Climb on the Bullet Train Despite its intensity and clever design, Epic Games’ first foray into an entirely original virtual reality game still has no promise of a street date.
After spending an hour explaining to an audience of developers and press how Epic tackled a number of key issues found in VR game development while creating Bullet Train, the project’s lead designer broke their hearts.
“You’re not going to see this in the foreseeable future," Nick Donaldson told one attendee, when asked about a release date.
It remains unclear why that is, but Nick Whiting, technical director for VR and AR at Epic Games, said that the playable level of the game — the only one that exists — could be made into a full game.
"The experience does scale," Whiting said. "This is only one level. If you layer on top of that game-isms like combos, scoring, different environments, you can scale it up.
"If you’ve played it a few times you start getting much more physical with it, and then hygiene and fatigue are limiting factors."
The game has already grown quite a bit since development started on what was to become Bullet Train. Whiting told the audience that the game was a direct byproduct of both what Epic had done in the past and where VR game development might head.
Epic’s first foray into VR was shown at E3 in 2013, a simple demo. Next, the company created a tabletop game demo. Then Epic created Couch Knights to play with the idea of multiple people using the same game space. In 2014 came a demo called Showdown, which was meant to show how cinematic a VR experience becomes when running at 90 frames per second.

Last year, the team worked with Weta Workshop to turn a moment in The Hobbit films into a purely visual VR experience.
"All of those things had something in common," Whiting said. "We adapted content we already made into VR."
For its next VR demo, Epic decided to build something from the ground up, a playable demo that uses the Oculus Rift’s touch controllers, leans on the learnings from previous demos, and pushes what the team knew forward.
The goal was to create a game built for a GTX 970 graphics card — a step down from the card needed to run Showdown — but to make it look better.
The developers also wanted to make motion controls to be a central part of the game.
And they only had six weeks to flesh out the idea.
Epic eventually showed off the Bullet Train demo during last fall’s Oculus Connect event. In the short demo, which we adored, players fight around a train station shortly after disembarking from a bullet train (get it?). The game uses Oculus Touch controllers to control its guns. Instead of reloading, players simply drop or throw away their guns and grab new ones. Players can also slow down time and pluck flying missiles out of the sky to redirect them at enemies.

But months before, the team’s first approach for the Bullet Train prototype was a shooter that played a bit like a virtual reality version of the light gun arcade classic Hogan’s Alley.
"It was a basic shooter gallery," Whiting said. "We had a table filled with weapons and bots would run at you. You could pick up the weapons and use them and blow the crap out of everyone."
Then the team thought of turning that concept into a co-op multiplayer game, with two players standing back to back, facing two alleys as they tried to take down waves of enemies.
But both approaches got boring quickly, he said.
So the developers went back and started looking at what makes shooting interesting in movies. They quickly realized that to make the game more fun, they were going to have to deal with the issue of movement in VR, a problem that’s hard to address without causing motion sickness or unease in some players.

They examined Asian action films like Oldboy and Hard Boiled, and liked the idea of doing a single camera shot. The idea was to follow alongside the player as he or she worked their way through a stream of enemies with a seemingly endless combination of gunfire and physical attacks.
"The one-shot solved the motion problem because the camera is moving through the action continuously," Whiting said. "We also control the path. So we can do things like change directions and have players go through those movements. And there would be a lot of chaining. As you go through the scene, you attack one guy, punch him, shoot that guy, take his nightstick and beat the next guy with it.
"It looks like you’re a badass and you feel like a badass."
The problem the team ran into was that players would start to turn and eventually obscure the tracking cameras, basically breaking the motion tracking.
Eventually, the team came up with the idea of minimizing movement by allowing players to teleport around a map. They could still move if they wanted to, but by combining the ability to teleport with some smart design decisions, the game was able to mostly keep players from walking around too much.
First, the game takes place in a train station. A train track running through the center of the game map is a natural, though subtle, reminder to players not to walk across the map, but rather to teleport.
The team also programmed enemy AI to move toward the center and make sure the boss of the level appears and stays in the middle of the map.

Once Epic layered in the ability to teleport to different sections on the maps to get weapons, take out enemies and move away from danger, players simply didn’t feel the need to manually move much.
To highlight the fun of chained attacks, the developers worked in a few other interesting tricks.
Bullet Train uses a stealth teleport to essentially always move you close enough to an enemy that you’re trying to punch, if they’re already pretty close to you.

