THE STORY On your first day as an apprentice at the Nytheris Archive, you accidentally unleash an ancient force that was meant to stay sealed forever. Ooops! Now, with the world teetering on the brink, it's up to you to piece together the remnants of a shattered relic and set things right. Explore a world filled with strange characters, forgotten ruins, and puzzles. Follow the clues. Trust your instincts... and try not to make things worse. Broken Relic invites you to navigate a crumbling world, uncovering its secrets one strange step at a time. You may not be the hero it needs. But you're what it’s got. What to expect: Fully voiced dialogue with a world full of unusual people. A handcrafted pixel art world filled with details and secrets. Nonlinear exploration across connected regions. No fail states, no pixel hunting, no filler.If you enjoy the demo, please wishlist and follow the game on Steam, it really helps support the project! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3384820/Broken_Relic/

Creating multiplayer games is complex. As the 3D market accelerates its evolution into live games, it is becoming more common for creators to feel overwhelmed by the technology and steps required to build those games. At Unity, we strive to push the boundaries of game development and equip developers with the best tools they need for building great gaming experiences.To that end, we are thrilled to announce the release of Megacity Multiplayer, our new competitive-action multiplayer sample. This release marks a significant milestone for our team, as it showcases how creators can build ambitious multiplayer titles that support more than 64 concurrent players while leveraging Unity Gaming Services (UGS) solutions like Game Server Hosting, Authentication, Voice Chat, and Matchmaker.Players will begin Megacity Multiplayer by hosting or joining a game server, which can either be set up locally on a player’s device or via Game Server Hosting.Once connected, players will join a lobby and be transported into the massive game world of Megacity Multiplayer, which features an immersive environment to play and chat with others. In Megacity Multiplayer, players earn points by shooting other cars while competing for the top spot displayed on the leaderboard.Our Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) adds much power to the Unity engine so that creators can build more ambitious games. A key feature of DOTS, the Entity Component System (ECS), shipped with Unity 2022 LTS. With this release, the Megacity Multiplayer sample demonstrates built-in features for supporting more than 64 concurrent players.Megacity Multiplayer illustrates how Unity and the Netcode for Entities package can work together to power large-scale multiplayer games without compromising performance. Seasoned creators are able to achieve an unprecedented and extensible level of control and determinism with ECS for Unity.Megacity Multiplayer helps you learn how to structure, network, and operate a competitive-action multiplayer game with solutions from the Unity ecosystem. It also showcases how creators can leverage UGS to develop engaging multiplayer games. For example, Game Server Hosting offers a streamlined approach to maintaining resiliency and scalability in gaming infrastructure, and Matchmaker, Voice Chat, and Authentication are used to connect your players and facilitate in-game communication.We eagerly await your feedback so we can further refine and enhance the multiplayer developer experience. Your insights and suggestions ensure we provide useful samples that inspire and empower our creators.Our current planning includes porting the Megacity Multiplayer sample to the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) to aid in the demonstration of how true, crossplay competitive action can be built with Unity tools. Stay tuned.Get the sample and request features or updates via our public roadmap. Then, keep up with the latest on Megacity by staying in touch with us and sharing your experience (or asking questions) on Discord or in the forums.

Red Bull Gaming has signed a deal with Fortnite star Ali “SypherPK” Hassan.Read More

Pope Leo XIV speaking to the College of Cardinals on May 10th. | Photo by Simone Risoluti – Vatican Media via Vatican Pool / Getty Images As Pope Leo XIV laid out his vision for the papacy in an address to the College of Cardinals, he also explained why he picked his papal name. Incredibly, artificial intelligence played a big part. In the Vatican’s translation of his speech, Pope Leo XIV explained that his name references Pope Leo XII, who presided over the church at the dawn of the industrial revolution. …I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour. Below is more of the excerpt, published by the Catholic News Service. The Catholic Church has taken a keen interest in the development of AI in recent years. In a January document published by the Vatican and translated to English, the church reflected on AI, its limitations, its relationship with the truth, and the ethics of developing and using the technology. The document also references a warning issued a year prior by Pope Francis about AI’s potential to create “partially or completely false narratives, believed and broadcast as if they were true.” But if Pope Francis set up how the Catholic Church feels about AI, Pope Leo XIV citing it as a main reason for his name hints that it will be an even bigger part of the church’s focus during his papacy.

