Valve has uploaded YouTube videos of all talks and panel discussions featured at this year’s recently concluded Steam Dev Days conference, offering developer-oriented insights into virtual reality, Early Access, and other emerging technologies.
The channel has also archived all of the Steam Dev Days talks from 2014 in a comprehensive playlist, giving developers an idea of how the industry has grown and changed in recent years.
Steam Dev Days is an annual conference hosted by Valve in which developers from around the world gather to discuss current industry events and trends. The event hosts multiple talks and panel sessions in which industry experts take the stage to discuss their craft and what they’ve learned over the previous year’s worth of work. The conference is open only to Steam-licensed developers, and excludes members of the press in order to encourage networking and collaboration among its attendees.
Featured presenters at this year’s event included Epic Games’ Wes Bunn, who discussed the difficulties involved in developing virtual reality games within Unreal Engine 4, and Unity Technologies’ Corey Johnson, who offered tips for developers starting VR projects in Unity.
Robin Meijer and Joost van Dongen from Ronimo Games later discussed games as a service, and how the approach defined their successful MOBA Awesomenauts. Other talks touch on topics ranging from gaming psychology to server hosting.
Many featured talks focus on Steam itself, including sessions discussing the Steam inventory system, the Steam controller, and SteamVR. Virtual reality is another common theme among many of this year’s presenters, and individual sessions covered specific subjects like graphical fidelity, VR philosophy, and VR’s future.
In addition to Valve’s uploaded series of YouTube videos and playlists, all of this year’s Steam Dev Days talks are available for free viewing via Steam.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.