The Gaming News Thread

[Beskar]

Anyone played the Stanley Parable yet?

A friend of mine did a bunch of videos of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haP2EnOtPTE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ8IgsL4Huo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ8IgsL4Huo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeOVKmrjMes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwfReeUvjFg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EiUTqx7prU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3xkAl6O7ow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VElFcvLIVzE

[rajpoot]

Anyone played the Stanley Parable yet?

Been playing the HD remake. It gets a little dull after few hours of running around, but the first experience was fun.
Kevan Brighting has done a stellar job as the voice of the narrator. In fact that is what makes this game so much fun. Good voice acting made this game.

[Crazed Rabbit]

NVIDIA shows off their new PhysX technology FLEX;


Some very impressive coding and dynamic interaction between rigid body, deformable, and fluid systems. I definitely recommend watching.

CR

[Husar]

NVIDIA shows off their new PhysX technology FLEX;


Some very impressive coding and dynamic interaction between rigid body, deformable, and fluid systems. I definitely recommend watching.

CR

That's really nice!

I missed the part about NVidia at first and feared it may be some startup developer technology that noone ever adapts.

[Fragony]

Wow. Why I will never buy an xbox-one, and will give it away if I got one for free. Micro-transactions in a fully priced game are bad enough to deserve to raped by a T-Rex, but buying a car in Forza for almost 40(!) euro? Have they gone absolutily insane? Sony, don't you do something like this as well because I absolutily want a ps4.

Now I am going to stare with Bambi-eyes to Ninty

[Beskar]

Wow. Why I will never buy an xbox-one, and will give it away if I got one for free. Micro-transactions in a fully priced game are bad enough to deserve to raped by a T-Rex, but buying a car in Forza for almost 40(!) euro? Have they gone absolutily insane? Sony, don't you do something like this as well because I absolutily want a ps4.

Now I am going to stare with Bambi-eyes to Ninty

That is a publisher, not console specific-issue. If Forza is on the PS4, it would be the same exact thing.

[Fragony]

That is a publisher, not console specific-issue. If Forza is on the PS4, it would be the same exact thing.

Nope, Sony and Nintendo don't cater this business model

(for now at least, Nintendo never, Sony maybe anyway)

Nintendo I would marry that Wii-U if they make it legal, awesome console

Edit: screw you Sony. No ps4 for me

[Fragony]

Bit of the Resident Evil:Revelations demo, it's pretty cool. It controls like third-person shooter now, which will no doubt anger some fans but it's all for the better. It's obviously a port from the 3ds that didn't get a lot of love from Capcom, but because it's Capcom that was to be expected as their ports and HD-remakes are always a joke that's not funny at all, it looks like a game that the ps2 could easily handle. It has a nice spooky atmosphere though, and since I am atmosphere-whore I am going to buy it once it gets as cheap as Capcom's efforts to make a decent port or HD-remake. Which means very cheap.

[Hooahguy]

So the Arma 3 dev team launched a new contest today: the "Make Arma, not war" contest.

Basically, make mods for Arma 3 and you could win a cash prize. Prizes total something like 500,000 Euros.

Crazy, cant wait to see what people can come up with!

[easytarget]

This looks rather lovely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRpDn5qPp3s

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...k-no-mans-sky/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...al-generation/

[Fragony]

Wii-u not next-gen, think again http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=APWTJMyM4qg

Might be the succesor to Xenoblade Chronicles

[Hooahguy]

Electronic Arts is currently under investigation by law firm Holzer Holzer and Fistel, LLC for possibly misleading investors and analysts regarding the quality of Battlefield 4.

[easytarget]

A ploy by the law firm to get their name in the press, which appears to of worked rather nicely for them.

[Hooahguy]

Regardless of their intentions, I find this whole case interesting. If this law firm wins, it will set a legal precedent that people can sue game companies for not delivering on their promises for their games and/or shoddy releases.

[easytarget]

The likelihood of that outcome being somewhere between zero and less than zero.

[Husar]

You mean a precedent that rich people like investors and analysts can sue gaming companies for lying to them while the whole part of lying to the customers is not of any interest here.

Maybe these investors should assess their risks better next time and then the market will fix itself instead of suckling on the court's teet to get money back that they invested into a risky business known for similar disasters.

[easytarget]

I do like the like the affected tones of morale outrage, I really do.

