Google’s new algorithm shrinks JPEG files by 35 percent

For obvious reasons, Google has a vested interest in reducing the time it takes to load websites and services. One method is reducing the file size of images on the internet, which they previously pulled off with the WebP format back in 2014, which shrunk photos by 10 percent. Their latest development in this vein is Guetzli, an open-source algorithm that encodes JPEGs that are 35 percent smaller than currently-produced images.

As Google points out in its blog post, this reduction method is similar to their Zopfli algorithm that shrinks PNG and gzip files without needing to create a new format. RNN-based image compression like WebP, on the other hand, requires both client and ecosystem to change to see gains at internet scale.

If you want to get technical, Guetzli (Swiss German for “cookie”) targets the quantization stage of image compression, wherein it trades visual quality for a smaller file size. Its particular psychovisual model (yes, that’s a thing) “approximates color perception and visual masking in a more thorough and detailed way than what is achievable” in current methods. The only tradeoff: Guetzli takes a little longer to run than compression options like libjpeg. Despite the increased time, Google’s post assures that human raters preferred the images churned out by Guetzli. Per the example below, the uncompressed image is on the left, libjpeg-shrunk in the center and Guetzli-treated on the right.

Source: Google Research Blog

Sony will soon stop PS3 production and shipments in Japan

Sony is ready to lay the PlayStation 3 to rest, a little over 10 years after the first model was released. Gematsu and Japanese website Gamestalk have discovered that the company will “soon” stop the PS3’s production in its home country. Sony made the revelation on the 500GB black PS3’s product page, which is the only remaining model still in production in Japan. The tech and gaming giant didn’t mention specific dates, but a game shop in Kurume, Fukuoka tweeted that it received a notification that production will end this month. Once all the remaining units are gone, shipments will also stop — anybody who wants the console will have to look in the second-hand market.

Sony has been taking steps to retire the console since last year. It released the last first-party PS3 title in October. In August this year, the console will no longer be able to access PS Now. The PS3 turned 10 in November 2016, and since Sony consoles have a 10-year life cycle, this doesn’t really come as a surprise. Still a sad news for fans who continue to game on the PS3, though. After the production stops, the company is bound to stop rolling out updates and supporting its titles on the PS Store, as well.

Source: Gematsu, Sony Japan, Gamestalk

Backblaze has some advice if you need to destroy the data on an SSD

Why it matters to you

You’ll want to follow this advice on data destruction if you’re getting rid of an SSD.

The switch from spinning hard disk drives (HDDs) to solid-state drives (SSDs) has brought significant increases in speed and improved battery life. Those are the advantages. Disadvantages include higher cost and therefore typically smaller storage capacities.

Another area where SSDs differ from HDDs is how best to make sure that all of your data has been removed when you pass them along to someone else or throw them away. That’s an important question today when so much of our private information is stored both locally and in the cloud, and cloud storage and backup solutions company Backblaze has some advice.

More: Seagate dazzles the Flash Memory Summit with a massive 60TB solid state drive

Backblaze starts out with a discussion of what not to do. First on the list is don’t bother with degaussing an SSD; while putting a strong magnetic field in close proximity to an HDD will wipe out its data, the same isn’t true for SSDs. While HDDs store information magnetically, SSDs do not, and so that method is useless.

Next, while using a drill or hammer to damage parts of an HDD will usually be enough to make the data unrecoverable, SSDs are different. They store their data in chips and not platters, and so destroying just part of an SSD isn’t sufficient. Finally, you can’t simply erase or reformat the free space on an SSD to make sure all of the data is gone as you can on an HDD.

And so what does work, according to Backblaze? The easiest method is to encrypt an SSD, which of course only applies if the SSD is still working and plugged in. If it is, then rather than erasing the data, encryption simply makes it incredibly difficult to recover — especially if you then reformat the SSD before sending it off to wherever it’s headed.

