Explore ‘Quadrilateral Cowboy’ even further with its source code
The team behind Quadrilateral Cowboy is giving a little something back to the community. Blendo Games has released the game’s entire source code for players and other studios to explore and examine.
Offering up the source code fits right in with the bizarre existence of Quadrilateral Cowboy itself, in fact, as it’s a cyberpunk puzzler that’s all about overseeing a hacking operation while utilizing a 56.6k modem and 256k of RAM. Impressive specs, right?
The code is written in C++, with solution files for Microsoft Visual C++ 2010, and is available in a package that’s just 12MB large. The game was created on a modified version of the same engine behind Doom 3 and Quake 4, and if you’re interested in putting those tinkering skills to good use, you can grab the source here.
That should satisfy any urges to mess about in the world of tech that arise after a game of Quadrilateral Cowboy.
Via: Develop-Online
Massive ‘No Man’s Sky’ day one patch is live a day early
No Man’s Sky’s substantial first-day patch is available now for the PlayStation 4, a day earlier than the game’s August 9th release date. The patch’s file size is 824MB, which isn’t too large considering the number of fundamental changes it makes to how the game plays, but it is roughly a quarter of the game’s size, which is 3.69GB.
No Man’s Sky’s patch brings three story paths to follow in the game — one of which has been completely rewritten — allowing you to make choices early on that will determine what you see later. The update brings a deeper trading system, new combat mechanics — like the slightly revamped hit systems in space fights — and expansions to your personal and space vessel inventories.
This patch, which includes a few more changes, is the “first of many” free updates to the space exploration title. Future upgrades will let you build bases and own “giant space freighters.” No Man’s Sky is seen (by developer Hello Games) as a constantly evolving project. You’ll most likely play a different game when you hop back in a few months later.
Via: Polygon
Day-one patches are the new normal
No Man’s Sky will receive a massive day-one patch that adds a ton of new content and gameplay elements to an already humongous game. This would be just fine, except a few retailers across the nation started selling the game early — it comes out on Tuesday, but some people (including reviewers) were playing it late last week. The patch, which includes the actual finished game with all of its bells and whistles, requires these early players to delete their saves and start over when No Man’s Sky actually comes out. Developers at Hello Games wiped No Man’s Sky’s servers on Sunday and they’re doing the same thing today.
And there’s nothing wrong with any of this.
Some players feel cheated (“I bought the game, so why can’t I keep my progress?”), and others think that a day-one patch is a sign developers are trying to ship an unfinished game (“Isn’t that just a cop-out so they can start making money without doing their jobs?”). These perspectives are not only entitled, but they misunderstand the modern game development process.
Day-one patches are the new normal — and, hell, they’re not even that new.
When Microsoft attempted to sell the Xbox One as an “always-on” console in 2013, the idea received so much backlash that the company changed its entire next-gen ecosystem. Microsoft abandoned the idea of a console that had to be constantly connected to the internet, while Sony crowed that the PS4 was never designed to be always-on.
However, in practice, both of these consoles rely heavily on online connections. Many major, AAA games — even single-player experiences — won’t function without first connecting to the internet, and all games receive multiple patches throughout their life cycles. Some of these patches are small, but some are large updates to the core of a game’s mechanics or playability. Modern consoles are not always-on, but they are mostly-on.
Within this mostly-on ecosystem, not only are developers able to release day-one patches; they’re encouraged to do so. Getting a game certified on consoles is an arduous, bureaucratic process filled with complex forms, weird benchmarks and a thousand ways to get rejected. Nuclear Throne co-creator Rami Ismail laid out the certification process in a blog post last night, and he noted that especially in the case of disc-based games, like No Man’s Sky, developers often submit their builds months in advance.
“If you’ve got months to improve upon a game that went through cert, do you think you would leave those months?” Ismail asked. “Do you think audiences would appreciate a developer just kind of doing nothing for three months? Can you imagine the Kickstarter outrage if a developer, three months from launch, posted, ‘We’re done, it’s good, we’re not touching it again until you get to play in three months?’ Anybody arguing that a game should be done when it goes ‘gold’ is living in the ’90s.”
