The good old bumblebee, known for scaring the hell out of you as it goes buzzing past your face, is now known as the King of Vision, thanks to recent research at the University of London. While the tried-and-true housefly still wears the crown for super-fast black-and-white vision processing, the bumblebee is the Overlord of Color Vision.

The lightning-fast color vision enables bees to zip through bushes and trees, escape predators, spot each other and otherwise deal with their world in fast forward. The trick to their fast vision is how many “snap shots” per second the color-detecting cells in bumblebees’ eyes take and send to their brains.

“The limiting factor is how fast the photo receptors can register a change,” explained bee vision researcher Peter Skorupski of Queen Mary, University of London. “So we measured the speed directly from the receptor.” In a human eye the receptors are the cells in the retina at the back of the eye.

“When we see something it seems instantaneous,” said Skorupski. “But there’s a lot of processing going on under the bonnet. In our case there can be a delay of tenth of a second before you register what you are seeing.”

Source

Blizzard is rolling out a new patch for the StarCraft II beta and, like most Blizzard patches, it takes a jackhammer to various skills, in some cases removing entire entire skills from units considered overpowered. Changelog below:

Balance Changes:Terran:

• Viking:
  • The armor value for this unit in Fighter Mode has decreased from 1 to 0.
  • The damage done by this unit in Fighter Mode has changed from 6 (+8 armored) to 10 (+4 armored).
• Reaper:
  • The damage done from D-8 Charges has decreased from 40 to 30.
  • The delay between attacks for D-8 Charges has decreased from 2.5 to 1.8.
• Orbital Command:
  • The build time for this upgrade has decreased from 50 to 35.

Protoss:

• Observer:
  • Gravitic Boosters: The cost of this research has decreased from 150 Minerals and 150 Vespene Gas to 100 Minerals and 100 Vespene Gas.
• High Templar:
  • Phase Shift: This ability has been removed from the game.
  • Feedback: New Ability. Drains all energy from the target unit and causes damage equal to the amount of energy drained.
• Colossus:
  • The building pathing radius for this unit has decreased from .75 to .5625.
• Mothership:
  • Vortex: The energy cost of this ability has increased from 75 to 100.
  • Vortex: The target radius of this ability has decreased from 3.0 to 2.5.
  • Temporal Rift: This ability has been removed from the game.
  • Wormhole Transit: This ability has been removed from the game.
  • Mass Recall: New Ability. Teleports all of the player’s units in the target area to the Mothership.
• Gateway:
  • The build time of this building has increased from 50 to 65.

Zerg:

• Infestor:
  • Fungal Growth: The damage done by this ability has decreased from 48 to 36.
  • Fungal Growth: This ability now prevents affected units from burrowing.
  • Neural Parasite: Functionality changed. The Infestor now channels this spell, which lasts 10 seconds or until the Infestor is destroyed. You can now target all units with this ability.
  • Terran Infestation: The ability’s energy cost has reduced from 50 to 25 and Infested Terrans now spawn 1 at a time.

Bug Fixes:

• Addressed an issue causing people to receive an “Internal Battle.net Error” message with their game client.
• Muting your microphone will no longer cause your microphone to be turned off in the operating system once the program has exited.
  • Please note that the voice chat functionality has only partially been implemented. There are many known issues with voice chat that we expect to address in a future patch.
• The “Medium” graphical settings were reconfigured to work better on appropriate machines. The video settings “auto-detect” functionality has been reset as a result.
• Added a frame rate limiter to the game menus to prevent some graphics cards from running at higher frame rates than necessary.
• Added GRB rating tags to the login menu for the Korean version of the Beta client.

Borderlands received its second DLC yesterday in the form of Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot. Mad Moxxi is a series of arena contests broken into rounds and waves, pitting players against an ever-strengthening army of foes.  There are several arenas on offer, plus three vending machines that sell great gear and perhaps best of all, a new locker system that allows players to permanetely store up to 12 items, seperate from your personal inventory. As an added bonus, Mad Moxxi will bestow two extra skill points on players who successfully complete specific challenges.

As it stands, Mad Moxxi is an excellent idea for DLC and a welcome addition to the Borderlands universe. However, there are a few issues popping up that are pissing people off, some of which are justified, others not so much.

