Ubisoft delays ‘The Division’ DLC to fix the base game
Ubisoft’s survival shooter multiplayer title The Division had a successful launch back in March, but unpolished design choices erupted into outright game-breaking bugs in the free content additions released in the months thereafter. While the game’s DLC roadmap pegged its second paid expansion Survival to be the next out the door, the studio will push that back until later in 2017 and dedicate the upcoming October update to fixing the core game. That leaves the third planned release, Last Fall, delayed until sometime in 2018.
In a blog post, Ubisoft presented a laundry list of things the so-called Update 1.4 will address: fixing a ton of bugs in its Known Issues backlog, making loot drops more relevant, tweaking enemy difficulty, balancing gear and introductory adjustments to PvP and the Dark Zone. While admitting that there are too many issues to fix before you can release your shiny new expansion must be humbling, they’re going so far as offering weekly State of the Game updates for their fans. Hopefully this offers a better foundation before the Survival DLC is released so the company can avoid banning players for exploiting bugs, as happened after the first bonus content pack dropped in April.
Via: Destructoid
Source: Ubisoft blog
The Department of Defense needs help designing a biohazard suit
The Department of Defense is looking for a few good creators to help create a brand new biohazard suit to life.
The Chembio Suit Challenge is being held by the Chemical and Biological Defense division within the US military, and there’s a $250,000 prize hanging in the balance for ideas on how to create a better chembio suit.
The current suit, according to the contest, has hindrances in the form of weight and bulkiness that greatly restrict soldiers’ range of motion, agility and maneuverability. Those judging the contest will look for specifics like improvements in expedience, mobility and other areas. Basically, making the suit a more svelte and less totally cumbersome piece of equipment is key here.
In addition to figuring out the problem with bulkiness and frustration soldiers face in putting the current suits on, the Department of Defense is also looking for designs to help keep anyone wearing the suits cool. If you submit an idea for this you could win awards ranging from $5,000 to $150,000.
“The ultimate goal is to relieve any burdens and hazards to the warfighter and improve operational capabilities in combating chemical and biological wartime threats,” reads the official Chembio Challenge site.
Interested in taking on the challenge? Go give it a shot.
Via: Fast Co. Design
Apple Working on Special Version of iPhone for Japan, Will Include FeliCa Tap-to-Pay Chip
Apple is developing a version of the iPhone for Japan that includes one of Sony’s FeliCa chips to enable contactless transit payments, reports Bloomberg.
FeliCa is a tap-to-pay format developed by Sony and built into cards that are used to access Japan’s railway and bus system. FeliCa is faster than Apple Pay, allowing transactions to occur in a fraction of a second, which makes it suitable for use in a fast-paced transit environment. It’s also able to store e-money that can be used at vending machines and cafes across the country.
Apple plans to work with several transit card providers to create virtual versions of FeliCa transit cards that can be stored in the Wallet app on the iPhone and used in place of a physical card.
The FeliCa chip will let customers in Japan store their public bus and train passes on their iPhones. Users would then be able to tap their phones against the entrance scanners instead of using physical cards. While the FeliCa chip is the standard technology underlying the service, there are several different providers of transit payment cards based on the type of transit and areas within Japan.
The addition of a FeliCa chip to the iPhone will help Apple make inroads into the mobile payment market in Japan, which is dominated by the standard. 1.9 million payment terminals in the country have already adopted FeliCa and FeliCa terminals saw 4.6 trillion yen ($46 billion) in transactions in 2015.
The FeliCa payment feature could be available as soon as next month, built into the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus that Apple plans to unveil in early September. Bloomberg warns, though, that Apple could potentially delay the feature’s launch until next year should discussions with Japanese payment networks fall through.
Related Roundup: iPhone 7
Tags: Japan, FeliCa
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Apple to Eliminate Home Button in 2017 iPhone
The radically redesigned iPhone coming in 2017 will not feature a Home button, Bloomberg today confirmed in a wider report focusing on new mobile payment features coming to Japan.
Apple is already at work on a major redesign of the iPhone for 2017 that focuses more heavily on the display by removing the Home button, according to a person familiar with the matter.
According to past rumors, the 2017 iPhone, which may be called the iPhone 8, will feature a complete design overhaul with an edge-to-edge flexible OLED display that does away with the top and bottom bezels where features like the Touch ID fingerprint sensor and front-facing camera are housed.
Instead, the functionality of the Home button, including Touch ID, may be built directly into the display. Apple design chief Jony Ive is said to have wanted to build an iPhone that looks like a single sheet of glass for several years, and 2017, the year that marks the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, is when it will happen.
