Campo Santo Aware of Firewatch's Poor PS4 Frame Rate, Working on a Fix

Reviews for the heavily anticipated first-person exploration adventure game Firewatch are finally out and for most part they've been favourable. But there has been a bone of contention for most critics on the eve of its launch. The game's technical performance, particularly on the PS4 isn't everything it should be what with a choppy and inconsistent frame rate.

It's something the developers of Campo Santo are aware of and are looking to fix at the earliest.

"FWIW [For What It's Worth], we're currently talking to both Sony and Unity and we're all working hard to to optimise performance of Firewatch on PS4," posted a developer from the studio on popular gaming forum NeoGAF. The comment explained the complexity involved in solving such a conundrum. Namely because it involves not just Sony, but engine maker Unity (as the game runs on Unity) as well.

"It's tricky, because it really requires all three partners working together to improve -- it's not something we can tackle on our own, unlike a game bug -- but we'll definitely continue to patch all platforms with every content and performance fix we can over time! To summarise: we're on it," the post continues.

While it's heartening to see such a prompt response for a game that not readily available for the general public, it was also met with derision. Some claim it won't be fixed.

"It's a Unity game. It won't and cannot be fixed. I'm positive of that. Not a single console Unity game with launch performance issues has been fixed with a patch," said forumgoer dark10x.

The skepticism is not without merit. Past titles powered by Unity on console such as Grow Home, Galak-Z, Gone Home, Oddworld New n' Tasty, and Never Alone to name a few suffered from erratic performance. Some of these were equally poor on PC too. But considering that Firewatch is undoubtedly one of the highest profile releases of the year, we might just see all three parties coming together to make things right.

However this should not deter you from playing the game. In our review we felt that Firewatch's story is well worth experiencing despite any technical niggles that might come in your way.

Source: (NDTV)

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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