Category: Technology

A Devil Immortal player seems to have lost access to player vs player (PvP) game modes in the title after spending over £80,000 ($100,000) in the free-to-play role-playing game.

YouTuber and streamer jtisallbusiness has claimed that after spending a massive amount of money on upgrading their character, they’re unable to gain access to any PvP games.

They said that they spent between “48 to 72 hours” queuing for a battlegrounds match, but every attempt to do so resulted in them being unable to find a game (via PCGamesN).

In a recent YouTube video, the streamer explained they are considering attempting a refund of their total spending or calling in lawyers to help with the situation.

“I can’t do things that I spent money on this character to do, and I have no time frame of when things are going to actually be fixed, or even know if things are going to be fixed because I am the only player in the entire world with this problem,” they said.

Jtisallbusiness said that they have tried contracting Blizzard through the official forums and on Twitter, but only received a reply saying it was “aware of the issue.”

The content creator and their clan also recently won the Rite of Exile battle on their server and are being repeatedly prompted to “prepare to defend their reign” by playing battlegrounds, but jtisallbusiness is unable to do so.

Their clan is also expected to defend its reign on their server, but when jtisallbusiness travels to the Rite of Exile entrance to register the clan, they can’t join or schedule a PvP match. If their clan ca n’t be registered in time for the Rite of Exile, their rivals will face NPCs instead – meaning jtisallbusiness and his clan could possible lose the crown.

Jtisallbusiness is also unable to leave the clan or pass leadership over to another member. They speculate that of the clan’s 300 members, around 30 and 40 have spent roughly £814 ($1,000) upgrading their characters.

In other news, terraria‘s highly-anticipated 1.4.4 update is apparently “extremely close” to the end of development.

If you’ve always had a burning desire to drive through Luna Park as Yoshi and chuck red shells at Bowser across the Sydney Harbor Bridge, say no more! The benevolent kings at Nintendo are bringing out a course called “Sydney Sprint” in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – Booster Course Passwhich is essentially an expansion pack for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe consisting of sexy new courses.

Real stans will remember Sydney Sprint from mario kart tourthe mobile version of the OG Mario Kart which gave revheads without a Nintendo console — like me — the chance to rip skids around Rainbow Road.

Yes, I was obsessed with mario kart tour for a solid year or two after it was released in 2019. If I’m being honest, I went a little bit crazy for Shy Guy Bazaar because it made me feel like I was having a mosey in a Moroccan bazaar. Neo Bowser City took me back to visiting Tokyo as a child and don’t even get me started on the sheer visceral thrill that Waluigi Pinball gave me.

Alas, I digress.

I never played Sydney Sprint, which appeared on mario kart tour during two different Sydney Tours in 2021; this meant there were two unique versions of the course.

The whole thing looked like a hoot and a bloody half though, with players gunning it down the Bradfield Highway and swerving around Sydney Harbor and Luna Park, before yeeting past the Opera House.

Drivers even had to dodge mushrooms and bananas and shit that passengers on the North Shore line were throwing at them. How silly and goofy and fun (not derogatory).

INJECT THAT SYDNEY SPRINT ORCHESTRA INTO MY VEIINS pic.twitter.com/RVx7IFvwnb

— GamesCage – Hype Guy (@OnTheDownLoTho) July 28, 2022

According to Super Mario Wiki, the specific course layout is yet to be confirmed but it’ll be an expanded and combined version of both Sydney Sprint courses that were featured on mario kart tour.

Based on the preview released by Nintendo, however, it looks like players will still visit the beautiful sites of mario kart tour yore, including the Sydney Opera House and Luna Park.

You can start dropping bob-ombs and bananas on the streets of Sydney on August 4.

Artificial vision systems find a wide range of applications, including self-driving cars, object detection, crop monitoring, and smart cameras. Such vision is often inspired by the vision of biological organisms. For instance, human and insect vision have inspired terrestrial artificial vision, while fish eyes have led to aquatic artificial vision. While the progress is remarkable, current artificial visions suffer from some limitations: they are not suitable for imaging both land and underwater environments, and are limited to a hemispherical (180°) field-of-view (FOV).