Another method is to shred the SSD. That’s an expensive proposition, however, as shredders capable to ripping an SSD apart have prices running into the thousands of dollars. And, if you decide to go this route, then you’ll want to make sure it’s capable of breaking the SSD remnants into half-inch widths or smaller to ensure that information can’t be recovered.

Ultimately, if you can find another use for your SSD and keep it in your possession, then that’s always a logical choice. Contacting the manufacturer is another good step to take — they sometimes have utilities that might be helpful. But in the end, particularly if the SSD is built into a machine and can’t easily be removed, then encrypting the drive before formatting it seems to be the simplest and most straightforward option.

Teenage paranormal thriller ‘Oxenfree’ now fits in your pocket

Spooky adventure game Oxenfree has made its way to mobile. Developer Night School’s sidescrolling tale debuted on PC and Xbox One early last January, with a stop on PlayStation 4 last May that added, among other things, a New Game+ mode. Now it’s available for iOS devices. At the minimum, iPhone 5S and iPad Air running iOS 9.1 or newer. The iTunes listing says that the game has been reworked a bit for the platforms and features “custom touch controls.” Sounds like it should make working through the game’s radio and cassette puzzles a little more tactile. To celebrate launch week Night School has knocked 20 percent off the regular price, bringing it down to $3.99.

If you grab it, make sure to play with headphones on — the game’s soundtrack is simply too good to ignore. Why? Well, my coworker Jessica Conditt’s description should be reason enough: “[It’s] an electronica daydream that fades into a bumping nightmare; it’s the aural interpretation of the sun setting over an abandoned, beachside military base packed with deadly secrets.” Need even more convincing? Peep the YouTube embed below. And if you really like it, it’s available on vinyl from iam8bit.

Boo!

Our supernatural thriller, OXENFREE, is out now on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac!

Download here: https://t.co/MIINY60DWZ pic.twitter.com/rlsgJB8omN

— NIGHT SCHOOL (@nightschoolers) March 16, 2017

Via: IGN

Source: iTunes

Amazon ups its Smile donations to 10 percent for one day

If you need a good reason to pull the trigger on that Amazon purchase, then try telling yourself it’s for a good cause. Today only (through midnight PT), the retailer’s AmazonSmile program will donate 5 percent of the purchase price from eligible products to the charity of your choice.

It is late in the day, but it is good to remember that you can participate and trigger a contribution anytime, simply by using the AmazonSmile website and selecting a charity to receive the contribution. The increased donation (it’s up 10x from the regular amount), comes as a thank you for customers ranking Amazon #1 in the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) with a score of 86.

Source: AmazonSmile

Gmail on desktop now lets you preview video attachments

A minor, but handy update comes to Gmail on the desktop today: videos sent as attachments can now be played right in your browser window, eliminating the need to actually download them to your hard drive and play them through a media player. Of course, you’ll still be limited to Google’s somewhat heavy-handed 50MB size limit on attachments, but you can always work around it by uploading bigger files to Google Drive.

Speaking of which, according to the official G Suite blog, the infrastructure behind the service is the same code that runs video previews in Google Drive and keeps YouTube humming, so video previews could be rolled into more G Suite applications later.

The video preview features started rolling out Thursday, and Google says they’ll be available to all users in the next 15 days.

Source: G Suite Updates

Apple launches permanent App Store section to showcase indie games

Why it matters to you

Apple’s dedication to promoting indie games could lead to the release of unique games that previously wouldn’t have stood a chance on the App Store

Apple is making it easier for independent games to get noticed by App Store users with its newly launched Indie Showcase. The curated section will receive consistent updates, and act as both a beacon for new and unique indie games, as well as best-of lists similar to Apple’s Editor’s Choice lists.

All of the highlighted games will be hand-picked by the team that has spotlighted worthwhile games, both free and paid, since the App Store launched in 2008. Leading up to the official unveiling and launch of Indie Showcase, Apple spent the last two weeks promoting an eclectic batch of indie titles at discounted rates on both the home and games pages. Prominently featured titles included the critically acclaimed Device 6, Super Hexagon, and Mushroom 11, a well-received PC indie that came to iOS recently.

