Fans of the Homeworld franchise won’t be seeing its new entry arrive this year after all. The long-awaited sequel to Homeworld 2, a sci-fi real-time strategy video game released way back in 2003, was supposed to come out in 2022 before its release was pushed back to the first half of this year. Now, its developer Blackbird Interactive and Gearbox Publishing have revealed that they’re moving Homeworld 3’s launch date to February 2024. In their announcement, they said that they want to deliver a game that “lives up to the standards set by its predecessors.
They continued that in order to fully realize their vision, they need more time to refine and polish the game. Fans’ reactions to the announcement on Twitter have been positive so far, with most of them supporting the companies for taking the time to get it right. Upon being asked about the collector’s edition they sold, they said those who purchased the box will still receive it at launch.
We are moving the launch of Homeworld 3 from the first half of 2023 to February 2024 so that we deliver the quality experience that fans deserve. pic.twitter.com/DaCX4eFMm4
The companies also posted an extended version of their announcement on Gearbox’s website, where they explained that Blackbird’s move to implement a four-day work week back in 2022 isn’t the reason why the game’s release date has been pushed back again. “In fact,” they added, “the team is able to achieve as much if not more when given the additional personal time.” They didn’t go through any technical hurdles and change the scope of the game either — it just simply takes time to create and polish a whole game. For fans who can’t wait to see how the development is going along, they promised to share their “biggest Homeworld 3 progress update yet later this summer.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/sci-fi-strategy-game-homeworld-3-has-been-delayed-to-february-2024-061237843.html?src=rss
When Girl by Moonlight landed in my inbox, I knew it was something special. A tabletop role-playing game using the Blades in the Dark system based on the Magical Girl genre in the year of Barbie2023? I was so ready. The game takes inspiration from classic shojo manga and shows like Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl…
Best-selling author Jim Butcher’s most famous series is the Dresden Files, but here’s a treat for fans beyond that ongoing contemporary fantasy: The Olympian Affair, the second entry in his Cinder Spires steampunk series, is arriving in November—eight years after it began with The Aeronaut’s Windlass.
Kandiss Taylor, a GOP district chair in Georgia, claimed the Earth is flat on her podcast, Jesus, Guns, & Babies, alongside fellow flat-Earther David ‘Flat Earth Dave’ Weiss and Matt Long. She becomes the latest GOP member to jump on the flat Earth bandwagon, tacking this ideology onto her previous conspiracy theory…
The Nintendo 64 was the first to introduce console gamers to analog control sticks, but over 25 years after its debut, many of those original controllers aren’t doing so well (we blame Mario Party). With 8BitDo’s new N64 Mod Kit, you can now give them a welcome and very easy upgrade, including a hall effect joystick…
Acer just announced two new laptops at this year’s Computex expo in Taiwan. For gamers, there’s the new Predator Triton 16 line and for creatives (and everyone else), there’s the Swift Edge 16.
The new Predator Triton 16 is a serious gaming computer that Acer says can easily handle “intense AAA” titles, though it also features a relatively modest design that could fit into office environments. Did somebody say dual-use? This laptop boasts a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, up to a 13th Gen Intel Core i9 processor, up to 32GB of DDR5 RAM and up to 2TBs of storage.
This is a gaming laptop, so visuals get special attention here, with a 16-inch WQXGA 2560 x 1600 display that features a 240Hz refresh rate, 500 nits peak brightness and full support for NVIDIA G-Sync. It’s still plenty thin, at 0.78-inches, and ships with next-generation cooling fans for those times when you just have to max out a game’s settings. The Triton 16 launches in September, with a starting price of $1,800.
The thin and light Swift Edge 16 is made for those who game a bit on the side but primarily use a laptop for creative work or just for browsing the web. You get the latest AMD Ryzen 7040 series processor, AMD Radeon 780M graphics, a 16-inch 3.2K OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and integration with the newest wireless standard on the block, the mythical Wi-Fi 7. The Windows 11 PC ships with up to 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM, up to 2TB of SSD storage and enhanced fans for cooling. It launches in July at a starting price of $1,300.
Acer didn’t stop with just laptops. The company also announced a forthcoming tri-band router called the Acer Connect VERO W6m. This is billed as the company’s first “eco-friendly router” and is designed for data protection, as it adheres to strict European cyber security standards.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/acers-16-inch-predator-triton-and-swift-edge-laptops-are-aimed-at-gamers-and-creators-130004036.html?src=rss
Arc, a Mac-only internet browser from the aptly-named Browser Company, is one of those apps trying to reimagine a core computing tool. Years after we all decided that a stack of tabs at the top of a browser window is how we’re doing things, Arc has a different approach. Like most modern apps, Arc puts everything in a sidebar and lets you build spaces that you can use to focus on a particular task. For example, all the research and documents I need for a particular article live in their own space, and I can jump over to another for personal tabs or a third for keeping an eye on the news of the day.