Unbreakable

It turns out that playtesting an in-progress game for the Oculus Rift and its Oculus Touch controllers can sometimes result in frustrating moments. During their GDC talk, the Epic duo mentioned some of the incidents that the touch controllers survived.

Being thrown across the room.
Being thrown into a wall.
Being punched into a wall hard enough to remove some of the plaster.

"These controllers are indestructible," Donaldson said.

Epic also tweaked the way some of the harder weapons, like rockets and grenades, work. If you keep missing with your throws, the game starts to subtly, slowly auto-adjust the trajectory of your toss to make sure you hit what you’re aiming at. The assist on those throws went through a lot of iteration before Epic found the balance between helping a player to have fun, but not coddling them.
"It’s really hard to fail," Whiting said. "The longer you suck, the less you suck."
The developers also made it impossible to die in the game.
"We didn’t allow failure to be an option," he said. "There’s no death; you only become more badass."
The end result is a game that quickly makes you feel like you’re a badass, throwing weapons at enemies to stun them and then teleporting by their side to grab that same weapon as it falls and use it to kill them.
The team hammered on playtesting and continued to add new twists and ways to have fun. That included being able to juggle your weapons between two hands to quickly switch which hand is holding which gun; racking the shotgun as seen in Terminator 2; and being able to toss a grenade and then shoot it out of the air.
Bullet Train lead Donaldson said Epic even played around with the travel speed of bullets, just to make sure players caught a glimpse of them.
"Our solution was to slow the bullet down to a quarter of its original speed over one-tenth of a second and then to speed it up to 1.25 the original speed over time," he said. "The total time is about the same, but early on it’s slow so you can see it."
While Donaldson enthused about living through "oh shit" moments in Bullet Train, he also made sure to point out that VR gaming is still very much in its infancy.
"It’s like the early mobile game days," he said. "I think it’s the same with VR. You’re not going to get to play 120 hours of Skyrim on your couch.
"I think it is going to be a completely different sort of games that succeed."

The Holodeck is a long way off, says former Pixar technical director Max Planck, 10-year veteran of Pixar and the technical director of Oculus Story Studio, threw cold water on his audience at Game Developers Conference 2016 today. For half an hour he explored the many constraints working against creatives working in virtual reality, and argued for prioritizing shorter experiences ahead of longform work.
“We’re kind of at where film was back at the time of the nickelodeon," Planck said, "where people were willing to pay a nickel just to see something cool. And I think we should embrace that."
Planck cited the independent games scene as evidence that consumers are willing to spend less on smaller experiences, while admitting that VR doesn’t have a pricing model yet.
The nitty-gritty of his talk focused on the limitations for developers working in VR, and delved into both the practical and philosophical.

For instance, Planck explained how, in his years working in computer-generated animation, he’s gotten used to a certain kind of workflow. Multiple teams can work on multiple portions of a motion picture at the same time without much interference, and directors can monitor their work from over their shoulder, essentially. That’s not the case with VR, he said, showing a video of one member of his team wearing a VR headset, trying to explain herself while her staff of animators tried to follow along on a traditional flat screen behind her.
Simply sharing the same virtual space is a practical impossibility for the artists and engineers building today’s experiences, and that slows down production. But by working slowly and carefully, his team has been able to produce short experiences like Henry, pictured above, which is available for viewing now.
Most importantly, the kinds of tricks that directors have used for years — like cuts, pans, fades and simple scene transitions — simply don’t make sense to the everyday consumers of VR. When they applied them to Henry, he said, people had a hard time determining if he was real or a ghost.
These skills may evolve in the future, as the audience becomes accustomed to the medium, but it’s also up to content creators to create a new visual vocabulary.
It’s also up to content creators to create a new visual vocabulary.
"If you showed a movie now to someone who was watching movies in the 1920s," Planck said, "it would look like art. They would say, ‘This is moving too fast. These are just abstract images being fed to my eyes.’ I think VR is going to go through that same arc."
Instead of longform, wide-open experiences with lots of interaction Planck stressed the need to take things one step at a time. By focusing on smaller, more deeply refined experiences, teams around the world can help move the medium forward.
"The Holodeck is a very long way away," Planck said, "and I think that everyone wants the Holodeck now. They see virtual reality and our imagination has been filled up with the idea that this is what we should be making, and I feel that people are making less-compelling experiences because they’re reaching too far."

