The newly released M4 Pro MacBook Pro 14-inch is back to its record low price of $1,749, with units in stock with free next day shipping. This deal was last seen on Black Friday and limited supply is available.Black Friday has return on Apple's 14-inch MacBook Pro M4 Pro - Image credit: AppleThe $250 price cut on the standard M4 Pro MacBook Pro 14-inch knocks the price down to the previous record low of $1,749. Equipped with a 12-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 24GB unified memory and 512GB of storage, the standard model in Space Black offers a good deal of performance for the sub-$1,750 price point.Get the $1,749 MBP deal Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Last year was one of the deadliest on recordforconstruction workerssince 2011. The findingsproduced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the rate of deaths in 2023 was still unchanged from the previous years survey. The fatality rate (9.6 per 100,000) has been hovering around what OHSA considers to be a relatively high 10 per 100,000 for over a decade, the span in which the workforce has grown some 31%. (h/t Construction Dive).

This edition of Bustler's curated picks of noteworthy architecture and design competitions features four calls seeking designs of new soccer stadium for Czech club, FC Bank Ostrava, outstanding kitchen designs, exceptional projects by North American designers who showcase inventive uses of Italian ceramic tiles in their work, and innovative student-driven proposals that aim to accelerate green urban redevelopment.For the complete directory of newly listed competitions, click here.

A Tale of Two Offsites, 2024An inside look at the itineraries for our all-company gatherings in Portland and Scotland this yearPublished inThe Medium Blog17 min readJust now--Bass Rock outside our hotel in North Berwick, Scotland. Photo by author.Do you remember high school chemistry class? My husband once told me about a poster in his class. It had an image of a giant elephant teetering atop a tiny beach ball. The key to life is balance was printed underneath. The phrase has since become a mantra for our relationship and our individual lives too. Ah, chemistry, its not just for the classroom!Medium is a remote team, but we meet up twice a year for all-company work sessions, team building, and bonding. We call them offsites. Two offsites a year gives us an opportunity to strike a balance between the vibe and focus of each offsite. When I start planning Mediums offsites for the year with our team, I cant help but have the image of that graceful elephant on a beach ball in my head. Considering the role balance plays in chemistry, I can easily see how important it is for strengthening the chemistry of a large gathering of colleagues.For our offsite locations, we search all over the world for inspiring properties that reflect Mediums values and sensibilities, then choose the place that most represents where we are as a team at that point in time. Some of it is strongly educated guesswork we like to plan our offsites as far in advance as possible, but you never really know exactly where things will be a year from now.In 2024, we went first to Portland then to Scotland. Right before Portland, Medium reached a milestone of 1 million members and we were ready to celebrate our wins, so we knew staying in downtown Portland was going to feel spirited and energetic. This meant we needed a location for our fall offsite that offered a balance. A beautiful old hotel in an idyllic seaside Scottish town was a restorative, quiet counter.As I share our itineraries for these two offsites, youll see how the balance between the two was an essential part of our year.Offsites are a game-changer for companies and are becoming essential for successful remote/hybrid teams. Its true they can feel overwhelming to plan, but they dont have to be! If you work for a remote company and youre thinking about planning an offsite, or are in the midst of planning one now, I hope these two outlines help make your job a little easier. Im not going to go into too much detail about our work sessions, but Ill share with you all the cool things we did in downtown PDX and rural Scotland. If youre planning an offsite, steal this itinerary! Why we chose Portland Itinerary Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Part II: Autumn in North Berwick, Scotland Why we chose North Berwick, Scotland Itinerary Weekend before (Fri-Sun) Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Looking ahead to 2025Part I: Spring in Portland, OregonJust to note: Medium isnt affiliated with any of the companies or businesses we mention below, and were not getting compensated for giving them shoutouts here. We just had a great experience with all of them and would recommend it. But of course, there are so many things to do and you can do your own research, too our experience is just one perspective!Why we chose PortlandPortland is a vibrant city that is bouncing back from hard times. We were faced with the difficult realities of a neighborhood in recovery and gave back in many ways throughout the week. Every employee and staff member at every location we went to was helpful, hardworking, and enthusiastic about their love of the Rose City. The next time I hear someone say they got the most bang for their buck somewhere, I might reflexively think of this offsite in Portland.Going into this offsite, heres what was important to us:A place where we could all be together in one building, with lots of space for work.A focus on fun and playour team loves games, and its a great way to build relationships and trust. Youll see how we leaned into this as a theme for the week.Activities that spark meaningful conversation and thoughtful reflection.A final night that felt like a celebration (in a way that aligns with our values and personality as a company).Heres what our itinerary looked like for the week.ItineraryMondayTravel day! For the folks who arrived early (some got in on Saturday or Sunday), we kept the day free so they could explore Portland on their own terms. Some of us hit up Hawthorne Asylum Food Carts, The Freakybuttrue Peculiarium, the big Pendleton store, and so many other things that we couldnt fit in the official program for the week.In the evening we gathered on the rooftop of The Hoxton, our hotel for the week. The Hoxton has 119 rooms, which was perfect for our company of ~80 people. Shoutout to the Hoxton team (Simone and Jen and the whole front desk crew!). They rearranged their entire restaurant to accommodate our group, set up snacks, and went above and beyond in their attention to detail for our team all week.. Their restaurant, Tope, not only has a terrace with gorgeous views of the city and Mt. Hood to the east, but also had outrageously good food and drinks.Perfect spot for a kickoff speech from our CEO Tony StubblebineTuesdayInstead of having our offsite work sessions in a basement conference center with no light and stale air, we got creative and worked with The Hoxton to have exclusive use of the first floor restaurant for the week. Ive gone into more detail about my disdain for windowless meeting spaces in my previous post, and I must say, The Hoxton knocked it out of the park for us.Just one of the pretty corners of our large workspace.Conversations on a comfortable, plush couch are very different from conversations had on a plastic folding chair.We had a quick breakfast in the hotels apartment space, then kicked off our first work session of the week. Some teams differ here, but we love to get right to it and front-load our week while ideas are fresh and energy is high.Powells historian telling us its historyAfter lunch and another work session, we headed to Powells City of Books. Its likely youve heard of Powells and really, The Hoxtons proximity to the bookstore was a huge selling point. The Powells team gave us a ten-minute talk on the history of the store, then we were off to wander the labyrinthian mecca of books. If you do this part of the itinerary, we highly recommend giving your team members a book stipend! It was fun to see our team recommend books to each other, buy books to bring home to their kids, and pick out books for Thursdays book swap (more on that in a bit). After Powells, we took a short walk to Mox Boarding House, a restaurant where you rent a board game to play while you dine. We love gaming and Mox has a gigantic store in the front of the restaurant filled with obscure board games from all over the world.WednesdayWe like to schedule optional group physical activity at least once throughout the week, so we had a phenomenal early riser yoga class with Sydney from YoYoYogi at the hotel, or folks could join a team-led run. We then went to an incredibly delicious and casual, show-up-whenever breakfast at Mothers Bistro, followed by breakout team time and smaller work sessions back at the hotel.Portland is known for its food truck culture, so we went to the Expensify Midtown Beer Garden for lunch. Usually food halls will ask that you buy gift cards for things like this, but were not into the gift card thing (the single-use plastic, and small amount of money that often ends up on the card, seems so wasteful). Midtown Beer Garden let us use wristbands! Each employee was given a wristband for the day, so after ordering their meal from one of the trucks in Midtown Beer Garden, they just showed their wristband and it was added to the running tab we closed out at the end. Midtown Beer Garden has a lot of picnic tables under big tents and folks gathered in smaller groups on their own.After lunch, we returned to our workspaces in The Hoxton and had small group presentations and downtime. Then we had dinner at Xin Ding Dumpling House and a Medium-themed trivia night, led by our People Team. Our way of dividing up teams was to shuffle different colored bandanas, hand them out one by one at the door, and have folks sit at the table with a corresponding color bandana placed at the center. (As any former camp counselor or teacher will know, assigning teams with objects or colors is a shortcut to a shared identity among a team.) Trivia is pretty interactive, so it takes the pressure off of conversation and can help ease social anxiety or social fatigue from a long workday.Kimberly Ebelt was my rousing co-host!Once dinner was over, we had an optional Spooky Ghost Tour with one of our team members friends from the area. This was one of my favorite parts of our offsite. There is a reason theres a popular, giant mural near our hotel that reads Keep Portland Weird and this spectacular, supernatural tour really gave us the weird factor!We learned so much about downtown Portlands history through our awesome guide!A note on what looks like an extremely busy day its important to communicate the things at your offsite that are mandatory and those that are not, as well as the things that you dont have to be at for the entire time. We really strive to make sure folks are reminded they can do things like sleep in and show up later to breakfast if they want, or come back from lunch early to relax in the quiet of their room, or go home directly after dinner. Empowering folks to find moments to recharge between mandatory work sessions is essential.ThursdayWith the busy Wednesday, we intentionally sought to bring some introspection to the morning of our last full day at the offsite. At 9am after a casual buffet breakfast at the hotel, we walked to Lan Su Chinese Garden, just two blocks from our hotel. The staff there was kind enough to open an hour early for our team to spend time writing and reflecting in one of the most beautiful places Ive ever seen.Our Chief of Staff Brittany Jezouit deep in contemplationWere very keen to consider when an offsite starts to feel overproduced. Were all pretty savvy here at Medium and dont