AMD have been surprisingly quiet in recent weeks, seemingly pinning much of its business plan this year on its upcoming Zen line of processors; but it seems the time is being spent very deliberately and cleverly, with a heavy focus on Research and Development to improve its CPU Technology further. And if the most recent leak, which comes courtesy a CERN engineer who gave a talk at the IT Technical Forum on market trends concerning data centres, is to be believed, it may be about to pay off in a spectacular fashion.

Basing his claims on what evidently seems to be information supplied to CERN by AMD themselves, the engineer stated that Zen CPUs will benefit from Symmetrical Multi-Threading, which would seem to be AMD’s own version of Intel’s Hyper-Threading. More shocking, however, is that CPUs in the Zen line will apparently feature up to 32 physical cores in a single package, though this is spread over two 16-core modules within the same die – effectively two chips in one.

If that wasn’t enough, Zen will also apparently support 8-channel DDR4, meaning a computer with one of these monsters installed could feature 8 separate RAM cards. Assuming an 8GB card in each slot, this means a potential maximum of 64 Gigabytes of DDR4 RAM.. excuse me while I pick my jaw off the floor.

The CERN engineer also reiterated previously leaked information about the Zen CPUs, which mainly focused on the point that these new CPUs are said to be able to handle 40% more instructions per clock than the current Excavator cores. Sadly, this was really all the information there was to glean from this leak – there is no news of a release date for any processor within the Zen line; and it is reasonable to assume that this monster processor is likely to wait to later in the launch cycle. For the first processor out of the gate, it is suggested that the line will start with the FX desktop CPUs – which are only expected to come in the now-standard 4, 6 and 8-core variants.

AMD appear to be seriously upping the game for CPU manufacturers and going far beyond anything done before if the claims are to be believe (and if you can’t trust an engineer at one of the major centres for scientific and technological research, who CAN you trust?). Could this spark some rivalry with the other major player in the scene, Intel? One thing’s for sure – this should only be good news for the processor market and its customers.

For their new game, Ubisoft constructed a game engine they called Snowdrop. It’s supposed to help support its lobby-free multiplayer functions along with the open-world, dynamic weathers and so on. Now we could see it being used for some of Ubi’s other IPs in the future.

Head of IP at Ubisoft Massive, Martin Hultberg, was interviewed and revealed that Snowdrop could be seen in other franchises in future.

“Internally we try to share as much technology as possible between the studios. It’s just more efficient that way. In our case we developed the Snowdrop Engine from the ground-up because we needed middleware that could run on the new consoles and PC, while doing everything we wanted to do with the open world, the weather, time of day and such features. Now we’ve made that engine available to other studios, and not just the Clancy teams. Any Ubisoft team can use Snowdrop now.”

Also, the Division’s ‘Dark Zone’ could see the functionality traveling across to other teams under Ubisoft’s umbrella as well in future. “I think that feature could definitely be incorporated into other Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed. It’s a really immersive feature that I think fits with pretty much all Ubisoft’s IPs.”

Ubisoft have recently announced their intention not to make a new Assassin’s Creed game in 2016, so I wonder if a desire to build their next game in that series upon this game engine is a part of that? It’ll be interesting to see if that theory holds water when the next one is announced.

As I’ve noted many times in my Kickstarter articles, the crowd-funding of games doesn’t always go smoothly. Some games even fail to reach target even with well known names attached, and one such game was the spiritual successor to Giants: Citizen Kabuto – First Wonder. Now the developers having exhausted other funding options have decided to shelf the project for the time.

An e-mail sent to backers of the failed Kickstarter has been posted to Reddit and in it the developer details the journey since the failure of their campaign.

“After the kickstarter failed we looked for other opportunities and partnerships to keep the development going. While your donations helped we were still self-funding 95% of the project directly out of pocket. The amount of investment needed to get the game to the next stage was too large for us to handle by ourselves. We had some interesting conversations but regardless of how excited some were for the project it came down to numbers and risk. For publishers, the kickstarter showed we just didn’t have or couldn’t find the audience.”

So for now the developer Rogue Rocket is going dormant while the team seek out work and focus on “other projects and jobs”. On the subject of donations towards the game the devs say it’s important that they sort out that, either through refunds or in the form of keys for the First Wonder demo or Gunpowder which was their previous release – if you’ve made a donation you can choose which option you’d prefer.

“I’m still very passionate about making games like these” the email concludes. “I always will be. They are unique and therefore rather hard to sell but once we get a foot hold I think they’ll be here to stay. I remain undeterred but it’s clearly been too many years since Giants and MDK and If I want to build games like First Wonder then I have to start off much smaller, simpler and grow a new audience. I have such a game in mind.”

So, it seems that despite setback First Wonder might even one day become a thing. It’s nice to see small developers not giving up on something they love.

Plague Inc: Evolved, successor to the highly successful 2012 iOS game Plague Inc., is out of early access and into official release as of 18th feb. 2016 for PC, Mac, Linux.  The game features many devastating ways to exterminate the human population of Earth.  It is hailed as a “highly authentic simulation of a world-ending pathogen”, so realistic that the developer was invited to the Center for Disease Control to speak about the game’s infection models.

Plague Inc. boasted a staggering 65,000,000+ players, and Plague Inc: Evolved has already sold over 800,000 copies before even leaving early access.

The game boasts a plethora of features, including:
10 different types of diseases, including the use of bio-weapons, mind control, and zombies.
20 Scenarios; spread a plague during an ice age, handle new strains of older diseases, and many more challenges!
Steam Workshop support where over 10,000 players have already created their own scenarios, worlds, and diseases.

The latest update brings multiplayer into the mix, where players can either join up in Co-Op to eradicate the world together, or compete against one another or AI to wipe out humanity and each other.

Plague Inc: Evolved by Ndemic Creations is now available on Steam!

XCOM 2’s release was quite good as far as the launches of big-name games has gone in recent years. No big issues, although some have reported performance issues that affected their gameplay by tkaing framerates down below what they should have been. And in a game that is all about getting things done in as few turns as possible… it sort of ruins the immersion, you know?

Last week publisher 2K Games acknowledged the issues, saying that they were “gathering more information from users” and today Lead Designer Jake Solomon said that the developer Firaxis was “working very furiously” to get XCOM 2 running smoothly.

He also said that the issues hadn’t been caught before launch purely because it doesn’t seem to effect every computer and every build. Where as some less powerful computers have reported no problems, so high-end expensive custom rigs have been seeing issues left, right and centre.

“We didn’t catch this stuff in compatibility testing. We’re fully, fully accountable for the product in people’s hands, so we certainly take responsibility.”

He admits that some of the camera pauses after events take far too long, and that all the issues with the stuttering and framerates annoy the developers as much as the players.  While he couldn’t say when the fixes would be coming he was adamant that Firaxis was working hard on them and that there would be “fixes coming soon.”