Sometimes the best offense is a strong defense, and God of War Ragnarok presents plenty of options with the 6 shields available. Players can access six shields in God of War Ragnarok, each with their own advantages and disadvantages to complement or hinder the playstyle of every fan who steps into the shoes of Kratos himself.

Throughout the years, open-world games have evolved significantly, taking advantage of the various unique game mechanics at their disposal. Implementing several NPCs to give players side quests, powerful weapons and resistant armor, theres no shortage of things to discover. One of the main things that make open-world titles so great is the choice that players have in their characters stories, and how they interact with others.

Keep up the good work.Thanks. If you allow me a joke. It's submarine technology. Subs beat the air fortress/UFOs

Unity is Canceling the Runtime FeeVaya con Dios Unity.That was a mistake that will never be forgiven.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Dune: Prophecy season 1.]Dune: Prophecy has blown it all up. Not literally but in a season that started with careful backroom deals and manipulations, Prophecys finale putting all the maneuvering into the open is a dramatic tone shift for the series. With season 1 ending with Valya (Emily Watson) fleeing to Arrakis alongside Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) and Keiran Atreides (Chris Mason), the table is certainly set for an epic cross-planet war. (This is Dune, after all.)And with some dramatic introductions and exits (more on that below), the path forward for the Bene Gesserit in Dune: Prophecy is less clear than ever. So what will a second season bring to the Imperium? Heres everything we know about Dune: Prophecys season 2. Is Dune: Prophecy season 2 happening? Dune: Prophecy is coming back for another season. Warner Bros. announced that the show would return for season 2 on Thursday, just a few days before the season 1 finale. It was not announced how many episodes this new season would be. When will Dune: Prophecy season 2 come out? This is something else that Warner Bros. didnt announce, so we have no real idea when this new season might be released. Its technically possible that filming has already begun, but pretty unlikely. If that is how the schedule worked out, then the show could return for another season next year. But its a lot more likely to film next year and be ready for a 2026 release. This pattern would also fit similar recent Warner Bros. shows, including The Last of Us and House of the Dragon.What will Dune: Prophecy season 2 be about? The season 1 finale of the show offers a surprisingly clear blueprint for season 2s plot. For instance, we know that the emperor is dead, and the Bene Gesserit are likely to be blamed for it. We know that Desmond Hart is alive, and that his eye is an infectious disease robot, and that learning his true parentage hasnt seemed to soften his hatred for the Bene Gesserit either. Meanwhile, inside the Sisterhoods home base theres an insurgency being led by a Reverend Mother spirit possessing the body of a young acolyte so who knows where that plots going to go. Nestled into the heart of all of it is the betrayal between Valya and Tula (Olivia Williams), with the latter having finally revealed that her son survived childbirth, and she hid him and now knows that he has become Desmond Hart. Learning such a massive betrayal from a sister she thought was in lockstep with the Sisterhoods vision is, to put it mildly, a pretty big shake-up for the pair running the order. Its blown everything up, but I think Valya is probably still holding I am the chosen one, I have the destiny [that] is still her guide, Watson said at a press conference ahead of the finale. [And] I think Valyas instinct is to run for the shadows.Its certainly a switch for the sisters particularly with Tula being immediately arrested by her own son and his Imperium soldiers. With all that in mind, there are sure to be other plots started up in the shows second season, but thats quite a complicated place to start from, at the very least. Especially since, with Reverend Mother Valyas arrival on Arrakis, its not quite clear if she means to stop a war or start one.After a season of Arrakis kind of exerting its pull from afar [] to actually go and put boots on the ground at this incredibly overdetermined and sort of almost mythic Dune space that we know very well, but we sort of kept it at distance the whole season, showrunner Alison Schapker said at a press conference, its very significant that Valyas back there.All I would say is, I think Valya is there; I think Valya is going to find out a lot more, given that she is sort of back where Desmond sort of emerged as an adversary. And [it will] be interesting to see what she finds out there.Is Dune 3 going to come out before Dune: Prophecys new season? This is a very good question. Dune 3 is currently set for release on Dec. 18, 2026. So if everything goes just right, Prophecy season 2 could hit somewhere around September or October 2026, providing a perfect lead-in to the release of the new film. On the other hand, if the timelines get out of whack, we could get a similar situation to what happened this year, with a new Dune movie arriving in theaters and the TV show following in its wake some nine months later.

Looking for Quordle clues? We can help. Plus get the answers to Quordle today and past solutions.

