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These British cows got access to 5G before most people
There's plenty of speculation around how 5G will impact our daily lives -- from enabling self-driving cars to seemingly instant downloads. But we might learn how it will impact cows before most humans put it to the test. In southwest England, 50 dairy cattle are now wearing high-speed smart collars that control robotic milking systems. It's both a way to test 5G's potential in agriculture and to publicize one of Cisco Systems Inc.'s rural network trials.
PotBS to hold ship skirmish testing event today
Today marks a very special event for the players of Pirates of the Burning Sea. Starting at 3:45 PST / 11:45 GMT, a ship skirmish event will take place on the Testbed server to analyze the effectiveness of the ship skirmish system. Named "The Battle of Gull Point", this event will match four teams of twelve players each to battle it out using "all of your ship combat skills to defeat your opponents".Simply meet up at the Marsh Harbour and the devs will auto-level you to 50 before the actual skirmish starts at 4pm PST / midnight GMT. The spots are first come first serve, but all participants will receive the special title "Gull Point Veteran" once the new patch 1.13 releases on the live servers.
The PotBS "Great Testbed Screenshot Hunt" is on
Pirates of the Burning Sea players now have another contest to take a crack at if the video competitions don't strike their fancy. Flying Lab Software has announced the "Great Testbed Screenshot Hunt", which involves players logging on to the Testbed server, performing particular tasks and then screenshotting them.The ultimate goal of this is to make the testing process a little more fun, but there are tangible rewards as well to spice things up a bit. After you've emailed your batch of eligible screenshots to FLS, you'll be in the draw to win one of 10 game-cards granting 30 days play time, or one of two PotBS t-shirts. Head over to the contest page to see what you need to snap to be in with a chance -- and make sure your character name is visible on each shot!
PotBS patch 1.4 available on test server
Those keen to sink their teeth into patch 1.4 for Pirates of the Burning Sea can do so ahead of its release on the live servers, by logging on to the Testbed server. Flying Lab Software is keen to get players to try out some of the new features that this patch brings (like the upcoming class changes) and have set up feedback pages for specific aspects of the game.If you want to leave feedback about career skills in 1.4, you can visit this page, and feedback on the early game missions can be left here, with different forum posts for each nation. Additionally, there is a page for general 1.4 feedback that doesn't fit in these two categories. Don't be scared if you've never been on Testbed before -- there is a handy forum post that will answer all your questions, and you'll be helping test new content in no time.
Character copy function introduced to PotBS' test server
The folks at Flying Lab Software have realized that they're probably not getting all the feedback that they could from their Pirates of the Burning Sea Testbed server, simply due to the fact that people have to level up a new character there. Testing out high level content from unreleased builds is left only to the most hardcore testers with this setup, so to remedy this, a "Character Copy" function has been implemented, allowing players to copy their live characters across to the Testbed. We are told that the tool will only be available for a limited time, so if you're likely to want a character copied to Test at any point, now's the time to act.To copy a character across, players need to log in to the official PotBS site, and then visit the character copy page. Auction listings, in-game mail sent while logged out, landmark unrest and society associations will not be copied over. As well as this, at the time of posting an issue has been identified that is causing live characters to have their auctions delisted when they are copied. A fix should be coming soon, and the items are able to be relisted again in the meantime.
PotBS devlog: the road to v1.1, ships and ship combat
A new devlog is up on the Pirates of the Burning Sea official site, explaining in detail a few of the changes and fixes that have gone into the next build of the game. The next major patch will bring the game to version 1.1, and is being deployed to the Testbed server this week and to live servers not too long after. Although there is much more that will come with v1.1, the devlog discusses NPC AI, outfitting, and ship fixes.The most interesting part of the devlog is the discussion of the NPC AI. Previously, enemy ships didn't really change targets that often, and specifically did not react to the person who was dealing the most damage to them like in other MMOs (aggro). This has been fixed in v1.1, ending the viability of a few cheap tactics. Also being fixed with NPC AI is the seemingly random-at-times surrendering of NPCs. It's true that quite often a ship would just surrender out of the blue, but this is being changed so that NPCs will only abandon ship shortly after being attacked, so that there's some logical reasoning behind it. Check out the full devlog for the rest of the discussions on v1.1.
