Saturday, April 26th, 2025 Posted by Jim Thacker Master FACS Rigging for Facial Motion Capture html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd" The Gnomon Workshop has released FACS rigging for facial motion capture, a detailed guide to facial rigging recorded by Ghost VFX Creature Supervisor Madhav Shyam. The intermediate-level workshop provides over 10 hours of video training in Maya and Marmoset Toolbag. A detailed guide to creating a FACS-based facial rig in Maya The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is widely adopted in visual effects and animation as a way to represent facial expressions. In the workshop, Madhav Shyam explains how to build a simplified FACS-based facial rig in Maya and animate it with motion-capture data captured using the ARKit system on an iPhone. He begins by explaining the key factors that contribute to believable character performances, then builds a rig system that drives the FACS shapes, focusing on one part of the face at a time. Shyam then demonstrates how to constrain mocap data for use with the rig, and how to transfer the animation and rig system to different types of 3D character. As well as the tutorial videos themselves, viewers can download supporting project files including the facial shapes required to build the rig system. The tutorial uses the free 3D head model available from 3D Scan Store, and the commercial Gorilla Écorché 3D model. About the artist Madhav Shyam is Creature Supervisor at Ghost VFX. He has over seven years of industry experience on movies and broadcast series including Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Troll, Slumberland and Star Trek: Discovery. Pricing and availability FACS Rigging for Facial Motion Capture is available via a subscription to The Gnomon Workshop, which provides access to over 300 tutorials. Subscriptions cost $57/month or $519/year. Free trials are available. Read more about FACS Rigging for Facial Motion Capture on The Gnomon Workshop’s website Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects. Full disclosure: CG Channel is owned by Gnomon. Latest News Master FACS Rigging for Facial Motion Capture Create a FACS-based facial rig suitable for VFX or animation work with The Gnomon Workshop's detailed Maya tutorial. Saturday, April 26th, 2025 Unity 6.1: discover 5 key features for CG artists See the key features in the game engine and real-time renderer, from better 3D water to Variable Rate Shading and Deferred+ rendering. Friday, April 25th, 2025 Adobe releases Photoshop 26.6 Check out the new features in the image-editing software, including nifty new Select Details options in the AI-based Object Selection tool. Thursday, April 24th, 2025 Chaos releases Corona 12 Update 2 for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D Update to the renderer adds over 3,100 Chaos Scans materials to the Cosmos library, and improves DoF and volumetric effects. Thursday, April 24th, 2025 Get 260+ modular Wild West building assets for Unreal Engine Get JustB Studios' 1850s Post Office Environment pack of 3D assets for free for two weeks on the Fab marketplace. For commercial use. Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025 Get VFX artist Thomas Marcos' free Blender clouds shader Lightweight Procedural Clouds Shader generates realistic clouds in production conditions, and works with the Cycles or Eevee renderers. Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025 More News NVIDIA open-sources PhysX's GPU simulation code Hair Cinematic Tool 2.0 simplifies hair shading in Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial: Creature Animation for Games LightWave Digital releases LightWave 2025 Get the free version of ZibraVDB for Unreal Engine and Houdini See JangaFX's first demo of IlluGen, its app for in-game VFX Autodesk releases Flame 2026 Character Creator gets new free MetaTailor plugin Epic Games releases Twinmotion 2025.1.1 Leopoly adds voxel sculpting to Shapelab 2025 Check out new 3ds Max UV unwrapping plugin UVReactor Reallusion releases iClone 8.53 with timecode support Older Posts

Nearly Half of Americans Still Live With High Levels of Air Pollution, Posing Serious Health Risks, Report Finds The most recent State of the Air report by the American Lung Association found that more than 150 million Americans breathe air with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution Lillian Ali - Staff Contributor April 25, 2025 12:50 p.m. For 25 of the 26 years the American Lung Association has reported State of the Air, Los Angeles—pictured here in smog—has been declared the city with the worst ozone pollution in the United States. David Iliff via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 3.0 Since 2000, the American Lung Association has released an annual State of the Air report analyzing