emerald
Latest
MIT uses wireless signals and AI to monitor COVID-19 patients at home
A team from MIT's CSAIL developed a wireless device that uses AI to monitor COVID-19 patients in their homes.
Sunless Sea Emerald update adds new regions to sail, fear
A few patches of the Unterzee's oceanic void Contributing Editor Mike Suszek approached in our Early Access Sunless Sea review have been properly charted – as in, developer Failbetter Games has actually implemented those areas into the build available via Steam in this week's Emerald update. Players can now explore the Sea of Autumns, the Salt Lions and the Iron Republic, but casting off on a new venture no longer involves a sense of direction earned from previous discoveries. A press release states that Sunless Sea's map now changes "every time you play," so just because you've become acquainted with certain territories doesn't mean their locations will be familiar. The Emerald update improves the sense of direction used by zee-bats and allows players to name their ship. It also boosts Sunless Sea's script beyond 100,000 words, but we'd use far fewer to describe Sunless Sea's unsettling brand of sea life: "gross," "what the hell is that" and "creepy enough to dine at Red Lobster in hopes of consuming its ancestors and preventing its existence" all come to mind. [Image: Failbetter Games]
Crowdfund Bookie: 'The Long Dark' path to $248K
The Crowdfund Bookie crunches data from select successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns that ended during the week and produces pretty charts for you to look at. It was a busy week in crowdfunding, as the Kickstarter projects for The Long Dark, Contagion, Steam Squad, King Randall's Party, The Ballads of Reemus 2, Slip, Emerald, SC2VN, Destiny Fails Us and Worlds Quest as well as the Indiegogo projects for Lords of Zulima and TurfBattles concluded. The Long Dark, a first-person survival simulator coming from triple-A veterans Hinterland Studio earned the most money this week, hauling in $256,217 CAD ($248,899). The game also had the highest number of backers of the group, with 6,966 people funding the project. King Randall's Party, a "side-scrolling fortress defense game," had the highest per-person pledge amount of the week ($184.23). Head past the break to check out the week's results along with some pretty charts.
Global Game Jam entry Emerald floats through Kickstarter space
Emerald, a game about exploring a spaceship in zero-gravity, was originally conceived during the 2013 Global Game Jam, but has since drifted through the cold void of the Internet and landed on Kickstarter. Creator Nick Yonge seeks $5,800 (Canadian) so that Emerald can release February 13, 2014 on PC, Mac and Linux. The Kickstarter page for Emerald describes the game as "Thomas Was Alone meets Analogue: A Hate Story meets System Shock, but without any gravity." Players will float through a damaged spacecraft, repairing systems one-by-one, while simultaneously rediscovering who you are and how you got there via flashbacks. Sounds like a jolly, carefree romp where nothing could go wrong, right? Right?
Mobilicity prepares HTC Emerald (aka MyTouch 4G) for northern ascent
Following its launch of the Nexus S, Mobilicity is bringing another Android superstar to Canada with the HTC Emerald, known stateside as the T-Mobile MyTouch 4G. According to Mobilesyrup, we're looking at a sticker price of $450 to $500 for this freshly re-minted device, so if you're hoping to benefit from the carrier's lower-cost monthly plans, we recommend you begin stacking up the loonies. Perceptive readers will note the phone is getting a Gingerbread upgrade just in time for its rumored mid-May arrival -- but otherwise the Emerald is a MyTouch 4G through and through, featuring the same 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 768MB of RAM and five megapixel shooter that we've come to know and love on T-Mobile's network. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope we also get a dash of subtlety in this revision, given the overly-excited styling we noted in our review. [Thanks, Steve]
Second Life's Emerald client facing obsolescence
Recent months have not been wholly kind to Second Life, and those circumstances don't seem finished just yet. The Emerald client, one of the most popular third-party viewers -- estimated to be used by as many as half of all players -- has fallen out of favor with Linden Labs and is no longer an officially endorsed option. Scott Jennings has posted a full rundown of the client's history, charting its progress from the earliest inception of the project to its current status of having fallen from grace. The short version (or as short a version as you can get for drama four years in the making) is that Emerald's coders included some rather... hack-tacular backdoors in the client's coding. This is a downside for reasons that should not need to be specified, but does add up to some major problems for the large playerbase still using Emerald. Second Life has had a hard time getting its users to switch to the 2.0 viewer, and about the only upside may be that the removal of Emerald will change that... but the overall drama isn't going to be kind for either the Emerald project or Linden Labs itself.
Why we should expect an expansion announcement at Blizzcon
We're almost six months into Wrath's lifespan. Patch 3.1 is just around the corner, and before too long we'll be talking about 3.2. I anticipate 3.2 will come out quicker than most content patches and that 3.3 will be on its way soon after. After that, I'm willing to put good money on an expansion following it. We've had a lot of hints and solid information ready to back up a Q4 2009 expansion release, and even hints about what the content in it would be. Here's what we know.
