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After a trademark dispute with broadcaster and British pay-TV Provider BSkyB – which owns the “Sky” trademark for TV services in the UK – Microsoft announced in January it would re-brand its cloud storage service, SkyDrive, to the new name OneDrive in order to erase confusion. However, despite this announcement, the name “SkyDrive” has remained top of most of the service’s access points – until now.
It appears Microsoft are finally acting on their claim; and starting today, all SkyDrive services are gradually being updated. So far, the website, mobile and desktop apps have all been updated to use the new OneDrive branding. Ironically, Windows 8 and 8.1 itself, as well as the recent Office Releases – which both incorporate the service for online file storage and retrieval – have yet to be updated and continue to refer to the service as “SkyDrive”, but we’re sure this will be corrected soon enough.
With the rebranding, Microsoft have apparently also seen fit to launch a new referral system to reward users for referring others to OneDrive, which echoes a similar system by another popular cloud storage platform, Dropbox. For each referral that subsequently joins OneDrive, Microsoft are offering a free 500MB increase to the referrer’s available storage, up to a maximum of 10 referrals. Another 3GB storage can be unlocked for free for accounts which utilise the OneDrive app on an iOS, Android or Windows Phone-powered smart phone. With the most recent update to the Android app, all three platform’s apps now offer an option to upload photos taken on the phone directly to OneDrive – and if you opt in, the extra 3GB storage will be added to your account.
Gaming development is like most types of business, in that you are always competing with other companies offering similar products to yours for a bigger slice of the current market share. Techniques, technologies and prototypes therefore are usually jealously guarded, which makes the decision reached by the developers of the games Star Citizen and Kingdom Come all the more rare, unusual and frankly quite inspiring in a few ways.
The two companies have entered into an unofficial partnership which sees them sharing information about certain tricks they’ve learned with the game engine (CryEngine) both games share, mutually benefiting both companies in the long run by leading to improved versions of both Star Citizen and Kingdom Come.
The move was detailed in a recent blog post by Star Citizen’s Chris Roberts highlighting not only the other game and its Kickstarter but the bond between the two companies as they trade information back and forth.
Kingdom Come doesn’t just look like a great game, though: it looks like something we on the Star Citizen team could learn from. The characters and outfits I saw working in-engine in the trailer impressed me so much that I contacted the team to talk about what was going on under the hood. Star Citizen doesn’t need peasants and knights… but it does need a robust character creation system for the persistent universe. And that technology is exactly what Warhorse is building for the CryEngine.
The good news is: the team at Warhorse isn’t just an incredible talented group of people… they’re also kindred spirits who are willing to share the work they’ve done! We will be sharing with them the tricks for working with CryEngine we’ve learned over the last 18 months and they will be letting us in on the secrets and the tech behind what they’re doing! I’ve always said that independent developers should stick together, and the potential good for both games that can come from this unofficial partnership is proof positive!
This lack of paranoia and suspicion is refreshing to see! Let’s hope both games benefit from this exchange of tips and tricks.
The new trailer contains a few more bits of action (including one horrifying moment with an octopus) alongside some new gags from its affable co-leads.
Despite Nick Offerman’s opening gag about noone giving a damn about the Jump Street reboot, we’re rather looking forward to seeing the boys back in action for round two. That said, it’s still a pretty great line…
Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller and co-starring the returning Ice Cube, 22 Jump Street will open in the UK on 6 June 2014.
What do you think of the new trailer? Tell us, below
The next patch update for Starbound has been released, but wait just a moment before you update your game. Acting too hastily could lose you your ship’s locker and fuel system.
The patch released last night is called ‘v. enraged Koala’, following Chucklefish’s tradition of naming their beta stages after angry marsupials and was released in two stages, an initial one and then one to add some of the new content that wasn’t included with the first patch. The major changes are engine tweaks that will allow Chucklefish to more easily add new biomes to the list already found upon the planets you can visit in game and make changes to existing worlds although they acknowledge that a future world wipe (but not character/ship wipe) could happen in the future. There’s also been a massive overhaul of the way the game is patched, allowing new content to be released when finished rather than having a chunk of content updates happening in one big patch as happens now (they say updates could be ‘nearly daily’).
New content include a greater variety of weapons for the Avian players/NPCs to wield, Valentine’s Day themed items, tech that can now be granted by armours, new death animations, dogs that can be captured (the first of the pet system! Hooray!) and most noticeably the microphone’s sounds are now being provided by ‘Smooth McGroove’.
However, as I said above hold off updating your game just yet. The original patch broke interactivity with beds and pilot seats and the hotfix applied to try and fix this issue has reportedly caused a number of players playing pre-existing saves to lose the locker on their ship and the fuel gauge that allows players to fuel their ships so they can travel to new systems and planets. Chucklefish have been very apologetic to those affected and a partial fix has already been applied to try and stop more players from losing theirs but it is still recommended that you make a back-up of your ship file and your worlds files in case the fix doesn’t work for you. Instructions on where to find these can be found on the blog post at playstarbound.com which I have linked below.