need much hand-holding (though that is nice once in a while) so we decided after the visit to the Chinese garden, a nice choose-your-own-adventure was in order. Want to go for a hike? Grab a Lyft to Hoyt Arboretum and get some forest bathing in. Want to get a bit of a workout in? Go for a brisk, uphill walk through downtown to Washington Park for a walk around the famed Portland Japanese Garden. Want to head back to the hotel to get some work done, pack for departure tomorrow, or take a nap? Do that!We all reconvened at the hotel for a casual, quite delicious lunch (the salmon was truly divine), then had our book swap! Here were the directions:Bring a book to give away (you cant take a book unless you bring one in exchange). It can be any book nonfiction, fiction, poetry, memoir and does not have to be work-related.For added mystery, were going to do this as a Blind Date with a Book style when you take home a book, you wont know which book youre choosing! Well have wrapping paper and markers for you to write a description/clues about your book and why you think another Median would love it.An intriguing way of describing a book ready for swapping.After the book swap, we did one of my favorite things to do at offsites: a two hour block devoted to follow ups and conversations that are best to have in person. Throughout the week there may have been that one thing you need to tie up before you leave and a tte tte is in order.As our week was winding down, we took the opportunity to connect with our larger Medium community and held our first ever Pub Panel with our featured pub editor guests, Debra G. Harman, MEd. and Judy Walker in conversation with our very own VP of Content, Scott Lamb. It was moving, enlightening, and so much fun. We had a coffee and donut social after, with an array of curious donuts from Doe Donuts, Coco Donuts, and Blue Star.For our final dinner of the week, we made it to the cozy but lively Deschutes Brewery Portland Public House where we enjoyed Oregon-centric food and world class brews including my new favorite, Black Butte Porter (the non-alcoholic kind)!I found out Im actually pretty good at pinball!We decided to save one of the most exciting moments for the last night of the offsite. After dinner, we all walked a few short blocks to Ground Kontrol. This place is a sight to behold. A multi-level arcade with vintage games from (and for) all generations. They separate their space into two areas, the blue zone and the red zone. We opted for exclusive use of the blue zone for the night (but could still play for free in the general public red zone). They even set up karaoke for us. We called it Karao-cade. While we were in Portland I asked all team leads and managers to take videos and photos and send them to me via slack. Then I tucked myself away for 3 hours during that donut social and edited the videos and pictures into a recap of the week that we projected on the screen at Ground Kontrol. I use a video editing app on my iphone called VideoLeap. Its shockingly easy to use and really fun!The last night of an offsite is thrilling. After the last work session ends, the final dinner is enjoyed, and the agenda is fully executed, I get this profound sense of accomplishment and gratitude for the effort everyone put into our shared experience.FridayWe had grab-and-go breakfast at the hotel, said our goodbyes to each other, Portland, and the wonderful team at The Hoxton, then all grabbed Lyfts back to the airport home to tell our friends and family of the thrilling week wed had.Part II: Autumn in North Berwick, ScotlandWhy we chose North Berwick, ScotlandIn March 2024, North Berwick, Scotland, a small seaside town outside Edinburgh, was named the #1 best place to live in all of the UK by The Sunday Times. Its idyllic and quaint with beautiful old stone churches, cottages, museums, and chip shops. After our bustling spring offsite in Portland, OR, North Berwick gave perfect balance to our offsites of the year. Our hotel was spectacular. With 83 gorgeously designed rooms, banquet hall and workspace, spa, gym, restaurant, bar, and even putting green on site, Marine North Berwick was one of the more luxurious places weve stayed. The staff is all top notch (shoutout to Gina, Megan, and Laura!) The town of North Berwick has many noteworthy historical highlights. In the 1590s King James the 6th claimed to have been assaulted at sea by a group of witches from North Berwick, saying they tried to sink his ship by conjuring a storm. It set off a pretty nasty series of witch trials that caused the murder of at least 70 women. Much later, Robert Lewis Stevenson drew inspiration from the islands off the coast of North Berwick as he wrote Treasure Island.North Berwicks harborItineraryWeekend before (Fri-Sun)Knowing our offsite was to take place close to the incredible city of Edinburgh, we encouraged our team members to arrive there the weekend before to acclimate to the time zone as well as explore the historic city. We reserved a hotel block for everyone so we were all in the same place. We opted to leave that part of the journey unstructured and unprogrammed. I did however share my own personal itinerary for that weekend in a Medium post so anyone could join me as I explored. This opt-in approach took the pressure off folks who were wanting some independence, but also gave me some company and connection with the folks who met up along the way.MondaySome folks skipped the weekend in Edinburgh and headed straight to North Berwick. Once your flight has landed on the isle, the fastest way to travel in the UK is by rail. Its so convenient, timely, and a more eco-friendly way to travel! North Berwick is at the end of the line on a 25-minute train from Edinburgh, then Marine North Berwick is a 10-minute downhill walk through a charming and safe neighborhood. We let folks mosey over to the hotel all day and explore the town of North Berwick at their leisure. We really enjoyed the Coastal Communities museum (where I learned about those cool witches!) and the Scottish Seabird Center.The Original St. Andrews Church in townIn the evening, we had our first gathering in the hotels plush bar, Bass Rock, with handheld bites, mocktails/cocktails, and a traditional Scottish band.TuesdayIn the UK, its customary for a full breakfast to be included in your stayeven in hotels with fewer stars than the one we stayed at! Every morning we had a huge breakfast buffet with fruit, cheeses, breads, granola, yogurt, and so much more. There was also an a la carte menu with full Scottish (yes, haggis and black pudding!) We kept breakfast optional and casual dining style to allow folks who may have still had a bit of jetlag to sleep in if they needed. We appointed leaders for a run/jog club on Tuesday and Thursday, so some folks got a run on the beach and through town on those days.Marine North Berwick has a fabulous banquet hall we used as our meeting space. Like most locations, they offer different table arrangements. I always opt for large banquet rounds for work sessions. I wont go into detail about our work sessions, but know that we usually like to start with the most important work sessions on Tuesday morning. This is an important part of setting the tone for the week, and its when most folks energy is highest.Scotland knows a thing or two about beautifully patterned carpets. The view out the work spaces window is of the Firth of Fourth, a stunningly gorgeous Scottish inlet. (photo courtesy of the hotel)I loved the unconventional nature of the Portland offsites meeting space, but Ive found that more traditional work spaces can be just as effective for focused, productive teamwork. But this only works when they have great natural light, or better yet, awe-inspiring views of the sea.We had a quick grab-and-go lunch in the foyer of the workspace and got right back to it. I totally need to give a shout out to Marine North Berwicks team here. When I worked with their head chef to decide our menu, we discussed the need for lighter fare for lunch. No one wants to come back to a work session all sleepy having eaten a big bowl of pasta. They brought us creative lunch wraps, interesting salads, light pastries, etc.We also did the Medium book swap we love to do at every offsite during this lunch. We changed the timing of the book swap from Thursday to Tuesday so people could read their books throughout the week.We set up our Friday departures on Tuesday, too. Some folks had early flights out of Edinburgh and trains wouldnt get them there in time. As an easy way to coordinate this, we put a simple sign up sheet for them to choose which hour theyd like to leave and booked enough cars for them.WednesdayAnother delicious breakfast in the restaurant kicked off our third work session of the week. The hotel offered multiple breakout areas and a property as large as Marine North Berwick, many of our meetings were able to be held in a comfy corner of the lobby or in the sundeck of Bass Rock Bar.A still from a video Cassie McDaniel took of Cameron Price chasing birds during sunrise!Maintaining the balance with the Portland offsite, we opted for all our official meals taking place at the hotel. That didnt mean all our meals happened in the same place around the same times. For our Wednesday lunch, we gathered for Scottish high tea, but instead of doing it in the foyer of the meeting space or in the restaurant, we held it in the lovely and cozy lobby. Towers of treats adorned the space, making it feel casual and playful.Ill never forget those Dulce de Leche tarts on the top rightWe returned to smaller work sessions for brainstorming and smaller group discussion, then broke before dinner. When you have offsites centered around crucial work sessions, its important to add even more break time to your schedule so folks can rest and recover.Being that we were in a magnificent, old Scottish hotel we felt we absolutely had to hire a murder mystery troupe for the evening. Trying not to ruin the surprise, we told everyone it was a theater troupe with macabre and adult themes. This was so fun, especially with the Scottish accents. The show started in the hotel lobby before dinner, dinner took place in the restaurant, then we finished the show back in the lobby.ThursdayBreakfast and lunch were in the same locations as Tuesdays meals, so we could focus on our last day together. We closed out our last work sessions with an all-team meeting and sendoff, then took a much-deserved break before dinner.Bagpipes are a must when throwing an event in Scotland. We booked Roddy (Reel Time Events) to announce dinner by playing his bagpipe at the entrance to Bass Rock Bar where the team got a drink before dinner. Then, he led us back to the banquet hall. We had flipped the room while everyone was away and it was turned from work stations to a dining room! Roddy did the address to the haggis.Its quite a show and the poem is great funAs is becoming customary, we designated the time after dinner a Medium game night. Folks played games of Werewolf, cards, and had quiet conversations throughout the hotels many cozy corners.FridayWe had grab-and-go breakfast at the hotel, said our goodbyes to each other, and headed to EDI. Some folks chose to stay on to explore the UK that weekend to visit the Scottish Highlands or Glasgow. A great thing about bringing your team to far-off places is they are given the opportunity to explore and deepen their understanding of the world.Looking ahead to 2025I think of the two offsites we do each year as companion pieces, so it makes sense to look year-over-year with a similar lens. Were laddering together. What havent we done? Whats out there for us to find? What does our team need most? Bolstered by our learnings and team experiences from this years offsites, what is our next frontier? I know were all chomping at the bit to find out.