Today on the befores & afters podcast, were diving into season 2 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, with DNEG and visual effects supervisor, Greg Butler. This season, DNEG delivered over 900 shots and led the work in some of the biggest battle sequences that happen around Eregion. This also involves Damrod the Hill Troll. With Greg, we look at what was filmed for these battles, the CG environments, digi-double soldiers and Orcs, CG horses, and the specific approach to the atmosphere in the scenes.This episode of the befores & afters podcast is sponsored by SideFX. Looking for great customer case studies, presentations and demos? Head to the SideFX YouTube channel. There youll find tons of Houdini, Solaris and Karma content. This includes recordings of recent Houdini HIVE sessions from around the world.Listen in above, and below, check out some fun before and after images and a video breakdown.The post How DNEG crafted the troll and the Eregion battle in s2 of The Rings of Power appeared first on befores & afters.

Remember that time when Apple removed the Function keys from its MacBook Pro laptops and replaced with with a long screen instead? It definitely earned its share of critics, but the Touch Bar offered a kind of versatility that was probably ahead of its time. Apple has since then gone back to a traditional row of keys, but there are definitely fans of the technology that felt it could actually become a useful tool with the right design.Introducing Flexbar, the ultimate touchscreen strip that revolutionizes how you interact with technology. This versatile 10-inch strip brings the convenience and flexibility of the MacBook Pro Touch Bar to everyone, offering a fully customizable experience for power users, streamers, gamers, and content creators. Whether youre managing complex workflows or executing intricate gaming strategies, Flexbar ensures you stay focused, in control, and connected across both Windows and Mac systems.Designer: ENIACClick Here to Buy Now: $139 $179 (22% off). Hurry, 5/560 left! Raised over $227,000.Flexbar is a joy to use in every way. Its compact, sleek, and portable design makes it a seamless plug-and-play addition to desktops, laptops, iPads, phones, and even MacBook Pros. With its ability to adapt to any scenario, it becomes an indispensable tool for content creators managing Adobe Premiere timelines, streamers controlling OBS layouts, and gamers executing complex in-game macros. Flexbar gives you a tool that adjusts to your needs, whatever they may be, not the other way around.What sets Flexbar apart is its deeply integrated extension toolbar for your most-used apps. Thanks to its third-party API support, Flexbar provides advanced, native-like controls for highly interactive professional software applications. It learns to automatically switch between relevant interfaces based on your current task window, ensuring a seamless and efficient workflow. The Workspace function lets you record and recreate your favorite layout, getting you started in a blink.Flexbars one-click macro recording feature is a game-changer. It learns your moves and effortlessly replays them through simulated raw mouse and keyboard inputs, automating repetitive tasks instantly. It also features sequence execution where you can set up advanced sequences with delays, loops, and custom configurations, all through FlexbarDesigners intuitive drag-and-drop interface. This capability not only saves time but also enhances productivity by eliminating manual repetitions.What makes the Flexbars customization capabilities possible is the innovative FlexbarDesigner, the software that powers every level of personalization. From preloaded shortcuts and combos to icons you can customize to your aesthetic tastes, the companion app gives you the freedom to tailor Flexbar to your specific workflow needs effortlessly. Discovering and using designs created by others becomes incredibly convenient and time-saving. Whether its a shortcut combo for your favorite software or a unique layout idea, you can explore, download, and apply shared templates in just a few clicks.In addition to its powerful functionality, Flexbar collects all hardware performance metrics from your PC and displays them in stunning, real-time graphs. This feature is particularly useful for gamers and content creators who need to monitor system performance closely. The vibrant 10-inch 2K AMOLED touchscreen offers a crystal-clear display, ensuring that every detail is visible and easy to read.Flexbar is designed to feel just as good as it works. In addition to an aluminum alloy body that gives it a premium personality, its strong haptic feedback makes every touch feel substantial and significant. It also comes with an aluminum magnetic stand, providing optimal ergonomics and convenience. Put it on your desk behind the keyboard or put it on top of your laptop while on the go. The stand ensures that Flexbar is always positioned perfectly for ease of use no matter the situation youre in.Despite its simple appearance, the Flexbar offers a revolution in how we interact with technology. Its versatility, customization options, and powerful features make it an essential tool for anyone looking to enhance their digital workflows. For streamers, gamers, content creators, and power users, Flexbar offers a tailored experience that keeps you focused, in control, and connected. Embrace the future of interaction with Flexbar, and transform the way you work and play.Click Here to Buy Now: $139 $179 (22% off). Hurry, 5/560 left! Raised over $227,000.The post Transform Your Workflow with Flexbar: A MacBook Touch Bar for Everyone first appeared on Yanko Design.