Credit: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images Google will pay Texas $1.4 billion to settle a pair of lawsuits alleging that the company violated people's privacy rights. The lawsuit alleged that Google collected users' biometrics without express consent and tracked their locations even if the feature was disable. “In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law. For years, Google secretly tracked people’s movements, private searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry through their products and services. I fought back and won,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement this week. “This $1.375 billion settlement is a major win for Texans’ privacy and tells companies that they will pay for abusing our trust. I will always protect Texans by stopping Big Tech’s attempts to make a profit by selling away our rights and freedoms.” Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! The suit involved allegations that Google misused location history in Maps and data in Photos. Texas alleged, for instance, that Google used features in Photos to scan faces. The company told Engadget that Photos scanned faces for organizing purposes only. Google denied wrongdoing as it agreed to the settlement. “This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, concerning product policies we have long since changed,” Google spokesman Jose Castaneda told CNBC. “We are pleased to put them behind us, and we will continue to build robust privacy controls into our services.” Tim Marcin Associate Editor, Culture Tim Marcin is an Associate Editor on the culture team at Mashable, where he mostly digs into the weird parts of the internet. You'll also see some coverage of memes, tech, sports, trends, and the occasional hot take. You can find him on Bluesky (sometimes), Instagram (infrequently), or eating Buffalo wings (as often as possible).

