Month: March 2017

SAN FRANCISCO—Hello Games, the makers of beleaguered space-exploration game No Man's Sky, announced a new initiative on stage at this year's Game Developers Conference: Hello Labs. As announced by studio founder Sean Murray, the company is setting aside money to fund multiple projects—one of which is already in development—that focus on "procedural [world] generation and experimental games research."

Murray made the announcement at the end of a discussion about the use of mathematic formulas to generate the quadrillions of planets in No Man's Sky. This discussion largely avoided talking about the game's mixed critical reception. Still, Murray did point out a few new details about the end of development.

For starters: Murray and his team made an astonishingly low-ball prediction about how many players would boot the game on its first day. As in, less than 14,000. The team considered that number a high-end estimate of concurrent players, because staffers saw that number attached to recent Steam-use data for the game Far Cry: Primal, which launched shortly before No Man's Sky. "It's a huge game, obviously," Murray said. "That [number] made us a little bit nervous about servers, and the sheer number of people booting the game up day one." (The team was tempted to estimate even lower, at around the 3,000-player count of indie game Inside, but staffers at Sony warned Murray to estimate something befitting "a triple-A product.")

Enlarge / Warren Spector, speaking at GDC 2017, talked about rebuking game industry expectations during the creation of Deus Ex. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

SAN FRANCISCO—Cyberpunk RPG Deus Ex celebrates its 17^th anniversary this year, and original game director Warren Spector took the opportunity to describe the classic game's development process at this year's Game Developers Conference. The rapid-fire talk was light on nitty-gritty details, but in addition to offering a unique version of the game's origin story, Spector explained how the game was nearly disrupted by work on a branded project for another "successful" game series.

Spector had just finished his work on Thief: The Dark Project at Looking Glass Studios Austin, and his goodbye from there was unceremonious: "Looking Glass ran outta money, let's be frank." Describing his financial situation as "panhandling" at that point, Spector returned to a game idea he'd pitched to Origin and Electronic Arts years earlier, called Trouble(Shooter). That action-RPG concept would have starred a '90s-era operative, ex-CIA, named Jake Shooter, who was now working as a "hard-boiled private eye." It likely would have shared elements of Deus Ex—particularly stealth and "play how you want" elements—that Spector had dreamed of creating post-Thief.

"I blew the dust off that Trouble(shooter) proposal and convinced a company I won’t name to let me make a RPG in a successful RTS line that I won’t name," Spector told the crowd. "I was about to sign the contract."

Enlarge / WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 17: U.S. Secretary of Interior nominee, Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT), testifies during his confirmation hearing before Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee January 17, 2017 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The former Navy SEAL commander is expected to face questions on whether federal government can transfer land to states or private ownership. (credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

On Tuesday the US senate confirmed former Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke to lead the Department of the Interior, and on Wednesday it confirmed former Texas governor Rick Perry to lead the Department of Energy. Both men will have considerable influence in how the US approaches energy issues over the next four years, from how advanced energy projects are funded to how public lands are used for oil and gas extraction.

Perry, who once claimed that he wanted to eliminate the Department of Energy, recanted during his confirmation hearing in January, stating: "My past statements made over five years ago about abolishing the Department of Energy do not reflect my current thinking. In fact, after being briefed on so many of the vital functions of the Department of Energy, I regret recommending its elimination." Perry also reversed his previous statements of doubt about the science behind climate change in his January hearing, although he stopped short of affirming a belief that human activity is a dominant driver of climate change.

Senators voted 62 to 37 to appoint Perry to the position.

SAN FRANCISCO—A few months ago, Microsoft announced that its upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update (currently in testing) would include a new "Game Mode" that improves the performance of interactive titles running under Windows by at least a few percentage points. At the Game Developers Conference this week, Eric Walston from the Xbox Advanced Technology Group explained a bit about how exactly that Game Mode will "focus the existing hardware on providing the best possible gaming experience."

Currently, on the Windows OS level, a game is just another process among many running simultaneously. With Game Mode, though, Windows will isolate CPU resources to be devoted exclusively to that game process and optimize the GPU to give the game as much attention as possible as well.

On the CPU side, Game Mode allocates a majority of the CPU's cores to be devoted exclusively to the target game, so an eight-core system might get six gaming-dedicated cores when running in Game Mode (depending on what other processes are running). The system then moves threads devoted to other processes off of those gaming-focused cores, reducing thread contention among the various gaming process threads and improving performance.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Hinterhaus Productions)

For years, researchers have tracked the source of hospital outbreaks back to superbug-splashing sinks. For instance, researchers found an outbreak in a Canadian hospital that spanned 2004 to 2006 was caused by multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa breeding and splashing out of the drains of hand-wash sinks in patient areas. Thirty-six patients were infected in the outbreak, 12 of whom died of their sink-spawned infection. Investigators found that with the water running, the sinks could launch deadly germs at least a meter away.

Despite the discoveries, researchers have puzzled over how sinks become superbug spreaders—and how to keep them from doing it. In the case of the Canadian hospital outbreak, no amount of cleaning or disinfectants fixed the problem. The hospital only ended the outbreak by renovating the sinks so they weren’t so splashy.

Now, with a new study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, researchers may finally have an answer to superbugs’ sink-dwelling skills: They survive in P-traps and can quickly climb pipes. More specifically, researchers at the University of Virginia found that bacteria can happily colonize a sink’s P-trap and then sneak back up the pipe and into the drain by forming a protective, creeping film, called a biofilm, on the plumbing. Once they get to the drain, they only need a burst of water to scatter up into the sink and surrounding, touchable surfaces.

(credit: Matt Wade)

A Secret Service officer has pleaded guilty to sexting, from the White House, an undercover officer he thought was 14 years old. Lee Robert Moore, who has been terminated from his post of checking identification at the White House entrance, also admitted (PDF) to sending a minor girl sexually explicit pictures of himself and of enticing her to do the same.

According to his court admission, Moore befriended an undercover officer and other girls on a website called Meet24 and on the Kik messenger application.

According to court documents, (PDF) the defendant in 2015 told an undercover officer posing as a teen girl that he was texting her "in the break room" and that he had "to go relieve someone else to go on break."