air quality data across the United States. This year’s report, released on Wednesday, found the highest number of people exposed to unhealthy levels of air pollution in a decade. According to the findings, 156 million Americans—or 46 percent of the U.S. population—live with levels of particle or ozone pollution that received a failing grade. “Both these types of pollution cause people to die,” Mary Rice, a pulmonologist at Harvard University, tells NPR’s Alejandra Borunda. “They shorten life expectancy and drive increases in asthma rates.” Particle pollution, also called soot pollution, is made up of minuscule solid and liquid particles that hang in the air. They’re often emitted by fuel combustion, like diesel- and gasoline-powered cars or the burning of wood. Ozone pollution occurs when polluting gases are hit by sunlight, leading to a reaction that forms ozone smog. Breathing in ozone can irritate your lungs, causing shortness of breath, coughing or asthma attacks. The 2025 State of the Air report, which analyzed air quality data from 2021 to 2023, found 25 million more people breathing polluted air compared to the 2024 report. The authors link this rise to climate change. “There’s definitely a worsening trend that’s driven largely by climate change,” Katherine Pruitt, the lead author of the report and national senior director for policy at the American Lung Association, tells USA Today’s Ignacio Calderon. “Every year seems to be a bit hotter globally, resulting in more extreme weather events, more droughts, more extreme heat and more wildfires.” Those wildfires produce the sooty particles that contribute to particulate pollution, while extreme heat creates more favorable conditions for ozone formation, producing smog. While climate change is contributing to heavy air pollution, it used to be much worse. Smog has covered cities like Los Angeles since the early 20th century. At one point, these “hellish clouds” of smog were so thick that, in the middle of World War II, residents thought the city was under attack. The Optimist Club of Highland Park, a neighborhood in northeast Los Angleles, wore gas masks at a 1954 banquet to highlight air pollution in the city. Los Angeles Daily News via Wikimedia Commons under CC-BY 4.0 The passage of the Clean Air Act and the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 marked a turning point in air quality, empowering the government to regulate pollution and promote public health. Now, six key air pollutants have dropped by about 80 percent since the law’s passage, according to this year’s report. But some researchers see climate change as halting—or even reversing—this improvement. “Since the act passed, the air pollution has gone down overall,” Laura Kate Bender, an assistant vice president at the American Lung Association, tells CBS News’ Kiki Intarasuwan. “The challenge is that over the last few years, we’re starting to see it tick back up again, and that’s because of climate change, in part.” At the same time, federal action against climate change appears to be slowing. On March 12, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced significant rollbacks and re-evaluations, declaring it “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.” Zeldin argued that his deregulation will drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Included in Zeldin’s push for deregulation is a re-evaluation of Biden-era air quality standards, including those for particulate pollution and greenhouse gases. The EPA provided a list of 31 regulations it plans to scale back or eliminate, including limits on air pollution, mercury emissions and vehicles. This week, the EPA sent termination notices to nearly 200 employees at the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. “Unfortunately, we see that everything that makes our air quality better is at risk,” Kate Bender tells CBS News, citing the regulation rollbacks and cuts to staff and funding at the EPA. “If we see all those cuts become reality, it’s gonna have a real impact on people’s health by making the air they breathe dirtier.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Interim DC attorney Ed Martin has written a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation — the organization behind Wikipedia — that calls into question its status as a nonprofit entity. In the letter, which was obtained by The Free Press, Martin claims he found that Wikipedia “is engaging in a series of activities that could violate its obligations” under US law about tax-exempt organizations.Under the law (Section 501(c)(3) of Title 26), tax-exempt organizations must operate “exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes.” Martin alleges that Wikipedia is “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda,” including by “rewriting” historical