After a weekend of tough competition, the Hearthstone Americas Winter Championship tournament is over, and a winner for the region has been crowned: 15-year-old William “Amnesiac" Barton (pictured on the right above), the youngest professional Hearthstone player in the world.
Amnesiac’s path here wasn’t easy. He narrowly won his first best-of-five series against Talion on Friday, then lost in a 3-0 sweep on Saturday against a dominant performance by Nostam. This pushed Amnesiac into the lower bracket, where he had to face off against Talion once more to kick off the final day of the tournament. He beat Talion again and then took down AlSkyHigh for a spot in the grand finals.
Amnesiac’s finals match was versus Nostam, the same opponent who had defeated him on Saturday. Amnesiac quickly took a two-game lead, winning with his druid and rogue decks. Nostam clawed back a win with his own druid deck, but in a final match-up of Amnesiac’s control warrior versus Nostam’s Reno warlock, Amnesiac proved victorious and took first place in the tournament as a whole.
Amnesiac first became a name to watch in the Hearthstone scene last year when, at the age of 14, he managed a number one finish in the ranked format for the game’s August 2015 season. Players began turning to the young competitor for thoughts on deckbuilding and the current state of the meta. Soon after, Amnesiac was signed Team Archon, a Hearthstone-centric esports team run by Jason "Amaz" Chan.
Amnesiac participated in the Hearthstone World Championship North American qualifiers last year but failed to progress very far. By winning the Hearthstone Americas Winter Championship, Amnesiac has guaranteed himself one of 16 spots for the 2016 Hearthstone World Championship, plus $25,000 from this tournament.
Interviewed following the final match, Amnesiac described the feeling of winning as "unreal" and "incredible." He thanked all the viewers for watching and supporting him throughout the weekend. During the interview, he was flanked by his mother, who accompanied him to the tournament and was interviewed as well during the broadcast, gaining the tongue-in-cheek name "Momnesiac" by the casters.
Hearthstone’s winter tournament season isn’t done yet. The Europe Winter Championship will run from March 18 to 20, and the Asia-Pacific Winter Championship will run from March 24 to 26. Similar Championship events will be held in those three regions in Spring and Summer, along with a Last Call Invitational in the fall. These will determine the competitors who will meet up at the 2016 Hearthstone World Championship at BlizzCon in November.
You can watch Amensiac’s final series with Nostam in the video below.

Apple debate is the perfect setup The huge debate occurring between Apple and the federal government couldn’t have come at a better time for Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail.
Esmail told a panel at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas that the majority of Mr. Robot’s second season would deal with the debate over privacy and encryption, according to Entertainment Weekly. Esmail told the panel that they deliberately chose not to include law enforcement in the first season, but that would change this time around.
“Elliot committed a crime and we’re going to see the ramifications of that this season," Esmail said.
In the first season of the show, computer security expert turned activist hacker Elliot (Rami Malek) works with a group of likeminded coders to take down Evil Corp, a conglomerate that stands for everything the anarchist group detests.
Esmail said that although they weren’t trying to "predict the future," the Apple debate was definitely on course with what they wanted to discuss in their sophomore season. The creator said that the conversation over whether privacy truly existed for private citizens was fascinating and was a concept he’s been interested in exploring since he came up with the idea for the series.
Mr. Robot’s second season doesn’t have a premiere date as of yet, but is currently in production. It’s expected later this summer.

Be scared all year round! The Walking Dead is about to become a year-around event at Universal Studios Hollywood.
Comedian and television host Chris Hardwick announced during his post-Walking Dead talk show, The Talking Dead, that the amusement park would be building a permanent “state of the art" attraction for fans to visit.
According to Hardwick, the attraction will be built inside an entirely new structure that will mix live performers with animatronic and special effects to create one of "the most intense" experiences for Walking Dead fans.
Famous visual effects artist Greg Nicotero, who also serves on the show as a sometimes director, will be heavily involved with the creation of the attraction, according to Hardwick.
Normally, the attraction only runs during the Halloween season in October as a seasonal treat for visitors, but due to the immense success of the both the show, Universal decided to make it a staple in its park.

