Category: Technology

If From Software’s uncompromising approach to difficulty has prevented you from playing Elden Ring, you’ll soon have another way to experience one of the most popular games of the year. This week, Steamforged Games announced it is adapting Elden Ring into a board game.

According to Mat Hart, the co-founder of the company, “fans should expect a dark, richly-realized tabletop world of mystery and peril, with satisfying combat and rewarding exploration.” At this stage, there aren’t many details on the project, but Steamforged promised a combat system that won’t involve dice rolling. Additionally, you’ll be able to play the game with up to three other friends – or by yourself, if you so choose.

Like Steamforged’s take on Dark Souls and Horizon Zero Dawn, Elden Ring: The Board Game will come with a handful of miniatures. On Friday, the company shared a render of one, showcasing how Margit, one of Elden Ring’s early-game bosses, will look in miniature form. Despite its small size, this version of the Fell Omen looks just as intimidating as its video game counterpart. Steamforged will share more details on the project when it brings the game to Kickstarter at a later date. Until then, you can sign up to receive updates as the company is ready to share them. 

 

Almost exactly five years after Hurricane Maria left Puerto Rico in the dark, the US territory is once again facing a power crisis. On Sunday, LUMA Energy, the company that operates the island’s electrical grid, announced that all of Puerto Rico had suffered a blackout due to Hurricane Fiona, reports Reuters.

With the storm nearing the island’s southwest coast, the National Hurricane Center warned of “catastrophic” flooding as Fiona began producing winds with recorded speeds of 85 miles per hour. Even before making landfall at 3:20PM local time, the storm left a third of LUMA’s customers without power. On Twitter, Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Pierluisi said the government was working to restore power, but after the events of five years ago, there’s worry there won’t be an easy fix.

In 2017, Hurricane Maria caused the largest blackout in US history when the Category 5 storm battered Puerto Rico, leaving 3.4 million people without power. The island had only recently begun rebuilding its weakened infrastructure, with blackouts a daily occurrence in some areas. Officials have tried to stress that Hurricane Fiona won’t bring a repeat of 2017. “This is not Maria, this hurricane will not be Maria,” Abner Gomez, the head of public safety and crisis management at LUMA Energy, told CNN before Sunday’s power outage. At the moment, the company is estimating it may take several days to restore power, and asked customers for “patience” while it works to respond to the natural disaster.

 

The entire iPhone 15 lineup will reportedly include the iPhone 14 Pro’s Dynamic Island. In a tweet spotted by MacRumors, display analyst Ross Young said he expects Apple to make the screen cutout standard on all 2023 iPhones. Additionally, the company will reportedly keep its ProMotion 120Hz display technology exclusive to Pro variants due to a supply chain that “can’t support” the feature on more affordable models. In a subsequent tweet, Young said Apple is likelier to trickle down the technology to less expensive iPhones in 2024.

Making the Dynamic Island standard on every new iPhone moving forward would make a lot of sense for Apple, particularly to encourage developers to take advantage of the feature. Some apps already use the cutout for fun features. Once iOS 16.1 arrives later this year, Dynamic Island will also work with Apple’s Live Activities API. It’s also a feature that would make the standard iPhone more appealing to consumers holding onto their current device. While the iPhone 12 was a big upgrade over the iPhone 11, the iPhone 13 and iPhone 14 have been less exciting. There’s not much reason to buy the latest one unless you’re coming from an iPhone several years old, and that’s not great for Apple’s bottom line.

 

With fall quickly approaching, Fortnite is ready to say goodbye to its summer-themed “Vibin” season. Dubbed Paradise, season four of chapter three introduces one of the most significant gameplay tweaks to the game since Epic made the Zero Build mode a permanent part of Fortnite’s rotation in March.

A new substance called Chrome is taking over the island, and you can use it to your advantage to gain a jump on other players. You can throw Chrome vials on walls to pass through them and at your feet to turn yourself into a blob that is faster and immune to fire and fall damage. As a Chrome blob, you also gain the ability to air dash, allowing you to close distance on your enemies quickly.

Chrome has changed the island too. You’ll find a new point of interest called the Herald’s Sanctum by the abandoned Sanctuary. Other locations, such as Condo Canyon, now float in the air as they try to find safety from the substance. Smaller gameplay tweaks include a buff to sniper rifles. Oh, and sliding into other players will now knock them back.

Of course, a new season also means a new battle pass, and this one comes with no shortage of cool skins. The obvious highlight is Spider-Gwen, but there’s also a nifty skater cat and what looks like a bear within a werewolf costume for players to unlock. Season four is available to play starting today.

 

A massive trove of footage from the next installment in Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series has leaked online. On early Sunday morning, a hacker who goes by teapotuberhacker uploaded 90 videos from a test build of Grand Theft Auto VI to GTAForums. Since PCGamer spotted the post, the clips have proliferated across YouTube and social media, and as of the writing of this article, they’re still viewable.