Autoregressive LLMs are complex neural networks that generate coherent and contextually relevant text through sequential prediction. These LLms excel at handling large datasets and are very strong at translation, summarization, and conversational AI. However, achieving high quality in vision generation often comes at the cost of increased computational demands, especially for higher resolutions or longer videos. Despite efficient learning with compressed latent spaces, video diffusion models are limited to fixed-length outputs and lack contextual adaptability in autoregressive models like GPT.Current autoregressive video generation models face many limitations. Diffusion models make excellent text-to-image and text-to-video tasks but rely on fixed-length tokens, which limits their versatility and scalability in video generations. Autoregressive models typically suffer from vector quantization issues because they transform visual data into discrete-valued token spaces. Higher-quality tokens require more tokens, while using these tokens increases the computational cost. While advancements like VAR and MAR improve image quality and generative modeling, their application to video generation remains constrained by inefficiencies in modeling and challenges in adapting to multi-context scenarios.To address these issues, researchers from BUPT, ICT-CAS, DLUT, and BAAI proposed NOVA, a non-quantized autoregressive model for video generation. NOVA approaches video generation by predicting frames sequentially over time and spatial token sets within each frame in a flexible order. This model combines time-based and space-based prediction by separating how frames and spatial sets are generated. It uses a pre-trained language model to process text prompts and optical flow to track motion. For time-based prediction, the model applies a block-wise causal masking method, while for space-based prediction, it uses a bidirectional approach to predict sets of tokens. The model introduces scaling and shifting layers to improve stability and uses sine-cosine embeddings for better positioning. It also adds diffusion loss to help predict token probabilities in a continuous space, making training and inference more efficient and improving video quality and scalability.The researchers trained NOVA using high-quality datasets, starting with 16 million image-text pairs from sources like DataComp, COYO, Unsplash, and JourneyDB, which were later expanded to 600 million pairs from LAION, DataComp, and COYO. For text-to-video, researchers used 19 million video-text pairs from Panda70M and other internal datasets, plus 1 million pairs from Pexels-a caption engine based on Emu2-17B generated descriptions. NOVAs architecture included a spatial AR layer, a denoising MLP block, and a 16-layer encoder-decoder structure for handling spatial and temporal components. The temporal encoder-decoder dimensions ranged from 768 to 1536, and the denoising MLP had three blocks with 1280 dimensions. A pre-trained VAE model captured image features using masking and diffusion schedulers. NOVA was trained on sixteen A100 nodes with the AdamW optimizer. It was first trained for text-to-image tasks and then for text-to-video tasks.Results from evaluations on T2I-CompBench, GenEval, and DPG-Bench showed that NOVA outperformed models like PixArt- and SD v1/v2 in text-to-image and text-to-video generation tasks. NOVA generated higher-quality images and videos with clearer, more detailed visuals. It also provided more accurate results and better matched the text inputs and the generated outputs.In summary, the proposed NOVA model significantly advances text-to-image and text-to-video generation. The method reduces computational complexity and improves efficiency by integrating temporal frame-by-frame and spatial set-by-set predictions with good-quality outputs. Its performance exceeds existing models, with near-commercial image quality and video fidelity. This work provides a foundation for future research, offering a baseline for developing scalable models and real-time video generation and opening up new possibilities for advancements in the field.Check out the Paper and GitHub Page. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,dont forget to follow us onTwitter and join ourTelegram Channel andLinkedIn Group. Dont Forget to join our60k+ ML SubReddit. Divyesh Vitthal Jawkhede+ postsDivyesh is a consulting intern at Marktechpost. He is pursuing a BTech in Agricultural and Food Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He is a Data Science and Machine learning enthusiast who wants to integrate these leading technologies into the agricultural domain and solve challenges. [Download] Evaluation of Large Language Model Vulnerabilities Report (Promoted)

