firehose

By Craig Pearson on August 15th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.

Deep breath. Take it right in. Expand those lungs, fill them with air until you feel like you’re going to burst. Now exhale. Feel your body contract as your breath heaves out of it. Remember that feeling, because it was taken in a pre-Space Hulk world. At midnight the game unlocks on Steam, and from then on each breath will be tainted with the smell of oil, death, burning Genestealer flesh, and if you live anywhere near a Lush shop, the lingering aroma of boutique soap. Not even death and war can cover that smell up.

I know a fair few people who are watching their clocks right now. Their expectations for Full Control’s recreation of the classic board game seem ridiculously high, but then Alec’s short time with it was enough for him to quit RPS for three months and sit at Steam just waiting for it. He’ll be back, but he won’t be the same man. Everyone who sees it comes away goggley eyed and dripping with the enthusiasm. Lead developer Thomas Lund has that effect when he demos it.

Here’s his baby’s launch trailer.

Where will you be at 12.01am on Friday the 16th of August?

Microsoft is revealing the next part of its Skype strategy today by confirming it plans to bundle its voice and video calling service into Windows 8.1. While the plans had been previously rumored, and a recently leaked near-final Windows 8.1 build demonstrated the integration, Microsoft is officially confirming the bundling today. The Skype application will take the place of Microsoft's Windows 8 Messaging app, providing voice, video, and instant messaging.

The announcement isn't surprising given the company's integration with the Xbox One, Outlook.com, and even the Office Outlook desktop email client. Windows 8.1's Skype integration includes the ability to answer voice and video calls from the lock screen, a change that's designed for the upcoming 7- and 8-inch tablets. Microsoft says the Skype bundling is part of "more than 20 new and improved Microsoft apps and services that come as part of Windows 8.1."

A court clerk who helped exonerate a man wrongly imprisoned for rape was fired in June, and now she's speaking out about the ordeal. Robert Nelson was convicted of rape in 1984. After two previous motions for DNA tests that could clear his name were rejected, 70-year-old clerk Sharon Snyder decided to step in and better his odds. She provided Nelson's sister with a successful DNA motion from another case, giving Nelson a better idea of how to properly seek the tests. His third request was granted, and ultimately Nelson was cleared of a 1984 rape conviction; he'd been serving time for the crime since 2006.

Fired for providing a public document

But for her good deed, Snyder was fired from her position nine months before she was due to retire. Jackson County Circuit Judge David Byrn said Snyder had gone too far in assisting Nelson, violating a number of court rules in the process. Specifically, by providing Nelson's sister with a motion that could help her brother's case, Snyder was found to violate Canon Seven, which the judge said "warns against the risk of offering an opinion or suggested course of action." Thankfully Snyder's pension remained intact despite the forced exit, and in an interview on MSNBC, she says she'd do it all over again. "I think that the law should be changed, that judges should be taken out of the mix on deciding these DNA motions, and they should automatically be granted."

Last month, the FBI launched an internal investigation that will see the bureau revisit over 2,000 cases that hinged on hair sample evidence. The study will examine "whether analysts exaggerated the significance" of those samples and seek to uncover any cases where results were reported inaccurately. DNA tests, the same tool that helped Robert Nelson find freedom, will be provided in instances where the FBI discovers itself to be at fault.

BattleHawk, a five-pound flying bomb that can wait for a half-hour before striking its GPS- and video-designated victim.

Sean Gallagher

WASHINGTON—At this week's AUVSI Unmanned Systems conference in Washington DC, while flocks of vendors vied for attention with their small unmanned systems technology, Textron Defense Systems unveiled a small drone with an added special surprise—it's also a flying hand grenade.

Designed to be carried by an infantry squad, the BattleHawk is an approximately five-pound collapsible drone with an onboard video camera, all packed in a spring-loaded launch tube. The battery-powered BattleHawk can stay in the air for as long as 30 minutes and can be controlled from up to five kilometers away.

Those characteristics alone don't match some of the other small-unit surveillance drones that have been in service for much of the past decade. But that's because BattleHawk isn't designed to be a persistent eye in the sky—it's a "loitering munition."

