Call of Duty Players Really Do Need to “Git Good” ▉

David Coulson, videogamer.com:

XDefiant has already become one of the standout games of 2024, drawing in millions of players in its first couple of weeks of release. Despite it’s success, the game does have some drawbacks including overpowered sniping and bunny hopping mechanics. And with the lack of SBMM, player opinions have been divided between the best direction that the game should go in.

To say that the player base has been divided is… misleading. It seems the general player base is grateful to finally have actual matchmaking back, as it used to be and should be, where generally “ping is king”. There really is no division honestly and the only people complaining are the COD kids that thought they were good because of Skill/Engagement Based Match Making.

Welcome to the party. Buckle up.

U/xikutthroatix took to Reddit to discuss the current issues with XDefiant when it comes to hit detection and the netcode not working correctly saying,

“I can not learn from my mistakes with the current state of the game because I don’t really know when I’m making them because of the netcode and hit reg. I can’t use certain weapons e.g. M16 – I keep getting hit markers and doing no damage or barely any damage when the person I’m shooting at kills me.”

This however is a valid criticism. I know Mark Rubin has said the team is working on this and has said it’s due to the Google servers they use.

Despite being heavily downvoted, u/Kabal82 replied with a good point saying,

“Honestly, the whole “git good” and get “better mentality” from the devs and the elites in regards to sbmm is going to kill the game. Nobody wants to play casual matches and get pub stopped. COD succeeds because they let casuals and less skilled players have thier time to shine within similar skilled player matches. Guarantee, if the devs stick to thier guns over no sbmm it will be the death of the game.”

This refers to a recent social media post where an XDefiant content creator told players that if you can’t find bad players then it means you’re the bad player in the match, which Producer Mark Rubin quoted to say he agreed.

No, It won’t. If anything it’s going to make the player base better in the long run. In fact it seems to have the behemoth that is Call of Duty so scared I’ve seen an absolute blitz in early marketing for Black Ops Gulf War 6. I’ve even heard rumors they’re going to “tone down the SBMM” in that game as well because XDefiant is doing so well without it.

This new generation of COD kids needs to sit down, shut up, and take their lumps like the rest of us did to get good at not just COD but any FPS in general.

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New Hit FPS Game XDefiant Was Made Entirely Working From Home ▉

Mark Rubin, Executive Producer of XDefiant on Twitter X:

Flew in to SF to be in the office for launch!!! Most people don’t realize but we are a strong WFH team. I actually live in LA even though the office is in SF. The Team is super excited today and we can’t wait to get those servers live!!!! #HappyXDefiantDay

If a Triple A studio can make a hit game working from home, don’t let your bosses tell you your shitty office job can’t be done remotely too.

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#Finally: Apple May Give Us A Passwords App in iOS 18 And macOS 15 ▉

Emma Roth, The Verge:

Apple is planning to introduce a new app called Passwords to help users manage their login information, according to a report from Bloomberg. The company will reportedly introduce the device at its Worldwide Developers Conference event next week.

Apple already lets you save your passwords across your iPhone, iPad, or Vision Pro using iCloud Keychain. The new app would sync the same way but with logins separated into different categories, such as accounts, Wi-Fi networks, and passkeys. However, Bloomberg says the new Passwords app would extend support for Windows as well — there’s no word about support for Android.

If this is true, hallelujah. The Windows support may also help push passkeys along. As of right now I’ve only seen the Target app actually use them. I’ve been wanting to embrace them but how can I when nothing supports them?

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SQL Creator Endorses NoSQL ▉

Lindsay Clark, The Register:

Debate has raged among database experts, some of whom see the need for the NoSQL approach, while others argue the properties of NoSQL systems can be absorbed as features in relational systems. Most popular relational systems now support JSON documents, for example, while graph-style queries are possible in Oracle and PostgreSQL.

However, Chamberlin sees a need for NoSQL to support modern applications. For example, traditional relational systems guarantee asset record reserves on transactions to provide immediate consistency, he says.

“To get higher performance, now we’re often distributing data over clusters of machines,” he tells us, “and we’re satisfied with eventual consistency, meaning we can be patient, it will take a little while for all the machines to catch up. That’s necessary sometimes in highly scaled environments.”

I’ve always been a firm believer in the using the best tool for the job. I agree with Chamberlin that there absolutely is a place for both and that SQL should not go away. Regular relational database systems are much better at organizing data than NoSQL, even if NoSQL may be faster and better equipped for pulling data across multiple machines.

As always, it comes down to what your use case is.

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Donald Trump Makes History: Is Officially The First Former US President To Become A Felon ▉

Via CNN:

Jurors have reached a guilty verdict on all of former President Donald Trump’s charges in his hush money criminal trial — 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.

The verdict was read out in the first-ever criminal case brought against a former or current president. A felony conviction of a former president or party frontrunner is unprecedented, but will not affect Trump’s ability to run for office in 2024.

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45 Year Long Console War Ends ▉

“Uniting Atari and Intellivision after 45 years ends the longest running console war in history,” said Mike Mika, Studio Head at Digital Eclipse, an Atari-owned game studio.