More: ‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ mobile app lets you manage your gear while on the go

Speaking with Polygon, Mushroom 11 creator Itay Keren said, “By setting up this showcase and reserving this desired spot on their store, Apple is essentially taking a stand to insure the creativity, sustainability and diversity.”

Placement on the App Store often has a direct correlation with the success of a game. The Indie Showcase initiative ensures that games from small studios are given a chance to thrive in a saturated market filled with free-to-play juggernauts like Clash Royale and titles from large developers like Nintendo’s Super Mario Run.

As of publication, Surgeon Simulator, Botanicula, The Escapists, and Prune — four indie games — occupy spots in the top-10 paid chart across the entire App Store.

It’s unclear at this time how often Apple will rotate games in and out of the showcase, but we know that it’s set to be a permanent and noticeable fixture with a myriad of categories to shine a light on a wide variety of titles. As of now, there’s categories for new indies, great sound design, gameplay, narrative, innovation, a deals section, and a top-25 list.

Apple doesn’t let developers pay for preferential statement on the App Store, so the playing field has never necessarily been unfair, but the Indie Showcase is still a step in the right direction for everyone that’s interested in widening their game selections.

BitFenix Portal is a mini-ITX case with style and room to show off your gear

Why it matters to you

If you’re looking for a mini-ITX case but don’t want to give up easy access to components or good looks, then the BitFenix Portal might just be your best bet.

Just because you need a smaller PC doesn’t mean you want to sacrifice performance or easy access to components. BitFenix seems to understand this, and its new Portal mini-ITX case is a testament to that fact.

From the looks of the space-age design and the all-aluminum build, BitFenix clearly was thinking about more than merely the size of the case when putting together its design. It’s smaller, yes, but it also incorporates some interesting features that set it apart from many other mini-ITX cases.

More: There is hope for your tiny PC with Elsa’s new single-slot GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

Perhaps most interesting is the Dual Frame Design, as the company calls it, which makes accessing the components easy and smooth. The smoothness is thanks to the ball bearing runner that allows the frame to track easily in and out, making component access quick and easy.

The Portal uses an SFX power supply that further allows a thinner and more svelte tower design. The case is large enough inside to house a 300mm graphics card, along with a pair of 3.5-inch drives. External connectivity options include two USB 3.0 ports along with 3.5mm microphone and headphone ports.

The case’s good looks are enhanced by a convex design with stands that give the appearance that the case is hovering off of the ground and come in black or white. An optional top window rounds out the modern design, with an inverted motherboard tray allowing a clear view of an LED-enhanced graphics card.

In terms of cooling, BitFenix has managed to create an intelligent cooling system that uses an air-permeable inner chamber with air inlets at the case’s four corners. The company promises sufficient airflow even with a single 120mm air intake and 80mm exhaust, but water cooling solutions are also supported for builds that might tax the air cooling designed into the Portal.

If this small and attractive case is on your short list, then you can pick it up today starting at $140 from retailers such as Newegg. It comes either with or without a window.

Find a security bug in Office Insider builds, and Microsoft will pay up to $15,000

Why it matters to you

If you’re a heavy Office user, then you can join the Office Insider program and potentially make some real money finding vulnerabilities in slow ring builds.

There’s probably no better way to find security bugs than to offer money to the people who actually use software on a daily basis to do just that. That’s why companies like Microsoft and Google offer increasingly significant amounts of money through reward programs aimed at discovering and then fixing vulnerabilities.

Microsoft has its lucrative Bug Bounty program for Windows that just saw its reward double to $30,000 for anyone identifying a verified exploit. Now, the company has announced a new program that offers some serious cash to users of its Office productivity suite for Windows Desktop.