Arc, which launched a little over a year ago, certainly has its quirks. A big one is the fact it doesn’t have a bookmarking system like other browsers, and there are a lot of small things that differentiate it from Chrome and Safari. One of those features is taking center stage in a new update that Arc is rolling out today. It’s called Boosts, which the Arc team grandly refers to as a way to take control over the sites they visit. I’ve been testing the Boosts 2.0 release for a few weeks, and while I don’t think it is reinventing the internet, it does open up some fun possibilities.
Boosts first launched about a year ago, and product designer Nate Parrott told me the concept was to “make it 10 times easier” to build a browser extension. “If you’re the kind of person who likes to tinker with things or a person who makes websites, you probably have all the technical skills to make a Chrome extension, like JavaScript and CSS and HTML,” Parrott said, “and yet nobody makes them because it’s just really hard.” And while the original Boosts release put a bunch of tools right in the browser to let you customize sites, it still wasn’t exactly user-friendly for people who don’t know things like CSS.
“Ten times easier than making a Chrome extension is not really that easy,” Parrott said. “You have to know how to code, you have to be willing to dig around in the web inspector and figure out what things are called in the code and stuff like that. It’s just not that easy.” Boosts 2.0 fixes that in a pretty major way by giving anyone a few simple tools to tweak sites they visit. If the original Boosts made things ten times easier, Parrott wanted Boosts 2.0 to make it 50 times easier.
To that end, Boosts now has a handful of simple but useful ways to customize basically any site. There’s a color picker that lets you change most sites from the standard white or black backgrounds you’re used to, and you can also replace the font in many cases as well. That might not sound like that big a deal, but it can really make things feel fresh – being able to change the Spotify web app from the black-and-green motif was nice, and being able to try some new customization features for my Gmail inbox was fun as well.
Perhaps more useful is the “Zap” feature. This lets you highlight an element of a page that you don’t want to see and just… zap it into oblivion. I tried this with YouTube Music; since the service added podcasts a few weeks ago, the “explore” page has included a “top shows” segment that surfaces some extremely low-quality garbage. I just clicked the zap button, highlighted the section and now I don’t have to think about it anymore.
Results can be a bit hit or miss. For example, I tried to zap some elements on Twitter’s website to essentially make it read-only so I can use it to dig for news without being tempted to actually engage with anything. I was able to delete the row that contains the reply and like buttons below a tweet, but getting that to apply to every tweet didn’t work for me. Of course, if you have the technical knowledge to dig into a site’s code, you can still do that just like you can in Boosts 1.0 and use tools like CSS, HTML and Javascript to tweak things to your liking.
You can also share your Boosts with other Arc users, something else that’s new to this release. (Any Boost that uses Javascript is unable to be shared for security reasons, though.) If you’ve come up with a particularly inspired tweak to a site, you can share it directly with a friend, as each Boost has a permalink. Arc will also be curating a gallery of its favorite custom options as well.
The Browser Company
I asked Parrott if he had any concerns that giant corporations would take issue with users tweaking their websites, but he had the good point that Arc’s user base is so small that it’s hard to imagine it would be an issue. He also had some philosophical thoughts about the tension between how people want the internet to look versus how companies and designers want it to look. “We’ve swung so far in the direction of ‘users do not have agency over the web tools that they use,’ while the companies have so much control,” he said. “I think that really anything that swings the pendulum a little bit in the other direction of ‘the users actually have a little bit of agency over this’ I think is gonna be a positive thing and a healthy thing.”
Right now, Arc is still Mac-only and you need to sign up on a waitlist to get access, so whatever weird things people try with Boosts 2.0 will remain a minor part of the internet landscape for now. And after playing around with them a bit, I can’t say they’d be a key driver in my decision to use Arc over another browser – but then again, I’m not much of a tweaker. Maybe the people who prefer Android over an iPhone, or those who are spending hours making wild contraptions in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom are exactly the kind of people who might enjoy painting Engadget’s home page in a lovely shade of teal.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-arc-internet-browser-lets-you-customize-or-vandalize-any-website-130010555.html?src=rss
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