Yahoo's redesigned weather app for iOS has been receiving praise and accolades for its gorgeous design and usability all year. In fact, the updated weather app included with iOS 7 appears to borrow more than a few ideas from Yahoo's version. Apple even recognized Yahoo's design chops with a Design Award at this year's WWDC. Now Yahoo is bringing that same design sense and feature set to Android.

The updated Yahoo Weather for Android, available across the world today, offers the same full bleed design as its iOS counterpart, and similarly crisp typography. Background images are handled by Flickr, and are specific to each location. In addition to the basic weather reports it previously offered, the app now provides a wealth of weather data, including 10-day forecasts, hour-by-hour predictions, chance of precipitation, wind and pressure, moon phases, UV patterns, sunrise and sunset times, an an interactive map. It also has a set of widgets that work on the home or lock screen, as well as a persistent notification in the status bar if you want it.

Yahoo Weather can sync saved locations from a Yahoo account and provide severe weather alerts. It also supports landscape viewing to get a better look at the Flickr photos on display. Needless to say, weather reports on Android just got a whole lot better looking. The updated Yahoo Weather will be available for free in the Google Play Store today.

I realize I’m probably in the minority, but to me, the iPad is a lot more than a consumption device; it’s a real computer. Sure, it has all the benefits that usually get touted whenever tablets come up — light weight, small size, long battery life. But there's more to it. There's the clarity and focus you get from the single window, and the speed and ease of the touch interface. There are limitations, like the lack of sophisticated software you need to really be efficient when you're working at a computer. But developer Ole Zorn is showing the world just how powerful of a tool the iPad can be for getting "real" work done with his Markdown editing opus, Editorial.

It makes automation simple enough that non-programmers can do it

This isn't a simple app, but that’s not what it sets out to be. It is an incredibly nimble and customizable editor and previewer for writing in Markdown, a lightweight markup language that makes it easy to add the kinds of formatting you see on the web and in rich text documents (bold, italics, hyperlinks, etc). But even that sells it short. I would call Editorial a laboratory for carving up and reassembling text in the fastest, most flexible, most natural way possible. The comparisons to desktop text editors like Sublime Text are obvious, but Editorial succeeds where Sublime doesn’t; it makes automation simple enough that non-programmers can do it.

Because the text you write in Editorial can easily be converted into HTML, it’s an ideal tool for writing on the web, but Markdown is readable enough that it's suitable for everyday tasks, too. Over the past couple of years, there has been an explosion in the popularity of Markdown editing apps for both OS X and iOS, but where Editorial stands apart is in its embrace of power, giving experienced users the tools to work with the speed and comfort you’d ordinarily find only in a desktop editor.

Navigating inside Editorial is quick and simple once you figure out where everything is. An immediate standout feature is being able to scrub over the row of convenience keys on top of the keyboard to slide the cursor along the current line, letting you insert text without having to go through Apple's tap-and-hold rigamarole. (The idea works so well, it makes me wonder why Apple hasn’t implemented the feature itself.) The convenience keys behave how you’d expect from a real text editor with quotes, parentheses, and asterisks wrapping the selected content. And just like implementations in iA Writer, Byword, and others, the text in the editor gives you a live preview. Formatting characters like asterisks don’t disappear, but they’re rendered in faint grey, bold text appears bold, links are blue, etc.

The only thing holding you back is your imagination

The basic editing functions are great, but the really impressive part of Editorial is its support for scripting and automation. The developer, Ole Zorn, is the man behind the groundbreaking Pythonista for iOS, and the app’s fingerprints are visible everywhere. Under the hood of Editorial is a complete Python interpreter and more than a dozen libraries for operating on images, scripting the editor, making HTTP requests, and using the iPad’s clipboard. As long as you know a little bit of the language, the only thing holding you back is your imagination. But if you've never written a line of code (or even if you have), Editorial has another, more accessible way to create custom actions called Workflows.

If you’ve ever used OS X's Automator you know everything you need about Workflows. Tapping on the wrench in the top-right corner of the editor brings up a list of pre-fabbed actions for doing things like emailing the contents of your document (as nicely formatted HTML, if you prefer), producing a list of statistics including word and character counts, and searching Wikipedia. Tapping the "+" button pulls up a drag-and-drop interface for building your own actions out of configurable blocks. Exploring the built-in options is a great way to start building your own; for example, it’s trivial to tweak the Wikipedia workflow to search the domain of your choice, like theverge.com. And there are tons of other features I don't have the space to talk about in detail: a bookmarks bar for quickly getting at your favorite workflows, Dropbox support (including a great interface for diffing versions of a file), and TextExpander-style snippets.

