Month: November 2022

Directed by Sean Dacanay. Produced by Justin Wolfson. Edited by Jeremy Smolnik, with Billy Ward. Click here for transcript. (video link)

In part one of our exclusive Callisto Protocol behind-the-scenes sneak peek, we hung out with Dead Space designer and Striking Distance Studio head Glen Schofield and got him to spill some details about his next shambling horror title, The Callisto Protocol. This week, in part two, we're focusing on a sometimes underrated but never unimportant aspect of game design: the audio.

For a horror game like Callisto Protocol, audio ends up having to shoulder a tremendous amount of responsibility for setting the stage. As audio director Nassim Ait-Kaci explains, "Music is maybe the effective tool, from an audio perspective, to apply tension, foreshadowing, lead-up, build-up, and [to] craft special moments." Accordingly, much of the soundscape that players will encounter in the game is hand-tuned—particularly in big moments. Glen weighs in on his feelings about the specific timing and volume of the musical cues and sound effects that will accompany jump scares or big reveals or really anything. The goal is to tell a compelling and scary story, and in horror, nailing the timing can make the difference between jolting the audience out of their seats—or not.

Enlarge / People look inside an Orion spacecraft simulator, which is used to train for docking to the Gateway space station, at the Johnson Space Center's System Engineering Simulator facility in Houston. (credit: Getty Images)

Wednesday's scheduled launch by NASA of the Artemis I mission will be the first integrated test of the agency’s SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, which have been in development for 16 years and are expected to usher in a new era of space exploration. The uncrewed mission will also be only the second time a network standard known as time-triggered Ethernet has been taken into space, with the first being Orion's orbital test flight in 2014.

Time-triggered Ethernet (TTE) is an example of a mixed-criticality network, which is capable of routing traffic with differing levels of timing and different fault tolerance requirements over the same set of hardware. Until now, spacecraft generally relied on one network to transmit safety-critical or mission-critical messages and one or more completely segregated ones for carrying video conferencing and other types of less-critical traffic.

Illustration of how time-triggered Ethernet works. (credit: TTTech)

Engineers built a better mousetrap. The mice defeat it anyway

Orion is the first spacecraft to rely on a TTE network to route mixed-criticality traffic, whether, NASA says, it's for vital systems like navigation and life support, file transfers that are critical for delivery but not timing, or non-critical tasks such as crew videoconferencing. TTE—which will also be used in NASA’s Lunar Gateway space station and the ESA’s Ariane 6 launcher—is crucial for reducing the size, weight, cost, and power requirements of modern spacecraft.

Enlarge (credit: Stefani Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)

The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire has sparked a vast global investigation, with dozens of authorities circling the company as lawyers warn there could be 1 million creditors in its bankruptcy proceeding.

FTX said in court filings it was in contact with US federal prosecutors, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and “dozens of federal, state, and international regulatory agencies” in the three days since the cryptocurrency exchange and more than 100 affiliated companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware.

The companies face at least 100,000 creditors, but that number could expand to more than 1 million, according to the filing. Most of the creditors were clients of Sam Bankman-Fried’s companies.