The first Intellivision home video game console was released by Mattel Electronics in 1979 and the console platform sold an estimated 5 million units through 1990. Atari and Intellivision arguably fought the first console war of consequence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Mattel went as far as enlisting the actor George Plimpton to appear in a series of ads comparing the two systems, as well as an eight-minute long video shown at the Gamescom trade show.

The original Console War ends. Literally almost as old as me.

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iCloud Photos Bug Caused By “database corruption” On Device Storage ▉

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

One question many people had is how images from dates as far back as 2010 resurfaced because of this problem. After all, most people aren’t still using the same devices now as they were in 2010. Apple confirmed to me that iCloud Photos is not to be blamed for this. Instead, it all boils to the corrupt database entry that existed on the device’s file system itself.

According to Apple, the photos that did not fully delete from a user’s device were not synced to iCloud Photos. Those files were only on the device itself. However, the files could have persisted from one device to another when restoring from a backup, performing a device-to-device transfer, or when restoring from an iCloud Backup but not using iCloud Photos.

If the space on the NAND storage was flagged but never overwritten this is the kind of thing that can happen when carrying things over from one device to another. iCloud probably wasn’t involved because technically these photos probably never made it off the device.

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Indian Government Still Doesn’t Understand How Encryption Works After Fourteen Years ▉

Russell Brandom for Rest of World.org:

For nearly 10 years, WhatsApp’s chat messages have been end-to-end encrypted, meaning they can’t be read by anyone except the sender and the receiver. Drawing on an open-source encryption system developed by Signal, WhatsApp began the move shortly after it was acquired by Facebook in 2014. For the most part, its encryption has been running quietly in the background ever since. There have been legal challenges, but for the world’s largest source of end-to-end encrypted communications, the past decade has been remarkably drama-free.

But WhatsApp is currently in the middle of its biggest legal challenge yet — and it’s a serious one. IT rules passed by India in 2021 require services like WhatsApp to maintain “traceability” for all messages, allowing authorities to follow forwarded messages to the “first originator” of the text.

In a Delhi High Court proceeding last Thursday, WhatsApp said it would be forced to leave the country if the court required traceability, as doing so would mean breaking end-to-end encryption. It’s a common stance for encrypted chat services generally, and WhatsApp has made this threat before — most notably in a protracted legal fight in Brazil that resulted in intermittent bans. But as the Indian government expands its powers over online speech, the threat of a full-scale ban is closer than it’s been in years.

This is the second time India has tried this. It tried this fourteen years ago and while RIM did get around the ban by setting up data centers in Mumbai, I can’t see the same working for WhatsApp. That also isn’t the same as handing over encryption keys that don’t exist.

It’s almost like the Indian government (or any government for that matter) simply doesn’t understand how end-to-end encryption works. There is no back door and creating one breaks the security and encryption for all. It’s not something that can be localized to India. This would impact users all over the world.

It’s not clear how the courts will respond to WhatsApp’s ultimatum, but they’ll have to take it seriously. WhatsApp is used by more than half a billion people in India — not just as a chat app, but as a doctor’s office, a campaigning tool, and the backbone of countless small businesses and service jobs. There’s no clear competitor to fill its shoes, so if the app is shut down in India, much of the digital infrastructure of the nation would simply disappear. Being forced out of the country would be bad for WhatsApp, but it would be disastrous for everyday Indians.

That’s not an exaggeration either. WhatsApp is not just the default chat app in India, its the chat app in India. Everything happens on WhatsApp. Everything. Disastrous is an understatement.

Reached for comment, a Meta representative emphasized WhatsApp’s central role in India’s digital economy. “We remain committed to safeguarding the privacy of our users which is integral to India’s digital growth and progress,” the company said in a statement.

Strange times when I agree with Facebook Meta.

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Valve May Have A New Franchise In The Works ▉

Ash Parrish at The Verge:

Valve’s next game appears to be a multiplayer hero shooter known as Deadlock. This is according to leaks from playtesters posted on social media earlier today, with some of the details verified by known Valve dataminer @GabeFollower and Valve watcher Tyler McVicker.

I did not have Valve creating a new IP on my 2024 Bingo card.

Deadlock wasn’t a game Valve gave any indication was in the works, so its reveal is certainly surprising. Earlier this week, GabeFollower shared more information about Deadlock on their X page, writing that the game is “fast-paced interesting ADHD gameplay. Combination of Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, Valorant, Smite, Orcs Must Die.” The Verge has reached out to Valve for comment.

That’s… an interesting mix of influences. I’ve never played Smite or Orcs Must Die but I am familiar with the rest of the pack here. DOTA 2 regularly tops the Steam charts and a quick glance at the Twitch charts as I write this shows DOTA 2, Valorant and Overwatch 2 in the top 20 categories.

Valorant and Overwatch play similarly, but DOTA 2 does not. DOTA 2 and Smite seem to have more in common with each other. Orcs and TF 2 have nothing in common with any of the other games other than the teamwork aspect.

Either way, Valve is known for taking their time and geting things right. It’ll be interesting to see the final product, whenever it ships.

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Voyager Still Alive And Kicking ▉

For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).

Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth.

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

I will never complain about debugging anything ever again.

Also, for some reason, I was under the impression that all of this was done with C. It’s not. Its all done in Fortran.

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