The invasive northern giant hornet, also called a murder hornet, has been eradicated from the United States. Karen Ducey / Getty ImagesThe name alone advertises that this insect is no joke: When the murder hornet was first spotted in the North American continent in 2019, entomologists were abuzz with worry and sprang into action to eradicate the invasive species.Five years laterand after four nests were successfully destroyedofficials have declared a rare victory against the murder hornets for having exterminated them from United States soil.Ive gotta tell you, as an entomologistIve been doing this for over 25 years now, and it is a rare day when the humans actually get to win one against the insects, Sven Spichiger, pest program manager with the Washington State Department of Agriculture, told journalists in a virtual news conference, per Gene Johnson of the Associated Press.The murder hornet, more formally known as the northern giant hornet or the Vespa mandarinia, is originally from northern parts of Asia, such as Japan and China. Its the largest member of the wasp family, measuring two inches in length. Their stingers deliver as much venom as a snake or seven times that of a honeybee. That makes its stings excruciatingone victim described the pain as like having red-hot thumbtacks being driven into my fleshand it also makes them deadly. These hornets cause an estimated 30 to 50 human deaths each year in Japan, not all of them due to venom allergy. An entomologist shows off the size difference between a dead northern giant hornet (bottom) and a dead bald-faced hornet, which is a native species. Elaine Thompson / POOL / AFP via Getty ImagesMoreover, giant hornets are known for their grisly methods for bee murderunfortunate beekeepers have found their hives filled with bee carcasses, the heads ripped from their bodies. The rapacious killers can wipe out an entire bee colony within hours. Asian bees that have evolved alongside these predators have developed a curious way of dealing with their threats: Bees will swarm onto the hornet interloper and beat their wings until they cook their quarry alive. Such bee-induced temperatures have been measured to reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit.Bees in the U.S. and Europe, however, have yet to devise similar defensive strategies. So, murder hornets pose a major threat not just to bees but also to other local insects. In areas where agriculture is a key economic driver and thus is dependent on pollinators, such murder hornet sightings can be a major cause for concern.Bees Kill A Giant Hornet With Heat | Buddha, Bees and The Giant Hornet Queen | BBC EarthWatch on The first murder hornet sighting in the United States occurred in Whatcom County in northwest Washington, an area near the Canadian border that produces millions of pounds of raspberries and blueberries annually, according to Mike Baker of the New York Times. The report came just about four months after a separate murder hornet detection on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. Officials said the first hornet to reach North America likely stowed away in a shipping container or plant pots.These first observations triggered a flurry of pest control activity to hunt the hunters. Pest managers created search grids and set traps. Trackers used thermal cameras to scan the forest floors in search of the hornet colonys signature heat. For live individuals that were captured, entomologists tied tiny trackers onto their bellies using dental floss to suss out the location of their nests. Sven Spichiger, Washington State Department of Agriculture managing entomologist, holds a canister of Asian giant hornets vacuumed from their nest on October 24, 2020, in Blaine, Washington. Elaine Thompson / POOL / AFP via Getty ImagesNow, officials think their multi-year efforts have paid off in the state. There have been no confirmed sightings of murder hornets in the last three years, enough to clear the bar for a pronouncement of eradication, according to the definition of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In October, officials received a tip of a giant hornet sighting 100 miles away from the original nest site, but they found no evidence confirming the report. But to be safe, the officials set up traps in the area and plan to continue the effort through next year.If the entire community hadnt stood up and taken action, there is a real good chance that we would just all be living with the northern giant hornet, even for years to come, Spichiger told the New York Times. It is a very difficult task to eradicate an insect once it has become well-established.Experts are celebrating for now, but they recognize the achievement came only at great hassle. It proves that the permanent removal of invasive species is possible, but only when given ample funding and public attention, entomologist Chris Alice Kratzer, author of The Social Wasps of North America, tells National Geographics James Bittel.The victory against murder hornets doesnt mean they wont pop up again in the future. Another wayward insect might find its way to U.S. shores again. We will continue to be vigilant, Spichiger tells the AP.Elsewhere, humans are waging war against other kinds of invasive insects. Georgia and South Carolina are fending off the invasion of the yellow-legged hornet, a smaller relative of the giant hornet that also makes quick work of local pollinators. In northern Spain, officials are scrambling to contain the recent invasion of the southern giant hornet, a second blow to the beekeeping sector thats already spread thin from the assault of another hornet, the Vespa veluntina.In an increasingly interconnected world, where humans and trade crisscross the globe, species invasion will only grow more common without intervention. Models predict that insect invasions will increase by 36 percent between 2005 and 2050. Since the mid-1800s, at least 930 foreign insect species have snuck onto U.S. soil. The terrorizing hornet is yet one more instance in humankinds long history of unwitting pest introductions, and it likely won't be the last.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Agriculture, Animals, Bees, Biology, Ecology, Good News, Insects, Invasive Species

In Bastogne, Belgium, dignitaries and American veterans who fought in the Battle of the Bulge gathered to commemorate the conflict's 80th anniversary. U.S. Army / Kristin SavageOn December 16, 1944, more than 200,000 German soldiers launched a surprise attack on Allied troops in a forested region of Belgium and Luxembourg known as the Ardennes. The ensuing World War II conflictwhich lasted until January 25, 1945became known as the Battle of the Bulge.In the end, the Allies managed to quash Adolf Hitlers last-ditch effort to win the war. But their victory, which paved the way for a full Nazi defeat, came at a high cost: More than75,000 American troops were killed, wounded or went missing in the conflict.This month marks the 80th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Bulge. Some of the few surviving American veterans gathered in Belgium and Luxembourg last weekendalong with American lawmakers and other dignitariesfor several commemorative events.Now in their late 90s and early 100s, the aging former service members hope to keep the Battle of the Bulges memory alive to prevent any future war, as David Marshall, a 100-year-old veteran who manned a mortar during the conflict, told theAssociated Press Virginia Mayo and Bryan Carter last week.Other veterans echoed that sentiment, including Joseph R. Picard, who was just 19 when he fought in the deadly battle.[Younger Americans] dont know much about it, Picard toldStars and Stripes Phillip Walter Wellman at an event in Bastogne, Belgium, on December 14. And you know what they say: If you dont keep the story alive, its going to happen again. We dont want it to happen again.Living History: Battle of the Bulge (Part 3)Watch on Earlier this year, veterans and officials commemorated the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings at Normandyan invasion that would ultimately set the stage for the Battle of the Bulge. On June 6, 1944, more than 160,000 American, British and Canadian soldiers arrived on a 50-mile stretch of Frances coastline in what was thelargest amphibious attack in history.Over that summer, Allied troops slowly advanced into northern France and Belgium. The Allies liberated Paris in August 1944, then headed east toward the border with Germany.The Battle of the Bulge was Hitlers counteroffensive. German soldiers initially outnumbered Allied forces and were able to penetrate the front line so deeply they made a large bump, or bulge, which is how the battle got its name.But soon, reinforcements showed up. Fighting in cold, snowy weather, the Allies held on and eventually retook the ground they had lost.The frigid winter conditions are what many surviving veterans remember most to this day.It started out rainy and foggy, but it got colder, American veteran Harry Miller tells theWashington Posts David Kindy. Then we had snow up to our hips. I had an overcoat that was like a horse blanket. When it got wet, it was heavy and cumbersome. We slept under tanks or on the ground. It was so cold and miserable. The Battle of the Bulge was fought in cold, snowy conditions. U.S. ArmyBy the end of January 1945, the Allies had succeeded in pushing the Nazis back to Germany. The Germans suffered between 80,000 and 100,000 casualties in the battle and used up much of their supply of weapons, vehicles and other equipment.That was the beginning of the end of the war in Europe, says Mike Malone, director of veterans affairs for the Best Defense Foundation, a nonprofit that supports American veterans, to theAsbury Park Press Jerry Carino. It was an incredible outpouring of grit from these guys, who were 18 and 19 years old and barely had enough clothes on during this freezing winter.Winston Churchill, then the British prime minister,described the Battle of the Bulge as the greatest American battle of the war and a conflict that would be regarded as an ever-famous American victory. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe (right) was given a Distinguished Service Cross by General George S. Patton (left) for his leadership during the Battle of the Bulge. U.S. ArmyOne of the mostmemorable moments of the conflict occurred just before Christmas in Bastogne, when the Germans demanded that the American troops surrender. American Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe famously replied NUTS!So there would be no misinterpretation, an officer translated It means the same as Go to Hell, according to a January 1945 issue ofTime magazine.After a commemorative parade in Bastogne earlier this month, attendees honored this reply bytossing nuts from the balcony of the citys town hall.This years commemorative World War II events were special because Normandy, D-Day and [the Battle of the Bulge] are the last anniversaries that well be celebrating because there won't be any veterans five years from now, American veteran Jack Moran tellsWCVBs Shaun Chaiyabhat.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: European History, Government, History, Nazis, US Government, US Military, Warfare, Weapons, World War II

