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We initially heard about a team modding an RTX remaster of Half-Life 2 last August. Today, NVIDIA released a trailer giving fans a behind-the-scenes look at Orbifold Studios' efforts to apply more modern graphics tools to the iconic title. The video highlights the RTX Remix engine and how the team is using it to make visual upgrades to a game with an engine two decades old. They have examples of how they're creating more dynamic light sources, volumetric fog in moody areas, and full 3D detail on the objects in the environment. The crew at Orbifold still doesn't have a release date for their work, but as the 20th anniversary for Half-Life 2 approaches on November 16, it's possible that there may be something official in the works from Valve. No, not Half-Life 3. But YouTuber and veteran Valve reporter Tyler McVicker noticed that there is a new, password-protected branch of the game in Steam. Just based on the number of new test builds that have been pushed out on that branch, the new update seems more involved than the one the company released to mark the 25th anniversary of Half-Life 1 last year. So if you're itching to pick up the gravity gun again, this weekend might be the time to do it. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/heres-a-fresh-look-at-the-half-life-2-rtx-remaster-221321847.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
Google will stop serving political advertisements in the European Union. The decision, announced in The Keyword blog, is in response to an upcoming new rule for the bloc that "introduces significant new operational challenges and legal uncertainties for political advertisers and platforms." The company says the Regulation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising has an overly broad definition for political advertising and raised concerns that technical guidance around the policy may not be given until close to October 2025, when the rules will take effect. In addition to no longer serving that ad content ahead of next October, Google said that paid political advertisements will also not be allowed on YouTube in the EU. The company said that similar regulations have already led it to stop serving political ads in Canada, France and Brazil. Google's advertising and ad tech have been subjected to scrutiny by the European government in recent years. The company faced (but ultimately avoided) fines for "abusive" advertising practices in 2019, and last year was hit with antitrust accusations. And Google has also engaged in other eyebrow-raising behavior in the bloc. Just yesterday, the company began what it called a "small, time-limited test" to omit results from EU-based news publishers in search, Google News and the Discover feed.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-will-stop-serving-political-ads-in-the-eu-including-on-youtube-210604043.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
Valves Steam store is more than just a place to buy computer games online. Its an active community of gamers. Unfortunately, a sizable portion of those gamers are posting an unprecedented amount of hateful, racist and anti-Semetic content on the gaming sites cyber social gathering place Steam Community, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League. The organization found 1.83 million unique pieces of extremist or hateful content from 1.5 million unique users in 73,824 groups. The content included explicitly anti-Semitic symbols and tens of thousands of instances of users showing support for foreign terrorist groups. The online gaming community even included an alarming number of copypastas, more than half of which were variations of Nazi swastikas. ADL The report also found a significant number of Steam avatars with hateful symbols. Investigators uncovered 827,758 users with extremist or racist-signaling avatar images including the cartoon character Pepe the Frog in Nazi regalia or adorned with stereotypical tropes and looks, swastikas, the white supremacist skull or siege mask and the Nazi Eagle. Another 15,129 avatars contained images of flags, emblems or logos of terrorist groups, the majority of which referred to the jihadist group ISIS. The ADL even uncovered images that glorify violent extremists and violent hate crimes. The report found references to and stills from tragedies like the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand shooting and the stabbing of five people in Eskisehir, Turkey committed by an 18 year old wearing neo-Nazi imagery. Even the Collections and Mods community on the gamer gathering site contained hundreds of mods that contained hateful imagery. An unidentified user named after the Christchurch shooter Brian Tarrant took the Valve physics sandbox game Garrys Mod and made the Australian S**poster collection. The user recreated Tarrants body armor look and posted screenshots implying the character is killing Muslims just as Tarrant did in 2019. ADL Other users utilized the Garrys Mod game to create maps that also celebrated tragedies like the Columbine High School shooting and the Tops supermarket white supremacist shooting in Buffalo. The maps inspired even more racist comments and reactions such as make synagogue next and remember labs, subscribe to PewDiePie, a chilling reference to a comment Tarrant made on a livestream just before he committed his shooting. The ADL accused Valve, Steam's owner, of not taking enough action to remove or curb the use of these images in its communities. The report claims Valve has a highly permissive approach to content policy and only took action in rare notable cases. Steam has selectively removed extremist content, largely based around extremist groups publicized in reporting or in response to government pressure, the ADL report says. However, this has been largely ad hoc, with Valve failing to systematically address the issue of extremism and hate on the platform. Weve reached out to Valve for a comment on the ADLs report.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/adl-report-finds-steam-is-rife-with-racist-posts-and-images-203934592.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
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