Besides, not only are games today more connected than they were in the ’90s, they’re vastly more complicated on a technical level. Patches are more prevalent in general because there’s more that can go wrong or need tweaking for a game to operate as its creators envisioned. This doesn’t just apply to console games, either; PC games are just as huge and many also require an internet connection at some point.
The ability to roll out a day-one patch is a crucial facet of a mostly-on ecosystem, in which developers and console manufacturers assume all players have access to the internet, at least for a little while. Long enough to download an update, if not an entire game.
A day-one patch is not a sign that the developers are trying to pull a fast one on players or that they snuck an unfinished game through certification. Sure, it seems like some games simply aren’t done when they hit consoles — we’re looking at you, Assassin’s Creed Unity — and those are worthy of our ire, especially if we’ve just dropped $60 on a supposedly AAA experience. However, day-one patches on their own are not sinister. They’re simply part of the modern game development process.
Sean Murray and the rest of Hello Games were thrust into the limelight the day they revealed the first trailer for No Man’s Sky in late 2013, and they’ve been working under its harsh glare ever since.
“We’re under a pretty intense spotlight right now, and hopefully it’s easy to imagine how hard it would be to switch off from that, or how deeply we care about people’s first impression of the game,” Murray wrote in a post about the day-one update yesterday. “In fact most of us were back here the day after we went gold, working on this update. We’re already proud of what we put on a disk, but if we had time, why not continue to update it?”
No Man’s Sky in particular is a passion project. You can hear it in the way Murray talks about devouring sci-fi novels as a kid and how he dreamed of one day playing a game that allowed him to explore entire universes from the comfort of his couch. The game gained attention because it’s gorgeous, and it kept us hooked because of its premise: the idea of unencumbered cosmic exploration unlike anything we’ve ever been offered in a video game. It’s a huge project and a new experience in the gaming world. And now, with the day-one patch, it’s even better than we could have imagined.
In this case, a day-one patch is not only normal — it’s ideal.
‘Rocket League’ update brings grappling hooks and giant boots
Psyonix still isn’t done finding ways to inject new life into Rocket League more than a year after it first hit the scene. It’s introducing a Rumble mode that adds some welcome chaos to the vehicular sport through random power-ups. You can use a giant boot to kick players out of the way, a magnet to lure the ball to your car, or a grappling hook to draw yourself to the ball. There’s even a tornado that will sweep up everything into a raging funnel cloud. Rumble will be free when it arrives in an update this fall, so it’ll be easy to try if you find that your exhibition matches are becoming a little too predictable.
Via: Rock Paper Shotgun
Source: Psyonix
‘No Man’s Sky’ day one patch changes large parts of the game
Many gamers are all too familiar with day one patches that fix bugs or add features that didn’t quite make it in time for certification or shipping. However, the first-day No Man’s Sky patch will be… more substantial. Hello Games has revealed that the 1.03 update arriving on NMS’ August 9th launch will make fundamental changes to how the game plays. Most notably, there are now three “paths” to follow in the game — choices you make early on will determine what you see later. There’s also a deeper trading system, new combat mechanics (such as a revamped on-the-ground aiming method and critical hit systems in space fights) and even new universe and planet generation criteria. If you’re one of the few to have scored a copy pre-launch, you may be in for a shock.
Notably, the upgrade also makes it easier to discover other players. You can scan other star systems players have discovered on the galactic map, increasing the chances that you’ll run into someone. Many have argued that NMS is really a single-player game given the sheer unlikelihood of two people finding the same celestial bodies (there are 18.4 quintillion unique planets), but those odds just went up.
This is merely the “first of many” free updates to the space exploration title, Hello Games adds. The next upgrade will let you build bases, own “giant space freighters” and marvel at graphical upgrades like new cloud rendering and temporal anti-aliasing. In other words, the developers see the title as a constantly evolving project. You might get a very different experience if you hop in a few months later, let alone over the long term.