The iPhone display may also feature edges that are curved on both sides, similar to the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge, and it is rumored to have a glass body, moving away from the aluminum that’s been used for iPhones since the iPhone 5. Other features that may be built into the 2017 iPhone include wireless charging, an enhanced Taptic engine, and new biometric capabilities like iris scanning or facial recognition.
Related Roundup: iPhone 8 (2017)
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Malibu bottles get connected with NFC, because summer
Malibu is embracing NFC to make a limited number of its rum bottles connected, meaning you’ll be able to tap to interact, rather than just swigging the whole thing down.
The idea is to provide connectivity with your smartphone, so you can tap on the NFC tag and your phone will then open up a range of content for you to interact with, including the chance to win 7 nights in Barbados.
Malibu says that this will be the largest test of NFC-equipped bottles, with 40,000 connected rum bottles hitting the shelves of 1600 Tesco stores over the next few months.
While this is in many ways an experiment to see whether NFC bottles will work, it also presents the opportunity for customers to have plenty of fun.
Malibu
There will be a range of experiences offered via the NFC tag, including the chance to instantly win UE Boom speakers. Tying into Malibu’s “because summer” marketing campaign, you’ll also be encouraged to upload summer pictures to enter that Barbados prize draw, you’ll be able to access recipes for your Malibu, locate Malibu bars with a leaning toward alfresco drinking and get access to summer tunes too.
NFC offers an advantage over other connected offerings, because the tag tells your phone exactly what to do. Getting the NFC tags onto the bottle was also something of a technical feat, passing the bottles through a heat tunnel to apply the tags.
If nothing else, it’s a chance to drink rum and play with your phone and what’s not to like about that?
EE’s free 6-month Apple Music subscription will save you Bacon, give you access to Britney, bitch
EE will be offering a 6-month free subscription to Apple Music to all new and upgrading monthly customers, from 1 September.
The pairing with the Apple music service is the first of its kind for a UK network, and the latest in a number of incentives offered by EE to convince you that it is the network of choice.
EE has 16 million 4G customers on its books and a large proportion of network data is used for video and music streaming, with the company reporting a 41 per cent increase in streaming over the past 3 years.
- Apple Music vs Spotify: What’s the difference?
Importantly, this announcement makes Apple Music available to both Apple and Android users through the app, as well as on other devices, such as your laptop. You’ll be able to access Beats 1 and Apple’s DJs as well as the rest of the service’s features.
The subscription is managed by EE, and at the end of the 6-month free period, you’ll have the £9.99 monthly subscription added to your phone bill.
The new deal is being backed with a major advertising campaign, starring Kevin Bacon and Britney Spears – whose album Glory launches exclusively on Apple Music. Check out the comedy advert below.
Judge orders the release of additional Clinton emails
The FBI recently discovered an additional 15,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. Though a vast majority of those communications appear to be innocuous, a federal judge has ordered their release beginning on September 13th.
These emails are separate from the 55,000-plus pages of documentation Clinton campaign previously, and voluntarily, turned over to investigators earlier this year. The FBI and Department of Justice discovered this new batch while scouring Mrs. Clinton’s personal email server and turned them over to the State department which, by order of Judge James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court, is required to set a timetable for their release. These were originally not expected to be published until at least mid-October.
“We are not sure what additional materials the Justice Department may have located,” Clinton campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon, told the New York Times earlier this week. “But if the State Department determines any of them to be work-related, then obviously we support those documents being released publicly as well.”
This story is developing, check back regularly for updates
Source: Reuters Politics (Twitter)
The co-creator of ‘Rick and Morty’ just founded a VR studio
Most folks know Justin Roiland as the co-creator and lead voice actor behind Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty, but it’s less widely known that he’s obsessed with virtual reality. The entertainer was one of the first backers of Oculus’ original Kickstarter, and has reportedly filled notebooks with game ideas and concepts. Now, he’s is going all in on his obsession: today, in partnership with former Epic Games executive producer Tanya Watson, Roiland announced Squanchtendo Games. It’s a VR game studio with, in Roiland’s words, one simple goal: “We just want to make super duper games dooood.”
Roiland is new to the world of gaming, but he’s not exactly a novice. He’s already helped Adult Swim make one Rick and Morty game, and has been working on another with Owlchemy Labs — a VR Rick and Morty simulator called Virtual Rick-ality. His role seems to be more focused on design than programming and production, but that’s where Watson comes in. At Epic Games, she helped make three Gears of War titles, Fortnite and Bulletstorm. Not bad at all.