With its clear, dark skies, Colorado's Browns Canyon National Monument is an ideal spot to admire planets, constellations and the Milky Way. Joe and Kimmie Randall / DarkSky InternationalOutdoor adventurers flock to Browns Canyon National Monument to paddle the whitewater rapids of the Arkansas River, hike among the pinyon pine and juniper trees, fish for brown and rainbow trout and admire wildlife like golden eagles and bighorn sheep.Now, the 21,586-acre protected wilderness area in central Colorado is also hoping to attract another kind of visitor: stargazers. This week, Browns Canyon National Monument became a certified International Dark Sky Park, a designation that recognizes its clear, inky-black skies and lack of light pollution.Browns Canyon is now the 18th certified International Dark Sky Place and the 12th International Dark Sky Park in Colorado. The designation comes from DarkSky International, a nonprofit that promotes dark-sky conservation and education efforts around the world. Since 2001, the organization has certified more than 200 Dark Sky Places in 22 countries on six continents, for a total area of more than 62,000 square miles of recognized dark areas. Whitewater rafting on the Arkansas River is one of the most popular activities in Browns Canyon National Monument. Bureau of Land ManagementBrowns Canyon National Monument sits between 7,300 to 10,000 feet above sea level, and its located roughly 100 miles from the nearest large city, Colorado Springs. These factors, coupled with the states dry climate, made Browns Canyon naturally suited for night sky viewing.Still, the national monument had to make an effort to ensure it met DarkSky Internationals rigorous certification standards. For example, some of the light fixtures that illuminate the parks campsites were contributing too much light pollution. Through a period of trial and error that lasted many months, staff designed a shield to retrofit each light and prevent its glow from emanating upward onto the sky.The staffs ingenuity in bringing the monuments lighting into full compliance is something worthy of praise and promotion, says Michael Rymer, a program associate with DarkSky International, in a statement.Friends of Browns Canyon, a local organization that spearheaded the certification initiative, also took light meter readings and hosted concerts, fundraisers, night sky events and photography excursions to help strengthen the sites case. The group even hired a contractor to help with the application. Moving forward, Browns Canyon employees will offer more night sky programming to visitors. Bighorn sheep, golden eagles, black bears, bobcats and many other creatures live in Browns Canyon National Monument. Bureau of Land ManagementPresident Barack Obama established Browns Canyon National Monument in 2015, citing its unique geology, diverse plants, abundant animals and long human history.Evidence suggests humans have inhabited the region for at least 11,000 years, including the ancestors of the Eastern Shoshone, Ute, Apache and Comanche peoples. Researchers have identified at least 18 archaeological sites and 5 prehistoric open lithic sites within its bounds, including the remains of seasonal camps, stone structures, rock shelters and open campsites. During the mid-19th century, Browns Canyon attracted fortune-seekers hoping to strike it rich by mining gold.Today, its inhabitants are animals, including mountain lions, black bears, bobcats, peregrine falcons and western rattlesnakes. Browns Canyon National Monument sits between 7,300 and 10,000 feet above sea level in central Colorado. Bureau of Land ManagementAlso this week, Oregon got its newest certified dark sky park. Cottonwood Canyon State Park, a 16,000-acre natural area in the north-central part of the state, was officially recognized after four years of work.Located along the John Day River, the remote park is nestled within deep canyon walls, which means visitors have nearly unobstructed views of stars, planets, meteors and the Milky Way. And, to educate guests about the importance of protecting dark skies, the park also installed interpretive signs and began hosting star parties during each new moon in the summer.Experts say light pollution is a growing issue around the globe. A 2023 study found that, thanks to the proliferation of artificial lighting, the night sky got 9.6 percent brighter, on average, each year between 2011 and 2022. That extra brightness not only makes it more difficult to see stars and planets, but is also affecting animal behavior and human health.Looking up at the sky, as Kim Arcand, a visualization scientist with the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, told Smithsonian magazines Brian Handwerk last year, means we are looking at stars that produce the same elements found in our bodies, like iron and calcium.There are very good reasons to protect dark skies for astronomys sake, Arcand said, but it all comes back to those same questions humans have been asking across the millennia: Where do we come from? Why are we here? And where are we going?Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Astronomers, Astronomy, Family Travel, Outdoor Travel, Outer Space, Pollution, Recreation, Travel

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Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn MoreElvis Presley once said, Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine. Brendan Greene, the creator of PlayerUnknowns Battlegrounds (PUBG), has a lot of ambition. His battle royale game, inspired by the Japanese film Battle Royale (2000), has sold more than 80 million copies.And one of Greenes ambitions is doing something important like that again in video games. And so he just announced that his PlayerUnknown Productions is resurfacing after years of development with a three-game plan to bring on the next generation of survival games. And its ambitious.I talked to Greene, who is known as PlayerUnknown, about it in an exclusive interview. Its down at the bottom of this introduction and I hope you like it. At the end, I asked him about ambition. Greene got the idea from the movie that he could stage a battle where 100 people would compete with each other. With each player eliminated, the battle space would get smaller until the last two were battling it out in a very small circle. The last one standing was the winner. Greene first created a mod called DayZ in the Arma universe. Then he teamed up with South Koreas Krafton to make PUBG. The game debuted in 2017, disrupted shooter games like Call of Duty. On the strength of PUBGs 80 million in sales, Krafton went public and Greene became wealthy from that. That gave him the money to work on something even more ambitious.Brendan Greene is the creator of PUBG and he is on to his next survival project.I had a front row seat to this plan. Greene went off on his own to create a new startup, PlayerUnknown Productions, in 2021 to make a gaming survival world that was a lot like a metaverse. Then he gave me a scoop on his ambitions. Without anything to show me except a screenshot at the time, Greene said was creating a world called Prologue that had a huge amount of terrain about 100 square kilometers. That world, bigger than just about any existing game world, would be a test where players would drop into the world and try to survive until they exited the world in a given spot. It would be different every time they dropped into it.Now Greene has released a video that describes his intentions more concretely. Prologue now has a real preview in the video and the world looks very realistic, with trees and grasses swaying in the wind. And its still a huge world, fashioned with machine learning and AI tools. The aim is to release it sometime in the middle of next year as a single-player game for people to try to survive. AI will generate the terrain of Prologue.The challenge is that the open-world of Prologue will be an emergent place, where anything can happen and the weather will get progressively worse. It may seem simple to get to the exit point on the map, but its likely going to be hell getting there.Then there will be something else. The company will do a shadow drop of the companys free tech demo, called Preface: Undiscovered World, showcasing its in-house game engine called Melba.Preface will be able to generate terrain for an Earth-size virtual world, using very little in the way of computing resources. This demo aims to provide users with an early look at the innovative technology that will power the subsequent titles in the series, and eventually a third game called Project Artemis.Project Artemis is the large-scale end goal project of the series. As described in the past, Greene sees this as an Earth-size world where players can drop in and create their own gaming experiences in different sections of the world. We dont use the word metaverse so much anymore, but thats what it seems like to me. The journey to get there could take another five or ten years.In the video, Greene said he embarked on Prologue three years ago and then life happened and it has taken three years to get it into a solid and breakthrough shape. Now the company can start sharing it and getting feedback to make it into really something different. In our interview, Greene said that the team started pulling together when Laurent Gorga joined as CTO. About a year ago, Gorga started putting in motion a process that enabled the team to make a lot more process. While they were making the tech, the team would now create frequent builds to test the tech on a granular level. They started making enough progress so that they started scheduling the timelines for Prologue and Preface. And they talked about it in a video stream on December 6, during the PC Gaming Show. It made a lot of jaws drop. Prologue is expected to drop into early access on the second quarter of 2025.Heres a view of Preface, another test of technology from PlayerUnknown Productions.When I started this I was trying to make a larger open world experience than most people made, and we tried to provide a couple of years and we found a way to do that, Greene said. We essentially reinvented how you create these worlds using machine learning technology, using natural earth data to generate the terrain.Now the company is ready to test this terrain, which will form the basis for the larger worlds. He said the team broke the journey into three stages. The first job was to fill out the terrain of the world. The second was to fill that terrain with lots of interaction