Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE), the joke cryptocurrency popularized by Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, has received an under-the-hood upgrade.
What Happened: The release of the Dogecoin Core 1.14.3 was announced on the r/dogecoin discussion board on Reddit on Sunday.
The update includes “important performance improvements,” and is a “strongly recommended update for everyone [running a DOGE node].”
Why It Matters: Significant improvements to the speed at which a node can upload blocks will be made by removing expensive integrity checks which were previously carried out each time a block was sent to another node after the update is applied.
The default time that transactions are cached in the mempool — a mechanism for storing information on unconfirmed transactions — will be reduced from 336 hours to 24 hours.
See Also: In Bitcoin’s Path Back To $50,000, Institutional Investors, Whales Battle Miners
The default setting can be modified by inputting a value in hours that makes the most sense for the use cases the node serves.
Technical development in DOGE has mirrored Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC), according to CoinDesk.
“Since March 2014, “[Dogecoin Core] has always been based on Bitcoin,” said DOGE developer Maximilian Keller, as per CoinDesk.
The price increase in the meme cryptocurrency has hastened the improvements in the Shiba-Inu-themed cryptocurrency.
DOGE has risen 812.56% since the year began. In the same period BTC has given 58.12% returns.
Price Action: DOGE traded 0.82% higher at $ 0.049 at press time, while BTC traded 0.54% higher at $46,637.15.
Read Next: Dogenomics: What’s So Special About Dogecoin Anyway?
Earlier this month, Terraria co-creator Andrew Spinks announced that his studio Re-Logic would cancel a Google Stadia port. However, the developer announced today that the Stadia port is now back in development.
”As you may have noticed, we had a ton of issues to kick off the year stemming from the locking-down of Redigit’s entire Google account in early January,” Re-Logic said in a recent Terraria forum post. “After a month of pushing (and with the immense support of our fans), Google finally reached out and was able to provide a lot of transparency around the situation and to restore access to all of our accounts.”
After publication, a Google spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that a Stadia port for Terraria was currently in development.
On February 8th, Spinks fired off a series of tweets expressing frustration that he was locked out of his Google accounts for weeks, which included losing access to his Gmail and Google Play account. Spinks first noted that he lost access to his accounts on or around January 16th.
Re-Logic has yet to announced when Terraria will launch on Google Stadia, but the game being back in development is good news for fans of Google’s cloud gaming service. On Friday, two reports from Bloomberg and Wired shed light on some of Google’s failures in building Stadia. And earlier this month, Google announced it was closing its in-house development studio.
Update February 26th, 7:32PM ET: Included information from Google confirming that a Stadia port of Terraria is in development.
Sony is reportedly shutting down its oldest in-house developer. According to VGC, the company hasn’t been renewing the contracts of many of the employees at Japan Studio. The developer is best known for its work on franchises like Gravity Rush, Ape Escape and Knack, as well as for helping out with Bloodborne, The Last Guardian and the recent Demon’s Souls remake. Some parts of the studio, including the team that works on Sony’s Astro Bot franchise, will continue to work for the company, but by the sounds of it, Sony has parted ways with most of the other staff.
2月末でSIE JAPAN Studioを離れることになりました。これまでありがとうございました。次の場所でもゲーム制作を頑張ります。 I’m leaving Sony Interactive Entertainment at the end of this month. I’m going to continue working hard on creating games. Many thanks to everyone! pic.twitter.com/WPpiLpCtoY
— 山際眞晃 Masaaki Yamagiwa (@giwamasa) February 25, 2021
Recent tweets from several people who worked at the studio appear to corroborate VGC’s reporting. The move comes after several prominent employees, including Gravity Rush and Silent Hill director Teruyuki Toriyama and Bloodborne producer Masaaki Yamagiwa, left the company late last year. We’ve reached out to Sony for comment, and we’ll update this article when we hear back from the company.
VGC suggests Sony’s decision to close Japan Studio stems from the fact the developer hasn’t been profitable in recent years. In November, Bloomberg published a report that said in recent months many of Sony Japan’s development teams had been downsized. According to the publication, the feeling at Sony Interactive Entertainment’s US division was that the company didn’t need games that “only do well in Japan.”
