Netease has just announced Harry Potter: Magic Awakened during its 520 conference, happening today. It’s an upcoming RPG currently in development at Portkey Games, that sees you play as a brand new student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. You get sorted into a house by that dusty old hat, study in various different classes, and head off on adventures with your classmates.

Thought we can’t confirm right now, it appears that multiplayer plays a big part. We witnessed what appears to be other players wandering around your house dorm, and the few battle sequences, which take place during adventures, involve working with your friends (and, presumably, strangers) to battle off a wide variety of fantastic creatures.

You do so by playing cards, which represent various different spells, onto the battlefield. It’s kind of like Clash Royale in that respect. It also appears that there are a wide variety of spells to unlock, and you can check the details of any spells in your arsenal at any point by rifling through your spellbook.

When not studying or making a general nuisance of yourself, you can wander around popular wizarding world locations. We got a good look at Hogwarts, naturally, as well as the Forbidden Forest and Diagon Alley.

Harry Potter: Magic Awakened enters open beta on May 29 across iOS and Android, though only for users in China. There is no word about a western release yet, but given the sheer amount of spoken and written English on display in the trailer, we’d be very surprised if this didn’t launch across the world.

We’ll keep you posted as we learn more. In the meantime, go ahead and check out the official site to grab as much information as you can.

“As we’ve learned more and more about what we need and the different limits of all the components that make up a supercomputer, we were really able to say, ‘If we could design our dream system, what would it look like?’” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “And then Microsoft was able to build it.”

OpenAI’s goal is not just to pursue research breakthroughs but also to engineer and develop powerful AI technologies that other people can use, Altman said. The supercomputer developed in partnership with Microsoft was designed to accelerate that cycle.

“We are seeing that larger-scale systems are an important component in training more powerful models,” Altman said.

For customers who want to push their AI ambitions but who don’t require a dedicated supercomputer, Azure AI provides access to powerful compute with the same set of AI accelerators and networks that also power the supercomputer. Microsoft is also making available the tools to train large AI models on these clusters in a distributed and optimized way.

At its Build conference, Microsoft announced that it would soon begin open sourcing its Microsoft Turing models, as well as recipes for training them in Azure Machine Learning. This will give developers access to the same family of powerful language models that the company has used to improve language understanding across its products.

It also unveiled a new version of DeepSpeed, an open source deep learning library for PyTorch that reduces the amount of computing power needed for large distributed model training. The update is significantly more efficient than the version released just three months ago and now allows people to train models more than 15 times larger and 10 times faster than they could without DeepSpeed on the same infrastructure.

Along with the DeepSpeed announcement, Microsoft announced it has added support for distributed training to the ONNX Runtime. The ONNX Runtime is an open source library designed to enable models to be portable across hardware and operating systems. To date, the ONNX Runtime has focused on high-performance inferencing; today’s update adds support for model training, as well as adding the optimizations from the DeepSpeed library, which enable performance improvements of up to 17 times over the current ONNX Runtime.

“We want to be able to build these very advanced AI technologies that ultimately can be easily used by people to help them get their work done and accomplish their goals more quickly,” said Microsoft principal program manager Phil Waymouth. “These large models are going to be an enormous accelerant.”

Learning the nuances of language

Designing AI models that might one day understand the world more like people do starts with language, a critical component to understanding human intent, making sense of the vast amount of written knowledge in the world and communicating more effortlessly.

Neural network models that can process language, which are roughly inspired by our understanding of the human brain, aren’t new. But these deep learning models are now far more sophisticated than earlier versions and are rapidly escalating in size.

A year ago, the largest models had 1 billion parameters, each loosely equivalent to a synaptic connection in the brain. The Microsoft Turing model for natural language generation now stands as the world’s largest publicly available language AI model with 17 billion parameters.

This new class of models learns differently than supervised learning models that rely on meticulously labeled human-generated data to teach an AI system to recognize a cat or determine whether the answer to a question makes sense.

In what’s known as “self-supervised” learning, these AI models can learn about language by examining billions of pages of publicly available documents on the internet — Wikipedia entries, self-published books, instruction manuals, history lessons, human resources guidelines. In something like a giant game of Mad Libs, words or sentences are removed, and the model has to predict the missing pieces based on the words around it.

As the model does this billions of times, it gets very good at perceiving how words relate to each other. This results in a rich understanding of grammar, concepts, contextual relationships and other building blocks of language. It also allows the same model to transfer lessons learned across many different language tasks, from document understanding to answering questions to creating conversational bots.

“This has enabled things that were seemingly impossible with smaller models,” said Luis Vargas, a Microsoft partner technical advisor who is spearheading the company’s AI at Scale initiative.

The improvements are somewhat like jumping from an elementary reading level to a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of language. But it’s possible to improve accuracy even further by fine tuning these large AI models on a more specific language task or exposing them to material that’s specific to a particular industry or company.

“Because every organization is going to have its own vocabulary, people can now easily fine tune that model to give it a graduate degree in understanding business, healthcare or legal domains,” he said.

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The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Remote

You connect people. Your tech helps them find their friends or make new ones – investing in a sense of presence and identity in a world that could last for years. You take on the challenges of online play that are unique and constantly evolving – a beast with many heads – and you have the sort of mind that craves the chance to slay it.