As for the market, while I have no sympathy for these shareholders, I'm also not stupid enough to consider it remotely close to sufficiently transparent in terms of completeness of information to all participants to not have concluded long ago it's rigged.

[easytarget]

Oh, and back to the real news that pulled me in here in the first place, go click on the links I posted about 5 or 6 messages back up the page. Way more intriguing than this legal story.

[easytarget]

Ok, if No Man's Sky didn't blow your mind, perhaps a bit of space nostalgia will do the trick: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...ite-dangerous/

Coupled with Star Citizen and it would appear we'll be up to our eye balls in space sims next year, and I for one, having been into PC Gaming from the very beginning, love seeing the return of this genre of game.

[Gregoshi]

I have fond memories of Elite back on the Commodore 64. Loved that game. This updated version sounds very encouraging.

[Husar]

I do like the like the affected tones of morale outrage, I really do.

As for the market, while I have no sympathy for these shareholders, I'm also not stupid enough to consider it remotely close to sufficiently transparent in terms of completeness of information to all participants to not have concluded long ago it's rigged.

Doesn't that just support my point that the shareholders shouldn't have invested in the first place? How does it reduce the responsibility of investors if they invest into a completely intransparent business without being aware of the risks?

Ok, if No Man's Sky didn't blow your mind, perhaps a bit of space nostalgia will do the trick: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...ite-dangerous/

Coupled with Star Citizen and it would appear we'll be up to our eye balls in space sims next year, and I for one, having been into PC Gaming from the very beginning, love seeing the return of this genre of game.

No Man's Sky looks intriguing, don't know about Elite, never played the original.

[easytarget]

Doesn't that just support my point that the shareholders shouldn't have invested in the first place? How does it reduce the responsibility of investors if they invest into a completely intransparent business without being aware of the risks?

No Man's Sky looks intriguing, don't know about Elite, never played the original.

Right, we're in agreement here, although I would just consider a drop in EA to this degree a buying opportunity if I held any shares in this company (just cost average to a better position). My point as to the transparency of the marketplace wasn't just about EA, more of a comment on the nature of the market as a whole

I can't get too hopeful, but I'm having a hard time. A procedurally generated universe open for exploration in space and at a planetary level is amazing. As for Elite, it's just sort of in a class of early space games that anyone playing them for a long time looks back on fondly, Wing Commander falls in that category for me as well.

What I'm hoping here for is that with so many coming out over the next year at least one of them will "get it right".

[Beskar]

http://kingdomcomerpg.com/
Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Mount&Blade + Cryengine + Skyrimish influence = Low-Fantasy Openworld RPG with good graphics.

It does look interesting!

[Fragony]

Resident-evil revelation, it's a scandalouly bad port of what is obviously a 3DS game, a ps2 could easily pump this out, but because it's released by Capcom that is hardly a surprise, all their ports are sloppy beyond believe. The game is fun though if you can get to terms with playing a 3DS game on the surprisingly powerfull Wii-U that can easily handle the current state of next-gen offerings. But it's Capcom so it's a really lazy product. Still having a blast though.

[Fragony]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...efeat-this-lot

Dark Souls 2 looks truly stunning. Looks even more bleak and desperate. These demons look terrifying, awesome art.

[rajpoot]

Game of Glens, and mashup of many popular mobile games, with a Scottish theme.

[Fragony]

This has the be the worst pr-fail in the history of console wars ever http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ditch-your-ps3

People get paid to make this up? It must be the worst deal ever LOL at phil Harrison.

Edit: lol, count the times you see the word desperate in the comments. Trading in a ps3 with the absolute wealth of free triple a titles for the same price as just playing online on the xbox costs. The extensive library. You can keep your ps3 and buy a ps4 on tops and the xbone still costs more. Of course I am really desperate to play Kinect Sports anyway. On a much much weaker machine that plays Tomb Raider at 30fps at 1080 while the ps4 runs at 60fps with the same resolution. Really. Fail to the max.

[Fragony]

Ps4 is a much better deal, it's much more powerfull (tomb Raider runs at 50/60 fps at 1080 on ps4, 30fps on xbone, and it's much cheaper. You pay extra for kinect, and why would you want kinect.