events and through “other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States.”Martin is known for thinly justified legal threats against media organizations. In recent days, Martin has sent letters to the New England Journal of Medicine, the CHEST Journal, and Obstetrics and Gynecology, accusing them of being “partisan in various scientific debates.”Martin asks the Wikimedia Foundation to respond to several questions, such as what it’s doing to “safeguard” the public from propaganda, as well as efforts to exclude “foreign influence operatives from making targeted edits” on topics that would “reshape or rewrite history.” He’s giving the Foundation until May 15th to respond.Related“Wikipedia’s content is governed by three core content policies: neutral point of view, verifiability, and no original research, which exist to ensure information is presented as accurately, fairly, and neutrally as possible,” Jacob Rogers, the Wikimedia Foundation’s associate general counsel, said in an emailed statement to The Verge. “The entire process of content moderation is overseen by nearly 260,000 volunteers and is open and transparent for all to see, which is why we welcome opportunities to explain how Wikipedia works and will do so in the appropriate forum.”Martin’s letter reflects a broader trend of the right targeting Wikipedia. Last year, Elon Musk told supporters to “stop donating to Wokepedia” before later calling the site “an extension of legacy media propaganda.” In January, a report from Forward.com found that The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, created a presentation with a series of slides geared toward “targeting” Wikipedia editors.The Wikimedia Foundation has since created tools to protect the identities of editors, with CEO Maryana Iskander telling the community that it’s “seeing an increase in threats, both regulation and litigation across the world,” as reported by 404 Media.See More:

Latest   Machine Learning Prompt Engineering Mastery: Optimizing LLM Performance Through Iterative Prompt Management 0 like April 25, 2025 Share this post Last Updated on April 26, 2025 by Editorial Team Author(s): Rajarshi Tarafdar Originally published on Towards AI. The introduction of large language models (LLMs) has truly transformed AI usage from customer service automation to content creation. The performance of these models is heavily reliant on the interaction with the system, and that is exactly where prompt engineering steps in. The prompt engineering market is projected to reach $6.5 trillion by 2034 currently, organizations are trying to hone the capabilities of LLM optimally by means of an iterative prompt management process. The article discusses prompt engineering techniques, iterativeness, and great improvements in LLM output in various client sectors. The Rise of Prompt Engineering Prompt engineering is the process of developing and modifying input queries (or prompts) to get the most accurate, relevant, and beneficial answer from an LLM. Effective prompt engineering takes importance in these cases, dramatically increasing the possibilities of optimizing results. In fact, the market is forecasted to grow by prompt engineering from $505.18 billion in 2025 to an unbelievable $6,533.87 billion by 2034, simply on the basis of increased adoption of generative AI technologies and natural language processing (NLP) technologies into industries. This growth shows how vital prompt engineering will be for future operations of AI. Understanding how to execute incremental prompt management becomes pivotal in organizations that want to leverage all the advantages an LLM affords while ensuring maximum efficiency and accuracy. Iterative Prompt Engineering: A Core Methodology At the heart of successful prompt engineering lies the iterative process, which involves continuous refinement of prompts to enhance the relevance, accuracy, and specificity of the model’s responses. This process is cyclical, often requiring multiple rounds of adjustment, testing, and evaluation to reach the desired level of performance. The Iterative Process Initial Prompt Creation The first step in iterative prompt engineering is the creation of an initial prompt. This is where the objectives of the query are defined, and the model is introduced to the task. The initial prompt might be relatively simple, outlining a basic request or task. 2. Output Evaluation Once the model generates a response, it is evaluated for accuracy and relevance. This evaluation can be both quantitative (e.g., accuracy scores, BLEU scores for translation tasks) and qualitative (human judgment of the model’s usefulness and coherence). 