Question is seeking a network engineer with Unreal Engine multiplayer experience for a full time position to round out our team with ownership over matchmaking, session flow, and/or dedicated servers. Our last game was a multiplayer peer-to-peer game, and we wish to scale the team up to take this further using PlayFab’s matchmaking, crossplay, and dedicated server offerings. Your expertise in this field would grant you agency within the studio to define your role as well as the shape of the company as it enters its next phase of existence.

You would be working remotely from home with competitive salaries and benefits for U.S. residents with a distributed team made up of ex-AAA developers whose past team credits include: Thief: Deadly Shadows, BioShock, BioShock 2, BioShock Infinite, Dishonored, South Park: The Stick of Truth, and South Park: Fractured But Whole. We draw on a long history of games with strong central narratives & diverse player-enabling systems with the goal of attempting to create new experiences in the same vein, but on a smaller scale.

Responsibilities

• Provide both, high level and low level, direction for the client and backend server architecture
• Implement client travel flow through various session patterns
• Write documentation for the maintenance and upkeep of your systems
• Provide technical insight regarding multiplayer gameplay design
• Lead and discuss networked game system architectural decisions and best practices

Requirements

GEOGRAPHY

• Must live within U.S. time zones from Pacific to Eastern time – We want office hours to overlap from West to East coast
• Due to logistics issues, we can only offer benefits to U.S. residents.

NETWORKING EXPERIENCE

• Required: Familiarity with Unreal Engine 4’s online subsystems and session APi
• Required: Must have shipped a multiplayer game on consoles (PS4 and/or XboxOne)
• Familiarity with online gaming backend services such as PlayFab, Azure, or AWS
• Familarity with cyber security methods and practices
• Knowledgeable about network protocols
• Keen to understand each millisecond of network exchanges, knowing where the time goes and how to reduce waste
• Nice to have: Experience with implementing network topography as it relates to dedicated servers
  A) running Unreal Engine in headless mode
  B) using third party online services

COLLABORATOR

• A mind for good architecture that caters to human factors and minimizes technical debt… specifically in the context of Unreal Engine 4
• Able to use or modify existing code instead of writing redundant new systems
• Understands gameplay
• Self driven quality standards:
• Proactive about tackling new problems instead of waiting to be told
• Able to write bug reports and feature requests for yourself
• Reaching out to team members as needed
• Be the first to test your own output

COMPUTER SCIENTIST

• Computer Science degree or equivalent experience
• Expertise in C++
• Ability to learn server-side programming languages as needed
• Memory management – References and pointers vs. copy
• Data structures, design patterns, and algorithms
• Mastery of replication tactics and multiplayer development patterns

ALGORITHMIST

• Systems design: Able to synthesize algorithms based on feature specifications AND teach that algorithm through writing and verbal discussions
• Able to speak in terms of Big O notation and algorithmic complexity
• Nice to Have: Understand common uses of dot product, cross product, normalized vectors, sine, and cosine in the context of gameplay programming
• Optimizations: Able to learn and employ optimization techniques as needed

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

The Nintendo Switch already has loads of amazing Metroidvania games, but we could always use one more, couldn’t we? It’s been revealed today that MindSeize will be headed to the Switch later this year.

Developed by self-declared hermit crabs of Kamina Dimension, MindSeize is an atmospheric new Action-Adventure with a Sci-Fi space-travel setting, drawing strong inspiration from titles like Metroid Fusion and Mega Man X.

Here is some more info about the game from the devs:

Key Features:

– Classic 2D-action with a modern twist – Smooth and fast-paced action with beautiful hand-drawn 16-bit pixel graphics, mixed with atmospheric music and hard hitting sound effects.
– Explore mysterious planets – Travel to 4 different and unique planets, unravel their secrets and fight the dangers within. Remember to take a break on your ship once in a while, and interact with your crew.
– Upgrade your MAG – Buy and find different mods, weapons and abilities that bring versatility to your MAG’s combat capability.
– Delve in to the world of MindSeize – Follow the story written by a professional script writer with comic book style cutscenes, read the log about planets and their fauna, experience the heart-rending twists.

Following a gruelling three-year development cycle, MindSeize is now out of early-access on Steam and Kamina Dimension will now be turning their attention to creating the ultimate Switch port, which is planned to be released on the eShop in September this year. A physical release for Nintendo Switch is also on the cards, which collectors will no doubt be delighted to hear.

Let us know what you think of the trailer above. Are you looking forward to adding MindSeize to your Metroidvania collection later this year?

Update: Backers of Wonderful 101: Remastered on Switch have now been sent a link to a specific help page created by The Yetee, the company PlatinumGames has partnered with to manage reward fulfilment. If you’re still missing your code for the Switch version of the game, you’re advised to head to that page.

If you’re wondering how the game stacks up on Switch, you can read our review (spoilers: we enjoyed it).

Original Story (Sun 10th May, 2020 12:30 BST): A few days ago, PlatinumGames began sending out Switch codes for The Wonderful 101: Remastered. While most Kickstarter backers were able to redeem and play the game, a number of people reported receiving blank codes, and others received ones that wouldn’t allow them to play the game immediately.

Below is an example of a blank code. As you can see, PlatinumGames acknowledged this slight mishap – explaining it had “identified the cause of the error situation” and got the “codes out properly” right away:

A week before this, Platinum announced the retail release of the game had been pushed back to 30th June in America and 3rd July in Europe due to the coronavirus outbreak. Physical backers may also not receive their copy of the game until after the retail release. The developer estimates it will start shipping backer versions in “late” June.

Did you have any problems redeeming your code? Did you back a physical copy of the game? Tell us below.