when scaling up. And then third, the goal was to pull a bunch of those players onto the world, Greene said. The company will keep enhancing Prologue with its current game engine and then it will move it over to the next version of its game engine.Prologue started off as an experiment in Unity and then it moved to Unreal a couple of years ago and the tools have proven to be a solid foundation. The proprietary tech will eventually be able to generate a world with millions if not billions of objects in it, with the help of machine learning. Its more about the large scale and again machine learning is very good at it because it will capture the patterns that we teach it, Greene said. The physics will be realistic. If the ground gets wet, the terrain becomes a slippery mud and rivers can form, and these will have repercussions for players as they try to survive in a wilderness. This will make the game challenging, but it cant be unbeatable, Greene said. Were discovering what is fun, what is not fun but at its core it is about survival. I think the more we can test, the more we can get the feedback from the users or the players, and thats one of the reasons why we are going to early access, Greene said. The more we can actually engage with the community and get their feedback the more it can reshape the models in the right way.Meanwhile, the company is working on Melba, the in-house game engine. Using machine learning, it should be able to generate worlds and then regenerate them for the next game.Preface technology will populate a world very quickly.The way that we build the engine is allowing us to scale up to large agent interaction, Greene said. We have an Earth-scale planner with some various biomes and some simple systems to allow you to explore it.The company is working on two projects at once one with Unreal and another with Melba so that it doesnt develop tech in a vacuum, said CTO Laurent Gorga, in the video. Unreal and Prologue will generate a piece of the world. Preface will help achieve the scale, and then Artemis will be the full expression.I want to get our tech into the hands of the people out there to help us perform what this tech will become, Greene said. Like this terrain tech is interesting, but I really need, I want to leave it open. I want to leave it moddable.Greene said this may be a five or 10-year journey, but Prologue could be available on Steam in the second quarter of next year. There were a lot of details about what hes doing that we talked about. Heres an edited transcript of our interview.Prologue: Go Wayback! is the first new game coming from PlayerUnknown.GamesBeat: I was very impressed by your demo. I saw the Discord event, as well as the announcement.Brendan Greene: Its been a busy six months. We finally got it out the door.GamesBeat: I remember the original vision and how you went about doing it. It sounded like there was a big technology pivot or approach pivot you made. What did that involve, from the time you were first talking about it? How has it turned out?Greene: We found Laurent Gorga, who we appointed as our CTO. Hes in the video we released. He wanted to make more of a product, rather than a research experiment. Try to focus our efforts on releasing something. He said he doesnt believe in developing tech in a vacuum. Laurent, Kim, Scott, Petter, they sat down and figured out how we could leverage the great team and tech we had, and the ideas we had, and make it into something we could release.He posted only last week on our Slack. He said, A year ago I joined the company, and said that in a years time we would release something. Not to the day, but in a years time we released something. Its a credit to him and the team for making it work.GamesBeat: Is there an easy way to explain what the approach is, and how it differs from what you had tried before?Greene: It was the approach that Petter brought to the production of Prologue, but also that Laurent broughtwe brought both projects into production rather than keeping them as research experiments. That was the previous tech leads view, that we should prove it all out before we move into a more production stage. Laurent really believedI remember Petter joining and asking the game team, Lets play the build. They said, Play what then? And within a week we had a playable build together.Since then weve shifted mentality, from experimenting and playing with ideas tonow that we have really strong leadership in tech and production. Thats put us on the right path. It brought in more traditional techniques. We have a seven-week sprint. We work fully remote, more or less. Were experimenting with how to make the teams work together well. We have a good synergy between all the different departments now. We have a core engine team. We have our art team. They all work together in conjunction on all the projects.Its a credit to Kim, Laurent, Scott, and Petter. I have the vision. I have the dreams. But theyre the guys that really make it work.GamesBeat: How many people did the team grow to now?Greene: Were 60 people now. Thats fully staffed for Prologue.Preface is part of a very ambitious project by Brendan Greene.GamesBeat: Thats higher than the original plan called for.Greene: Yes, I think we were around 50 or so. But now we have publishing. We have finance. We have a game team of about 30 people. The core engine team is about 10 or 15 people at the moment. Its a really tight team now. The team itselfwe have a presentation and Christmas party in a few days. Were doing five-year anniversary presentations. Thats quite something. A lot of the team have been with us for years. Im very happy now that we have leadership in place that can do what I want to do, rather than telling me we can do what I want to do and then not really having a plan.GamesBeat: The vision sounded the same. Youre going to build this world, and then the players will figure out what the game is.Greene: The vision really hasnt changed. Even when I looked at some old pitches I did from four years ago, when I was first pitching it internally to Kraftonagain, it was a three-game plan. They came back with slightly longer time frames and slightly more realistic goals, but it was still this idea that wed prove each stage of the tech with each game were building. The vision is still the same.I dont think anyone is serious about building a metaverse. I think everyones building IP bubbles that will sometimes have to talk to each other, I guess. I dont really see the metaverse as described by the people building it. What were doing, its open. We have it in Discord. People are already modding and hacking it. I see Artemis or Melba, that engine being hopefully an open-source world creation engine that will power some form of 3D internet. Its not just one world. Its hundreds of worlds, thousands of worlds. I see every world as like a web page.Since we did the releasethey have those things, deep links. You probably saw them in Discord, where you can hop around the planet. I had this flash in my mind. Maybe thats what a hyperlink will be. Theres this idea that you dont have to travel there on the planet. Someone will just send you a link to something cool on their planet or your planet or Toms planet. Then you can click and it will open up the app and bring you there, much like a browser will in todays internet. Its just a 3D location that has something interesting, or not. It might just be beautiful. The vision is still going for that.Its not meant to be like a game world. Its a world with game-like experiences, Im sure, but ultimately its just a huge world for players to come and build or view or share. Im not really sure what theyll do yet. I know Ill give them lots of tools to do stuff. I always thought that the world well provide, or the example well provide, will be like Minecraft survival. That will be our slice in all the worlds. Thats more just a big Earth-shaped thing that looks like Earth and has basic survival mechanics. Lets say civilization mechanics. You can do lots of stuff to eventually build communities. But again, thats 10 years away, I think.GamesBeat: I didnt quite grasp what the three games meant. Prologue is a geographically limited game. Preface is more like a demo. But I didnt know whether you counted that as one of the games. And then you have Artemis.Greene: Preface will be the final game, probably. Prologue was just us testing the small-scale systems, player interaction, and the terrain tech. The reason we have three games is that each is solving one step in the process, or one problem. The first is terrain. Prologue, we have our ML tech that powers the terrain, generates the terrain. We can leverage Unreal to test that in this box called Prologue. We can test out lots of player interaction systems. How do we store that? How do we have persistence? All this using this ML agent.A screenshot of Prologues wilderness.Game two will be testing the ML agent on a bigger scale, making bigger terrain. Hopefully the terrain tech will be relatively mature at that stage. And then thinking about multiplayer. Not on a crazy scale. Just whats usual at the time. But then lots of agent interaction. Its going bigger and testing the terrain, the systems, stuff like marketplaces on a slightly bigger world, before we finally go to massive multiplayer, where I hope hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, in 10 years, on this massive terrain, which should be generated locallythat should be well mature with all these other systems that weve tested through Prologue and game two. Its all just iterating on the vision.GamesBeat: Will each game then be a separate product that gets to market? Or do you see them more as demos?Greene: Prologue will be a product, for sure. Theres a story that we have, that I would like to leverage during early access, or after we launch into a full product. But it serves a purpose. I dont want to put every bell and whistle on it, but it will still be a product. Then, once its life cycle is over, well evolve it into the next stage. Prologue will move into the next game. Maybe you can play Prologue in the next game. I dont know. But its kind of like Rust. As we go bigger, the products will be separate products, but theyll bleed into each other and iterate on top of each other. Theyll stand on each others shoulders, so to speak.GamesBeat: If you have a story, it sounds like youre going to make your game within that game world. But youll also make it moddable so that other people can play with it and figure out what kind of game they want to make. Prologue can be that directed game whereit seems like its important for you to design a game, as opposed to leaving it all up to consumers.Greene: When I thought about this many years ago, when we were thinking about whether we could generate a terrain every time you press playthats an interesting idea. Whats the easiest thing to do here? I thought about a simple survival