Pros Small and lightPrints via USB and BluetoothThermal paper eliminates any need to buy ink Cons Monochrome printing onlyLoading paper is a little trickyCan't conveniently print multipage documents on cut sheetsUnimpressive speed Polono D810 Specs Color or Monochrome Monochrome Connection Type Bluetooth Connection Type USB Cost Per Page (Monochrome) 5.6 cents roll/13.5 fanfold or cut sheet Maximum Scan Area N/A Maximum Standard Paper Size Letter Monthly Duty Cycle (Maximum) Not rated Monthly Duty Cycle (Recommended) Not rated Number of Ink Colors 1 Printer Input Capacity Fanfold, roll, or single sheet Printing Technology Thermal Rated Speed at Default Settings (Color) NA Rated Speed at Default Settings (Mono) 5.6 ppm Scanner Optical Resolution N/A Scanner Type N/A Standalone Copier and Fax N/A Type Printer Only All Specs The Polono D810 ($177.99, often highly discounted) is a low-end competitor to the Brother PocketJet PJ883, our current Editors' Choice for a mobile thermal printer. Both use heat to print on thermal paper, a technology that gives them a small size and low weight, and makes them tempting choices for portable use. But the similarity largely stops there. The PJ883 is way out in front on features: faster speed, better output quality, and a range of connection choices. Where the D810 shines is price, coming in at several hundred dollars less than the PJ883. The upshot: The D810 doesn't come close to knocking the PJ883 out of the top spot, but its price alone is enough to keep it in the running.Design: Fax Machine Tech InsidePrinters like the D810 and PJ883 are basically what you would get if you started with an old fax machine design and got rid of all the fax features. The big similarity is the printing process and the paper it uses. Like those old fax machines, thermal printers work by strategically heating up special paper that turns black in spots when it gets warm.The printers themselves are often used in applications in vehicles (printing receipts in a delivery truck, for example) or by salespeople at customer sites (printing a proposal at a potential buyer's desk or kitchen table). But they can also be useful for more general-purpose printing, when all you need is a portable printer that can deliver readable mono output without fast speed or high quality. And when we say portable, we mean it: The D810 measures just 1.5 by 11.5 by 2.1 inches (HWD), and weighs roughly 1.2 pounds, complete with the built-in battery. Polono says a full charge takes two to three hours, and it pegs battery life at 49 minutes and roughly 200 sheets.(Credit: M. David Stone)Setting up the D810 to print from a Windows PC or Mac is simple. First, plug in the power cord, or skip that step if you've already charged the battery. Then connect the supplied USB cable to your computer, install the Windows or Mac driver as appropriate, load paper, and print. For Android and iOS mobile devices, substitute Bluetooth for the wired connection, and Polono's print app for the driver. In my tests using a Windows PC and an Android phone, installation went smoothly in both cases.The only issues I ran into were with the paper. For one thing, the input slot is in the back of the printer, which is a little inconvenient to reach. I needed several tries to learn how to feed the paper so it wasn't askew. I also found it surprisingly hard to open the lower cover to release the paper so I could reposition it. By the time I finished testing, however, I'd learned both how to feed the paper more reliably and how to open the cover more quickly, so it doesn't take all that long to acquire the necessary skills.(Credit: M. David Stone)A more important issue: There's no easy way to print multipage documents on cut sheets. After printing one sheet, the printer doesn't tell the driver to wait until the next sheet gets loaded. The data keeps coming while you're manually feeding the next sheet, and the printer doesn't have enough memory to store the info. So, by the time I got a new sheet loaded, the output had skipped over at least one page, and often more.Recommended by Our EditorsPolono confirmed this was expected behavior and shipped me some fanfold paper for multipage printing. My recommendation is to avoid buying cut sheets entirely unless you never print anything longer than a single page. If you're limited to cut sheets, you'll need to print multipage documents one page at a time, by giving separate print commands for each page in whatever program or app you're using.(Credit: M. David Stone)Because thermal printers don't use ink, their running cost is based entirely on the paper. At this writing, Polono's thermal paper is available on Amazon in cut-sheet, fanfold, and roll formats. Prices for the US letter-size cut sheets and fanfold paper work out to 13.5 cents per page. The company also sells tattoo transfer paper, at a list price that comes out to 21 cents per page. You might want to experiment with other brands of thermal paper as well, although less-expensive papers are more likely to have an annoying chemical smell.Quality and Speed: Not Fast, But Good EnoughFor our performance tests, I set the D810 up with Polono's fanfold paper, the AC adapter plugged in, and a USB connection to our standard Windows testbed. I then compared the results with three potential alternatives: the Brother PocketJet PJ883, the HPRT MT800, and the HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One. As already mentioned, the PJ883 is also a direct thermal printer. The MT800 uses thermal transfer technology, which heats a ribbon coated with wax to transfer the wax to standard paper. The OfficeJet 250 is a portable inkjet and the only color printer in this group.I was not able to time the MT800 for any multipage documents in our tests (it is limited to using cut sheets), so it does not appear in the charts above and below. However, for the two tests I was able to time, it was the slowest in the group by far. For the three models that were able to complete all the tests, the D810 was the slowest across the board, taking more than twice as much time as the others to print both the first page of the Word file and the full 12 pages, for example. The PJ883 and OfficeJet 250 were basically tied for printing the Word file, but for the full business applications suite (shown below), the monochrome-only PJ883 had the advantage. It zipped through the pages for an easy first place, while the OfficeJet 250 fell to second place, printing them in color.Print quality for the D810 is necessarily limited by the 203dpi printhead (which probably means 203-by-203dpi, but Polono wasn't able to confirm that). I saw only one font in our tests that could qualify as reasonably well formed at any size, and that was true only at 12 points. However, all the sans-serif fonts (Arial, for example) in our tests were easily readable at 8 points; the serif fonts (including Times New Roman) passed that test at 10 points, as did one of the two heavily stylized fonts with thick strokes, (The stylized font that's harder to render well needed a 12-point size for easy readability.)(Credit: M. David Stone)Graphics showed obvious dithering and gradients that looked more like smudges. However, with the exception of thin lines on a dark background tending to fill in or even disappear in one line graph, our test images held well enough to convey all the information they are meant to show. Photo quality was below the level you'd expect from a black-and-white newspaper photo from the 1990s, with both dithering and a tendency to lose shadow detail.