3. Incremental Adjustments The next step is minor modifications of the prompt in phrasing, structure, or context. This process of adjustment is iterated until the desired quality is approached. Research has shown that iterative training improves translation quality by as much as 8%, as demonstrated by a study wherein ten iterations to translate the text yielded increased BLEU scores to 70 from a previous value of 62. This cyclical refinement process is central to making LLMs more effective and reliable, allowing models to better handle specific tasks and deliver more accurate results. Case Study: Role-Specific Prompts The power of role-specific prompts was demonstrated by another study. By prompting the model with statements such as “Act as a neuroscientist,” it achieved a 37% improvement in performance in biomarker identification for AI-assisted meditation research. This exemplifies how slight, iterative changes in prompt structure can yield great performance benefits for models in specialized applications. Iterative Process Breakdown Iteration Phase Key Activities Impact Measurement Baseline Prompt Define success metrics Initial accuracy score Refinement Cycle Add context, constraints, or rephrase +15–20% relevance Optimization Use dynamic variables +25% task specificity Improving your prompt involves not only modifying language but also adjusting the context, constraints, and variables so that the prompt is refined and tuned for its given task. It is an iterative process that garners small improvements toward an accurate and effective outcome from the given task to the performance of the LLM. Sector-Specific Applications of Iterative Prompt Engineering The iterative character of prompt engineering makes it quite adaptive across industries-from healthcare to finance to content creation-right down to powerful LLM applications custom-made to handle the specific needs in any particular instance. Healthcare: Precision in Diagnostics In improving the accuracy of diagnosis and enhanced decision-making in health care, prompt engineering assumes a significant role. For instance, high-stress worker studies showed that 42% of suicidal ideation detection errors could be reduced by the use of iterative prompting techniques. By altering the prompts to include contextual factors such as worker stress levels, the model can provide healthcare professionals with insights that are more directly applicable, putting better decisions in their hands. Finance: Enhanced Data Analysis Like all other areas in prompt engineering, finance also has its uses in data analysis and asset class evaluations. In one such case study, iterative prompt engineering brought about a significant improvement in asset class analysis completeness scores from the baseline score (68%) post-iteration to 92%. This corroborates the fact that an installation has to be continually improved to obtain appropriate and actionable financial intelligence. Content Creation: Engaging Marketing Copy Iterative prompt engineering is especially good for content generation, where the matters of relevance and engagement are concerned. In marketing, the systematic testing of prompts could further refine content generation tools toward more compelling and engaging outputs. One study cites a 31% increase in engagement rates with marketing copy due to iterative prompt testing. By refining the wording and contextual aspects of prompts, marketers can craft messages that better resonate with the target audience. Performance Optimization Strategies in Iterative Prompt Engineering Iterative cycles can not just help in refining a prompt, but quite a few strategies can be applied to further optimize an LLM’s performance after these iterations. Optimizing the specificity and relevance of model outputs could ensure that AI systems provide output that is right in line with business goals, rather than just being accurate. 1. Precision Framing Another important procurement method is precision framing, whereby prompts are specifically fashioned to elicit the most pertinent, accurate responses from the model. Research has shown that specific prompts outperform vague queries in output relevance by fifty-three per cent. By providing the model with a wider context and narrowing its focus, it understands better what is required to generate responses that will be useful. 2. Contextual Layering Another important strategy is contextual layering, where domain-specific knowledge is integrated into the prompts to guide the model’s understanding. For example, in medical applications, adding medical jargon or specific conditions can significantly improve diagnostic accuracy. One study found that contextual layering improved medical diagnostic accuracy by 28%. 