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Last year, Delphi demoed a self-driving car that drove across the country autonomously. (credit: Megan Geuss)

Today, auto parts supplier Delphi and sensor-maker Mobileye announced a plan to build a fully autonomous car system that auto manufacturers can use to make their cars self-driving without investing a lot of expensive R&D. The companies say the system will be production-ready for OEMs by 2019.

On a conference call with Delphi CEO Kevin Clark and Mobileye CTO Amnon Shashua, the two executives estimated that car-buyers would likely see such a system in new cars between late 2019 and 2021.

Delphi has been working on building self-driving software for years now—Ars went down to its Silicon Valley garage last spring to see an Audi that Delphi had tricked out with its own autonomous system prior to embarking on a self-driving cross-country road trip. Mobileye, too, has a lot of experience—most recently it announced a partnership with BMW and Intel to build self-driving BMW platforms. It also had a falling out with Tesla earlier this year after a driver was killed when his car struck a left-turning truck while the Tesla was in autonomous mode.

What's impressive about Dawn of War III is how beautifully it manages to communicate the weight, scale, and ferocity of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. From the severe, decaying landscape of its maps, to the radical conservatism of prominent factions and technology that carries a distinctly Gothic edge, no other game based on a Games Workshop IP manages to deliver such a morosely charming combination of grief, rage, and fanaticism.

Given that this is developer Relic's third game in the series you'd expect the design team to have nailed the aesthetic by now, but the visuals are especially striking. Which is not to say that Dawn of War III's charms are entirely superficial. It combines the best bits from the first two Dawn of War games: the dominant, powerful hero units of the second, and the larger armies and strong emphasis on base building and expansion of the original.

I've played just one single-player map—as Blood Raven Space Marines facing off against Eldar—but the relationship between managing the scale of an army and efficiently using each hero's special skills feels perfectly pitched to satisfy fans of the series. Base building and the training of units is simple enough that you're not forced into micromanaging everything, leaving you plenty of time to concentrate on the more exciting task of using hero abilities.

John Carmack (left) poses with Oculus founder Palmer Luckey (center) and other members of the Oculus team. (credit: OculusVR)

The 2014 lawsuit filed against virtual reality headset company Oculus and its parent company Facebook has now received its first major amendment in nearly two years. The civil complaint from game publisher ZeniMax was updated on August 16 with 22 additional "paragraphs," and those updates mince few words. Most notably, the lawsuit now names Oculus executives John Carmack and Brendan Iribe as defendants, in addition to the aforementioned companies and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.

The updated filing, which was reported by Game Informer on Monday, still alleges that Oculus's major VR technologies were taken from ZeniMax in a way that violated contracts and nondisclosure agreements—especially since Carmack originally worked for ZeniMax and had signed contracts that made ZeniMax the owner of any technologies he worked on within the company (specifically, at its subsidiary, id Software). Now that Iribe and Carmack are listed as defendants, ZeniMax has aimed further allegations directly at those two men—and have questioned claims that Luckey had much to do with the development of Oculus' core technologies.

Issues with disclosure

In the last amended complaint, Zenimax simply said that "Rift’s VR Technology... had actually been developed by ZeniMax without Luckey’s involvement." This new complaint goes much further, especially when talking about the ways Oculus bolstered its reputation en route to being acquired by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. "Oculus needed to be able to explain how it came to own VR technology" without acknowledging any misuse of another company's technologies, the suit now claims, and it also alleges that Iribe instructed Oculus staffers to "disseminate to the press the false and fanciful story that Luckey was the brilliant inventor of VR technology" and "had developed that technology in his parents' garage."

Pokémon Go is starting to lose its buzz, with the latest tracking data seeming to suggest the game is simply a fad.

It had almost 45 million daily users in July, but this figure appears to have sunk by more than 12 million since the start of August, to just over 30 million said to be playing Pokémon Go. Further decline is expected, as downloads, engagement, and the time users spend on the app have all also visibly flopped, according to data provided by Sensor Tower, SurveyMonkey, and Apptopia.

