Month: April 2023

Enlarge / You think I'm using an external cheat device? Then why is this shot going to miss so badly? (credit: Bungie)

After nearly six years of managing the Destiny 2 player base, developer Bungie has had plenty of experience trying to stop cheaters who use software tools to try to gain an unfair advantage in the online shooter. Now, though, the company is expanding its anti-cheating policies to target certain uses of third-party peripherals that it says have been "entering their villain arc" among the player base.

Bungie's latest "This Week at Bungie" post specifically calls out "programmable controllers" and "keyboard and mouse adapters" that players can use to "execute simple scripts or trick the game into giving you extra aim assist." While Bungie doesn't mention any of these devices by name, the description seems to encompass "passthrough" hardware from companies like the ConsoleTuner or Crosus, which can modify or amend player inputs from generic USB controls.

As we've reported previously, some cheat makers have used these tools as part of an intricate external computer-vision-assisted toolchain that detects enemy targets before automatically and instantly sending the appropriate input command to aim and fire at them (Bungie also calls out the "advanced macros" and "automation via artificial intelligence" that make these cheats work). These external cheats can evade some standard anti-cheat software-detection tools since all of the processing and illicit input comes from a completely separate device from the one running the game itself.

Enlarge / Volkswagen has established the "face" of its ID electric vehicles—because there's no mistaking this for anything else. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

NEW YORK—On Monday morning, Volkswagen introduced its next new electric vehicle with simultaneous events in New York, Shanghai, and Berlin. It's called the ID.7, and it will go on sale in Europe and China later this year and in North America in 2024. It's a fairly substantial thing—more than a foot longer than the ID.4 crossover that VW now builds in Chattanooga—with a low-drag shape and some powertrain refinements that VW says will make the car highly efficient.

But it will face stiff competition in the electric sedan market, up against the established juggernaut that is the Tesla Model 3, not to mention Hyundai's excellent new Ioniq 6.

Its curves are more rounded than you'd see on a Model 3 or Ioniq 6, but the ID.7 is similarly low-drag. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

This is not our first view of the ID.7—VW showed it off underneath luminescent camouflage back in January. It's a big car—longer even than the VW Arteon sedan at 195.3 inches (4,961 mm), with a 116.8-inch (2,967 mm) wheelbase. It's relatively wide at 73.3 inches (1,852), but it also has a relatively low roofline at 60.6 inches (1,539 mm) that helps keep the frontal area down to 2.45 m2 in order to make the most of the ID.7's drag coefficient of 0.23.

Enlarge / Angry Birds launched in 2009 and became one of the most downloaded apps of all time. (credit: Bloomberg)

Sega Sammy, the Japanese games maker behind the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, has launched a 706 million euro ($776 million) offer for Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish group that gave the world Angry Birds.

The 9.25 euro a share offer values the mobile games pioneer at almost 20 percent below the price at which Rovio went public five and a half years ago, when it debuted with a market valuation of 896 million euro.

In a joint statement, Sega Sammy said it had based its bid on projections that the global gaming market would expand to $263.3 billion by 2026. In particular, it said, the share of mobile gaming would grow to 56 percent of the overall market.