In line with reporting Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier published in July, the footage shows two playable protagonists. One of them is a female character named Lucia, who we see robbing a restaurant in one of the clips. In a separate video, you can see the other playable character riding the “Vice City Metro,” pointing to the fact that GTA VI will take place in a fictionalized version of Miami. According to Schreier, the leaked footage is legitimate.

“Not that there was much doubt, but I’ve confirmed with Rockstar sources that this weekend’s massive Grand Theft Auto VI leak is indeed real. The footage is early and unfinished, of course,” he tweeted. “This is one of the biggest leaks in video game history and a nightmare for Rockstar Games.”

Adding intrigue to an already interesting story, teapotuberhacker claims they’re also responsible for the recent Uber hack. They said they obtained the test build after gaining access to a Rockstar employee’s Slack account and may upload additional data online, including source code and assets from GTA V and GTA VI, as well as the test build itself. It’s unclear how old this version of the game is. Rockstar has reportedly been working on GTA VI since 2014. In July, Schreier reported the studio was at least another two years away from releasing the game to the public.

Grand Theft Auto series publisher Take-Two Interactive did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment.

 

We all have those thoughts, the ones that come to us in the small hours of the night. Who am I? Why are we here? What if my cellphone ran on vacuum tubes instead? Randall Munroe has the answer to, well, only one of those questions, but also the answers to a whole bunch of others collected together into What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Yes, that is a T-Rex eating an airplane. In the excerpt below Munroe examines what it would take to haul an average sized human in a chair over Australia’s tallest skyscraper, using only the power of pigeons. Lots and lots of pigeons.     

Excerpted from What If? 2 by Randall Munroe. Copyright © 2022 by Randall Munroe. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

How many pigeons would it require in order to lift the average person and a launch chair to the height of Australia’s Q1 skyscraper?

In a 2013 study, researchers at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics led by Ting Ting Liu trained pigeons to fly up to a perch while wearing a weighted harness. They found that the average pigeon in their study could take off and fly upward while carrying 124 grams, about 25 percent of its body weight.

The researchers determined that the pigeons could fly better if the weights were slung below their bodies, rather than on their backs, so you would probably want pigeons to lift your chair from above rather than support it from below.

Let’s suppose your chair and harnesses weigh 5 kilograms and you weigh 65 kilograms. If you used the pigeons from the 2013 study, it would take a flock of about 600 of them to lift your chair and fly upward with it.

Unfortunately, flying with a load is a lot of work. The pigeons in the 2013 study were able to carry a load 1.4 meters upward to a perch, but they probably wouldn’t have been able to fly too much higher than that. Even unencumbered pigeons can only maintain strenuous vertical flight for a few seconds. One 1965 study measured a climb rate of 2.5 m/s for unencumbered pigeons,* so even if we’re being optimistic, it seems unlikely that pigeons could lift your chair more than 5 meters.†

No problem, you might think. If 600 pigeons can lift you the first 5 meters, then you just need to bring another 600 along with you, like the second stage of a rocket, to carry you the next 5 meters when the first flock gets tired. You can bring another 600 for the 5 meters after that and so on. The Q1 is 322 meters high, so about 40,000 pigeons should be able to get you to the top, right?

No. There’s a problem with this idea.

Since a pigeon can carry only a quarter of its body weight, it takes four flying pigeons to carry one resting pigeon. That means each “stage” will need at least four times as many pigeons as the one above it. Lifting one person may only take 600 pigeons, but lifting one person and 600 resting pigeons would take another 3,000 pigeons.

This exponential growth means that a 9-stage vehicle, able to lift you 45 meters, would need almost 300 million pigeons, roughly equal to the entire global population. Reaching the halfway point would require 1.6 × 1025 pigeons, which would weigh about 8 × 1024 kilograms—more than the Earth itself. At that point, the pigeons wouldn’t be pulled down by the Earth’s gravity—the Earth would be pulled up by the pigeons’ gravity.

The full 65-stage craft to reach the top of the Q1 would weigh 3.5 × 1046 kilograms. That’s not just more pigeons than there are on Earth, it’s more mass than there is in the galaxy.

You could make things more efficient by reusing pigeons. In the 2013 study, the researchers gave the pigeons 30 seconds to rest on the perch before bringing them down for another trial. If each “stage” is two seconds, and pigeons are refreshed after 30 seconds, you could fly arbitrarily high with a 15-stage craft—but that would still require trillions of pigeons.

A better approach might be to avoid carrying the pigeons with you. After all, pigeons can get up to the top of the skyscraper themselves, so you might as well send them ahead to wait for you there instead of having their friends carry them up with you. If you could train them well enough, you could have them glide along at the appropriate height, then grab you and tug you upward for a few seconds when you reach their altitude. Keep in mind that pigeons can’t grab and carry things with their feet, so they’d need little harnesses with aircraft-carrier-style hooks to intercept you.

