Month: May 2024
Silent Hill 2’s remake hits PS5 and Steam in October
Image: Konami
Konami provided a fresh — and terrifying — look at its upcoming remake of the survival horror classic Silent Hill 2, sharing a new trailer and release date during Sony’s State of Play and offering an extended look at gameplay during Konami’s Silent Hill Transmission event.
In the trailer, husband of the year James Sunderland makes his way through the haunted town, fighting monstrous nurses and generally looking sad, wet, and guilty. Konami’s Silent Hill presentation expanded on his patheticness featuring extended scenes of James fighting more monsters and interacting with the other people lost in the town. However, developer Team Bloober seemingly realized the value of the tease, exercising restraint in not including any glimpses of the big daddy himself: Pyramid Head. You can watch the full Silent Hill Transmission presentation, which also features a short vignette on the Silent Hill 2 movie, below.
The remake was first announced in 2022 as part of a big drop of Silent Hill news that included multiple spinoffs and a new live-action movie (which is also based on Silent Hill 2). The updated version of the game, which originally launched on the PSone in 2001, is being developed by Polish studio Bloober Team, which is best known for horror games Layers of Fear and The Medium.
At the beginning of the year, Konami put out a trailer detailing the combat of Silent Hill 2, while also surprise launching a short, free spinoff called The Short Message. Interestingly, though today’s two events confirmed the game’s October 8th release date, only Konami’s featured the confirmation that Silent Hill 2 will come day and date to PC.
Image: Konami
Konami provided a fresh — and terrifying — look at its upcoming remake of the survival horror classic Silent Hill 2, sharing a new trailer and release date during Sony’s State of Play and offering an extended look at gameplay during Konami’s Silent Hill Transmission event.
In the trailer, husband of the year James Sunderland makes his way through the haunted town, fighting monstrous nurses and generally looking sad, wet, and guilty. Konami’s Silent Hill presentation expanded on his patheticness featuring extended scenes of James fighting more monsters and interacting with the other people lost in the town. However, developer Team Bloober seemingly realized the value of the tease, exercising restraint in not including any glimpses of the big daddy himself: Pyramid Head. You can watch the full Silent Hill Transmission presentation, which also features a short vignette on the Silent Hill 2 movie, below.
The remake was first announced in 2022 as part of a big drop of Silent Hill news that included multiple spinoffs and a new live-action movie (which is also based on Silent Hill 2). The updated version of the game, which originally launched on the PSone in 2001, is being developed by Polish studio Bloober Team, which is best known for horror games Layers of Fear and The Medium.
At the beginning of the year, Konami put out a trailer detailing the combat of Silent Hill 2, while also surprise launching a short, free spinoff called The Short Message. Interestingly, though today’s two events confirmed the game’s October 8th release date, only Konami’s featured the confirmation that Silent Hill 2 will come day and date to PC.
TikTok Preparing a US Copy of the App’s Core Algorithm
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: TikTok is working on a clone of its recommendation algorithm for its 170 million U.S. users that may result in a version that operates independently of its Chinese parent and be more palatable to American lawmakers who want to ban it, according to sources with direct knowledge of the efforts. The work on splitting the source code ordered by TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance late last year predated a bill to force a sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations that began gaining steam in Congress this year. The bill was signed into law in April. The sources, who were granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the short-form video sharing app, said that once the code is split, it could lay the groundwork for a divestiture of the U.S. assets, although there are no current plans to do so. The company has previously said it had no plans to sell the U.S. assets and such a move would be impossible. […]
In the past few months, hundreds of ByteDance and TikTok engineers in both the U.S. and China were ordered to begin separating millions of lines of code, sifting through the company’s algorithm that pairs users with videos to their liking. The engineers’ mission is to create a separate code base that is independent of systems used by ByteDance’s Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, while eliminating any information linking to Chinese users, two sources with direct knowledge of the project told Reuters. […] The complexity of the task that the sources described to Reuters as tedious “dirty work” underscores the difficulty of splitting the underlying code that binds TikTok’s U.S. operations to its Chinese parent. The work is expected to take over a year to complete, these sources said. […] At one point, TikTok executives considered open sourcing some of TikTok’s algorithm, or making it available to others to access and modify, to demonstrate technological transparency, the sources said.
