.
Dr. Robert Corona, CEO of Upstate University Hospital, said, “There is much anxiety from the public, and understandably so, during this critical time. The coronavirus assessment tool, coupled with our COVID-19 triage line, can help the public get quick accurate information about their current health situation, and reassurance on next steps.”
Understanding the financial impact at Purdue
Announced last month, Purdue University, a top public research institution in Indiana, partnered with Microsoft to create a Power App, the Higher Education Crisis Financial Impact Tracker, to help determine how the current situation is affecting academic research programs and provide an aggregated view of the financial impact on the university. Purdue researchers can access the application through Teams and input information on specific research initiatives and how they’ve been affected.
In a recent press release, Theresa Mayer, Purdue’s Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships, said, “At this point, we have more than 1,100 faculty members on campus using the tool, and it is allowing us to get a clearer picture of how the COVID-19 event has affected our research programs. Until now, we have not been able to quantify impact at the research project level this efficiently.” Purdue University was the first university to implement the Higher Education Crisis Financial Impact Tracker. Microsoft announced that this Power App will soon be available to all universities. Learn more at https://aka.ms/educfit.
ANS provides student engagement solution
To support student engagement, ANS, a UK cloud and digital services provider, developed a Power App solution to help improve student engagement and identify at-risk students during the COVID-19 crisis. The solution works by gathering various data from Microsoft Teams such as which students have virtually attended lectures. It then automates a workflow that helps the university pinpoint and address specific student needs, allowing them to act quickly to ensure the best outcome.
Microsoft’s platform is flexible to assist higher education institutions in adhering to local guidance and requirements regarding faculty, staff and student privacy and safety. With the help of these tools, Microsoft aims to continue to be a resource for higher education institutions as they address the emerging needs of students, faculty, and staff across university and healthcare settings.
Learn more about Power Platform and Teams for Education and adapt quickly with agile, low-code tools available using the following solutions:
Microsoft Power Apps empowers everyone, regardless of their technical abilities, to build low-code apps quickly and easily.
Power Automate enables you to streamline repetitive tasks and paperless processes.
Power Virtual Agents enables you to create powerful chatbots, like a crisis response chatbot—without the need for developers or data scientists.
Power BI enables everyone at every level of your institution to make confident decisions using up-to-the-minute analytics.
Review: Urban Flow – An Accessible And Absorbing Traffic Toy Box
Traffic is stressful. A game about directing traffic should be stressful. Urban Flow isn’t. If anything, it’s quite a zen experience; more so with each additional player you bring into the game. It’s a game that anyone can play, with a premise that can be explained to anyone in a matter of seconds. This is a tremendous strength.
To our recollection, there haven’t been that many games about the traffic department. Air traffic, sure – it’s a minor subgenre in Japan with the likes of the brilliantly-titled I Am An Air Traffic Controller – but not so much with ground-based vehicles. DOS obscurity Traffic Department 2192 took a less pacifistic approach to the profession, with the closest thing to Urban Flow that we can recall being Nintendo’s hidden GBA gem bit Generations DigiDrive, But even that isn’t particularly reminiscent of Baltoro Games’ little traffic toy box.
Urban Flow is extremely simple, but there’s a fair amount to get your head around. You’re presented with a section of city; intersecting highways, roundabouts – your commute, basically. Each face button switches a traffic light on or off. All you need to do is make sure the traffic – yes – flows. This is a little easier said than done, as there are plenty of little nuances and additional considerations to take into account.
Besides your common-or-garden traffic, you’ll need to keep an eye out for the likes of ambulances, which operate on their own timer. While you can delay standard vehicles as long as you want, the ambulances need to get going soon or you’ll fail the current level. As well as the emergency services, you’ll need to watch out for the disconcerting sight of tanks roaming the streets, as they’ll ignore your red lights entirely no matter how bright they are. What are you going to do about it?
Further spanners are thrown into the works with particularly convoluted intersections and automated bridges and train tracks. Your “camera” (the view of each stage) isn’t infallible, either – sometimes poor conditions will steam it up and you’ll need to hit the left analogue stick to clean it. This move is also used to remove broken-down cars from the roads, or errant trash that’s fallen out of a passing garbage truck.
