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Submission + - Elite: Dangerous Dumps Offline Singleplayer

Submitted by Robotron23
Robotron23 writes: The developers behind the sequel to legendary videogame Elite has, to the anger and dismay of fans, dropped the offline singleplayer mode it promised. The game is due for full release in under a month. With the title having raised about $1.5 million from Kickstarter, and millions more in subsequent campaigns that advertised the feature, gamers are livid. A complaints thread on the official Elite forums has swelled to 450+ pages in only three days, while refunds are being lodged in the thousands. It is down to the discretion of Frontier, the game's developer, whether to process refund requests of original backers.

Submission + - IBM Plays SimCity with Portland Oregon

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Greg Lindsay reports that Portland Oregon will be the first city to use IBM's new app called Systems Dynamics for Smarter Cities containing 3,000 equations which collectively seek to model cities’ emergent behavior and help them figure out how policy can affect the lives of their citizens. The program seeks to quantify the cause-and-effect relationships between seemingly uncorrelated urban phenomena. "What’s the connection, for example, between ...obesity rates and carbon emissions?" writes Lindsay. "To find out, simply round up experts to hash out the linkages, translate them into algorithms, and upload enough historical data to populate the model. Then turn the knobs to see what happens when you nudge the city in one direction." One of the drivers of the “Portland Plan” is the city’s commitment to a 40 percent decrease in carbon emissions by 2030, which necessitates less driving and more walking and biking. Running the model planners discovered a positive feedback loop: More walking and biking would lead to lower obesity rates for Portlanders. In turn, a fitter population would find would find walking and biking a more attractive option. But as the field of urban systems gathers steam, it’s important to remember that IBM and its fellow technology companies aren’t the first to offer a quantitative toolkit to cities. In the 1970's RAND built models they thought could predict fire patterns in New York, and then used them to justify closing fire stations in NYC's poorest sections in the name of efficiency, a decision that would ultimately displace 600,000 people as their neighborhoods burned."

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