3. Behavioral Conditioning Behavioral conditioning involves using 5–7 iteration cycles to achieve high satisfaction rates in enterprise deployments. After several rounds of refinement, models typically reach 90 %+ satisfaction levels for real-world applications, demonstrating the effectiveness of iterative prompt engineering in producing reliable AI solutions for businesses. The Role of Automation in Iterative Prompt Engineering As the demand for optimized LLM performance grows, emerging tools are now automating much of the iterative process. Research shows that machine learning-driven optimization loops can automate up to 60% of the prompt iteration processes, reducing the time and resources required to refine prompts. While automation plays a significant role in accelerating the process, human oversight remains critical for handling edge cases and ensuring that the outputs align with the desired goals. The Future of Prompt Engineering The market for prompt engineering is expanding rapidly, with a 32.9% CAGR projected over the next few years. As more industries recognize the value of iterative prompt management, the demand for skilled prompt engineers will only increase. Mastering the art of iterative prompt engineering will separate successful AI implementations from experimental or inefficient ones. By combining human expertise with emerging automation tools, organizations can ensure that their LLMs operate at peak performance, unlocking the full potential of AI-driven solutions. Conclusion It has been profoundly recognized that prompt engineering is an evolving and paramount skill in optimizing LLM performance. Through several iterations, refinements in phrasing, modifying context, and adding domain knowledge-economies can heighten AI model output to considerable levels of improvement. From healthcare to finance and content generation, iterative prompt engineering has had much to play in terms of better outcomes, higher engagement in human judgment, and accurate decisions. This prompt engineering market continues to grow, making it more and more important to master these techniques in order to remain competitive in the AI field. The future of prompt engineering-automated or human-driven-is destined to be a thrilling one, with more and more advanced tools and methodologies coming in to empower organizations to redefine what LLMs would be able to do. Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor. Published via Towards AI Towards AI - Medium Share this post

Amazon is currently running a massive 3 for $33 deal on 4Ks and Blu-rays. The bestsellers so far have been sci-fi classics like the Godzilla movies, but I’m personally all about adding to my horror collection. Still, this is one of those deals that’s almost too good. I just want everything. To rein myself in, I wanted to settle on a theme, and I happen to organize by shelves by director. You know what director happens to have exactly three awesome horror movies, all of which are eligible for the deal? Jordan Peele. After scrolling through the entire sale, I’ve decided I'd go for Us, Nope, and Get Out, all for $33. Nope, Us, and Get Out in 4K for $33 Nope [4K UHD]Get Out [4K UHD]Us [4K UHD]Shop the Full 4K Sale See it at AmazonIf you forced me to pick a favorite between these three movies, I’d lie to you. Well, I’d say one movie and then immediately feel like I was lying. Get Out, I truly believe, is one of the best directorial debuts in movie history. Lupita Nyong'o’s performance in Us is one of the best I’ve seen in horror, period. And I don’t think I’ll ever forget being awestruck by watching Nope on the big screen. Nope is also the most recent physical release, and as such the one horror fans are least likely to have already. It’s also a movie I’d hesitate to call just “horror.” IGN’s 9/10 review of Nope describes it as “a sci-fi-horror-comedy that builds cinematic myths before casually knocking them over... from a studio director at the peak of his craft.” To get this deal (or anything else from the sale), you just have to add all three movies to your cart. Amazon applies the promo automatically. Jordan Peele's Next Movie Comes Out in 2026PlayJordan Peele's next project is set to release in theaters in October 2026. I think it’s safe to say there are pretty high expectations here, but this is one director who’s more than likely to meet them. Peele's production company Monkeypaw is also releasing the sports horror movie Him later this year. In other mediums, the director is collaborating with none other than Hideo Kojima on a game currently titled OD.More horror movies included in the sale: The 2021 Candyman remake, which Peele helped write, is also included in the sale. I’ll probably use that as my excuse to get another three movies.Candyman [4K UHD]See it at AmazonPsycho [4K UHD]See it at AmazonThe Forever Purge [4K UHD]See it at AmazonThe Birds [4K UHD]See it at AmazonBlythe (she/her) is an SEO Coordinator at IGN who spends way too much time in character customization screens and tracking down collectibles.