Bloomberg, which saw the raw data, reported that other major apps such as Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat "can breathe a sigh of relief" that Pokémon Go is finally wobbling, as the game's popularity had apparently been costing them considerable amounts of users.

COLOGNE, Germany—With shooters trending towards the modern or futuristic—see the likes of Titanfall and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare—Battlefield 1 and its exaggerated take on the First World War is something of an anomaly. And yet, when it was unveiled in May, the first Battlefield 1 trailer became one of the most viewed and liked game trailers of all time. Who says old military technology would make for a less interesting game, eh?

More so than any other game in the series, Battlefield 1 has the potential to capture the spirit of much-loved games like Battlefield 1942 and the original Call of Duty, which were both set in WW2. Replacing guided missiles and thermal scopes with bolt-action rifles and bayonets forces you to play keener attention to the environment and, crucially, learn how to master the basics of your weapon instead of relying on gadgetry. The fundamental principles of staying alive in a war zone—checking all of your corners, keeping track of allies, only crossing an open-space when it's safe, and making best possible use of vehicles—are brought to the fore.

"I think that the response we've had so far is that people seem to like the fact that it is an analogue battlefield that we're presenting and that there's less high-tech equipment," explains Lars Gustavsson, Battlefield 1 design director. "Here we've brought in shorter engagement distances deliberately in order to expand the diversity of viable tactics, so it becomes a more accessible experience…Our analogy has been that if Battlefield 4 was Formula 1 then this is more like a rally championship. Both are great and highly competitive sports, but they work under different circumstances. There are more details in Formula 1, but rally is more brutal."

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Despite first- and second-generation High Bandwidth Memory having made few appearances in shipping products, Samsung and Hynix are already working on a followup: HBM3. Teased at the Hot Chips symposium in Cupertino, Calfornia, HBM3 will offer improved density, bandwidth, and power efficiency. Perhaps most importantly though, given the high cost of HBM1 and HBM2, HBM3 will be cheaper to produce.

With conventional memory setups, RAM chips are placed next to each other on a circuit board, usually as close as possible to the logic device (CPU or GPU) that needs access to the RAM. HBM, however, stacks a bunch of RAM dies (dice?) on top of each other, connecting them directly with through-silicon vias (TSVs). These stacks of RAM are then placed on the logic chip package, which reduces the surface area of the device (AMD's Fury Nano is a prime example), and potentially provides a massive boost in bandwidth.

The tradeoff, though, as with most fancy packaging techniques, has been price and capacity. HBM1, as used in AMD's Fury graphics cards, was limited to 4GB stacks. HBM2, as used in Nvidia's workstation-only P100 graphics card, features higher density stacks up up to 16GB, but is prohibitively expensive for consumer cards.

There are less than two months to go until the start of Formula E's third season, which kicks off in Hong Kong on October 9. One of the more interesting things about Formula E's upcoming season is the new support series, Roborace. As the name suggests, it's a series for self-driving race cars, and the organizers have just unveiled the mule—called DevBot—that teams will use to develop their control software.

All of the Roborace teams will use identical Robocars, but each will develop its own control algorithms. The race cars are fully electric—in keeping with the ethos of Formula E—and have more than a little Speed Racer about them. But DevBot will look much more familiar to fans of sports car racing; it's a Le Mans-style prototype coupe, shown in the test photos without the front and rear bodywork.

DevBot also has a cockpit for a human driver, unlike the Robocars, but it does have the same powertrain, sensor suite, processors, and communication systems as the forthcoming autonomous race cars. DevBot is also fully electric, suggesting the handiwork of Drayson Racing Technologies. Several years ago, Drayson converted its Lola B10 Le Mans Prototype racer from internal combustion to electric power and has been involved in developing the technology used by Formula E.