Assassins Creed Unity isn’t going to help rebuild Notre Dame after all
On the 15th of April 2019, a fire broke out beneath the roof of the Notre-Dame cathedral. It caused severe damage to the spire, which collapsed during the blaze, as well as much of the roof and upper walls. Luckily, most of the important and irreplaceable things were saved in some way or another. Following this unfortunate incident, people started to wonder if a restoration was going to be possible, granted the monument is over 650 years old. Thinking about it now, it seems like a reach but then everyone’s collective mind jumped to Ubisoft Montreal’s 2014 Assassin’s Creed Unity for assisting with the restorative efforts. The team behind that game made 3D models accurate to the millimetre right?
Well, it turns out, that the game — which was met with a lot of criticism on its release — didn’t have the scans people thought it did. Much of the work around the cathedral in the game was altering it so your assassin could better kill people and that isn’t going to translate well for the restoration process — at least we don’t think. As Maxime Durand, Ubisoft’s resident art historian, told French newspaper Le Monde, “The monument that we recreated takes great artistic liberty.” So don’t count on the new Notre Dame, upon completion of its restoration, to look like the one in Unity. And that isn’t even touching on French copyright laws depicting the various artworks in and around the monument.
Source: Polygon
Steam hits new all-time concurrent player record
It was only seven short months ago in April, that Steam broke its previous record for most concurrent players when more than 26 million people signed into the platform. Well, it’s just done it again. Over 27 million accounts were signed into the platform which can be attributed to the US Thanksgiving holiday as well as people taking advantage of Black Friday specials.
Whether the cause be the regulars signing in to try for the 12th time that week to improve their rank in CS:GO, or new players climbing on the ‘Cyberpunk 2077 is half price’ hype train, doesn’t really make much difference. Sure, 27 million is a big number but, at least as things stand now, that number is only going to get bigger. At the time of writing, there are 17.5 million users signed in but only around 4 million of them playing anything.
Source: PCGamer
If you’ve always wanted a Spider-man NFT this is for you
AMC and Sony Pictures are trying to keep the hype going for the upcoming Spider-man: No Way Home premier by offering NFTs to people who preorder or reserve tickets through AMC’s website for the 16 December showing of the film. Not that they need to put any extra effort in to keep the hype going, the trailers are doing enough for that already.
And before you grab your torches and pitchforks to burn AMC and Sony down for supporting an environmentally damaging practice, they are using the Worldwide Asset Exchange (WAX) Blockchain. A carbon-neutral blockchain that uses the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, making it far more sustainable than one that uses Proof-of-Work, like Bitcoin for example. Depending on how well the NFTs do this practice could become more commonplace. Let’s hope copycat promos also take into account the environmental problem, or that clock is going to start ticking a little faster.
Source: Engadget
Kazakhstan faces power shortages thanks to crypto miners
Since China, the world’s former biggest Bitcoin mining country, cracked down on cryptocurrency mining and crypto transactions this year, miners have been heading for the hills. Those proverbial hills turned out to be the physical hills of the neighbouring country of Kazakhstan. As a result, the influx of power-hungry miners has put tremendous strain on the country’s already struggling power grid. According to the University of Cambridge, it is now the second hottest crypto mining spot, behind the US.
Last month three of Kazakhstan’s coal-fired power stations faced emergency shutdowns which meant it had to limit power to some consumers. Where have we seen that before? According to Kazakh officials via The Verge, the problem isn’t with crypto miners as a whole but rather unregistered miners, or what they call ‘grey miners’, people who illegally mine for crypto. Energy issues aren’t limited to just Kazakhstan though, Iran recently banned crypto mining for four months to try and prevent rolling blackouts, or as we in SA call it, load shedding.
Source: The Verge