Technology - Google News

Mobile Carriers Left Out of Home Automation Party - Light Reading

Posted: 20 Dec 2019 11:11 AM PST

Amazon, Apple and Google, along with the Zigbee Alliance, have started a new working group to develop a royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among the various smart home devices from Amazon and others.

Despite the multitude of companies involved in this Connected Home over IP project, it doesn't include any mobile operators.

Companies involved include IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy and Wulian, as well as the major connected home players.

"By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services, and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification," reports a joint statement on the project.

The working group says it will launch a preliminary specification in late 2020. This spec "aims to make it easier for device manufacturers to build devices that are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, and others," says the consortium. The forthcoming protocol will work across multiple networks, such as WiFi, Bluetooth Low Energy and cellular.

The project is a rare moment of agreement for three of the top tech companies in the world. The working group deal is especially unusual for Apple and Google, which appear to be putting aside years of heated competition to create this smart device standard.

At present, however, it appears that there will be no mobile operators involved in crafting this smart device protocol. Major carriers, like AT&T, have certainly taken part in their own connected home efforts, but are not involved in this effort.

AT&T appears to be working to somewhat similar aims through its project with ex-Microsoft man Ray Ozzie and his startup Blue Wireless. "Notecard will enable developers of a broad range of commercial and industrial products to embed connectivity that just works, near globally," says AT&T of its work with the startup.

The carrier, as well as many operators in the smart home and IoT areas, is still focused on delivering purely cellular connectivity and doesn't deal in the IP layer, as the tech giants' latest project does.

— Dan Jones, Mobile Editor, Light Reading

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PT Modder Escapes House and Walks the Streets of Silent Hills - IGN - IGN

Posted: 21 Dec 2019 01:00 PM PST

Remember the modder who discovered that in PT, the vengeful ghost of Lisa was actually always behind you in the game? Well, that modder is back to inject even more nightmare fuel into our horror-loving hearts, as his latest video reveals an explorable version of the Silent Hills street we saw Norman Reedus walk in the demo's ending.

YouTuber Lance McDonald's latest video (via Eurogamer) shows his modding handiwork in action, as he manages to escape the confines of PT's haunted house and walk the streets of Silent Hill for a surprisingly long distance.

Credit: Lance McDonald on YouTube

McDonald achieved this feat by manipulating the game's code, he says. Originally, PT achieves the house's endless loop effect by linking together separate map files, allowing different variations of the same hallway. McDonald simply changed the code in this process and swapped in the code for the Silent Hill street, since it's all rendered in-game for that final cutscene.

Credit: Lance McDonald on YouTube

McDonald evidently learned the hard way that Kojima Productions obviously never intended for players to walk around that space. Since there's no collision physics, the player character simply falls beneath the "earth" and continues falling until, suddenly, Lisa appears and strangles the player to death, just like in the normal game. It appears that the Kojima Productions team accounted even for this scenario.

McDonald remedied this problem by simply changing the code to get the player camera to float a small distance above its usual height, which allowed him to continue on down the Silent Hill street. What he found was a fairly typical assortment of vaguely suburban minutia, including cars, trees, and a number of large apartment buildings. It's all shrouded in darkness, and each street seems to be lined with different kinds of garbage or worn down construction equipment.

"As is common in Silent Hill, there's a perpetual feeling of the entire world both being under construction and long since abandoned," McDonald says in his video. "The street signs, roadblocks, and scaffolding throughout help to create this unwelcoming atmosphere."

McDonald's journey down the road ends with an equally spooky walk underneath a bridge before signing off.

"I found it fairly amazing to have a chance to explore a somewhat entirely new physical space in PT, something handcrafted by the team at Kojima Productions while in-house at Konami as an official part of the mainline Silent Hill series. While there's no way to tell what the future holds, this may be the final canonical rendition of Silent Hill ever to exist, so I hope you feel that I helped in some way today by giving you a chance to explore along with me."

Credit: Lance McDonald on YouTube

McDonald was also responsible for discovering a seemingly unused scenario in PT where Lisa's headless corpse could be found in the bathtub. It's unclear if PT holds any more mysteries now that it's been five years since its release, and now that modders like McDonald have mined it for (seemingly) all its worth, but hope (and murderous ghosts) spring eternal.

If you're looking for some horror to fill your holidays, check out our favorite horror games of the PS4/Xbox One generation.

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