[Fragony]

Oh ouch Microsoft, after Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid 5 is also running on 1080/60 on the ps4, and 720/60 on the X1. If it wasn't for Titanfall I'd call the X1 an overpriced pile of

Even more painfull, they are marketing it as a multimedia device, but the results on the ps3 are actually better than on the X1.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Apparently Valve's anti-cheat program VAC reads the domains you've visited and stores the info;
http://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffens..._have_visited/

Decompiled module: https://i.imgur.com/z9dppCk.png

What it does:

Goes through all your DNS Cache entries (ipconfig /displaydns)

Hashes each one with md5

Reports back to VAC Servers

So the domain reddit.com would be 1fd7de7da0fce4963f775a5fdb894db5 or organner.pl would be 107cad71e7442611aa633818de5f2930 (Although this might not be fully correct because it seems to be doing something to characters between A-Z, possible making them lowercase)

Hashing with md5 is not full proof, they can be reversed easily nowadays using rainbowtables. So they are relying on a weak hashing function

You dont have to visit the site, any query to the site (an image, a redirect link, a file on the server) will be added to the dns cache. And only the domain will be in your cache, no full urls. Entries in the cache remains till they expire or at most 1 day (might not be 100% accurate), but they dont last forever.

We don't know how long this information is kept on their servers, maybe forever, maybe a few days. It's probably done everytime you join a vac server. It seems they are moving from detecting the cheats themselves to computer forensics. Relying on leftover data from using the cheats. This has been done by other anticheats, like punkbuster and resulted in false bans. Although im not saying they will ban people from simply visiting the site, just that it can be easily exploited

Gabe Newell posted on the particulars of it;
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comme...vac_and_trust/

Trust is a critical part of a multiplayer game community - trust in the developer, trust in the system, and trust in the other players. Cheats are a negative sum game, where a minority benefits less than the majority is harmed.

There are a bunch of different ways to attack a trust-based system including writing a bunch of code (hacks), or through social engineering (for example convincing people that the system isn't as trustworthy as they thought it was).

For a game like Counter-Strike, there will be thousands of cheats created, several hundred of which will be actively in use at any given time. There will be around ten to twenty groups trying to make money selling cheats.

We don't usually talk about VAC (our counter-hacking hacks), because it creates more opportunities for cheaters to attack the system (through writing code or social engineering).

This time is going to be an exception.

There are a number of kernel-level paid cheats that relate to this Reddit thread. Cheat developers have a problem in getting cheaters to actually pay them for all the obvious reasons, so they start creating DRM and anti-cheat code for their cheats. These cheats phone home to a DRM server that confirms that a cheater has actually paid to use the cheat.

VAC checked for the presence of these cheats. If they were detected VAC then checked to see which cheat DRM server was being contacted. This second check was done by looking for a partial match to those (non-web) cheat DRM servers in the DNS cache. If found, then hashes of the matching DNS entries were sent to the VAC servers. The match was double checked on our servers and then that client was marked for a future ban. Less than a tenth of one percent of clients triggered the second check. 570 cheaters are being banned as a result.

Cheat versus trust is an ongoing cat-and-mouse game. New cheats are created all the time, detected, banned, and tweaked. This specific VAC test for this specific round of cheats was effective for 13 days, which is fairly typical. It is now no longer active as the cheat providers have worked around it by manipulating the DNS cache of their customers' client machines.

Kernel-level cheats are expensive to create, and they are expensive to detect. Our goal is to make them more expensive for cheaters and cheat creators than the economic benefits they can reasonably expect to gain.

There is also a social engineering side to cheating, which is to attack people's trust in the system. If "Valve is evil - look they are tracking all of the websites you visit" is an idea that gets traction, then that is to the benefit of cheaters and cheat creators. VAC is inherently a scary looking piece of software, because it is trying to be obscure, it is going after code that is trying to attack it, and it is sneaky. For most cheat developers, social engineering might be a cheaper way to attack the system than continuing the code arms race, which means that there will be more Reddit posts trying to cast VAC in a sinister light.

Our response is to make it clear what we were actually doing and why with enough transparency that people can make their own judgements as to whether or not we are trustworthy.

Q&A

1) Do we send your browsing history to Valve? No.

2) Do we care what porn sites you visit? Oh, dear god, no. My brain just melted.

3) Is Valve using its market success to go evil? I don't think so, but you have to make the call if we are trustworthy. We try really hard to earn and keep your trust.

An interesting insight into cheat makers (cheat DRM!) and anti-cheat programs.

CR