With this arrangement, it’s possible you could fly yourself to the top of the tower with just a few tens of thousands of well-trained pigeons. You should probably make sure you have some kind of safety system that will keep you from plunging to your demise every time a falcon flies by and spooks the pigeons.

The craft wouldn’t just be more dangerous than an elevator, it would also be a lot harder to pick your destination. You might plan to go to the top of the Q1, but once you take off… you’ll be completely under the control of anyone with a bag of seeds.

 

The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max may have only arrived yesterday but developers are already dreaming up fun and interesting use cases for Apple’s new Dynamic Island interface. Take Apollo creator Christian Selig, for instance. On Friday, he updated his Reddit client to implement support for “Pixel Pals.” The feature adds a Tamagotchi-like critter that does cute things on top of your phone’s Dynamic Island while you have Apollo open. You can even choose between multiple creatures, including a cat, dog, hedgehog, fox or axolotl.

If you don’t have an iPhone 14 Pro or Pro Max, don’t worry. You can also add the creatures to your phone as lock screen widgets – provided you have iOS 16 installed. On the subject of iPhone widgets, Google teased one that will function as a shortcut to Chrome’s Dino game.

Selig isn’t the only person doing something creative with the iPhone 14 Pro’s Dynamic Island. In a tweet spotted by The Verge, WaterMinder creator Kriss Smolka showed off Hit the Island, a game that uses the UI element for a Pong-style game. You can download it from the App Store. I can only speak for myself, but these apps make me a bit jealous I’m still rocking an iPhone 12.  

 

Tesla has crossed another significant manufacturing milestone. As caught by Electrek, the automaker shared on Saturday that its Texas Gigafactory recently produced its ten thousandth Model Y SUV. The achievement could be good news for those hoping to buy a Cybertruck next year. Tesla plans to build the pickup truck primarily in Texas. The automaker initially expected to begin volume production in 2021 but then delayed the Cybertruck to 2022 and then 2023.

According to multiple reports, one of the reasons Tesla’s next EV hasn’t arrived yet is due to a bottleneck related to the company’s next-generation 4680 battery cells. In 2020, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the technology would lead to electric vehicles that cost less than cars with combustion engines. At that point, however, Tesla and battery partner Panasonic had yet to produce the cells at scale, and it was only this past June that they looked ready for a production surge.

That’s why the Model Y milestone is interesting. In April, Tesla began selling a new variant of the SUV that features 4680 battery cells. It can travel 279 miles on a single charge and starts at $59,990. On Saturday, Tesla didn’t say how many of the new Standard Range AWD variants it has produced to date. However, Electrek estimates the Texas Gigafactory is currently manufacturing more than 1,000 Model Y vehicles every week and that the plant is likely on track to begin making 2,000 units every seven days. 

 

If Half-Life: Alyx left you with an itch to revisit its seminal 2004 predecessor, now you can do so in virtual reality. On Friday, a group of fans known as the Source VR Mod Team released Half-Life 2: VR Mod. As long as you own the original, you can download and play the mod free through Steam.

While it’s currently in public beta, the mod allows you to play through Half-Life 2’s single-player story from start to finish. The Source VR Mod Team integrated a handful of features found in Half-Life: Alyx to modernize the experience and make it playable in VR. For instance, you switch between weapons using the same selection grid found in Valve’s 2020 game.

Other VR-minded tweaks include the addition of optional laser sights, over-the-shoulder ammo storage, manual reloading and two-handed weapon handling. There’s even support for room-scale movement. The Source VR Mod Team says the project isn’t finished, but that hasn’t stopped people from enjoying the experience, with the mod currently holding an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on 732 reviews.

Like Black Mesa before it, Half-Life 2: VR Mod has been a long time coming. As Eurogamer notes, the project was first announced in 2017 and went through development hell before remerging in 2021. The fact you can play it today is thanks to a recent influx of new team members who “revitalized” development.

 

The Department of Justice has asked a US federal judge to participate in the upcoming appeals case between Epic and Apple, according to court documents seen by Reuters. The companies will return to court next month to argue over the outcome of their 2020 antitrust case.

The Justice Department filed a brief to enter the case at the start of the year. The agency said it was concerned that Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had improperly interpreted US antitrust law. In 2019, reports surfaced that the DOJ was preparing to launch a probe of Apple’s business practices. A decision to uphold the company’s win over Epic could limit the DOJ’s ability to sue it for antitrust violations.

“The United States believes that its participation at oral argument would be helpful to the court, especially in explaining how the errors (in antitrust law interpretation) could significantly harm antitrust enforcement beyond the specific context of this case,” the Justice Department wrote on Friday.

The agency has asked for 10 minutes of the court’s time. Neither side is against the Justice Department’s involvement, though Apple has requested that the DOJ’s argument time count against Epic’s total time allotment or that the court extends the proceedings.