Archives for March 2024

You’ve heard of Unreal Engine and Unity, two engine juggernauts that power most of your Steam library, but you’ve probably never heard of Bitsquid. It was an obscure game engine used in a handful of notable Swedish indies of the early 2010s. In 2014, Autodesk bought Bitsquid, renamed it Autodesk Stingray, then discontinued it in 2018. One of the last games released using Stingray was Fatshark’s Warhammer 40,000: Darktide in 2022. The newest Stingray game is Helldivers 2. Responding to an article on game development blog 80 Level, Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Johan Pilestedt confirmed that their smash hit, PlayStation-published co-op shooter is running on abandonware. “The project started before it was discontinued,” Pilestedt tweeted. “Our crazy engineers had to do everything, with no support to build the game to parity with other engines.” One might reasonably think that if Helldivers 2 was still early on in development when Autodesk hung the “closed forever” sign on Stingray, a good option would have been to start over on a different engine, but it’s not that simple—Stingray isn’t just the Helldivers 2 engine, it’s the engine Arrowhead has used in most of its games over its 16-year history, including The Showdown Effect, the 2014 Gauntlet reboot, and the original Helldivers. Stingray is what the studio knows, and when you have an experienced group of experts in a specific set of tools, you don’t give that up lightly. Just ask the fellow co-op shooter aficionados at Fatshark who also stuck with Stingray for Darktide despite starting development after Autodesk killed it. This is true. Our crazy engineers had to do everything, with no support to build the game to parity with other engines.And yes. The project started before it was discontinued. https://t.co/mz61TnYNGNFebruary 21, 2024 Loyalty could be a factor, too. Arrowhead and Fatshark seemingly have a close relationship with the original Bitsquid founders Niklas Frykholm and Tobias Persson, two Swedish industry vets who founded Bitsquid after the closure of Grin (Bionic Commando: Rearmed) in 2009. The two Swedish outfits were the earliest and some of the only studios to ever use Bitsquid/Stingray in commercial projects. Six years after its obsolescence, Arrowhead and Fatshark are still holding a torch for the defunct engine, and supporting its founders. After Frykholm and Persson left Autodesk, the two studios were early investors in their next engine project, Our Machinery. Oddly, a year into the public release of their Machinery engine in 2022, Frykholm and Persson suddenly ceased development of the engine and insisted that all users wipe it off their hard drives. That makes the pair 0-2 on creating game engines and sticking with them for the long haul. Thankfully, it sounds like Arrowhead were able to make it work with Stingray over the years with their own modifications and modernizations, which begs a Ship of Theseus-like question: at what point does the Helldivers 2 engine stop being Stingray and start being its own thing?

American R&B singer Chris Brown says fans are being messy for stirring up drama as he denies that he shaded rapper G Herbo during an interview with Funny Marco.

Brown’s interview with Funny Marco has quite a few memorable moments, including Marco telling him that he has a sister who wants a baby with him. However, fans seemed to think that a particular question by Brown about a G Herbo and Marco run-in could be him shading the Chicago rapper.

“I tried to reach out, I really was hitting you up because I was like bro why you let G Herbo and dem do you like that?” Brown asked Marco. Marco laughs before answering, “Cause I was just in the mall like damn is this really happening? Like damn.” The “Deuces” artiste added, “So you just let light-skinned n***as bully you and sh*t?”

The M88 comedian, however, said he couldn’t believe it was happening as it unfolded.

“I was like damn is this happening? And I was like thinking damn this is happening? Like you know like something is going on, like if you was in a car wreck, you can’t stop it. Like is it tumbling? And I was like damn, the car tumbling,” the comedian added.

It seems that they were discussing Marco’s last viral interview featuring producer Southside, who brought in his friend G Herbo. The interview took a turn for the worst as both men took over the interview in a rude and unsavory manner. They insulted Marco and G Herbo, who was drunk and belligerent, and even appeared to destroy the comedian’s brand new $30K watch.

Marco later addressed the incident, saying that he didn’t want to match the same bullying energy by Herbo and Southside and had come a long way on his journey.

However, G Herbo appeared pissed on Friday night at Brown and Marco addressing the incident.

In a video posted on his Instagram account, the rapper said

“PSA that’s a public service announcement, for the simple fact that I don’t be having nobody’s name in your mouth, especially n****as. If you have my name in your mouth talking to another party, I hope you able to back it up and I hope to tough, way tougher than me because if I hear it, Imma slap the f**k out of you,” Herbo said.

He continued, “I’m just warning y’all, If you a b***h a** and got my name in your mouth and you really don’t want me to hear that you got my name in your mouth… I’m not gonna spare you b****h a** n**as no more.”

In the meantime, Chris Brown later cleared things up, writing on his Instagram Story that he and Herbo are cool.

“Y’all gotta chill wit the negative sh*t. Herbo is my real blooda. Now y’all can go listen to the album and chill da f**k out Jeeeezzuzzz Christ!” he wrote.

G Herbo and Southside were dragged by fans for their behavior, but neither have apologized to the comedian.

Key Takeaways

Dell just announced the new Precision 7875 Tower. This crazy-fast desktop PC features a 96-core CPU under the hood, helping ensure it’s good for AI workloads, and anything businesses and enterprises can dream of.

The new Precision 7875 Tower features Threadripper Pro 7000 WX-Series processors, which were just announced by AMD today. These desktop CPUs are built on the 5nm Zen 4 architecture, and the top-end chip has as much as 192 threads, up to 384MB of L3 cache, and support for eight channels of DDR5 memory. If you’re wondering about the specifics, it is the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX that’s the 96-core top-end part here, which has a boost clock rate of 5.1 GHz, a 480MB cache, and a TDP of 350W.

Other than that beast of a CPU, this workstation tower does have some other treats that engineers, creatives, and those in the creative industry will appreciate. The tower is now much taller and has a deeper chassis than the previous models. This helps improve the overall cooling and allows for more air to get to that powerful CPU. There’s also now a sixth PCIe slot onboard, which helps with expandability and customization. Capping out the changes is the integrated Wi-Fi slot.

You can configure this workstation with a lot of parts, too. It can hold up to two 48GB AMD Radeon Pro W7900 or up to two 48GB NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs. You even can add up to 56TB of storage, and 2TB of DDR5 memory. And for keeping this tower secure? It has a lockable chassis, and intrusion detection to prevent people from messing with the parts.

Dell did not announce pricing on the new Precision 7875 Tower. It said that it will be released on December, and pricing will come closer to that launch date.