game where you get from A to B across a map. Its you every time. The weather gets worse, wave-based weather. It just keeps hitting you. Prologue is essentially that. Its not that Im making a game. I said in the Discord chat that I want to build games with the community, not for the community.This is an interesting way of generating game worlds. We have some simple systems in it, but already, during the playtest, people are suggesting, How about this? How about that? I want to stay in a cabin for four hours and play guitar and watch the weather outside and not do anything else. Im not trying to make people play a game. There are things you can do within Prologue to get to the other side of the map, get to the finish, and learn a bit of what the game may be about. But otherwise you can just sit in the cabin for five or six hours if you want.Im not trying to force people down a particular path. Thats why I want to get the community involved early. This way of creating game worlds is interesting and exciting to me. People who love survival games more than me will give some really good ideas when they get a chance to play it. Thats why we have playtests already. People are already finding weird and wonderful things about the game. That excites me. Sharing this tech early with the community and getting their input now is how we make this a great game. Its not just me directing everything. Its pulling feedback from people who really care about these games in ways that I havent thought about.Trees blow in the wind in Prologue.GamesBeat: One thing that I wonder is what kind of variations you can have if the game isI dont know if you call it procedural. You regenerate the world every time you log in, is that what youre actually doing?Greene: Its machine learning procedural, but its machine learning. The ML agent generates a low-res map at the start of the game. Technically, mathematically, we can do 4.2 billion-odd maps, or generations. If a million of those are interesting, Ill be happy. But you can see in the background, this is the ML map, but with us generating mountains. These are going to be impossible to create. You wont be able to traverse them. But the idea was, we want to get the weather station up here. How can we make it more interesting and get it up in the clouds? They got very excited when we generated this, but no, its not going to be traversable.The idea that it gives us a base to work on in Unrealthe maps we have, Ive seen a good deal of variation. Even now, its very early days with this tech. The guys are discovering new ways to manipulate the PGC system, the procedural generation system in Unreal, to create more interesting biomes, to leverage our tech to create different rivers, masks for rivers and mountains. It gives a pretty good variation of worlds. Weve seen some interesting worlds from the generations already, and that can only get better over the next six months.Before we did our very first playtest with the Dutch Game Association, we had gotten cabins spawning in the week previous. This is all very new for us. But its still exciting. This looks cool. Its not going to make it into the game because its far too high, but still, this kind of landscape, to meyes, I want to go explore that. I want to get up to the top of that. Thats why were doing it.GamesBeat: Theres the thrill of exploration that you can have in a world that generates over and over. What about the feeling of familiarity that some people may want? I can see myself thinking that I just want Earth, so I know where everything is. Or something that remains persistent that I can go back to and explore different parts of it. Is that going to be possible? Or will it be different every time you log in?Greene: Melba and Preface is meant to be persistent and deterministic. If you go back to the same place, youll see the same things, always. Thats the aim. With Prologue, its seed-generated. We can hopefully eventually share the seed of the map you just played with friends, and you can play that same map. There will hopefully be a meta-game. Maybe you can even race people. But thats probably DLC content down the road, because for the first launch its too much to expect from the dev team. This is not a fully-featured product. I dont want to split dev resources. I want to focus Prologue on what its there to do, which is test the terrain tech and make an interesting systemic survival mechanic or game loop that we can carry over.Itll never duplicate the Earth. Nvidias Earth 2, that kind of thing, our terrain tech isnt designed like that. Its not designed for replication. Its designed for Earth 5, Earth 10. It looks like the Earth. It might have the same feeling, the same biomes. But if you go to Barcelona itll look a lot different. Its not Barcelona. Its just that part of the world generated in a new way. Also, I just think Earths been done. So many other people are generating duplications of these things. Go on Google Maps and you can see the world. I want to create unique spaces. This is going to be Earth-like, of course, but itll be not-Earth-like as well, depending on whos putting in the design input. This will all be open.PlayerUnknown Productions team members: Alexander Helliwell and Hakan Kumar.GamesBeat: Some of the variety is going to come from how many biomes you can create, then? If you come up with 1,000 biomes, you can have wide variation in the terrain.Greene: Exactly. But again, you look at NASA data, and there are 20 defined biomes on the Earth. That fills the whole Earth. Theyre very high-level definitions of what a biome is, though. Tundra, this kind of stuff. Within these youll have sub-biomes and so on. Earth data already provides us with a huge amount of data to try to train these agents to give us the right combination and depth. We still style and theme the worlds. We decide on how many biomes, how frequently they should mix. That kind of thing is still decided by us rather than agents. Were still guiding their hands, so to speak.GamesBeat: If somebody wanted to re-create your battle royale inside Prologue, do you think that would work?Greene: Prologue, you wont be able to do that. Its Unreal. Its a single-player game. This is a survival game. Wed like to open it up for modding, but I dont know if thats on the table right now. Whereas Preface, the tech demo we released, thats being released with an open mind. Were leaving the files unencrypted. The models are there for you to play with if you can. Were not trying to hide that. I like to say its HTTP version 0.01.Its funny. If you think about biomes, there are already people in our Discord who say, Ive been going for hours and its still just the same rocky desert. Yes, because the Earth is big. The true scale of the Earth is massive. Its going to take time. The internet was pretty empty at the very start. I see the same thing with Preface. Right now its empty. Theres not much happening. But people in the Discord really see the possibility. You can see them getting what it is, or what it could be.GamesBeat: By Artemis, then, you have that world where anybody could create anything. You could do your battle royale there. But maybe you want to rope off territory and say, You can only play in this area.Greene: No, not necessarily. One of my earlier ideassay I discover this forested area here, and I want to do a motocross race. I should be able to just pull up something on my wrist, paint where I want the track, and the game provides the rest. The game enacts a motocross race for me, adds everything there. Thats what I would like. Were probably 10 years away from getting there, if not longer. But ultimately I would like that ease of creation. You can just wander around this big planet, fly around doing whatever, see something cool, and say, Yes, I want a battle royale there. Or a motocross race or whatever. The game should make that easy for you.A cabin in the woods.That requires whole layers of thinking, different networking layers specific for those types of game modes. Theyll probably lift and shard off that part of the world from the main world. As I said, five or 10 years. Probably longer.GamesBeat: If you look at what everyone else is trying in these different ways, theres the Nvidia Earth 2. Theres Hello Games trying something with a planet-sized world. Theres Flight Simulator doing it by adapting photos of the Earth that planes or satellites can take, getting their hands on all that available data to generate an Earth. Are there any approaches youve seen that youve thought about or found interesting? It seems like everyone is doing something different.Greene: As I said, I like our approach. I think we have a pretty good one. We use three agents to generate the world locally. Most of the stuff Ive seen from even Epics big world stuff is server-client. I dont think thats how you create massive worlds. Youre always dependent on a performant internet connection and all kinds of things that a kid in Africa doesnt have. How do you generate a world for everyone that half the world cant access?Our view on it, which is, you do the simulation as much as possible locally on the device, rather than worrying about server farms handling that for youI just think the future is local anyway. Ultimately I would like to have all my data stored locally and give it out to the network when I need to. Otherwise its here, rather than worrying about what server its on. Again, five or 10 yearsfor what were trying to create with Melba and the platform, these kinds of things are important to think about. They will come into play in a very big way. Trying to solve them with Band-Aids is not the way to do this.GamesBeat: The good thing is well have much more storage by the time this is ready. The interesting thing I talked to the Flight Simulator people about, if you added up everything they created for Flight Simulator 2020, it was about 500 gigabytes. Then they decided to shift almost completely to the Azure cloud. Now they have just 50 gigs on the local machine, and everything else streams in. That led to some hiccups at the beginning, trying to deal with so many players coming in, but that seems to be under control. But I wonder, why would that way of building a world be harder to do than the approach youre taking, where it sounds like most of it will be on the local machine?Biomes will provide the foundation for each section of a world. Greene: Im not familiar with how they do things. I guess the core difference between their tech and our tech is that its still generating game worlds in an old way, where you need to understand what they look like. Our tech understands that inherently. It understands what terrain is, what mountainous regions are, what biome placement is, what trees to place in various areas. Thats all done generatively and in real time around the player, rather than having everything baked. Thats why you have so much data, whether 50 gigabytes or 