It would be hard to imagine a better editor

So is Editorial right for you? Honestly, even though it works well as a basic editor for plain text, people looking for something simple to jot down ideas with might be more at home with something like Byword. But if you want to turn your iPad into an efficient writing tool and have five minutes to learn the Markdown syntax, it would be hard to imagine a better editor, let alone recommend one that actually exists. The flexibility you get from the combination of workflows, Python scripting, and snippets is truly transformative, and as more applications begin to implement URL schemes for inter-app communication, the possibilities will continue to grow.

In the brief time I’ve spent with the app I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. Editorial is the new king of iPad text editors, and at $4.99, is easily one of the best values in the App Store.

Google's controversial Street View project has photographed millions of miles of roads and paths across the world, but that doesn't mean everyone has accepted the company's camera-equipped cars with open arms. A group of 20 villagers from Sa-eab, in Northern Thailand, blocked one of the cars, interrogated the driver, and then demanded he swear on a statue of Buddha that he wasn't up to no good, according to the Associated Press. Why the hostile response? The villagers weren't opposed to Google's mission, but they were concerned that the driver may have been scouting for a planned dam project that locals have vehemently protested. A representative for the villagers told the wire agency in a written apology that they were "extremely worried and there had been so many repeated cases that convinced the villagers to believe someone was trying to survey the area in disguise."

Google's official response to the incident suggests the company is unsurprised by such disturbances at this point: "Embarking on new projects, we sometimes encounter unexpected challenges, and Street View has been no exception." Earlier this year, imagery discovered by Street View users suggesting one of the cars plowed over a donkey sparked a bit of controversy, but Google's harshest criticism has come from US and UK regulators after it was discovered that the cars were snooping on Wi-FI networks as they passed through neighborhoods.

By Alex Rubens on August 15, 2013 at 12:00p

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Obsession and internalization of Missile Command

Obsession and internalization of Missile Command

Theurer's internalization throughout all this stemmed from spending every waking minute of his life on Missile Command for nearly six months, he says. "When I make a game, that game is what I think about almost exclusively for the entire development period of that game."

"For each section of the game, I imagine it in many different scenarios; I design and program the more promising scenarios and in the end, choose the one that feels the best," he says. "I imagined missiles streaking in, imagined the explosions, both with the sounds and the visuals, over and over, day after day until it felt just right."

For him, this wasn't just obsessing over every line of code, but doing so for days at a time without sleeping. "It's hard to get into that state of mind and once you get there, I hate to leave," he says.

To combat the need of constantly starting and stopping his workflow, Theurer chose to forgo the typical eight-hour workday to work on Missile Command until he couldn't stay awake any longer.

When he finally reached the point of exhaustion and sleep deprivation, he would go home and sleep for a while before returning to Atari to do it all over again.

This was only amplified during field test periods.

During this time at Atari, each game had to be field tested before it was greenlit for general arcade audiences. This meant that a build had to be up and running so that a machine could quietly be placed in an unsuspecting bar or arcade.

At the time, this was a great deal for arcade owners. They were able to keep all quarters from the machine — which, at the time, were normally split between the owner and cabinet operator — and, in return, all the arcade owner had to do was keep a tally of the players that used the machine during a certain period of time, and do so quietly. As soon as word got around that a machine was being field tested, competitors would attempt to come in and research the machine to create and distribute a clone prior to full release.

This field test allowed the team to silently track how players were reacting to not only the base game, but also changes made to the gameplay in between field tests conducted over the course of development.

One of the biggest changes made because of reactions gathered during a standard field test was the removal of a light-filled panel on the Missile Command cabinet above the player's head. This panel displayed flashing lights that served as status indicators for each of the in-game bases, but during the field test, Theurer found that it distracted players too much. "They kept looking up to check the status lights and stuff, so we just chopped off the whole top of the cabinet and saved ourselves a whole lot of money and it didn't hurt the gameplay any," says Theurer.