The new company hasn’t yet announced any games in production, but Roiland certainly has ideas. In 2005, the creator told PCGamer that he’d filled three notebooks with VR game idea, said he’s trying to figure out how to allow players to talk to virtual reality NPCs in a way that feels natural and unrestrictive. For now, though, Squanchtendo Games is mostly just looking for staff to help them build their first title. The company’s website (and hilarious hand-drawn press release) focuses almost exclusively on finding artists, designers, producers and programmers to help them build great VR experiences.
Not a game designer? Check it out anyway — the entire website is saturated in Roiland’s brand of oddball humor, and likely serves as a good preview for the kind of games we can expect from Squanchtendo in the future.
Source: Squanchtendo Games
Universal Music Group is reportedly done with streaming exclusives
Apple Music and Tidal have tapped into exclusive releases to gain the upper hand on Spotify over the last year, but it appears one major record label may have had enough. Frank Ocean released his long-awaited follow-up to 2012’s Channel Orange on Apple Music over the weekend, an album that should top the charts this week. However, Blond has apparently caused quite a stir with Ocean’s label Def Jam and its parent company Universal Music Group. In fact, Billboard reports that UMG CEO Lucian Grainge has informed the heads of Universal’s labels that streaming service exclusives are a thing of the past for their artists.
This report comes after Ocean released his visual album Endless with Def Jam as an Apple Music exclusive the day before the full-length Blond debuted. That visual album isn’t for sale, but Blond is and it was released independently of Def Jam/Universal on Frank Ocean’s own Boys Don’t Cry imprint. Billboard says it’s unclear if the release of Ocean’s latest record directly influenced the change in policy or if it was simply one of many factors for the revised strategy.
What’s more, Billboard reports that Ocean paid a $2 million advance back to the label that essentially bought the 17-song album back and allowed him to fulfill his contractual obligations to Universal with what is basically an extended music video. We reached out to Universal Music Group for a comment on the matter and we’ll update this article when/if we hear back.
The 24-hour turnaround is certainly cause for question, but Billboard’s sources indicate that Universal Music Group isn’t currently seeking any legal action against Ocean or members of his team. Of course, by releasing the album independently through Apple, he stands to get a bigger piece of the revenues from it. A figure Billboard says increased from 17 to 40 percent when he decided to make the move. Def Jam is also home to Jay Z, Kanye West and Rihanna, the latter two having released exclusive albums on Tidal that hit the top spot on the Billboard 200 chart. Drake’s Views from the 6 was a timed exclusive on Apple Music for Universal through the Cash Money/Young Money label and it too hit number 1 on Billboard’s album chart.
Perhaps what’s more interesting than a major record label potentially refusing to offer new releases as timed exclusives is how Apple Music is essentially functioning as a record label. Two of Apple’s latest high-profile exclusives, Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book and Ocean’s Blond, were both released independent of a regular record label. Don’t forget: Apple’s Jimmy Iovine came over in the Beats deal and he was the co-founder of Interscope Records. Thanks to some tweaks to Billboard’s charts that count a certain number of streams as an album sale, Coloring Book was the first streaming-only album to make the Billboard 200 chart. It will be interesting to see if other artists take a similar route or if labels are indeed fed up with the notion of exclusive releases all together.
Source: Billboard
Google’s Fiber rollout isn’t going as planned
Google Fiber may have just gone live in Salt Lake City, but the process of laying all that fiber optic cable is reportedly making Alphabet’s homebrewed ISP the company’s most expensive unit outside of the core Google business. According to a new report from The Information, those costs have prompted Larry Page and Sergey Brin to push Google Fiber away from its original plan and more towards a cheaper wireless standard.
The Information’s report cites low subscriber numbers, as well as some disputes between Page and Fiber CEO Craig Barratt as the main reasons for the shift in focus. Page, who is known for setting hard targets, reportedly instructed Barratt to cut the cost of home internet by a tenth and slash his 500-person staff in half. According to an earlier report from Recode, it costs at least $1 billion for Google Fiber to enter a new market.
That said, the switch from fiber to wireless has been coming for some time: In June, after Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt discussed the possibility of using gigabit WiFi to cover the last mile, Google Fiber (which falls under the Google Access umbrella) snatched up Webpass — a company that was already using a combination of fiber and high-speed wireless connections to do just that. Earlier this month, Google also started seeking permission to test wireless broadband in 24 other US locations, although those tests will likely be limited to Google employees to start.
Via: Recode
Source: The Information
