Technology

Last Monday, Microsoft declared that DirectStorage would usher in “a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games.” And while that now seems a little too grandiose, the developer of upcoming tech showcase game Forspoken now claims that one-second load times are legitimately in reach. Speaking at a GDC 2022 presentation about the tech embedded in the PC version of the game, Luminous Productions technical director Teppei Ono says that the Square Enix title will actually load some scenes in one second flat, provided your Windows 11 PC has a NVMe SSD capable of over 5,000MB/sec reads. That one-second load time is not the case for every scene, and he didn’t actually show us any scenes load in that amount of time — instead, we saw cutscene and gameplay examples where Forspoken took...

Today, NASA announced plans to develop a second human lunar lander for its Artemis program, the agency’s major spaceflight initiative to send humans back to the Moon. To build the vehicle, the space agency is calling on commercial space companies to propose concepts for landers that can take people to and from the Moon’s orbit and the lunar surface, with the goal of having them ready by 2026 or 2027 at the earliest. NASA already holds a contract with commercial partner SpaceX to develop a lunar lander for Artemis, which aims to land the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon. In 2021, the space agency awarded a sole contract to SpaceX worth $2.9 billion to develop the company’s future Starship vehicle into a lander that can take humans to and from the lunar surface. As of no...

Elden Ring has patched an exploit on PC that hackers used to trap players in endless cycles of death. In the patch notes for update 1.03.2, game publisher Bandai Namco says it includes a fix for “a bug in multiplayer that allowed players to teleport others to incorrect map coordinates.” The exploit first emerged last week after invaders started crashing players’ games and teleporting their character to an out-of-bounds location, causing them to fall to their death over and over again upon reopening the game. While some victims were able to get themselves out of the death loop by quickly teleporting to a site of grace, others reported losing dozens of hours of gameplay. You can see the effects of the hack for yourself in a video posted by EldenRingUpdate on Twitter. ⚠️Elden Ri...

Zoom announced on Wednesday that it’s making it easier to livestream your meeting or webinar to Twitch by adding native integration with the streaming service to its app. After you connect your Zoom and Twitch accounts, you can start broadcasting your meeting with just a few clicks. Zoom says the feature is meant to “streamline the process of sharing content within” communities, which definitely sounds like it expects this to be used for things like company webinars. There are a lot of use cases I can think of for this kind of thing, though — it’d be an easy option for people who want to do a live podcast, share a sermon, or make something like a town hall meeting publicly available. Or heck, just stream your 8AM stand-up if you’re really excited about sharing what you’re working on with t...

HBO Max is rolling out its very own shuffle button for desktop. Rather than working like a “play something” button, HBO Max’s new feature will shuffle episodes. So if you know you’re in the mood to watch Friends or South Park but don’t know where to start, the button will do the work for you. HBO Max said the button is one of its most requested features. Streaming rivals like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, among others, have similarly experimented with shuffle functions on their apps. Currently, the shuffle feature is available for 45 series on HBO Max, meaning you have 45 options for mindless streaming next time you’re having trouble finding something to watch. The full list of shows supported is as follows: A World of Calm Adventure Time Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown Apple & Onion Chap...

Instagram has introduced two new methods for users to control how they see their feed, CEO Adam Mosseri shared in a blog post. Entitled Favorites and Following, the two options are intended for users to quickly see what they’re most interested in. With Favorites, users can choose accounts to prioritize content from, such as their close friends or influencers. Posts from favorited accounts will show up first in one’s feed. Users can add up to 50 accounts to their Favorites list and can change it at any time. Other people won’t know when they are added or removed from the list. Those favorites will be indicated by a star icon in a user’s feed. Following simply displays posts in reverse chronological order, based on what was posted most recently. This was how Instagram ordered posts when the ...

Google has introduced a new sidebar feature to Chrome, which lets you quickly access your bookmarks and reading list while using the desktop version of the browser (via 9to5Google). Previously, the reading list’s main home was as a button on the bookmark bar, which not everyone has enabled. Clicking the side panel button, which looks like a rectangle with a shaded portion on the right side, will show or hide the panel. Once you’ve got it open, you can access the same reading list functions that were available in the old UI, including the ability to add the page you’re currently on to your list, mark items as read, or remove them. You can also switch over to the bookmarks tab to browse your saved pages. Of course, you’re still easily able to mark items in the reading list as read, or remove...

Although many data plans these days are advertised as “unlimited,” most actually have a cut-off point when your data stream is going to slow radically. If you don’t want to pay the premium prices that “unlimited” plans demand, then it’s even more important that you avoid going beyond your maximum data allowance, or there will be high penalties to pay. Either way, it’s smart to monitor your data flow — not only to make sure you don’t pass your limits but also to find out if you need to rethink your current data plan. It’s not hard to do this using tools baked into current versions of Android or a third-party app. Here are a few strategies that you can try. (Note: these directions are for a Pixel 6 running Android 12. The interface of your phone may vary somewhat, depending on the manufactur...

Last week, AMD promised a new technology that should let you blow up your games to higher resolutions or increase their framerates without requiring the fancy machine learning hardware of Nvidia’s GPUs like Nvidia’s lauded DLSS. Now at GDC 2022, it’s revealing how the new FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 actually works — and that it’s coming to Microsoft’s Xbox game consoles too. While AMD says it can’t actually say when Xbox game developers might take advantage of FSR 2.0, it says it “will also be fully supported on Xbox and will be available in the Xbox GDK for registered developers to use in their games.” And it’s also giving the community a list of both AMD and Nvidia GPUs where you can expect FSR 2.0 to run — if you’ve got an Nvidia GeForce RTX 1070 or higher, the company suggests, you...

Apple’s digital car keys are arriving on the 2022 Kia Niro, 2022 Genesis 690, and the all-electric 2022 Genesis GV60. As spotted by MacRumors, Apple added a key symbol next to all three vehicles in a list on its site, indicating support for the feature. It’s not clear when Apple first updated the list or if the feature is immediately available on any of these cars. There hasn’t been an official announcement from Apple or either car company yet, so there may be more steps involved in the rollout. Kia and Genesis have reportedly been working to integrate Apple’s digital car keys since last year. Samsung has also announced a partnership with Genesis (along with Audi, Ford, and BMW) to create a phone-based digital car key of its own. A Kia spokesperson told MacRumors that the company will have...