Update 8:37 PM ET: Sony has confirmed that it’s reorganizing Japan Studio. “In an effort to further strengthen business operations, SIE can confirm PlayStation Studios JAPAN Studio will be re-organized into a new organization on April 1,” a spokesperson for the company told Engadget. “JAPAN Studio will be re-centered to Team ASOBI, the creative team behind Astro’s PLAYROOM, allowing the team to focus on a single vision and build on the popularity of Astro’sPLAYROOM.” The company added that it will concentrate the majority of its localization, IP management and external production efforts within its PlayStation Studios brand.
From Hyper Light Drifter studio Heart Machine, Solar Ash is coming to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC via the Epic Games Store later in 2021. The developer showed off new footage of the stylish alien world during Sony’s State of Play presentation on Thursday.
Heart Machine first revealed Solar Ash in 2019. The game’s aesthetic — rich with purple and pink tones — feels connected to the studio’s legacy. But unlike Hyper Light Drifter, which is a top-down, pixelated game, Solar Ash is a dynamic, 3D game. Solar Ash creative director Alx Preston showed off and described the gameplay in a nearly 3-minute video during the Sony event. Preston said the player takes control of Ash, on a mission to save her planet, using “fast and fluid” movement and combat.
“Solar Ash is Heart Machine’s vision of the adventure platformer,” Preston said during the video. “The giant spaces, the feel of movement, the flow of combat, and the high stakes battles atop enormous beasts all come together to bring players something we think is incredibly unique, and more importantly, fun.”
Annapurna Interactive will publish the game when it’s out later this year.
The Android 12 developer preview is out, and the internet is busy poring over it to find any new features or hints at the OS’s future. So far, there have been a few interesting things discovered, such as an Emergency SOS feature, some redesigns, and other useful, if minor, finds:
As pointed out by Android Police, the Emergency SOS feature is also much easier to access now. Before, making an emergency call required you to hold the power button down, tap the emergency button, then tap twice on the Call 911 button. In Android 12, however, it can be activated by rapidly pressing the power button five times, which will trigger a countdown telling you that an emergency call is about to be placed.
Android Police notes that, by default, it calls 911. You can set it to call a different number, but if the number isn’t a government-run emergency line, your phone will have to be unlocked for the call to go through.
The process for accessing the Emergency Call feature in Android 11.Screenshots: Sean Hollister / The Verge
There have been a few minor redesigns of the Settings app search bar and the lock screen and notification media player, but Mishaal Rahman found a feature flag that “dramatically” changes the settings UI to be easier to use one-handed.
BIG change: If you enable the “Silky home” feature flag that I previously mentioned, you’ll get a DRAMATICALLY changed Settings UI that’s MUCH more one-handed friendly. Here are a few screenshots: pic.twitter.com/EcwqnU0LlB
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) February 18, 2021
9to5Google has also found that some screens in the settings app have blue-tinted backgrounds. It speculates that it could be part of a rumored theming system, but at the moment, it seems very unfinished.
Image: 9to5Google
Of course, notifications have also gotten a redesign, with 9to5Google noting that there’s a dedicated snooze button now, and the icon bubbles are now much larger. This looks like it reduces the density of notifications, but it’s still very early days for Android 12, so it’s possible changes could be made or toggles could be added to control whether you want to see the larger app icon.
The app icon bubbles are now larger.Image: 9to5Google
There are also a few features that are hinted at, or even have settings present, but currently don’t seem to work or aren’t enabled, including:
Given the early state of the developer preview, it’s not really meant for day-to-day use on your main phone. And as with all betas, these features and designs are subject to change in new releases. Still, it’s a tantalizing glimpse at the future of Android and the features Google is adding to an already feature-packed mature OS.
The very first Android 12 developer preview is available now. You can install it on select Google Pixel smartphones.
This first preview is mostly for developers and is far too unstable for you to use as a daily driver.
Google says the focus this year is to make Android “more intuitive, better performing, and more secure.”
Today’s the big day: our first official look at Android 12! The debut developer preview of the 2021 iteration of the world’s biggest operating system is now available.
The Android 12 developer preview will work on all Google Pixel smartphones from the Pixel 3 series forward. That means the Pixel 3/3 XL, Pixel 3a/3a XL, Pixel 4/4 XL, Pixel 4a/4a 5G, and Pixel 5. Earlier Pixel phones and phones from other OEMs are not compatible, but you can always use the Android Emulator within Android Studio if you like.
Related: All the Android 12 features we know of so far
As usual, this first DP is not intended for consumer use. Therefore, you can only manually install it. You can flash a factory image if you are OK with wiping your data and unlocking your bootloader. If not, you can sideload an OTA which won’t require an unlocked bootloader or data wipe. Either way, you will get OTAs for future preview launches as well as the inevitable beta versions.
