Month: August 2018

Enlarge / Who says mobile players are at a disadvantage? (credit: Reddit / legocraftmation)

A decent part of Fortnite's meteoric success has been the capability for players on non-Sony platforms to play the game with friends regardless of what console, mobile phone, or PC everyone is using. One side effect of that system, though, is that it pits players using handheld controllers or imprecise touchscreen controls against those using the more precise aiming of a keyboard and mouse.

Developer Epic now says it will be taking steps to account for this potential imbalance soon. Community Manager JustMooney1 writes on Reddit that the company is "working on some matchmaking tech... that'll pair you against folks based on your choice of peripherals," meaning users playing with a keyboard and mouse will go against others using the same control scheme. Further down the Reddit thread, another Epic representative promises that more details will be available next week.

Currently, the PS4 is the only console that officially supports mouse-and-keyboard controls for Fortnite—that support was recently restored after being inadvertently disabled in a recent update. Xbox One players can currently use third-party adapters such as the XIM4 to get those controls working on the console, as Microsoft continues to work on long-promised official mouse-and-keyboard support.

Enlarge (credit: Kari Greer/USFS Gila National Forest)

We tend to use "ice age" to mean a period where large ice sheets push south to what are now temperate regions. But from a geologist's perspective, even current conditions are part of an ice age, since large ice sheets exist at the poles. The term provides a contrast to what are called hothouse conditions, which the Earth has experienced for periods that were long enough to entirely melt the poles. The planet hasn't seen hothouse conditions for more than 2.5 million years.

But this week, headlines were full of discussion of a possible return of a hothouse Earth courtesy of climate change. The sudden worries weren't the product of any new research; instead, they were simply the product of a perspective some researchers had written on our current understanding of the climate, plus some potential risks associated with it. The perspective argued that there are multiple tipping points in the climate, and we can't rule out shooting past them even if we get emissions under control within a few decades.

Hot hot hot

So how seriously should we view this risk, and why are scientists suddenly talking about it now?

Enlarge / Musk in 2015. (credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Tesla's board of directors is gearing up to consider Elon Musk's plan to take the electric carmaker private. But yesterday afternoon—more than two days after Musk's original tweet announcing the proposal—Tesla's board still hadn't been told who would pay for the deal, Reuters has reported.

The board "has not yet received specific information on who will provide the funding," a source told Reuters.

It's the latest sign of how deeply unconventional Musk's take-private plan is.

Enlarge / This use of the swastika, barred in German games since 1998, will now generally be allowed under an "artistic" exception.

A decades-old German practice barring the sale of video games that show swastikas and other Nazi party symbols has been reconsidered by the country's ratings board, putting the medium on equal footing with other "artistic" productions in the country for the first time.

Germany's Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle ratings board (USK) announced Thursday that it will now make a "case-by-case examination" of games that include banned symbols from "unconstitutional organizations," including the Nazis. That decision reverse a decades-old precedent in which USK refused to provide ratings for those games, effectively banning them from sale in the country.

"Through the change in the interpretation of the law, games that critically look at current affairs can for the first time be given a USK age rating," USK Managing Director Elisabeth Secker said in a statement. "This has long been the case for films and with regards to the freedom of the arts, this is now rightly also the case with computer and video games."