As evidenced by this major cabinet redesign, this was a vital phase in testing how the game would be received by the average arcade player, but often left Theurer working for days on end without any sleep, almost ceasing to function at one point. "I remember one time where I had a field test and I had been up for four days in a row. I actually got the game ready to go, I was tired and I couldn't work the machine that burned the ROMs anymore, because I couldn't remember how to punch the buttons on the keyboard."

Instead of sleeping and coming back another day, Theurer continued to work at it, opting to call in a favor to finish the job on time. "I had to invite one of my buddies in to work the keys. I explained and he worked the buttons for me," he says.

Theurer's constant strides for perfection left him working his body to the point that Missile Command's premise started to manifest itself in his subconscious, sneaking into his dreams and turning them to nightmares.

Tempest

Theurer's penchant for taking creative influence from nightmares continued in his 1981 release of arcade classic Tempest. In fact, the game was ultimately saved from the cutting-room floor by a redesign that spawned from a recurring nightmare of his.

Tempest started as a completely different game than the game we know today; it was first-person Space Invaders. It was something that Theurer had always wanted to do, so he started on it after the completion of Missile Command.

Theurer met with marketing and engineering teams at Atari multiple times throughout development to show them a working prototype build of the game. Everyone played it and thought it was OK, but it didn't stand out.

At the time, if it wasn't going to be the hottest game in the arcade, they weren't going to make it, says Theurer. Theurer's team and the marketing team had a serious discussion about scrapping the idea completely halfway through the development cycle.

Theurer stepped in. "Well, I've got this other idea that's sort of related," he recalls saying.

Theurer grew up in a home where he was not allowed to watch movies. However, one summer in the fifth grade while away at patrol camp, he saw a movie about monsters coming out of a hole from the center of the Earth and attacking humans. This imagery stuck with him.

"That movie haunted me over the years," says Theurer. "When I was pondering what to do with my first-person Space Invaders prototype, the thought struck me that I could simply take the 3D plane with its vanishing point, wrap it into a cylinder (the hole in the ground) and have the monsters come up and out of the cylinder, much like the monsters in that old movie."

It didn't take long for him to convert the initial prototype to this new idea and for it to become a hit internally.

He kept his initial design philosophy in the back of his head and made some core changes to the fundamental nature of it to construct what players know today as Tempest.

"I basically just took Space Invaders and wrapped the surface into a circle," Theurer says. "Monsters come down the tunnel at you, out of the hole, and you [try] to kill them before they [get] out."

The mental toll

The mental toll

Barry Krakow, M.D., a sleep disorder specialist and authority on nightmares, says that Theurer's reoccurring nightmares of a nuclear war likely have to do with his constant dedication to working on the game for days on end during this six-month period. "Things attended to with great intensity during the day frequently appear in our dreams," Krakow says.

With Theurer's days no longer confined to 24-hour periods, the mixture of horrific imagery and constant internalization caused Theurer's nightmares to surface. "I think the haunting nightmares were a byproduct of working on the subject matter," says Theurer.

These nightmares weren't all bad though, as Theurer eventually used their influence to shape the direction and tone of the game's ending.

Forgoing the traditional "game over" taunt after a loss, Missile Command opted for something much more ominous, simply "THE END" as your cities lay destroyed in an endless nuclear war. "[These nightmares] probably motivated me to create the final 'THE END' explosion," says Theurer.

The message of Missile Command — straight from Theurer — was simple: In the end, all is lost. There is no winner.

Armageddon

Missile Command wasn't originally supposed to be called Missile Command, but rather, Armageddon.

As Calfee pointed out, no one knew what armageddon meant at the time. "The management, themselves, didn't know what the word meant and they thought none of the kids would."

The team loved the name, but eventually, the decision was no longer its to make. "From the very top came the message, 'We can't use that name, nobody'll know what it means, and nobody can spell it,'" said Calfee, Theurer recalls.

The name didn't just sound cool. It was meant to drive home just what nuclear war meant.

On August 1st, a space simulator called Star Citizen raised their 15 millionth dollar. It was enough to fund the first installment of the game and put the developers on track for the full $21 million they need to finish the whole thing. Along the way, backers will get access to exclusive ships and early peeks at game modes that are still in development.