However, please understand that this version of Android 12 should be considered completely unstable. It is not appropriate to use this as your daily driver, as it will cause all sorts of problems! As such, this is for developers and tinkerers only.
Android 12 developer preview: This is only a test
Credit: Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
Since we’re so early in the development of Android 12, this first developer preview won’t feature many new consumer-facing features. Instead, most of the features will be geared towards developers. As always, devs will find hints of consumer features within this code, so stay tuned for our coverage of those rumors.
Google did disclose what it aims to achieve with Android 12 overall. It says that this version of Android will be “more intuitive, better performing, and more secure” than other versions. Last year, Google’s big focus was on communication: notifications, messaging features, etc. So the Android 12 developer preview will have different priorities.
With that in mind, a lot of the confirmed features within Android 12 so far are all very technical. Google says Android 12 will allow for faster and higher quality image transcoding, which will allow for better-looking photos with smaller file sizes. Notifications will also be faster with more tools for developers to customize them. It will also be easier for devs to discover compatibility issues so they can get their apps up and running faster.
There are a few confirmed features, though, that consumers will appreciate. One is haptic-coupled audio, which will allow a phone’s vibration motor to sync with app audio, creating more immersive gaming experiences. Likewise, gesture navigation while your phone’s display is completely covered with media (like, say, when you’re watching a movie) will be easier and more consistent.
Stay tuned, as we will likely discover a lot of cool features over the next few days as we play with the Android 12 developer preview!
Related: Android versions: The history of the biggest mobile OS
When will everyone get Android 12?
Google says its goal is to reach platform stability by August 2021. In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Google pushed the stable version of Android 11 on September 8. It’s possible Android 12 could land sooner than that this year, although it is highly unlikely it would land any earlier than August.
Meanwhile, the first beta for Android 11 launched on June 10, 2020. It isn’t unreasonable to expect a beta for Android 12 to land around that same time this year.
The bottom line is that the Android 12 developer preview is just the beginning. We have many months to go before general consumers should be using it!
Emoji Evolution‘s Steam store page shows how hard it is to distinguish the developer’s “Very Positive” name from the merely “Positive” review summary (on the right).”/>
Enlarge / An archived copy of Emoji Evolution‘s Steam store page shows how hard it is to distinguish the developer’s “Very Positive” name from the merely “Positive” review summary (on the right).
Emoji Evolution
Here at Ars, we’ve covered Valve banning Steam game developers for everything from sexual content and gratuitous ultraviolence to ill-defined “trolling.” But we’ve never seen a case where a developer got kicked off of Steam just because of its (non-infringing) name.
That’s just what happened to Emoji Evolution developer Very Positive, which said on Twitter Saturday that its developer account had been banned for “review manipulations.” Unlike other prominent examples of Steam user-review manipulation, though, Very Positive didn’t do anything to unduly skew the reviews players posted for its games.
Instead, Very Positive exploited a vagary of the Steam store’s user interface. That interface displays a game’s developer and publisher name in the same font, color, and general area as the written summary of the game’s overall user review summary (e.g., “Overwhelmingly Positive,” “Mixed,” “Mostly Negative,” etc.) Thus, it was hard for users to distinguish at a glance that the “Very Positive” developer name wasn’t an accurate summary of Emoji Evolution‘s actual user reviews (which ranged from “Mixed” to “Mostly Positive” according to screenshots).
The wrong kind of attention
Simon Carless was among the first to notice this bit of trickery, writing about it in his GameDiscoverCo newsletter on February 8. Over the next few days, word of Very Positive’s existence and actions spread among gaming news sites and social media. By February 12, the developer had been banned from Steam.
“I knew that reviews have a huge impact on the customer’s decision,” the coder behind Very Positive (who goes by the pseudonym Mike) told Vice. “I noticed that the publisher/developer name is located really close to the reviews and has the same color, and I decided to use it for my purposes.” Steam users, Mike said, “make conclusions about information when seeing familiar words and don’t spend much time reading all the words.”
Mike seems to be taking the ban in stride, promoting memes and jokey polls about the saga on Twitter. Even before the Steam ban, the Very Positive account tweeted, “to be honest the Developer and Publisher name is the best thing in the whole Emoji Evolution project,” acknowledging the bargain-basement simplicity of the game itself.