More: Microsoft and Google paying more than ever for bugs found in their systems

The new Office Insider Bug Bounty program will pay anyone using the Insider slow ring builds up to $15,000 for finding security bugs before they have a chance to make their way to the production version. The kinds of bugs for which Microsoft will pay out include:

• Elevation of privilege via Office Protected View.
• Macro execution by bypassing security policies to block macros.
• Code execution by bypassing Outlook automatic attachment block policies.

Go here to dig into the details of how Microsoft will determine eligibility and how you need to submit your bugs. These particular bugs are viewed as likely to be the most prominent and most likely to affect Office users. Macros and email attachments are common vectors of attack on all Office platforms.

Before you spend too much time looking for bugs, here’s a list of vulnerabilities that will not be covered:

• Vulnerabilities in anything earlier than the current Office Insider slow build on Windows Desktop.
• Vulnerabilities in user-generated content.
• Vulnerabilities requiring extensive or unlikely user actions.
• Vulnerabilities found by disabling existing security features.
• Vulnerabilities in components not installed by Office.
• Vulnerabilities in third-party components that might be installed on the system that enable the vulnerability.
• Vulnerabilities about escaping Protected View where Protected View is explicitly not activated in Office code or enabled by default for the reported scenario.
• Vulnerabilities in the Application container.
• Any other category of vulnerability that Microsoft determines to be ineligible, in its sole discretion.

The Microsoft Office Bug Bounty program will last from March 15, 2017, through June 15, 2017. Payouts will range from $500 to $15,000, and of course, there are important terms and conditions to keep in mind. You also need to be a member of the Office Insider program utilizing an Insider slow ring build of Office for Windows Desktop.

You can sign up to be an Office Insider here. Go to File > Account and look under Office Updates to check which version you’re running. Click on Office Insider and select Change Level to move from one ring to another or remove yourself from the Office Insider program.

Good, beta, best: How beta tests help shape games like ‘Gwent’ and ‘The Elder Scrolls: Legends’

If you eagerly anticipated any of 2016’s biggest AAA video games, chances are you could have found a way to play it ahead of its formal release.

Street Fighter V, Battlefront 1, Gears of War 4, Overwatch, The Division — No matter the genre, it seems like every big-name multiplayer game has some kind of beta just prior to launch to kick the tires and start converting eager fans into a loyal community.

Beta tests are becoming a bigger part of the development process than ever before — and that’s good news for gamers.

House of Cards

In 2014, Blizzard launched Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. By April, 2016 it had amassed a player base of 50 million players, demonstrating that the digital card game genre had serious potential, and breathing new life into the genre from a wave of developers looking to capitalize on the game’s success.

There are a lot of little knobs and levers that you can turn and pull.

In 2017, we’ll see two of the more prominent projects hit the scene; Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls: Legends, and CD Projekt Red’s Gwent, a spin-off of The Witcher series’ in-world card game. Though Legends just launched last week and Gwent’s formal debut is a long way off, players have been digging into both of these games for months now. You see, like Hearthstone, both projects launched lengthy beta tests far before their official launch.

Announced at E3 2015, developer Dire Wolf Digital rolled out Legends to a select group of players in April 2016. In August 2016, the studio opened the floodgates with an open beta for anyone interested in trying it. By the time the game formally launched March 9, 2017, the game had been widely available for the better part of a year. According to Bethesda Softworks VP Pete Hines, the extended beta period gives the developer information that they couldn’t get otherwise.

Bethesda announces Elder Scrolls: Legends at its E3 2015 showcase.

“We’re trying to find this balance of reward, and challenge, and fun,” said Bethesda’s Pete Hines when he spoke to Digital Trends in late 2016, while The Elder Scrolls’ Legends beta was in full swing. “There are a lot of little knobs and levers that you can turn and pull. I think we have, in a number of cases, done a little more or a little less of various things to see where the sweet spot is — and we’re going to continue doing things.”

Gwent has taken a little bit of a different path. When CD Projekt Red made the decision to spin the card game off into a standalone release, they realized they couldn’t just dump the content from The Witcher 3 into a standalone app and expect people to like it. Gwent had to become a much bigger and more complex, with more cards and more sophisticated mechanics.