This review contains spoilers for Dune: Prophecy episode 6.Its time to change tactics, Valya (Emily Watson) declares at the start of the finale to Dune: Prophecy. Valya has good reason for a revision. The High-Handed Enemy finds her plans threatened on every side. The revived Lila (Chloe Lea) is under the control of Dorotea, who wants revenge against Valya for murdering her. Javicco (Mark Strong) seeks to regain control of his empire from not just Valya, but also from the increasingly powerful Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel). At the same time, Empress Natalya (Jodhi May) makes her move for power, while Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) tries to rescue Kieran Atreides (Chris Mason), even as the Sisterhood moves to put her on the throne.With so many plot lines in play, it would seem wise for Dune: Prophecy to change tactics as well. Thus far, the show has been a murky mess of lore dumps and exposition, hamstringing even proven actors like Emily Watson and Olivia Williams and burying human emotions. With all the plotting plotters who fill the show moving into their endgames, nows the time to focus on clear motivations and character exploration.Unfortunately, no such change in tactics occurs in The High-Handed Enemy. Written by Elizabeth Padden & Suzanne Wrubel and directed by Anna Foerster, the season finale squanders its potential to achieve actual compelling drama by favoring exposition and lore.Nowhere is that more clear than in Lilas storyline. Chloe Lea has been a highlight of the series, especially when her wide-eyed true believer character accessed genetic memory and was possessed by her ancestors Dorotea (Camilla Beeput) and Raquella Berto-Anirul (Cathy Tyson). Lea convincingly plays a vengeful adult in the body of a child, and while the explanation of the mix of identities likely confuse viewers who have only seen the Denis Villeneuve movies, the composite character has a legible motivation. Valya killed Dorotea, and now Doroteas back for revenge.The episode starts to follow that trajectory, with thrilling scenes of Lila convincing her sisters to go along with her, before they realize that shes possessed by ancestors. But instead of having Lila go after Valya, she instead gets ideological. Lila spends all of her time gathering sisters to her anti-machine perspective.The ideological turn in the episode fails for numerous reasons. First, its just not as emotionally immediate as a revenge plot. Second, the philosophical stakes of the Butlerian Jihad havent been well-articulated throughout the series. The show has demonstrated people mistrust machines in this world, but the religious fervor that drives Butlerians in the book has not been on display, not so much that it deserves this much attention in the finale, especially over a basic revenge plot. Third, it muddles Valyas intentions, which already fluctuates between revenge against the Atreides and putting a Sister on the throne.Sadly, Lilas storyline is not the only time the finale chooses lore over characters. An otherwise powerful scene at the beginning, in which former Sister and current Suk doctor Nazir (Karima McAdams) exposes herself to the virus with Tulas help, trips up with they throw out the term prana-bindu as if it means anything to anyone who hasnt read the books. Furthermore, the duo discusses at length the viruss attraction to fear, which readers will recognize as setting up an origin for the Litany Against Fear, but doesnt feel like a actual conversation between real people.The failure of the scene between Nazir and Tula highlights the true problem with this series. McAdams and Olivia Williams give proper performances during the interaction, doing their best to find emotional truth under all the jargon. Likewise, Jessica Barden and Emma Canning shine during a flashback scene with young Valya and Tula. Both performers use their expressive faces to speak volumes with just a wrinkled brow or a flicker in the corner of their mouths. In those moments, we believe that were watching two sisters struggle with contradictory feelings and not just pieces on the board, to use a tired metaphor invoked throughout the show.Watson suffers worst of all in this regard. Not only has the writing on the series failed an actor of her caliber, but the adult Valya must be in control at all time, which deprives her of any opportunity to play the emotional range given to her on-screen sister Williams. The viewer can almost see Watson giving up on the character when Valya explains the entire plot of the show to Javicco, even as Mark Strong continues to play against type as the weak-willed Emperor.Frustrating as these positive points are within the episode, they do provide some hope for the future. Surprisingly, Dune: Prophecy has been given a second season and there is enough good stuff here for showrunners Diane Ademu-John and Alison Schapker to make a solid second season. By the end of the episode, Valya has escaped to Arrakis with Ynez and Keiran, Tula has decided to stay with her son Desmond Hart, and Lila/Dorotea continues to recruit Butlerian followers within the Sisterhood.Join our mailing listGet the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!The show still has some secrets left to explain. We now know that a machine was involved in Harts transformation, but its not clear who had control. The machine could very well be a specific figure from the books, Omnius or Erasmus, or it could be related to Ixians, a race only mentioned in the show. Either way, the series hasnt shown that it can balance lore with character well, which does leave worries about the second season.Still, Dune: Prophecy ends with a strong cast, a fully-developed world, and, some lessons learned. Hopefully, it wont take centuries of engineering to create a leader who can guide the series into something as rich and moving as the Frank Herbert books that inspired it. Hopefully, a change of tactics will be enough.Every episode of Dune: Prophecy season 1 is streaming on Max now.