Source: Hello Games
Ben Heck’s Hackbotz, part 1
With the return of BattleBots and Robot Wars, The Ben Heck Show team produce a real-life Nintendo Mario Kart battle arena with robot kits. In this first of a three-part series, the robots are assembled — and weaponized — without instructions. Join Ben as he shows us how to combine motor controller driver hardware with a custom LiPo battery pack. Meanwhile, Felix introduces us to XBee to wirelessly remote control the robots, and considers using Bluetooth with an Intel Edison chip. However, Felix is keeping his weaponizing details under wraps; it’ll have to be something good since Karen has something crazy in mind! Tell us your ideas for your battling robots over at the element14 Community.
‘Pokémon Go’ welcomes trainers in 15 more countries
Apparently, Pokémon Go’s launch in Japan signified a wider release in the region. Niantic’s hit app is now officially out in 15 more countries in Asia and Oceania, specifically Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau. A lot of people in those locations began playing way back when the application first launched by downloading its APK. But now that the game is officially available, they can get it straight from the App Store or from Google Play.
As TechCrunch noted, this latest Asian expansion leaves out three huge mobile markets: China, Korea and India. Niantic CEO John Hanke explained to Forbes in July that they’re having trouble expanding to Korea, because the country’s Google Maps info is pretty limited due to security concerns over the North’s activities. In China, the company still has regulatory hurdles to overcome. It’s unclear why the game’s still not out in India, but Niantic admitted in the past that its server problems have been slowing down the game’s rollout.
Source: Pokémon Go (Facebook)
Fan-made ‘No Man’s Sky’ app catalogs your interstellar journey
The galaxy-faring sci-fi fest No Man’s Sky isn’t out until next week but one enterprising fan has already made parts of the game perhaps a little less daunting. Reddit user Aleator83’s NMS Ally is a companion app that will, among other things, generate custom names for the planets you visit and creatures you find, and upload your screenshots to share with other users of the app. Polygon notes that it’ll also track where you find resources. It’s live for Android at the moment, and Aleator83 says that the iOS version is pending approval from Apple.
It isn’t the first fan-made app for a sprawlingly huge game, but let’s hope that like Rockstar, the teams at Sony and Hello Games won’t shut this down. If you’re feeling jealous of the people playing the game (and using the app) early, know that their progress isn’t permanent. Ahead of the game’s retail release on Tuesday, Sony and Hello Games have announced No Man’s Sky’s pre-release servers will be wiped on Sunday. That means that everyone will start with a clean slate whether they want to or not.
Servers are being wiped on Sunday pic.twitter.com/JTmzabmU1R
— Harry Denholm (@HarryDenholm) August 5, 2016
Via: Polygon
Source: Google Play, Reddit
Iran bans ‘Pokémon Go’ over security jitters
A number of governments are already nervous about the security implications of Pokémon Go, but Iran is taking that fear one step further: it just became the first country to ban the critter catching game entirely. The nation’s High Council of Virtual Spaces wouldn’t say what prompted the decision besides “security concerns.” However, it comes after reports that Iran wanted to see what cooperation it could get from Niantic before taking action.
The move isn’t shocking. On top of concerns about players wandering near military bases and other sensitive areas, it wouldn’t be surprising if Iran was worried that Pokémon Go would encourage large-scale gatherings and thus protests against the powers that be. Whatever the motivations, the ban shows just how much the game has done to draw attention to location-based gaming — much to the chagrin of Iranian residents who just wanted to join in the fun.
Source: BBC
One month after going free, ‘Evolve’ averages 15,000 players
Pick a random moment in June and you’d likely find about 100 people playing Turtle Rock Studios’ Evolve on Steam. That’s not a lot of players in general, but this number is especially sad for a game billed as an online multiplayer extravaganza. One and a half years after launch, it looked like Evolve was dying. And then, in July, Evolve’s active player base shot up to an average of 15,400 at any given time on Steam, according to current lead designer Brandon Yanez.