“A lot of us on the Gwent team have previously worked on live-service multiplayer games, so we generally knew what to expect,” said Benjamin Lee, the studio’s development director. “When it comes to balancing a live competitive multiplayer game like Gwent, we look at a large amount of data, what the players think, and also our own experiences to determine what changes we need to make. It’s a lot of work and you’re doing that constantly throughout the game’s lifecycle.”

Fresh Eyes

By the time an open beta begins, the game being tested is usually very close to completion. There’s no sense in letting your audience try things out for themselves if the overall experience is undercooked.

In Gwent‘s “keg” system the player receives a pack of cards and gets to choose the final card they want to keep.

No matter how extensive the game’s internal testing has been, there are sure to be flaws in the beta build. Tiny details that went unnoticed throughout development, suddenly often stick out like a sore thumb to players who have never seen the game before.

This is where beta testing comes in very handy, as evidenced by a problem that CD Projekt Red solved in November 2016.

More often than not, the most involved players in a beta test become the game’s most supportive fans.

In Gwent, the process of opening new packs of cards is slightly different to rivals like Hearthstone. When opening a pack of cards —called a “keg” in the game — you are given a random smattering of cards, but are also asked to pick one of three cards offered up on a separate screen. A popular post on the Gwent subreddit pointed out that the system would be better if players could check what cards they already owned when making this decision. “I hope it will be fixed fast,” another player said.

Before long, a CD Projekt Red representative had taken to the comments section to confirm that the change would be made, and shortly after the game’s first patch, it was implemented in-game.

“With regards to this specific change, I think it was the volume of suggestions surrounding the same idea, both from the community and within the team, and with hindsight it seems very obvious,” Lee said, when asked about this particular fix. “We had no arguments about making the change. It does improve the gameplay experience, especially for newer players, and so we wanted to make sure it was in the game as soon as possible.”

Bethesda’s booth featuring Elder Scrolls: Legends at Gamescom 2016 (Photo: Marco Verch / Wikimedia Commons)

This kind of crowdsourced user experience improvement also played into the way The Elder Scrolls: Legends changed as a result of beta testing. To test the mobile version of the game, Bethesda launched an iPad version in Canada. The team found soon after that creating an account was much more of a barrier to entry on the platform than it was on PC. As a result, they tweaked the mobile version by employing a guest mode that can be converted to a full account at a later time.

“It’s nothing to do with whether the game was fun,” explained Hines. “It’s more about how Bethesda.net currently works, it’s simply some functionality that we currently didn’t have, that we knew we needed.”

More: Hands on: ‘The Elder Scrolls: Legends’

He compared the scenario to a conversation he had with legendary Bethesda designer Todd Howard during the production of Morrowind. “He said, ‘you know, nobody ever spends any time talking about how awesome the installation process for a game is, they just expect it to work — but it doesn’t just work unless you put the time in to make sure that it works.’

“In this case, it doesn’t matter whether Legends is a good game,” he continued. “If we put a roadblock in front of you that you’re not expecting, we have a much bigger problem, that has nothing to do with the game.”

Balancing Act

These tweaks ensured that, when the game officially launches, players’ day one experience will be as smooth as possible. However, launch day isn’t the biggest concern when it comes to a beta test.

Both Gwent and Legends hope to engage an active player base for many years, with regular injections of new content along the way. As players develop new decks and new strategies, the game will evolve organically. That makes it all the more important that the base game is as well-balanced as possible before each game goes live.

“We’ve changed stats, we’ve changed values, we’ve removed abilities, we’ve added abilities,” Hines said. “The team behind Legends is an elite bunch with plenty of experience crafting this kind of game, but they’re not too proud to reassess earlier design decisions if the finished product stands to benefit.

“There’s no substitute for putting it in front of wider and wider numbers of players.”

“These are really good designers and strategy card players who have gone back and changed what they initially designed, because they aren’t beholden to, ‘well, I made it like this so it needs to stay like that.’ We’re going to keep changing it so that the game continues to improve and grow.”