“I’ve made a really bad game—this is the only thing I’m guilty of,” Very Positive cheekily tweeted on Wednesday. “If making awful games is not allowed on Steam, why haven’t they already suspended the CDPR account?” (Zing!)
In the end, Very Positive tried to exploit a small attention glitch in Steam’s byzantine store system and failed in part because too many people gave it attention. Going forward, though, we can’t help but think a UI change on Valve’s part might be more effective (and easier to implement) than policing individual developer names for looking like “fake” review summaries. Or as Twitter user DoctorWyrm put it (in a tweet retweeted by Very Positive), “Maybe Valve should fix their easily exploitable review system instead of just banning developers.”
Valheim developer Iron Gate is advising all players to back up their world and characters, as the “evil world-destroyer bug is still roaming free.”Iron Gate’s CEO Richard Svensson took to Twitter to share the warning, and let Valheim players know that the developer has yet to reproduce the bug even once, meaning it is still impacting certain players.Svensson notes that it “seems to occur more often if you exit the game by ALT+F4, so try to use menu->exit instead.”
He also notes that, if PC Valheim players weren’t aware, worlds and characters are saved in C:UsersUsernameAppDataLocalLowIronGateValheim.
Valheim has been a huge success for Iron Gate, despite being in Early Access, and it sold over one million copies in just 8 days. As of this writing, Valheim is the third-most played game on Steam with a current player count of 297,783. Valheim peaked at 346,170 today, February 14, as well.
If you are new to the world of Valheim, be sure to check out our 11 tips to get you started and five things you need to know about the survival game taking the world by storm. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Rumors of Dying Light 2 developer Techland potentially being the target of an upcoming acquisition have been greatly exaggerated, it seems. According to the studio’s community manager, Techland is still very much an independent company and hasn’t been acquired by any other publisher at this moment.
Traction with these rumors started yesterday when the host of a popular Xbox podcast shared that they had heard Microsoft was potentially looking into picking up Techalnd and making the developer part of its Xbox Game Studios stable. This then prompted a response from Techland’s aforementioned community manager after mentions of the rumor started making it into their direct messages on Twitter. “There was the same rumour floating around the internet one year ago and the situation didn’t change,” said Uncy, the studio community manager. “Techland is an independent studio and it was not acquired by another publisher.”
I’m getting a lot of dm’s about Dying Light acquisition so I’ll answer here: There was the same rumour floating around the internet one year ago and the situation didn’t change – Techland is an independent studio and it was not acquired by another publisher (:
— Uncy (@Uncy8) February 13, 2021
The news about Techland potentially being acquired comes at a time where acquisition rumors have been circling for months. Just a few weeks ago, a major new report came about that said multiple publishers such as Xbox, PlayStation, Electronic Arts, and Amazon have all been looking to snatch up various independent studios recently. Considering how Techland is a prominent indie company, it makes sense that they became one of the companies in the rumor mill.
For now, all we really know for certain about Techland is that it’s hard at work on Dying Light 2. While we haven’t heard anything new about the game officially from Techland in quite some time, the studio has been teasing that we should start to hear more as the year progresses. In the interim, a new report has come about recently claims the game will be launching sooner than we think.
In reality, Dying Light 2 hasn’t even been given a release window just yet, although a launch in 2021 is expected. Whenever it does arrive, it will come to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC.
Mobile app developer Kosta Eleftheriou has a new calling that goes beyond software development: taking on what he sees as a rampant scam problem ruining the integrity of Apple’s App Store.
Eleftheriou, who created the successful Apple Watch keyboard app FlickType, has for the last two weeks been publicly criticizing Apple for lax enforcement of its App Store rules that have allowed scam apps, as well as apps that clone popular software from other developers, to run rampant. These apps enjoy top billing in the iPhone marketplace, all thanks to glowing reviews and sterling five-star ratings that are largely fabricated, he says.
Up to now, I’ve been in the “Apple *wants* to do the right thing” camp. My viewpoint is starting to change.
How to spot a $5M/year scam on the @AppStore, in 5 minutes flat:
— Kosta Eleftheriou (@keleftheriou) February 6, 2021
“It’s surprising more people don’t know about this. The extent to which this has been going on and is currently going on is absolutely mind-blowing,” Eleftheriou tells The Verge of the magnitude of fraud he says is occurring daily on the App Store. “In particular now with the App Store, which is my main concern, the problem has grown to such an extent that having the rating and review system is making it worse. It gives consumers a false sense of security and a false idea that the app is great as you’re entering it through a glowing App Store page with raving reviews.”