The story has all the elements of a classic Kickstarter or Indiegogo success story: an established name (Roberts created the classic Wing Commander series) comes back from obscurity and reconnects with a rabid fan base that decides to fund a new project directly.

"It's mostly meant for one-off creative projects."

The only difference is, they didn't need a platform. Star Citizen did have a Kickstarter, netting a full $2 million, but the bulk of the fundraising happened on their own site, where the team built its own donation meter and collected donations directly. That required a little more logistical work, but also let them wriggle out of Kickstarter's 5 percent fee — which in this case, would have cost the project a hefty $750,000.

With the concept and process of a successful crowdfunding campaign now established in the mainstream, projects are increasingly bypassing the services that pioneered large-scale crowdfunding and simply going to the fans directly. Soylent, the infamous food substitute, raised $700,000 on its own site. "We didn't really fit into Kickstarter's design," says Soylent CEO Rob Rhinehart. "It's mostly meant for one-off creative projects. If you want to raise funding for an idea or a business like us, then Kickstarter is not really amenable to that."

Kickstarter's fee would have cost the project $750,000

Rhinehart turned to his Y Combinator classmates at Crowdhoster, which was working on its own plug-and-play crowdfunding software. Soylent still had to pay for the software, but the fee was much lower than it would have been for a marketplace like Kickstarter or Indiegogo — and most funders never knew the difference. "A lot of people still referred to it as a Kickstarter, even if it wasn't on the site," Rhinehart says.

"It will be a simple thing, as simple as launching a blog."

In other cases, projects have turned to independent crowdfunding to get around Kickstarter's tightening terms of service. Scout CEO Dan Roberts launched his smart-lock project just weeks after a similar product, Lockitron, had been kicked off the platform for terms-of-service violations. In a clarifying blog post, Kickstarter placed new restrictions on hardware projects, banning product simulations or renderings and placing Scout in a difficult spot. But after moving the campaign to an independent platform, Roberts found the alternative wasn't as bad as he thought. "You do give up Kickstarter's established base of users," Roberts says, "but you gain more flexibility, and you're saving a decent chunk of money." In addition to the money, Scout was able to keep pre-orders open after the project hit its fundraising goal, as well as hold onto valuable customer data that Kickstarter blocks on privacy grounds.

At the same time, the market for white-label crowdfunding software has seen surprising growth in recent years. InvestedIn makes crowdfunding software on a licensing model, and has hosted $31 million in crowdfunding deals since it launched in 2011. CEO Alon Goren says most of that has come in the last year. It's not much compared to the $320 million that was pledged through Kickstarter in 2012, but as crowdfunders learn more about their options, Goren thinks the independent option will become the default. "It will be a simple thing, as simple as launching a blog," he says, "It’s just a matter of time."

Crowdfunding doesn't belong to Kickstarter

The hardest work has already been done, now that Kickstarter has pioneered the idea of crowdfunding. In the four years since the company's launched, it’s become a commonly used term — but crowdfunding doesn’t belong to Kickstarter. Now that the practice is established, anyone can try their luck, and Kickstarter will be competing with all the newcomers for market dominance.

The site still has plenty of advantages. Both Scout and Soylent pointed to Kickstarter's aggressive marketing efforts as a potential benefit. When contacted by The Verge, Kickstarter reps pointed to the site's active internal community as worth the price of admission, with more than one in four backers returning to back another project, along with an array of anti-fraud tools and economies of scale. If you’re not a coder or you don’t want to deal with payment processing, there are many reasons to stay in a manicured marketplace. But the days when people refer to every campaign as "a Kickstarter" may be numbered.

A photo series has shown the dramatic transformation that Val Kilmer undergoes to become one of the country's most-famous authors, Mark Twain. Over the course of two hours, Kilmer has prosthetics, hair, make up, and a very Twain-like moustache applied until only his eyes reveal his true identity.

The transformation is for Citizen Twain, a one-man show currently playing at the Pasadena Playhouse, California. "There's a part of the makeup that starts to become the way I understand Mark Twain," Kilmer tells the LA Times, "he's old in my story... old people are often frustrated because their movement becomes restricted." You can see the full transformation take place in a 28-photo album over on Imgur.