This didn’t happen by accident: Developers at Turtle Rock knew they had to take drastic action to save Evolve and so, on July 7th, they did. They made the game free on PC.
Evolve originally cost $60, the standard price of a AAA video game, and it launched alongside a bevy of pricey downloadable extras. This flood of day-one DLC was one reason the game simply didn’t resonate, even though it received a ton of pre-release buzz from critics and players alike.
“There was a ton of conversation in the community with regard to business models rather than discussion on the game itself,” Yanez said.
When Turtle Rock released Evolve into the wild, it landed smack in the middle of a “DLC shitstorm,” according to studio founders Chris Ashton and Phil Robb. It was early 2015, and gaming forums and blogs were rife with conversations about developers overloading their titles with pricey downloadable content. Many players were sick of it and extremely vocal about their displeasure. Any mention of DLC, especially tied to a $60 AAA game, instantly ignited comment sections and Twitter.
And Evolve certainly had a lot of DLC from day one. Players lambasted it for this fact, which surely influenced some people’s decision to not buy the game. However, DLC wasn’t Evolve’s only problem.
The game had a steep learning curve, Yanez said, meaning many players couldn’t jump in and have fun right off the bat. On top of that, the game simply wasn’t fun until late in each round. Evolve used an asymmetrical multiplayer strategy where four players acted as hunters, each with an individual skill, and one person embodied a Lovecraftian kind of monster that attempted to evade capture and take down the other players. It looked like a fast-paced, hectic kind of game, but Yanez said it was criticized for being a “running simulator” before the monster gained all of its abilities.
Basically, until that point, Evolve was boring.
“After seeing our original player base decline and after reviewing a ton of feedback, we realized we needed to change the game so that it was faster-paced, less role dependent and more accessible,” Yanez said.
Going free was always on the table for Turtle Rock. Plenty of team members were fans of other free multiplayer games and they talked about the option early on in Evolve’s development. Some of the most successful online multiplayer games in recent memory have been free, including League of Legends, Dota 2 and Hearthstone. Shooters, however, tend to have an entry price — think Overwatch, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty or Destiny. Evolve was well within its genre’s boundaries when it launched at $60. However, its sluggish gameplay simply didn’t support a large, captive audience.
Evolve Stage 2, as developers dubbed the free version, didn’t just include a price drop; it reworked how the entire game operated. The hunters were overhauled, lending them all a more robust set of skills, rather than rigidly defined roles. For example, originally, only the hunter known as a “trapper” could deploy a dome that caught the monster, but Stage 2 gave that power to all hunters. Plus, monsters started with enough skill points to unlock all of their abilities right away.
The message was clear: No more running simulators.
“That has probably been the most exciting thing about this first month [as a free game] so far, is how much has changed simply because our community asked for it,” Yanez said. “We feel that has been the biggest difference. You still find wonderful people who become exceptional members of the community, but now there are way more opportunities for community growth and engagement with a much wider audience we could’ve never reached if we remained a ‘paid’ community.”
Evolve Stage 2 hit Steam for free on July 7th, bringing with it all of the content that Turtle Rock had previously released for the game. Since then, more than 1 million people have tried it out, and it hit a peak of 25,000 concurrent players just two days after going free. One month in, an average of 15,000 active players means Evolve certainly isn’t dead just yet.
The game still has a base price on consoles, for now. Turtle Rock said that if the PC experiment goes well — meaning, if Evolve can sustain a large and steady player base — it’ll go free on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 as well.
To that end, the studio is focused on regularly updating and tweaking Evolve on PC in a bid to keep players interested. Turtle Rock recently kicked off “Shear Madness,” a month-long event that will introduce three new characters, three fresh map variants, a new game mode and a bunch of community-requested features.
This is a far cry from where the game would be if it had remained a paid product.
“We’d be reaching the tail end of our life cycle,” Yanez said. “It’s exciting for us to see people giving the game another chance, but we know this is only the beginning.”
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