Summer is coming — time to back the Spyra One in Kickstarter
How much is too expensive for a water pistol? If you’re one of the folks backing the Spyra One on Kickstarter, about R2,000 is an acceptable price to pay for a harmless (unless your phone isn’t waterproof) water-dispensing weapon. Why? Because it’s got its own ammo counter, fires measured bursts of liquid and can be refilled in seconds from a bucket, basin or river — making this the sort of thing you want to whip out and cool down with while you’re waiting for the braai-master to finish working his magic. The only downside of this €364,000-raising (so far) Kickstarted water-gun? They won’t be shipping it to South Africa on launch. Oh well, we’ll find another way to get hold of one.
Source: Kickstarter
Watch the first gameplay for Doom Eternal revealed at QuakeCon
Doom was an almost surprising comeback from the long-running shooter series, one that managed to feel fresh despite being quite the gaming throwback. Arenas, health and armour pickup, smooth and fluid movement — what did iD think, that this was the 90s? Apparently yes, and it worked. Hard. Doom Eternal is set to finish the job and the developers have shown off some of what the upcoming infernal gameplay is going to look like at this year’s QuakeCon event. Check out the whole video if you have time as it gives out some info beyond what you’ll see in the monster-shooting-and-stabbing gameplay segment. This is one time that “Go to hell” seems like a pretty good idea.
Source: via GameSpot
Rockstar shows off Red Dead Redemption 2 gameplay and it looks incredible
If you’ve ever wondered exactly why Rockstar Games is called Rockstar Games, a look at the first real Red Dead Redemption II gameplay video should sort it out. How do you follow perhaps the best Western-themed video game of all time? By making it bigger, better, and more detailed than anything else we’ve seen from the developer, of course. RDR 2 looks incredible on a purely visual level, whether you’re looking at the player and NPC animation, the game world, animal movement, or weapon physics. But there are also large secondary systems in place, where your actions will define how others react to you. A full morality system seems to be included, your horse will grow more used to you over time, and animals will react to humans and predators in a realistic manner. Then there are the choices you can make. See a hold-up? You can intervene or make it clear that you don’t care — which should lead to a lot of very varied random encounters. We cannot wait to get our hands on this one at the soonest available opportunity.
Source: Rockstar
And now, a computer that writes poetry. Sonnets, to be exact
Right, so now computers are being taught to write sonnets. Specifically, a simple neural network has been fed a whole bunch of the poetry type and has attempted to come up with its own works of art. It’s also achieved this, though it has been criticised for a lack of emotion in its composition, according to it creators from the University of Toronto and the University of Melbourne. The effort makes sense, really. Sonnets are ideal works of art for computer systems to attempt to reproduce — they have a very rigid structure of 14 lines, as well as a specific metre and rhyming scheme and computers are very good at following rules. They may not be great at conveying emotion, but we get the feeling that’s more of a ‘yet’ situation. And it’s not like it is all that easy teaching humans sonnets these days — computers might as well have a go. You can check out Deepspeare for yourself over at GitHub.
Source: via Engadget