After testing earlier this year, Google is now widely rolling out a Material 3 redesign of Gmail on iPhone and iPad.  While the design language is widely available in Google’s Android and web apps, iOS adoption has been much slower.  In Gmail, it starts with a pill-shaped search bar replacing the rounded rectangle. The bottom bar, if you have the integrated Google Chat and/or Meet experience enabled, identifies your current tab with another pill instead of highlighting the icon. Old vs. new The “Compose” button is now a rounded rectangle. Blue is used as the accent color throughout the application, with red being mostly retired.  Gmail’s navigation drawer with your folders and labels is unchanged. In the message view, one tweak sees the three-dot overflow icon go horizontal. This “refreshed look and feel” is meant to match the Android and web experience. We’re seeing this Material 3 redesign rolled out with version 6.0.250413 of Gmail for iPhone and iPad. Overall, it is a pretty straightforward modernization. On iOS, Material 3 is available in Google Chat, Home, Maps, Meet, Photos, and Search. Meanwhile, Google Calendar, which is an app using the previous design language, for iOS is getting the ability to “create and modify birthday events.” Once available, creating a new event reveals “Birthday” as an option alongside “Event” and “Task.” This is not yet widely rolled out.  More on Gmail: Add 9to5Google to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Google — experts who break news about Google and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Google on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Can a Hail Mary to stave off climate change by dimming the Sun work? Scientists in the UK are poised to find out. The Telegraph reports that the British government is expected to greenlight a bevy of solar geoengineering experiments in the coming weeks, which will explore techniques ranging from injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to brightening clouds to reflect sunlight.The experiments will be funded to the tune of roughly $66.5 million by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, making the UK one of the biggest funders of solar geoengineering research in the world, according to the Guardian. This stands in contrast to the US, where a number of high-profile solar geoengineering experiments have been shut down while some states consider banning future attempts. Such dramatic measures to respond to climate change remain extremely controversial in the scientific community — for good reason — but as we race towards critical warming tipping points past which the effects of climate change are believed to be irreversible, some argue that we should be exploring all our options. "The uncomfortable truth is that our current warming trajectory makes a number of such tipping points distinctly possible over the next century," Mark Symes, programmer director for ARIA told the Guardian. "This has driven increased interest in approaches that might actively cool the world in a short time frame in order to avoid those tipping points. Having spoken to hundreds of researchers, we reached the conclusion that a critical missing part of our understanding was real world, physical data."The leading proposed method for reducing our planet's dose of solar radiation is through stratospheric aerosol injection, which involves releasing massive amounts of small particles — the most popular candidate being sulfur dioxide — into the atmosphere, where they would reflect some sunlight back into space.Another known as marine cloud brightening proposes we enhance nature's greatest source of shade, clouds, by spraying them with sea salt aerosols that promote water droplet formation to make them denser and bounce back more sunlight. The flip side of that is a more fringe technique called cirrus cloud thinning, which suggests thinning the high-altitude clouds because they trap more sunlight than they reflect.As easy as it is to imagine any of these going catastrophically wrong — not to mention their potential to distract from the fact that we must dramatically curb greenhouse gas emissions — there is some real-world evidence suggesting that these measures could work, according to Jim Haywood, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Exeter. Scientists have observed how the gigantic clouds of sulfur released by volcanic eruptions have led to global temperature drops — evidence in favor of aerosol injection — and similarly how the ashy plumes brightened clouds while also increasing their size — ditto cloud brightening. Additional research has shown that a sharp dropoff in shipping fumes due to international regulations ironically caused a spike in global temperatures. But how scientists interpret that result is a glass half-empty half-full situation. On the one hand, it suggests that deliberately releasing aerosols could help measurably cool our planet. On the other, critics argue that it's a foreboding example of how solar geoengineering could go wrong by leading to a "termination shock," in which the planet rapidly heats up again the moment we stop releasing aerosols."At the moment, all of these ideas need to remain on the table, because otherwise climate change in the coming decades could be extremely damaging," Haywood told the Guardian. "Recent global temperatures have been a real wake-up call."More on climate change: Scientists Activate Facility to Suck Carbon Directly Out of the OceanShare This Article

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for April 26.