To overcome these issues, a group of researchers from Korea and US, including Professor Young Min Song from Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, have now designed a novel artificial vision system with an omnidirectional imaging ability, which can work in both aquatic and terrestrial environments. Their study was made available online on 12 July 2022 and published in Nature Electronics on 11 July 2022.

“Research in bio-inspired vision often results in a novel development that did not exist before. This, in turn, enables a deeper understanding of nature and ensure that the developed imaging device is both structurally and functionally effective,” says Prof. Song, explaining his motivation behind the study.

The inspiration for the system came from the fiddler crab (Uca arcuata), a semiterrestrial crab species with amphibious imaging ability and a 360° FOV. These remarkable features result from the ellipsoidal eye stalk of the fiddler crab’s compound eyes, enabling panoramic imaging, and flat corneas with a graded refractive index profile, allowing for amphibious imaging.

Accordingly, the researchers developed a vision system consisting of an array of flat micro-lenses with a graded refractive index profile that was integrated into a flexible comb-shaped silicon photodiode array and then mounted onto a spherical structure. The graded refractive index and the flat surface of the micro-lens were optimized to offset the defocusing effects due to changes in the external environment. Put simply, light rays traveling in different mediums (corresponding to different refractive indices) were made to focus at the same spot.

To test the capabilities of their system, the team performed optical simulations and imaging demonstrations in air and water. Amphibious imaging was performed by immersing the device halfway in water. To their delight, the images produced by the system were clear and free of distortions. The team further showed that the system had a panoramic visual field, 300^either horizontally and 160^either vertically, in both air and water. Additionally, the spherical mount was only 2 cm in diameter, making the system compact and portable.

“Our vision system could pave the way for 360° omnidirectional cameras with applications in virtual or augmented reality or an all-weather vision for autonomous vehicles,” speculates Prof. Song excitedly.

Provided by GIST (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology)

More and more products are slowly being unveiled that have Thread support, with Eve considered at the forefront of this new direction. While nearly all of their formerly Bluetooth-enabled products have now been updated for Thread support, one device, which previously had Thread support added via a firmware update, has now also received a ‘facelift’, namely the Eve Aqua.

the third generation of the Eve Aqua follows in the footsteps of some of its other product line, with a rounded-off square black plastic shape, encompassed by an aluminum frame, much like the Eve Room, Eve Weather, and the Eve Button, which is incidentally the last of the holdouts for a Thread update (not counting their WiFi products). The new design is supported by a new magnetic valve, that claims to be “quiet, fast and reliable”, whilst also featuring a new brass connector to replace the previous plastic ones that were reportedly quite unreliable.

The new design also has a flattened front section, as opposed to the bulbous front of the previous generations, whilst increasing the size of the power button. The new Eve Aqua still uses two AA batteries, and as such is only a Thread end device, meaning whilst it can be part of the Thread network, it is unable to help extend that network, as only powered Thread devices are capable of this function . And as it’s designed for outdoor use, it’s also both IPX4 rated, and contains UV protection for the plastic, to minimize sunlight damage.

The new Eve Aqua is available from Eve’s own website, priced at US$149.95 or €149.96 in Germany.

(Bloomberg) — The weaker yen has triggered price hikes on electronics from iPhones to refrigerators across Japan this year, with one glaring exception: the video game console.

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Sony Group Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Nintendo Co. have held fast to a 100-yen-to-the-dollar conversion rate that today sees their consoles as much as $100 cheaper in Japan than elsewhere in the world. No company wants to be first to break the unwritten rule against raising prices after a console’s release, for fear of losing players and game developers to rivals, and all three believe they can recover any losses through international software sales. But that may be changing.