Hines gives the example of an Orc deck that hit the scene around the time the game’s open beta got underway. The deck was easy to use, fairly cheap to build, and proved to be incredibly effective against just about anything that was put in front of it.

“It was just so good, so often, against so many different decks, that it was really kind of out of control,” he remembered. “But, it’s hard to know whether that’s the case until you get a much wider sample size, right? Because if you have all the developers, and the QA and production folks, that’s still — relative to the number of people who are going to play the game — a pretty small sample size.”

Putting the game in the hands of the players allows developers to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t in a scenario that’s much closer to a retail release than internal development. When you’re creating a game that needs to stand up to the rigors of competitive play for years to come, feedback is very important. And opening up your game to the masses gives you feedback that you simply can’t get elsewhere.

“There’s no substitute when you’re trying to figure out how balanced the game is,” added Hines. “There’s no substitute for putting it in front of wider and wider numbers of players.”

Let’s Talk

But even the feedback from players may take a back seat to the community building that occurs when a developer works with the community to polish its game. There’s seemingly transactional relationship that forms between the two: The player gets a sneak preview, at the price of being a guinea pig. The developer gets essential feedback, at the price of letting players see their unfinished product, warts and all. This relationship, however, doesn’t come to an end when the beta is done.

It isn’t always possible to make a game without breaking some hearts.

More often than not, the most involved players in a beta test become the game’s most supportive fans. Whether their interest is in a genre, a franchise, or a particular game, participants sign up for a reason. These players are going to be crucial later on, if the game is going to be a success.

Between the fact that beta players are supplying crucial feedback, and the fact that the population of a beta test will hopefully stick around to become the game’s initial player base, developers need to maintain a good relationship with their testers.

“We are not doing any resets at all anymore, ever,” Hines said when asked about the prospect of a progress wipe for Legends players while the game’s open beta was still in full swing. “We did a reset several months ago, and when we did it, we said we’re not doing any more resets. The game is just, live, at this point. We’re not going to have anybody — myself included — lose all this stuff that they’ve been working on.”

In games like Gwent and Legends, where players can track their progress by the library of cards they’ve amassed, that can be tricky. It isn’t always possible to make a game without breaking some hearts. When you have wipe players’ progress, it’s in the interest of the studio to keep them in the loop as much as is possible.

“You know us [Bethesda] well enough to know we can hold things fairly close to the chest,” Hines said. “We can go to the E3 before Fallout 4 launched before you even know that that game exists. But at the same time, with a game like this, we do want to be more transparent and let folks know. I think that kind of interaction is critically important.”

More: Gwent: The Witcher Card Game: Our first take

That’s why the team behind Legends has gone beyond their official channels to source feedback. They’re scouring social media, Reddit, and forums like NeoGAF for any mention of their game, good or bad. Any information is good information, and no feedback should go to waste.

Conversation-starters

Modern game development is expensive. Any AAA multiplayer title that suffers from lopsided online play, technical issues, or a lack of players at launch could spell doom for its developer. Beta tests help make sure these scenarios don’t play out. They’re a dress rehearsal, a safety net — and done right, they can make the finished product much, much better.

Beta tests are only going to become more prominent in the gaming industry, and the techniques that companies are using to get your attention before launch are becoming more and more sophisticated. In February, Ubisoft launched closed and open betas for its medieval fighter For Honor in rapid succession, effectively extending the launch coverage of the game for a full week prior to launch, while building a community and circumventing the need for pre-release reviews.

A beta test can serve several different purposes at once, from perfecting a game’s balance, to making sure technical infrastructure is in place, to out-and-out promotion. But all of these purposes really boil down to one goal: making sure the game doesn’t flop when it’s released.

When Gwent and The Elder Scrolls: Legends drop their beta status, they will not only represent the design choices of their creators, but countless hours of test play and lots of feedback. With any luck, all that effort will result in games that can stand the test of time for months and years to come.