The first thing players are noticing is the lack of experience points. People are wondering if there is a bug. There is no bug because you were never intended to earn experience playing Mad Moxxi, nor will you receive any weapon skills. Sounds like a bummer, but I actually find value in this. I play Borderlands exclusively with my brother over Xbox Live and as such, we’re careful not to play without the other so we don’t level our characters and complete quests without the other in tow. Prior to Mad Moxxi’s release, this meant we simply couldn’t play Borderlands unless we were both on and ready to go. Obviously I could start a new character for solo purposes, but that doesn’t interest me. So Mad Moxxi is an excellent addition in this regard, allowing me to play when I want with the character I want.

Besides, if you earned experience points in Mad Moxxi then you’d never have any reason to play the actual game, which defeats the purpose.

I keep seeing people bitch about the lack of money drops. I’m not experiencing this at all. Tons of money is dropping, even more so when I unleash Bloodwing. Perhaps you need to use a better mod that will increase your cash drops? Or perhaps you should find a co-op hunter to augment your income…

If its not money people are bitching about then its the lack of weapon drops. People are saying there are NO weapon drops, which is NOT true. They just happen to be rare and infrequent, which is good because like the XP issue, you’d have no reason to play the Borderlands campaign if Mad Moxxi showered you with gear.  Perhaps some players are not aware that after you successfully defeat a Boss then random weapons appear at a special location that you can acquire.

There are some genuine issues worthy of a good bitch, however, so Gearbox isn’t getting away easy here.

After each round the player has a few seconds to gather ammo and health that litterally drop from the sky and bounce around the level. Problem is, a big grey window appears mid-way through your collection run depicting the specific round modifier you will be facing next. This window is barely transparent and as such, make it near impossible to see where you are going. This could easily be fixed in a patch.

Another gripe is the weapons that drop after a Boss battle. I haven’t seen this happen so I can’t verify its existence, but seeing how the weapons spawn as they do, I can see this occurring: the weapons can sometimes get stuck at an elevated location the player is unable to reach. I imagine there is nothing worse than spotting some ultra rare gun you can’t reach, especially after a long battle. I’ll take it at face value that this bug exists and I am seeing enough people complain that it must have some merit. Gearbox will need to address this as soon as possible.

Other bugs being reported are some mobs not spawning late in a round or the round not ending when all the enemies are seemingly dead. Again, I have not seen this bug myself, but several people have complained so there must be something amiss. Considering the difficulty of achieving later rounds and the total lack of a save system, having the game fuck you because of a spawn bug is no fun and needs to be fixed ASAP.

So, yes, there are a few issues, some of which should have been addressed before Moxxi was released to gamers. Fortunately, the issues seem rare, though that doesn’t minimize the need for fast fixing.

I’m happy with Mad Moxxi and I’m going to get my 800-points out of the expansion, so I have few complaints.

Once again Modern Warfare 2 is making the news and not for a good reason. Unlike last week, which found players exploiting a bug that allowed an individual to explode, this time around we have something more nefarious: a bug that spreads like a virus, infecting all players who come into contact with the carrier.

According to reports, players get “infected” by unwittingly joining a private match hosted by a carrier. They then get hit by the same issue — unlimited ammo and no reloads — and can pass it on if the end up hosting any games themselves. Allegedly, it’s “spreading like an STD.”

This unique issue started out as a mod on the PC version of the game, which we spoke about yesterday. It has been transported to the Xbox 360 and put to more sinister work. Infinity Ward is apparently “working” on the issue, and it appears that Microsoft is wielding its banhammer for anybody caught employing it.

Obviously, Infinity Ward has fucked up once again. Worse, they are threatening bans (once again) for anyone found exploiting their crappy code. How about we ban Infinity Ward for not open beta-testing their product like they did with the original Modern Warfare?

Source

ARMA II will be a great game some day. It offers a ton of play options, a massive game world, oodles of realism, flight simulation, and more bugs than the Amazon Rain Forest. It’s a classic case of biting off more than the developer could chew. Three patches in, ARMA II is still a long way from stability.

Now, ARMA II has finally been patched to version 1.3, bringing with it a ton of fixes. Unfortunately, if you own the Steam version of the game, prepare for a real groaner. It seems the patch for the store-bought version of ARMA II is only 150-megs or so, but if you patch the Steam version, you need to download a whopping 4.5-gigs of data.