His vocal complaints, which have attracted the attention and support of countless other app developers in the iOS community, underscore the increasing tension between Apple and the software makers upon whom it depends. It comes at a time of unprecedented antitrust scrutiny and legal challenges from competitors related to the company’s stewardship of the App Store, from which it is estimated to have made more than $64 billion last year.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
The issues Eleftheriou is raising are interlocking ones all stemming from what he says are inconsistently enforced App Store rules and lazy moderation. It’s not just apps that try to siphon money away from consumers under false pretenses using exploitative subscription services. It’s also fake reviews and ratings that can be bought and a broken algorithmic ranking system that helps these apps float to the top and take the spot of genuine paid apps developed by small teams or singular developers, Eleftheriou says. Letting it perpetuate, he adds, is a platform that Apple does not actively police unless it’s an issue that gains the attention of the media or involves one of Apple’s current rivals like Facebook or Fortnite maker Epic Games.
Eleftheriou first detailed his personal experience with App Store scams late last month in a Twitter thread, where he explained how his app FlickType was maliciously copied by numerous developers that built non-functioning versions of the software and charged egregious subscription fees, only getting away with it because of strong App Store reviews and high five-star ratings he claims are fake.
Eleftheriou says his primary competitor, a scam app called KeyWatch, was charging users $8 per week and amassing more than $2 million a year, according to analytics from Appfigures, despite the app not functioning properly. He says KeyWatch even advertised its software using his promotional video — with his name still attached.
The App Store has a big problem
You: an honest developer, working hard to improve your IAP conversions. Your competitor: a $2M/year scam running rampant.
1/
— Kosta Eleftheriou (@keleftheriou) January 31, 2021
Eleftheriou has since embarked on an online crusade to bring more attention to the topic, fueled in part by Apple choosing to take down some of the apps he’s been highlighting but letting the developers behind those apps continue publishing to the App Store. Scores of other developers have begun chiming in with their own experiences, too, including notable Apple critics like Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson.
Some of these critics, including Hansson with regard to his company’s Hey email client, have accused Apple in the past of mistreating and overcharging developers using the App Store’s standard 30 percent cut of app downloads and in-app purchases. These critics see the scam situation as further proof that Apple profits off of these developers and therefore doesn’t take proper steps to moderate the platform and enforce its rules.
The subscription scam apps that Apple allow in the App Store really are bananas. While they’re busy hunting legitimate developers down for their pound of flesh, they’re letting these hyaenas strive on the savannah unopposed. https://t.co/NpsjjWC0CY
— DHH (@dhh) February 8, 2021
Apple has yet to respond publicly to Eleftheriou’s claims, though the company has removed KeyWatch and some of the other scam apps he’s brought attention to over the past week. But the issues are systemic, Eleftheriou says, and nothing short of an overhaul to how the App Store ranks software, measures trustworthiness, and roots out bad actors will remedy the issue. Until then, Eleftheriou says he’s going to keep sounding the alarm.
“I’m not gonna stop. Whenever I see a scam, I’m going to call them out,” he says. “I just can’t wait for some actual proper change from Apple to make me feel like I should concentrate on what I should be concentrating on, which is app development.”
He says a competing app store on the iPhone could help solve a lot of these issues. That’s the same line of argument Epic has used in its lawsuit against Apple over the removal of Fortnite. Epic and its chief executive, Tim Sweeney, have called for alternative marketplaces on iOS, as well as the ability for apps distributed through the App Store to use their own payment systems and not give Apple 30 percent of every transaction. After Epic deployed its own in-app payment system within Fortnite last summer, Apple removed the app for violating its rules. Epic is now suing both Apple and Google.
“In an ideal world, competition does have the tendency to sort a lot of things out, whether it’s pricing or enforcement of rules. Competition is like creativity; you get all these new ideas and hopefully the best get to the top,” Eleftheriou says. “The other way would be for developers to publicly share their stories as far and as wide as possible. The more users understand this is a problem, the more pressure there will be on Apple to act.”
Eleftheriou adds that he’s disappointed in Apple’s silence on the matter, though that’s only energized him further to continue speaking out. “It’s not just acting. I think Apple needs to, at the minimum, say something, acknowledge the issue and that they’re working on it,” he says. “Just staying silent about it is just falsely reinforcing this notion for consumers that App Store reviews and ratings are to be trusted. They are not.”