500. Our world, which is 500 million square kilometers, is 3.6 gigs. Thats all generated locally on the players side. Its just the way theyre thinking about doing it.We have three patents on what were doing because were making these breakthroughs. How were doing this is a new way. Weve seen other attempts at using inpainting and all kinds of stuff, using ML in other ways to create these worlds. But Ive been happy with what weve been able to do. Were generating millions of worlds in Unreal now, eight by eight, and they look pretty good, pretty high detail, not super fake. They look natural. It really excites me. I think this can open up games to a lot more varied experiences, rather than replaying the same map over again.I saw that The Long Dark is coming out. But also Dont Starve. That was a great game, super procedural, a different map every time. It was exciting to play. But weve never really had that in a single-player game. Maybe we have and the internet will shoot me down. But I really want to create this kind of replayable single-player game that focuses on exploration. We were even putting maybe a tent into the game, because people had said, Maybe I want to sit on a hill until the weather changes and see the vista. So lets put a tent in so people can survive there instead of being cold. Theres this kind of lovely back-and-forth with the community already.The dev team is excited. The community Discord is excited. I cant wait to see what we can do in the next six months as we ramp up to Q2.GamesBeat: I remember when we were talking about the metaverse before and what happens when you try to go between worlds, different worlds. Theres one question there. Did you consider breaking up something like Artemis into a bunch of worlds? You have so much territory here, something planet-sizedGreene: But I think it will be eventually. It will be millions of worlds. Its like the internet. It wont be one single page.GamesBeat: You mentioned that when you cross a border, AI is going to translate your stuff from one world into the next world.Greene: I would hope so.Laurent Gorga is CTO of PlayerUnknown Productions.GamesBeat: I thought that was crazy at the time. But the last year or two years of generative AIit seems like its made that possible. Has that become important for your plans?Greene: I wouldnt say very important, but theres definitely been some advances that we can leverage. For example, texture generation. For a whole planet, to ensure we have a variety of textures, ML generation is great. It gives you infinite variety, basically. It also speeds it up and lowers the cost. You dont need to store hundreds of texture files. Its all generated on the fly as you go through the world. Stuff like this, we can find specific ways for it to make the world run better, with a smaller footprint.Doing the photo to a 3D object, that kind of stuff is exciting to watch, but Im not all in on AI yet. Even though Im working on it quite a bit. There are some great possibilities. Its an exciting future. But we want to be careful about committing too hard in one way or another. Were pretty happy with what we have right now. But some advances in the last few years have filled me with a bit of excitement as well.GamesBeat: I was trying to think of game spaces within these different projects you have. With Artemis, it seems like youd have those millions of different kinds of spaces. People can choose to have very small game spaces, like a town where you could have a gunfight, or very large ones too. How many people do you envision in one game space? Is there a maximum youre thinking about?Greene: I dont know. In the shared experience I want millions of people. Having a massive Earth-scale world, you need millions if not billions of people. But I dont think thatsagain, solving the network problem. Weve solved the terrain issue, generating massive planets. Thats not that hard. Its not that costly anymore. We can do it locally. It doesnt ask for a lot of disc space. It generates pretty nicely. Its the same for multiplayer. We want to make sure the protocol, the layer we have works well allowing multiple people to get on the same space together.I would love to see a 1,000-player team deathmatch, with teams of 50 or 100 players going against each other. Why not? As long as the play space is big enough. With game two its something well try to explore, upping the player count to something thats still reasonably possible and then seeing how that large-scale interaction works. Again, if its a systemic world, if its emergent, like a lot of the spaces I like creating, its easier to build. But these kinds of large-scale interactions excite me because no ones really pursuing them. Everyones still happy with 20 or 30 or 100 players. Come on! Its been 20 years already. Give me millions of players, please.GamesBeat: A lot of game designers have said that thats all they can see as being fun. Would that many players in a game be fun for the individual? The Call of Duty designers are perfectly happy with six-on-six.Preface is the second project of PlayerUnknown Productions.Greene: Again, 100-player battle royale probably wasnt seen as fun before it happened, and it turned out to be a lot of fun. I dont think we can say something isnt fun if weve never experienced it. I struggle with that kind ofit can never be fun if its over whatever number? Lets try it. Maybe its fun and maybe its not.Im not trying to make games with millions of players. Im just trying to create these shared social spaces for millions of players to have experiences together. Maybe theyre games. Maybe theyre concerts. Maybe theyre all kinds of things. But its more that you have large-scale interaction. But hell, bring on 1,000-player battle royale and see what happens. Bring on 1,000-player search and destroy. Look at the real world. You see nowpaintball games used to be six-on-six, but now you have whole teams of hundreds of players going at each other in some of these massive paintball tournaments.I dont know. Any new technology scares the stalwarts, right? You saw it with that lovely ILM documentary, Light and Dark, about moving from puppetry to computer graphics. We cant do it? Oh, shit, we can do it. Of course puppetry has now evolved into something even more special. Its been forced to evolve because of other tech taking away the low-hanging fruit. Its always an evolution. You should want to see it move forward, rather than just trying to trap it in a box.GamesBeat: I remember games like World War II Online. They were trying to get 100,000 people or more into an MMO, so that they could replay historical battles. Would something like that be doable inside this kind of world?Greene: Wouldnt it be great? We could get 100,000 people all playing together. That would be great. The tech should hold up. But again, this is what game two and game three are intended to test and prove, to make sure that we have multiplayer, that we have interaction systems, that we have all these AI systems that work well together. By AI I mean bots in games, so you can control stuff. Having all this level of interaction and scale all working. As I said, Melba, Preface, its all open. Not open source technically right now, because that comes with certain responsibilities were not ready to commit to yet. We need time to work. But were still doing it with this open mentality, where nothings encrypted. It has to be built with the community. The internet was, and I think the metaverse has to be the same.GamesBeat: In this kind of game world, does the concept of shards still exist?Greene: No, because I dont see servers. Thats the thing. I think it will be peer to peer. Well have a hybrid peer system, where youll have peers that handleyou could be one of these peers if you have a decent enough system, handling the high-level simulation for physics, weather, ballistics, these other heavy needed simulations. That sends data to lower-end devices. Thats how I see this working. Well have some kind of peer to peer system that will self-validate or self-auth rather than being reliant on servers.I still think well have a hybrid peer-server type of model that will hopefully be able to distribute across both users and a more commercial grade. But again, I dont thinkit cant be based on servers, or else well never get to hundreds of thousands of players. It just doesnt work like that.GamesBeat: Is it starting to look more like a decentralized blockchain infrastructure?PlayerUnknown Productions team.Greene: No. Its decentralized in the sense of that word. I still think federated is better than decentralized. It achieves the same general goals. There was that interview I did a year ago with Nathan where he asked me about blockchain, and then the next day it was PUBG guy making blockchain game! That filled me with joy.Blockchain or hashgraph or whatever, decentralized ledgers are useful in certain regards, especially when youre trying to build a decentralized network. Whether well use them, we dont know. Were years away from actively investigating that. Its an interesting space, but I dont see us using it in a similar way to how its been used so far. As a tech stack or a tech layer its interesting, but its not something Im going to build games on. I dont get that part. Im building our own engine. It may incorporate some level of the tech as a layer to facilitate digital bookkeeping, but for me, thats about the usefulness of it.GamesBeat: Are you confident in the ability of a peer to peer system to handle something so large?Greene: Just brash confidence, right? With reckless abandon I say yes. I think weve seen, with Bittorrent and blockchain, that decentralized peer to peer can be secure. There are some new blockchains that do this kind of self-auth stuff quite well. Im relatively confident, as confident as I can be with the knowledge I have, that something will be there that can work.Because were not building a game, so to speak were building a world then theres certainwe dont have to make it as performant, for example, as an FPS game. There are certain things we dont need to ensure at that level. But then if you want to have an FPS game within our world, well probably have to use a more known network protocol to enable a good experience there.GamesBeat: What if the player is requesting a certain world? You have a great wilderness world, but I want a city. Can you generate that for me? Instead of getting a random world, can they wish for a certain kind of world?Greene: With Preface, everyone gets the same world. With Artemis, everyone will get the same world. If you want to create your own world, the tech stack will be there for you to do that. Maybe well provide a way where you can give us some money and we can create a world for you. I dont know. This is 10 years away. But for me its always been like Minecraft. Well give you Minecraft survival. You can go there, explore, create, do things in the