Bohemia Interactive says don’t blame them:

Hi everyone, the dedicated server exe will be relased later today hopefully. Please, be patient and stay tuned.

And, at last: please, don’t blame us for the steam update. As it was mentioned on several places and threads it’s a Steam issue. Instead of downloading just the difference data to be replaced inside of your pbo’s (normal D/L update does this exactly), Steam users must download the whole pbo’s and files affected be the update, which is about 4.3gigs in total.

By the way, we have the response from Steam, that they plan to implement more sophisticated method of updating games to avoid such situations.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

So, what’s new? Full list of fixes/changes on the flipside.

Changelog

Engine

• New: Functions getPosATL and setPosATL to allow controlling position relative to terrain.
• New: command line option -showScriptErrors introduced to show errors in scripts on-screen
• New: Direct analogue throttle and brake for airplanes now available.
• New: More flexible configuration of Flares in the config (brightness, size)
• New: Mission name (with
• indicated unsaved work) displayed in the mission editor
• New: Keyboard shortcuts in the mission editor
• Improved: better handling of gravitation for shots (esp. for grenades)
• Improved: Building destruction
• Improved: Better airplane HUD visibility both night and day
• Optimization: Reduced frame stutter near map borders.
• Hotfix: Players are forced to reconnect after MP Load on server.
• Fixed: no particles effect when hit object with destructNo
• Fixed: grenade could destroy a building just by impact
• Fixed: grenades may explode only on the final impact
• Fixed: when a grenade bounces on a ship deck, the proper particle effects is shown now
• Fixed: missiles should pass through vegetation
• Fixed: Player connected to loaded game was sometimes frozen.
• Fixed: Game crashed when launched on a system with more then 8 CPUs/cores.
• Fixed: Possible crash with laser designator active.
• Fixed: Sometimes crew of a close vehicle was visible through the vehicle.
• Fixed: Infinite looping of commands ‘Stop’ in radio.
• Fixed: Leaning ‘limits’ do not work in TrackIR.
• Fixed: Clients were often endlessly stuck in ‘Receiving…’ window after MP Load.
• Fixed: Rainbow could be visible even with sun below horizon.
• Fixed: 3D Editor – civilian and resistance units did not work correctly
• Fixed: Sea surface was not rendered in NE area out of map.
• Fixed: Terrain surface was sometimes using wrong parallax map.
• Fixed: Grenade could sometimes destroy a building just by impact
• Fixed: Radio messages sometimes echoed
• Fixed: Team switch did not work when player died
• Fixed: Reduced AI detecting slowly moving enemy vehicles by ear.
• Fixed: Prevent killed AI units reporting who killed them.
• Fixed: After respawn in MP, player’s tasks, diary content and skills are transferred to the new entity
• Fixed: Leaning ‘limits’ did not work with TrackIR
• Fixed: MP client frozen in Receiving… screen sometimes
• Fixed: Problems with saving and loading games in cooperative campaign

Missions

• Fixes and improvements in most of the campaign missions (Into the Storm, Harvest Red, Bitter Chill, Manhattan, Badlands, Dogs of War)
• Improved: autosave logic to not save when it was not safe
• Improved: Eye for an Eye in Scenarios

Modules

• Fixed: Warfare fast travel on clients was not using logistic values
• Fixed: Warfare money sending
• Fixed: Warfare HQ multiple reports
• Fixed: First-Aid: Action module caused healing scripts to run twice
• Fixed: Supply drop not ending (wrong vehicle class)
• New: First-Aid modules work with respawn
• New: First-Aid ability to stop healing
• New: Added ability to add Support Requests that do not expire.
• Improved: First-Aid modules more robust and faster
• Improved: Better support for side Resistance in SOM / ACM.

Data

• Fixed: Invisible driver in UAZ (MG and GL)
• Fixed: AI soldiers were able to hear extremely well
• Fixed: various minor problems on buildings
• Fixed: rocks destruction effect changed
• Fixed: penetrability of some vegetation
• Fixed: collision geometry of A_BuildingWIP
• Fixed: react FSM core conversations
• Fixed: cargo animations in LAV25
• Fixed: indicators in Ka52 when using NVG
• Fixed: cargo animations in BTR
• Fixed: Warfare keypoint on Chernarus