Month: May 2022

Yeah yeah, this looks exciting and all, but the spreadsheets are where the real action happens

There aren't many games for which built-in integration with Microsoft Excel would be a major feature whose announcement would draw literal cheers from fans. But Eve Online showed itself to be the exception when developer CCP announced coming Excel integration during its Eve Fanfest keynote this morning.

Through an official partnership with Microsoft, CCP said it is creating a JavaScript API that will allow players to "seamlessly export data from Eve Online" into the popular spreadsheet program. That "will help players access and calculate everything from profit margins to battle strategy, making day-to-day Eve operations easier to execute," the company said in a press release.

"It's not April fools; this is real," Eve Online Creative Director Bergur Finnbogason said on the Fanfest stage, receiving bemused laughter in response. "I'm not lying—we actually reached out to [Microsoft] and they were like, 'Oh my god, We love Eve!'"

Enlarge (credit: Cellar Door Games)

I remember sitting down to play the game for the first time on a Friday, and the next thing I knew, it was Sunday night. I emerged from that gaming bender bleary-eyed and disoriented, entirely unable to account for where my weekend went.

Rogue Legacy 2, which began life as an Early Access title in 2020, was fully released late last week, and it seems that Cellar Door has done it again. I’ll sit down to play “just one run” before I get my day started, and all of a sudden, it’s dark outside and I realize I’ve skipped two meals. For a certain kind of player, this game is a black hole.

Like its predecessor, Rogue Legacy 2 puts you in the role of an adventurer who strikes out on a quest to kill monsters and take their stuff. You hop around 2D levels and assault baddies with swords, bows, magic wands, and various other implements of death. Starting out as a puny weakling, you gradually upgrade your character to become strong enough to take on the game's six bosses, who rule over the game's six biomes.

Enlarge / A two-megawatt hydrogen-fueled powerplant, designed and built by First Mode in Seattle, is installed in a haul truck at Anglo American's platinum mine at Mogalakwena, South Africa. This vehicle is the world's largest zero-emission truck. (credit: Anglo American)

Mining will always be an inherently anti-environment activity to some degree due to the whole "digging stuff out of the ground" thing. But mining companies are a part of society, and as society as a whole looks to decarbonize, so too does the mining industry.

In South Africa, mining company Anglo American is looking to set an example at its platinum mine in Mogalakwena, which has become home to one of the world's largest electric vehicles—a 210-ton (463,000-lb) truck powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

The nuGen haul truck started life as a Komatsu 930E with a diesel-electric powertrain, in which a 16-cylinder engine acted as a generator to power the truck's electric traction motors. Now that diesel engine is gone, and the haul truck's traction motors are powered by eight 100 kW hydrogen fuel cell modules from Ballard and a lithium-ion battery pack from Williams Advanced Engineering capable of outputting 1.1 MW, integrated by First Mode in Seattle.