As we say, there’s a good amount to commit to memory and that helps keeps the game involving. Power-ups can be a boon when things get hectic, with the basic extra life being joined by an icon that allows you to slow time if you need to make quick decisions to prevent a nasty collision. Having some measure of command over the flow of time tends to be useful in this sort of situation; you can’t just leave traffic sitting at the lights as they’ll switch over automatically if you want too long.
Adding more players, though, will give you something of an advantage. It’s easier with friends, where you won’t need to multi-task quite so much – instead, you can assign tasks amongst your fellow players. Multiplayer is local-only (for up to four players) but to be fair, online wouldn’t be a great fit for this kind of game. Any kind of latency would make it next to impossible It’s a nice way to take the edge off what’s ultimately a difficult and demanding puzzle game by introducing co-operation into the mix. It’s still not easy, though.
Graphically and musically, Urban Flow is good stuff. Not particularly detailed, but it doesn’t really need to be; you need to know what’s moving, what kind of vehicle it is, and whether it’s currently able to progress. Anything else is just cruft, so it’s extremely effective that everything you can see on the screen is somehow critically relevant to the game in progress. The soundtrack is a rather chilled-out glitch-hop-ish ambience, not dissimilar to the music from the brilliant Love and its sequel Kuso. You could almost call them… wait for it… traffic jams.
It all amounts to a game where you’ve got a lot of plates to spin, but doing so ends up being conversely relaxing. Watching the traffic move safely at you and your friends’ command is satisfying and a little bit hypnotic. Progressing through the games lengthy campaign will last you long enough – getting three stars on every stage with careful management is satisfying and difficult – but even if you clear that out there’s a lovely “Endless” mode to play as well, in which you’ll pick your traffic interchange and go to town. With an achievement system and plenty of unlockables, there’s a lot here to work towards if you find yourself sucked in.
Conclusion
The word of the day here is “absorbing”. Urban Flow’s title isn’t a misnomer; the gameplay is as smooth as the graphics and once the pieces are in place you shouldn’t have any trouble getting your head around it. Accessibility has been rather masterfully welded to a relatively complex, punishing task, here. We dare say it might be difficult to think of your own ventures out into the city centre the same way again. After all, Urban Flow will quickly make you an expert at directing traffic.
Scratchy Summer Sale, Royal Wave Bundle, Ghost of a Tale deal
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Become the hero the mousekind deserves in Ghost of a Tale!
Tilo is not much of a fighter, so stealth and nimbleness are your allies when confronted with enemies twice your size. ? https://youtu.be/9rfuK3u7_oc
PGA Tour 2K21 Will Make Fun Of You When You Hit A Bad Shot
The first-ever PGA Tour 2K game launches in August, and among its new features is a beefed up broadcast package that includes Luke Elvy and Rich Beem calling the action.
Elvy has the most experience in the broadcast booth, as he has been featured over the years on Fox Sports and GameSpot sister company CBS Sports. Beem is a former player who has won three times on the PGA Tour, including a Major championship at the 2002 PGA Championship. He is also a commentator for Sky Sports.
A new trailer for PGA Tour 2K21 featuring Elvy and Beem as been released. They speak about bringing their unique expert insights to the game, and it seems the commentary in PGA Tour 2K21 won't be very traditional. Elvy and Beem say some of their outtakes and bloopers from recording sessions will actually make it into the game, and this includes Beem describing an eagle as a "Super Chicken."
Wicked Engine Gets DX12 And Vulkan Raytracing Support
The open source cross platform C++ powered game engine Wicked Engine, just got raytracing and path tracing support for both DX12 and Vulkan renderers. Available as both a low level framework for building your own game engine, or as a fully capable engine on it’s own, Wicked Engine boosts the following features:
DirectX 11, DirectX 12 & Vulkan renderers
Image rendering,animation : 2D,3D space
Font rendering (True Type)
Networking (UDP)
meshes,objects,armatures,animation,materials,lights,hit-spheres,wind,world info,dynamic cameras,ribbon trails,particle systems