The consensus among analysts is that the current business model is unsustainable and overdue for revision. Part of the problem is a growing arbitrage market that sees people buying consoles in Japan and selling them overseas, exacerbating difficulties for companies already beset by supply chain and logistics challenges. Sony’s PlayStation 5 is jokingly referred to as a financial asset in its home country, something one buys to resell at a profit rather than to play games on.

“Consumers in Japan are getting used to price hikes,” said Morningstar analyst Kazunori Ito, pointing to higher prices of TVs, headphones, monitors, fridges, dishwashers and printers on the back of the weak yen. “I don’t see them getting upset if game consoles followed suit.”

That change could come as pressure builds to protect margins and address a slowdown in software sales attributable to shortages of hardware on store shelves. Sony cut its profit outlook for the year because of slumping game sales on Friday, triggering a 3.2% fall in its share price the next trading day, and Nintendo is expected to report its own drop in profit on Wednesday.

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Meanwhile, fellow gadget makers from Apple Inc. to Xiaomi Corp. have raised prices in Japan to address the currency imbalance — the iPhone is now 25% pricier and Xiaomi’s health gadgets and tablets got a hike on Monday.

As the yen softens, every console sold in Japan becomes less lucrative for its maker, because manufacturing costs are denominated in US dollars. And the final push toward more realistic pricing may come from the flipping of consoles on resale markets. Emboldened by a 21% fall in the yen over the past year, scalpers and opportunistic resellers have increased their activity because they now earn more per console.

Turbocharged by flea market apps, they are snatching up consoles at Japanese prices and holding onto them until the best opportunity to maximize profit, such as the release of a must-have blockbuster title. That will become increasingly untenable for Sony et al as the scalping activity constricts console supply and slows the virtuous cycle between hardware and software sales.

The industry is losing potential customers, Famitsu Group Representative Katsuhiko Hayashi said. “More gamers are trying out alternatives, such as PCs, when they can’t buy the console they want.”

The latest generation of consoles, Sony’s PS5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series, have been in tight supply globally since their launch in late 2020, owing to Covid-19 disruptions to the electronics supply chain and global shipping. The component shortages that stifled Sony’s output are improving, but the logistics challenge remains as great as ever, Sony Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki said after his earnings report last week. The CFO declined to say whether the company would raise prices in Japan.

Nintendo said it has no plans to raise Switch prices. Microsoft declined to comment.

Sony Cuts Profit Outlook on Weaker PlayStation Prospects

“Arbitrage is a healthy function of the market, suggesting the retail prices are too low for underlying demand,” Toyo Securities analyst Hideki Yasuda said. Japan’s scalper market has thrived since the launch of the PS5, which was so in-demand that units of the sought-after console were initially sold through a lottery system. Without raising prices in their domestic market, Sony and Nintendo are creating room for scalpers to operate “and their shareholders are losing profits they should be pocketing,” he said.

PlayStation 5 Scalpers Use Bots to Hunt Down Scarce Consoles

The Nintendo Switch OLED model is priced at $350 plus tax in the US, but costs 37,980 yen (roughly $290) in Japan. Hardware resellers around Tokyo currently offer to buy it for over 40,000 yen apiece, relying on that price delta for their profit. Sony’s PS5 costs about 55,000 yen in stores, yet can be resold immediately for 80,000 yen or more at retailer Noah Trading Co. in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro. The company boasts on its website that it generated 10 billion yen in revenue in 2020, selling electronics domestically and to countries and regions such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the US.

Until now, Nintendo and Sony have been able to offset hardware losses stemming from the weak yen with corresponding yen-inflated profits from overseas software sales. With most of its costs in Japanese currency, Nintendo has been able to largely resist raising prices. Console makers have traditionally cut prices of consoles as they age — not the other way around — and appear wary of killing demand or losing market share to rivals.

“The best scenario is to be second, after someone else has tested the waters; the worst is to be first and alone,” said Atsushi Osanai, a professor at Waseda Business School in Tokyo. “Companies tend to settle with the second-best, which is to stand pat.”

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