Gigabyte now pre-installs the Wi-Fi driver on its Aorus Stealth ICE motherboard.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Climate change causes South Africa to mysteriously rise instead of sink. NASA helps find why Sayan Sen Neowin · May 10, 2025 19:14 EDT Image by Curioso Photography via PexelsScientists from the University of Bonn have discovered that South Africa is slowly lifting—by up to two millimeters per year—not because of deep underground activity, but due to a loss of water. The research, published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, suggests that severe droughts are causing the land to rise, challenging earlier ideas about mantle movement. South Africa has a network of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) base stations that monitor land elevation. Between 2012 and 2020, data showed that parts of the country had risen by about six millimeters. Many scientists thought this was caused by mantle flow and dynamic topography, believing that a plume—a tube-like structure carrying hot material from deep inside Earth—was pushing the land upward. However, researchers led by Dr. Makan Karegar explored a different idea: Could drought-related water loss be responsible? The team studied daily GPS height data from 2000 to 2021, using singular spectral analysis (SSA) to filter out noise and focus on long-term trends. To understand the role of water in land movement, the team estimated water mass loading—how water weight affects the Earth's surface—using a grid system. They based their calculations on the Preliminary Reference Earth Model (PREM), which describes how the Earth responds to changes. The results showed a strong connection between water loss and land uplift. Data from NASA's GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite mission, which measures changes in gravity related to water storage, also supported this. Even though GRACE provides low-resolution readings, its data revealed that areas losing the most water were also rising the fastest. When comparing GPS-based water storage estimates with GRACE satellite data and hydrological models, the researchers found high correlations—up to 90% and 94% on a monthly scale across different regions. Long-term trends also matched up well, with correlations of 46% and 53%, giving further proof that drought-driven water loss is the main reason for South Africa’s uplift. The study explains that when water leaves the land, the surface expands—similar to how a foam ball regains its shape when you stop squeezing it. Before the droughts, underground water applied pressure that kept the land compressed. As these reserves dried up, the crust responded by rising. This discovery could help scientists track drought severity using GPS receivers, which provide accurate information on groundwater depletion. Since much of the world’s fresh water is stored underground, these measurements could give early warnings about water shortages. South Africa has faced major water crises, including the severe drought from 2015 to 2019, when Cape Town was close to "Day Zero", meaning taps could run dry. With climate change expected to alter rainfall patterns, the risk of future water shortages is high. According to Karegar, “This data also showed that the land uplift could primarily be explained by drought and the associated loss of water mass.” The researchers hope this method will help policymakers make better decisions about water use, especially in areas where supplies are running low. By studying how environmental changes affect the land, scientists can improve water management strategies and better prepare for future challenges. If droughts continue, South Africa’s gradual land uplift could become an even clearer warning sign of a worsening water crisis. Source: University of Bonn, American Geophysical Union This article was generated with some help from AI and reviewed by an editor. Tags Report a problem with article Follow @NeowinFeed

Long-time Slashdot reader mbessey (a Mac/iOS developer) writes: As we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the first release of UCSD Pascal, I thought it would be interesting to poke around in it a bit, and work on some tools to bring this "portable operating system" back to life on modern hardware, in a modern language (Rust). Wikipedia describes UCSD Pascal as "a version that ran on a custom operating system that could be ported to different platforms. A key platform was the Apple II, where it saw widespread use as Apple Pascal. This led to Pascal becoming the primary high-level language used for development in the Apple Lisa, and later, the Macintosh. Parts of the original Macintosh operating system were hand-translated into Motorola 68000 assembly language from the Pascal source code." mbessey is chronicling their new project in a series of blog posts which begins here: The p-System was not the first portable byte-code interpreter and compiler system — that idea goes very far back, at least to the origins of the Pascal language itself. But it was arguably one of the most-successful early versions of the idea and served as an inspiration for future portable software systems (including Java's bytecode, and Infocom's Z-machine). And they've already gotten UCSD Pascal running in an emulator and built some tools (in Rust) to transfer files to disk images. Now they're working towards writing a p-machine emulator in Rust, which they can they port to "something other than the Mac. Ideally, something small â" like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi Pico." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Inspiring watercolour and pencil illustrations.