Enlarge / A prototype wonder effect—featuring Mario's head turned into blocks that could be eaten by enemies—didn't make it into the final game. (credit: Nintendo)

In a game industry that seems to engage in periodic layoffs as a matter of course , it's often hard for even popular game franchises to maintain continuity in their underlying creative teams from sequel to sequel. Then there's the Mario series, where every person credited with the creation of the original Super Mario Bros. in the 1980s ended up having a role in the making of Super Mario Bros. Wonder just last year.

In a recent interview with Ars Technica, Wonder producer Takashi Tezuka said it wasn't that tough to get that kind of creative continuity at Nintendo. "The secret to having a long-tenured staff is that people don't quit," he said. "For folks who have been there together for such a long time, it's easy for us to talk to each other."

That said, Tezuka added that just getting a bunch of industry veterans together to make a game runs the risk of not "keeping up with the times. Really, for me, I have a great interest in how our newer staff members play, what they play, what they think, and what is appealing to them. I think it's very interesting the things we can come up with when these two disparate groups influence each other to create something."

Enlarge / Kaboom! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

For years, the Unity Engine has earned goodwill from developers large and small for its royalty-free licensing structure, which meant developers incurred no extra costs based on how well a game sold. That goodwill has now been largely thrown out the window due to Unity's Tuesday announcement of a new fee structure that will start charging developers on a "per-install" basis after certain minimum thresholds are met.

The newly introduced Unity Runtime Fee—which will go into effect on January 1, 2024—will impose different per-install costs based on the company's different subscription tiers. Those on the Unity Personal tier (which includes free basic Editor access) will be charged $0.20 per install after an individual game reaches $200,000 in annual revenue and 200,000 lifetime installs.

Users of Unity's Pro and Enterprise tiers (which charge a separate annual subscription for access to a more full-featured Unity Editor) will pay slightly smaller per-install fees starting at $0.125 to $0.15 after a game reaches $1 million in annual revenue and 1 million total installs. The per-install fees for the paid subscription tiers are also subject to "volume discounts" for heavily installed games, going down as low as $0.01 per install for games that are installed 1 million times per month.

Enlarge / An AI-generated and human composited image of "Wolverine programming on a computer." (credit: Benj Edwards / Midjourney)

Debugging a faulty program can be frustrating, so why not let AI do it for you? That's what a developer that goes by "BioBootloader" did by creating Wolverine , a program that can give Python programs "regenerative healing abilities," reports Hackaday . (Yep, just like the Marvel superhero.)

"Run your scripts with it and when they crash, GPT-4 edits them and explains what went wrong," wrote BioBootloader in a tweet that accompanied a demonstration video. "Even if you have many bugs it'll repeatedly rerun until everything is fixed."

GPT-4 is a multimodal AI language model created by OpenAI and released in March , available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and in API form to beta testers. It uses its "knowledge" about billions of documents, books, and websites scraped from the web to perform text processing tasks such as composition, language translation, and programming.

We're now firmly ensconced in the second decade of Star Citizen 's crowdfunding-driven development . And while backers can currently play a minimally functional alpha version (that's still missing many promised features ), there's still no sign of even a fully playable beta version in sight.

Don't worry, though—that state of affairs hasn't stopped developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) from finding new and interesting ways for the game to break.

Star Citizen 's current problems revolve around this week's rollout of the Alpha 3.18 "Lasting Legacies" update , which RSI is selling as "the biggest Star Citizen update yet ."

Enlarge / Moderna pharmaceutical and biotechnology company's CEO Stephane Bancel speaks during a session of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos on January 18, 2023. (credit: Getty | Fabrice COFFRINI )

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel on Monday pushed back on criticism of the company's plans to raise the price of its mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines by 400 percent, arguing that the billions of dollars in federal funding the company received played little role in the vaccine's development.

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal Health Forum , Bancel suggested that the vaccine's development is thanks to private investors and that the federal funding merely hastened development that would have occurred regardless. The comments came in response to a question of whether the company has a "moral obligation" to give back to the taxpayers who helped develop the life-saving immunization—presumably by not dramatically hiking the vaccine's price as it moves from federal distribution to the commercial market this year.

While the government most recently paid $26 per dose for Moderna's updated booster dose, the company is planning to raise the price of its shots to $110 to $130 per dose .

In my previous blogpost I briefly explained the IPL and the tasks that these individual libs can perform. Today I want to explain how our ipl-html lib works and how to use it. This library helps you write HTML in a very simple and safe way. You don’t need text escaping and view scripts. Usually […]

The post IPL: How to use ipl-html appeared first on Icinga .

Značky: #Developer, #Development, #Network, #icinga-php-library, #oop, #How-tos

Enlarge / WARNING! INTRUDERS DETECTED

Today, FTL: Faster than Light is recognized as one of the most influential games in the indie sector. Alongside The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky , it was part of a holy trinity of games that popularized the roguelite genre in the early '10s.

But before it was a hit, FTL was just a humble idea shared by Matthew Davis and Justin Ma, two developers working at 2K’s Shanghai office. The studio wasn’t a bad place to work, by their accounts, but they just weren’t making the kinds of games they were interested in. So Davis and Ma departed the big-budget firm and started a hobby project to keep them busy while they were looking for new jobs.

“The original intention, at least from my perspective, was that [ FTL ] was only intended as a hobby project or a prototype,” Davis tells Ars. “It was something in between jobs to build up a resume that we could use to get a job at a studio working on projects that we were more excited about. But we stumbled into something that became a lot bigger than what we set out to do.”