What we've been playing - engine musings, staying the course, and a tinge of sadness A few of the things that have us hooked this week. Image credit: Eurogamer/Bethesda Game Studios Feature by Tom Orry Editorial Director, Gamer Network Additional contributions by Tom Phillips, and Victoria Kennedy Published on April 26, 2025 26th April Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing. This week, Tom P has been loving his time in Cyrodiil, Victoria has been playing with dragons, and Tom O has been mostly just wandering about. Content warning: The Split Fiction section below talks about losing a beloved pet and the feelings of sadness and grief that go along with it. What have you been playing? Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, Xbox Series X To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Watch on YouTube Bethesda has been a little vague over exactly how its creaky old engine has been plugged into (or wallpapered over by) the new Unreal Engine 5-powered remake of Oblivion, but from the moment of that first cinematic pan around Emperor Patrick Stewart's castle I was thinking: thank goodness it has. Of course, this is an older and (despite its lovely new lick of paint) simpler game than something like Starfield or Fallout 4. But, returning to Cyrodiil and creeping through its sewers blasting lovely 4K rats, things also just seem to work. Reaching daylight on the ray-traced shores outside the prison, seeing a mudcrab and it not be flying backwards in mid-air... it got me wondering. Alongside filling a handy gap in Bethesda's release schedule as we all wait another five years for a proper new Elder Scrolls, is this version of Oblivion something of a test? To see if things work smoother in Unreal Engine, and act as a template for further projects in future - be that more ports, or all-new games. As I explore The Gold Coast, and as the game seems to be landing successfully with old and new fans alike, I wonder if we might have seen the end of that old engine for good. -Tom P Avowed, Xbox Series X Image credit: Digital Foundry I really wanted to jump into the Oblivion Remaster, but I know that if I leave Avowed for a considerable amount of time I won't go back to it. I'll lose track of what's going on and inevitably lose interest. So, no Oblivion for me, not yet anyway. I'm currently wandering around a farm operated by reanimated corpses, which isn't something I expected to be doing, and also smashing up a lot of mushroom men. As I think I've said many times in this regular column already, I just love exploring the world. Give me a small opening in a cave that leads to a vast underground cavern, and I'm happy. Put some strange goings on in there, perhaps some kind of arcane magic, and boom, my evening is tip top. -Tom O Split Fiction, Xbox Series X Image credit: Hazelight I, like many, have been playing Split Fiction. I won't talk at length about how brilliant it is, you know all that already. The co-op shenanigans are of course great, and I have had a lot of fun making my way through the game's sci-fi and fantasy worlds, trolling my co-player at every available opportunity. That's all I really have to say about that. What I will talk about further, though, is one particular chapter which I found surprisingly affecting. It was the chapter where Mio and Zoe are joined by two dragons. These dragons start off as eggs, and as things progress they eventually evolve to become fully grown and very competent beasts (I am using the word beast affectionately, here). At the end of April, I had to put down my dog The Captain, after he was diagnosed with cancer. He had been off his food for a few days, and I took him to the vet just thinking perhaps he had a stomach bug that needed some antibiotics to help clear it up. However, the vet found a tumour, and one that was too big to remove safely. I was heartbroken, and still am. But, what has all this got to do with Split Fiction and its dragon chapter? Well essentially, I became more emotionally attached to my dragon companion than I expected, because I kept thinking of it as The Captain. The Captain was by my side when I went through some of the hardest times of my life, and he was a constant source of reassurance and love during our 13 years together. And if I was ever being attacked by a whopping great big and very fierce dragon enemy like Mio and Zoe in Split Fiction, I know he would have absolutely had my back. When I said goodbye to my dragon at the end of that chapter, a dragon I had nurtured from a tiny little thing in need of my protection before it grew into an incredible and confident creature, I cried. I am actually crying a bit now. -Victoria