Executives have communicated plans and provided updates on the code-splitting project during a team all-hands, in internal planning documents and on its internal communications system, called Lark, according to one of the sources who attended the meeting and another source who has viewed the messages. Compliance and legal issues involved with determining what parts of the code can be carried over to TikTok are complicating the work, according to one source. Each line of code has to be reviewed to determine if it can go into the separate code base, the sources added. The goal is to create a new source code repository for a recommendation algorithm serving only TikTok U.S. Once completed, TikTok U.S. will run and maintain its recommendation algorithm independent of TikTok apps in other regions and its Chinese version Douyin. That move would cut it off from the massive engineering development power of its parent company in Beijing, the sources said. If TikTok completes the work to split the recommendation engine from its Chinese counterpart, TikTok management is aware of the risk that TikTok U.S. may not be able to deliver the same level of performance as the existing TikTok because it is heavily reliant on ByteDance’s engineers in China to update and maintain the code base to maximize user engagement, sources added.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: TikTok is working on a clone of its recommendation algorithm for its 170 million U.S. users that may result in a version that operates independently of its Chinese parent and be more palatable to American lawmakers who want to ban it, according to sources with direct knowledge of the efforts. The work on splitting the source code ordered by TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance late last year predated a bill to force a sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations that began gaining steam in Congress this year. The bill was signed into law in April. The sources, who were granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the short-form video sharing app, said that once the code is split, it could lay the groundwork for a divestiture of the U.S. assets, although there are no current plans to do so. The company has previously said it had no plans to sell the U.S. assets and such a move would be impossible. […]
In the past few months, hundreds of ByteDance and TikTok engineers in both the U.S. and China were ordered to begin separating millions of lines of code, sifting through the company’s algorithm that pairs users with videos to their liking. The engineers’ mission is to create a separate code base that is independent of systems used by ByteDance’s Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, while eliminating any information linking to Chinese users, two sources with direct knowledge of the project told Reuters. […] The complexity of the task that the sources described to Reuters as tedious “dirty work” underscores the difficulty of splitting the underlying code that binds TikTok’s U.S. operations to its Chinese parent. The work is expected to take over a year to complete, these sources said. […] At one point, TikTok executives considered open sourcing some of TikTok’s algorithm, or making it available to others to access and modify, to demonstrate technological transparency, the sources said.
Executives have communicated plans and provided updates on the code-splitting project during a team all-hands, in internal planning documents and on its internal communications system, called Lark, according to one of the sources who attended the meeting and another source who has viewed the messages. Compliance and legal issues involved with determining what parts of the code can be carried over to TikTok are complicating the work, according to one source. Each line of code has to be reviewed to determine if it can go into the separate code base, the sources added. The goal is to create a new source code repository for a recommendation algorithm serving only TikTok U.S. Once completed, TikTok U.S. will run and maintain its recommendation algorithm independent of TikTok apps in other regions and its Chinese version Douyin. That move would cut it off from the massive engineering development power of its parent company in Beijing, the sources said. If TikTok completes the work to split the recommendation engine from its Chinese counterpart, TikTok management is aware of the risk that TikTok U.S. may not be able to deliver the same level of performance as the existing TikTok because it is heavily reliant on ByteDance’s engineers in China to update and maintain the code base to maximize user engagement, sources added.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why France’s start-up champion has struggled abroad
Its appointment booking software is everywhere in France, but Doctolib has struggled to make a dent elsewhere.
Its appointment booking software is everywhere in France, but Doctolib has struggled to make a dent elsewhere.
Wordle in legal row with geography spinoff, Worldle
The New York Times, Wordle’s owner, accuses similarly-named geography game of “creating confusion.”
The New York Times, Wordle’s owner, accuses similarly-named geography game of “creating confusion.”
AI Search Company You.com Launches Custom AI Assistants – CNET
Custom Assistants can be built on GPT-4o, Llama 3 or Claude 3 Opus.
Custom Assistants can be built on GPT-4o, Llama 3 or Claude 3 Opus.
The Hidden Costs of Cloud Services and How to Avoid Them
In the fast-paced world of technology startups, leveraging cloud services has become a cornerstone of success. The cloud offers flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency that traditional IT infrastructures simply cannot match. However, hidden beneath these apparent benefits are costs that can
The post The Hidden Costs of Cloud Services and How to Avoid Them first appeared on Tech Startups.
In the fast-paced world of technology startups, leveraging cloud services has become a cornerstone of success. The cloud offers flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency that traditional IT infrastructures simply cannot match. However, hidden beneath these apparent benefits are costs that can […]
The post The Hidden Costs of Cloud Services and How to Avoid Them first appeared on Tech Startups.