world using the tools we provide, but if you want to create your own world, you have to put it together yourself, host it from your own machine, rather than relying on us.Well provide one layer, and experiences for lots of parts of the world, but you wont be creating a new world when you press play locally. Youll just be entering our world. Also, it may not be just our browser that you use to enter this world. Maybe someone has already created a new browser, better than the one we have, that allows you to do more in the world.GamesBeat: Do you think that your world is going to be a contiguous world, an actual 3D planet, as opposed to something likeSecond Life is this collection of places you can go, but its not the map of a world.Greene: I would like our world to be contiguous. I would like that it seems to be the one world. But again, I dont know. Ultimately I want to create a contiguous world. Thats what I would like to do. I would like something like this you see in the background, a massive world thats there to explore. Theres lots of stuff to do. People can do whatever they want with it. Great. Thats the aim. Lets talk again in a few years and see where its going. But thats the aim, to provide a contiguous, unique 3D planet that allows you to spawn at various locations and create some stuff. It might have some urbanization. Early on itll probably have very little. But as we add more systems it should get more interesting.PlayerUnknown Productions is generating terrain on a massive scale.GamesBeat: Would you get something like the actual physics of the Earth?Greene: Why not? Exactly. Then maybe we have a more extreme world, or a more playful world. It should be easy sliders for me. Thats ultimately what we want to create with Melba. It should be that easy. We can just change a slider and the gravity changes. The world is created in real time, so if the data slightly changes, we should be able to do that.GamesBeat: I think I know the answer to this, but others might be wondering. How do you build something this big without 10,000 game developers?Greene: That was always the aim. When we sat down to do a 100 kilometer by 100 kilometer map initially, when I was still at Krafton, we discoveredokay, you need that many game devs to build that world, because it takes so much time. Thats why we tried to solvehow do you create a world in real time and generate it? Thats how were doing it. We already have the terrain part of that solved. We still have to figure out how you store persistent data in an efficient way, but at least weve solved the terrain generation part.Now comes the gameplay and other systems. But since theyre always systemic, theyre pretty simple, especially in the real world. I hesitate to say I dont see this as much of a problem, but I think were solving the bigger problems. The terrain was a big challenge. Weve solved it in a pretty unique way, in a breakthrough way. Theres still a lot to do, a lot I dont know, but I think the vision is clear. Im confident about getting there.GamesBeat: Financially, is your situation still pretty similar to what it was a year ago? You had your own money. You had money from a couple of companies.Greene: We have funding to get us through launch and after. Of course we would like more money, but we prefer to make that from selling the game and using that to reinvest in the studio, rather than looking for another round. My aim with all of this, always, is to make sure the team can pursue the vision without having to worry about just pumping out products for sale. Whatever we choose to do moving forward, its always with that priority in mind. I have to give the team that safe space to dream, to be able to be psychologically safe. This is a good place to work. Were doing some good stuff. Weve achieved that pretty well over the last year. People feel good coming to work and excited about the project. I want to continue that. We need to sell games, but were pretty good right now.GamesBeat: When you look down on the micro level of things like the cabin you had, it was pretty detailed in there. On that side, do you envisiondo you have to have an army of creators making these small things that could be useful for players in this kind of world? How much work is that?Greene: Id love for our art director to give you a proper answer on this, but its more that the tools these days, for example Houdini, are allowing us to do a lot more variation on stuff like cabinets. Ultimately there will be some kind of blueprint that can generate multiple different variations. We have something like 300 variations of the cabin spawned across the world, because its relatively easy to do. It doesnt take a lot of dev time. The cabins still look pretty good. With the variation theyre relatively believable.It does take time. Im not going to say it doesnt take time. But Im impressed by how far theyve come in the last six months. When Petter, our producer, joined about nine months ago, he asked, Wheres the build? Where can I play the game? There werent many responses. Within a week he got a playable build up and running. Since then, the progress has been remarkable. We have a game that I get excited to start up, excited to run and try to find my way through it. I cant wait to get it in the hands of more people.GamesBeat: It sounded like one thing you were asking players to give feedback on was the level of detail in the world, if it was enough. Do you think youll have a difference in the quality of what you can generate compared to the quality theyd expect in single-player Unreal Engine 5 games?Greene: I think it looks pretty good already. The forest landscapeswe still need some more detail, for sure. Especially the terrain level, to make it a bit smoother. But its keeping me happy. Im pretty pleased with how it looks. The forests look natural enough. Its still early days. We still have six months of work to focus down on the look and feel. But Im pretty happy with what we have already. I think players should be excited to explore the world. Theres enough detail already that it doesnt look bad. Lets put it that way.GamesBeat: The Flight Simulator people said that compared to 2020, the 2024 game has 4,000 times more detail in the landscape. That suggests a rate of progress they can continue to ride on. Is that something you can do? If players do demand it, is that a curve you can ride in some way?Greene: Were trying to build the engine in a very generic way, so that as new tech comes on stream, we should be able to update that part or add it in. It shouldnt be much of a problem. The world were building in Prologue behind me, weve already gone through various iterations on the terrain uprezzing tech. Weve already gotten it down to finer detail. As our agents improve, as the training improves, it will get better and better. As youve seen with a lot of AI image generation, video generation it will always improve. Were building the engine with that in mind, that it will constantly be iterated. If a new thing comes online, we should be able to adopt it as quickly as possible.If people want more detail, sure. I dont know if youve played the playtest yet, the build, Im pretty happy with how the world looks. Its a bit rough still, but the forests look pretty good. Im excited.GamesBeat: Well, Im still very impressed with the scope of the ambition here.Greene: I try to be consistent with my madness, right?GamesBeat: Would you have advice for people around sticking with their ambitions?Greene: Just be stubborn. Or, well, no. Someone told me Im not stubborn. Im single-minded. Im in a privileged position to be able to do this. I know the games space right now is not the most wonderful place to work. Theres been a shit-ton of layoffs. Theres this conglomeration of IP where studios are just being thrown out the door. Were in a privileged place right now, that we can pursue this and have me in a position where I dont have to worry about anything else other than pursuing it. But being single-minded about what you doif someone tells me no, I look for a way around it. If you really believe and think its reasonable and possible, then you should pursue it.There are always going to be people that tell you no. Like you said about game designers whove decided that games of 1,000 people are probably not going to be interesting. They said that about games of 100 people, and now those are some of the most popular games out there. If youre sure about something, if youre confident and optimistic, just pursue it. Be single-minded about it.Thats not very wise stuff. Thats what everyone says. Its hard, though. Youre going to get knocked down a lot. But its having that anger inside you, the spite inside you, to say, Im going to prove you wrong. Just going and doing it. It takes a lot of work. We were lucky with battle royale. It took about three years to form a genre. Counter-Strike took a lot longer. DOTA took some time as well. Things take years to cement and become something. Thats the other thing to remember. It doesnt happen overnight. It might seem like it does, but it took me a year and a half or two years to make sure battle royale was in a place where it was picked up by someone bigger and went somewhere crazy. It does take time. Dont give up. Keep going.GamesBeat: The metaverse seemed to inspire a lot of people, including you, some years ago. Its gone out of fashion now. Do you still believe in the metaverse, or has your view of that changed?Greene: I just dont see the metaverse that everyone else is building. This idea that its an IP bubbleeven in the interviews that have been going around, that the biggest challenge is the business to business. The metaverse isnt controlled by companies. Its not my metaverse and your metaverse and this metaverse and that metaverse. Its the metaverse, I believe. Thats only achievable if someone builds an open-source platform or protocol that everyone can use. Theres no partnerships needed. Its just there, like HTTP. We tried to monetize that with AOL and other things, but really the metaverse just has to be an open-source platform.Thats what Im trying to provide with Melba, which is just this open-source tool that creates digital places, much like HTTP generates web pages. Thats where I think the metaverse is. I havent gone off it. Im still plugging forward toward it. I think thats what it should be, rather than what everyone else is trying to build, which seems to be just a funnel to sell you skins.I dont think we should be thinking about what fits in the world. Theres always going to be a joker in a crazy costume running the ultramarathon. This world might have billboards put up because someone can afford to do it. This is a beautiful world. What people make of it? Well, we dont know. But lets see.Daily insights on business use cases with VB DailyIf you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. 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