This is the sound of the future: Roborace autonomous race car completes Goodwood’s uphill climb
If you’re a Stuff reader then there’s a passing chance that you’re familiar with Roborace, the autonomous race car project currently being tested on tracks of all sorts. The driverless vehicle’s latest achievement was completing the Goodwood uphill climb over the weekend at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Above is the video of the Roborace run, which completed without hitting anything it wasn’t supposed to (like the crash barrier). A couple of other autonomous cars also gave the drive a shot but were guided through a few difficult sections by their safety drivers. We don’t think that Roborace is road — or track — ready just yet but it’s certainly getting there. Now let’s put a bunch of them in a pack and make them fight for first place.
Source: Goodwood (YouTube)
Lockheed Martin has just completed its largest 3D-printed space component
Going to space is a serious business, where serious scientists and engineers get together to painstakingly create components for engines and other important bits needed for surviving in space. 3D-printing hasn’t featured in these operations a lot to date but Lockheed Martin, them of the F-16 Falcon and the F22 Raptor, has just completed its largest 3D-printed-component-in-SPAAAACE!!! build. It’s a dome for a satellite fuel tank, measuring 1.16 metres across, and it’s designed to cap the ends of a titanium cylinder which will hold fuel for satellites. The point? Reduced wastage, a faster creation time (more traditional methods can take up a year for delivery),and at least the same level of engineering as would be expected by older methods. Hey, anything that makes going into space cheaper is awesome in our book.
Source: Lockheed Martin
Battlefield V‘s open beta will be kicking off in September
Battlefield’s multiplayer is a chaotic affair, with often-improbable kills taking place as a matter of course. Battlefield V, which is launching a little later this year, is going to be no different. But you won’t have to wait too long to find that out for yourself — developers DICE have posted the results of their recent closed alpha test, revealing just what they’ve learned and the changes that are coming to the upcoming beta. They’ve already given the timing for the pending open beta test, which will be taking place in September ahead of Battlefield V‘s October release. Check out the update notes for the shooter at the link below.
Source: Battlefield
And now the update you’ve been waiting for: Microsoft’s finally updating Notepad
Microsoft’s Notepad application has been around for a long, long time. Long enough that we remember coding an entire website from scratch by typing raw HTML into that blank white box and then going mad because of missing punctuation… Anyway, enough with the nightmare fuel. Microsoft has announced that there are changes afoot for Notepad, with support for wrap-around find/replace (it’ll remember your last search now, too), text zooming, and line/column numbers functioning when word-wrap is enabled being the highlights. Various smaller changes are coming as well, along with Ctrl+Backspace now deleting the previous word. Um… yay?
Source: Microsoft