Month: February 2020

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  A selection of 720p promotional images showing off the Switch version of Warface.

Today's surprise launch of a Switch version of the popular free-to-play, first-person military shooter Warface marks an important milestone for the system's growing list of ports: the first Switch game to make use of Crytek's CryEngine. Like many other high-end Switch ports, though, squeezing the game down to run on the Switch's Nvidia Tegra-based hardware comes with some significant drawbacks.

As publisher My.Games notes in a press release, getting Warface on the Switch meant "using a heavily customized version of CryEngine... running locked in 30fps/720p in TV mode and 540p in handheld and tabletop modes, providing an optimal balance of image clarity and performance."

Those are relatively low resolution numbers even for the Switch, where a wide variety of games manage to hit 1080p or 900p resolution when docked and 720p when in portable mode. There have been some notable exceptions, though, including Switch ports like Doom and The Witcher 3, where portable mode has to drop noticeably below HD resolution in order to ensure a playable game. You can see how that resolution downgrade looks for yourself in the above screenshots and below trailer for the Switch version of the game.

Despite its distance from the Sun, the asteroid belt will disintegrate as it expands. (credit: NASA/ESA/STScI)

We tend to view the bodies of the Solar System as creations of gravity, which pulled their parts together and hold them in place as they orbit. But as we saw with ideas about the formation of Arrokoth, there are lots of situations where gravity is essentially a constant for long periods of time. And given enough of that time, relatively small forces like friction from sparse gas clouds or pressure from the light of the Sun can add up and create dramatic changes. In fact, a remarkable number of these potential influences have been identified and simulated.

One of these has been named the YORP effect, for its developers, Yarkovsky, O'Keefe, Radzievskii, and Paddack. It describes how light can alter the rotational properties of orbiting bodies. In a recent edition of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dimitri Veras and Daniel Scheeres decided to calculate what happens as the Sun ages, the intensity of its light increases dramatically, and the entire asteroid belt gets YORPed.

A (perhaps too) bright future

It's pretty widely understood that, as the Sun ages, it will expand until its outer edges come close to the Earth's orbit. What's less widely recognized is that it will get quite a lot brighter than it is at present. Other stars with masses similar to the Sun can get thousands of times brighter than the Sun in the last stages of their fusion-driven lives, allowing effects that might otherwise be a bit weak to become dominant.

Enlarge / Could we squeeze a few more lightsabers into this Clone Wars poster image, Lucasfilm? (credit: Lucasfilm)

After a long road to The Clone Wars’ final season, the animated series returns to wrap up a story over a decade in the making. The opening episodes of the new season—which debuts on Friday, February 21, exclusively on Disney+—are by turns thrilling, funny, and as good as anything the series’ live-action side has ever turned out.

But appreciating how far The Clone Wars has traveled to get to this point is impossible without tracing the series' previous steps.

After cancellation, a return of familiar story arcs

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  The Bad Batch, left to right: Tech, Crosshair, Wrecker. [credit: Lucasfilm ]

Minor plot spoilers for the entire series, and a preview of the new episodes' plot, follow below.