Enter the world of #TWD in an all-new year-round attraction at @UniStudios, coming Summer 2016! #TWDatUniversal https://t.co/GsVwe12tq6
— AMC Talking Dead (@AMCTalkingDead) March 14, 2016

The first teaser for the attraction was tweeted out by AMC after the most recent episode of the show aired last night. You can check that out above.
The attraction is expected to open this summer.

Build your own robots out of parts from evil machines Automatron, the first paid add-on for Fallout 4, will be released March 22 on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One, publisher Bethesda Softworks announced today.
The DLC pack will cost $9.99 in North America and £7.99 in the U.K. on its own, and it is included in Fallout 4’s season pass. If you didn’t purchase the season pass before March 1 and you’re still interested in buying it, you’ll have to pay the new, higher price of $49.99 instead of the original $29.99 price.
Here’s the full description for Automatron from Bethesda; you can watch a trailer above:
In Automatron, the mysterious Mechanist has unleashed a horde of evil robots into the Commonwealth, including the devious Robobrain. Hunt them down and harvest their parts to build and mod your own custom robot companions. Choose from hundreds of mods; mixing limbs, armor, abilities, and weapons such as the all-new lightning chain gun. Even customize their paint schemes and choose their voices!
Automatron is designed for characters that are at level 15 or higher. It will be followed by the “Wasteland Workshop" DLC pack in April and the story-based expansion Far Harbor in May. Bethesda said last month that it will be running closed betas for all three add-ons on all platforms, but did not provide any details today on a beta for Automatron. We’ve reached out to the publisher for comment, and will update this article with any information we receive.
For more on Fallout 4, read our review.

Games are great, but our workspaces will never be the same The technology industry is watching the launch of big-name virtual reality devices like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift with great interest. If there is even a hint this hardware will generate actual consumer demand outside of the true believers that are already sold about jumping into their favorite video games, expect nearly everyone to come onboard.
Almost all the major tech companies are already hiring up and the film and television industry have begun to dip their toes into the VR waters, and we’re beginning to see the first steps toward what could be the technology’s true killer apps: completely virtual environments for work and play.
Why do we want non-VR content in VR?
We take reality for granted in a way that’s only obvious after spend a significant amount of time in virtual reality. You pay a lot of money for a large television screen that’s locked to a single size, and then you physically connect it to a single wall and arrange your viewing schedule around those decisions.
How big a screen would you like? What does it get? In the current system of viewing content those questions both require one answer. You can take your laptop anywhere, but of course the trade-off is a smaller screen.
Virtual reality destroys the idea of an arbitrary screen. Why not play your games or watch your movies in a virtual environment where the screen could be any size and could be placed anywhere you like? Valve itself is showing a solution to this “problem."
"SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode is in early beta, and will be showcased at next week’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco," Valve said in a news release. "Desktop Theater Mode enables users to play non-VR games with VR systems such as the upcoming HTC Vive and others."
It’s interesting that Valve is creating programs that will work with other VR platforms such as the Oculus Rift — or at least we’re assuming that hardware will be included from the "and others" wording — but what’s more interesting is that Valve itself knows the utility of creating environments in which to view content that wasn’t initially designed for VR.
Darshan Shanker is the founder and CEO of BigScreen, a company creating a program for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift that wants to make viewing all sorts of content better in VR than it is on a standard screen. Microsoft has already announced the ability to stream Xbox One content to your PC, to be played in a virtual movie theater.

"The best content out there today are TV shows like Game of Thrones and games like Rocket League," he explained via e-mail. "Virtual reality and BigScreen can be the best way to experience the existing content we already love. This is especially compelling in the early days of VR when there’s a limited amount of awesome VR content (compared to the decades of non-VR content we have)."
But we have existing screens, why bother viewing that content through a headset that wraps around your face? "First of all, a bigger screen, hence the name BigScreen!" he explained. "Why spend all day hunched over a tiny 13" laptop when you could have massive screens of any size and shape, best suited to the content and your needs? You could have your own movie theater-sized screen!"
Virtual reality destroys the idea of an arbitrary screen
There are other social applications for the software, and we’ll be covering those in future stories after we’ve been able to try the technology, but announcements like Valve’s Desktop Theater Mode and programs like BigScreen are the first steps in showing how much better virtual reality can display content than your current screens.
Why not connect a headset to your laptop so you can work on a giant screen instead of your laptop’s relatively tiny display? Why not work in a virtual environment where you can create screens with a button press, change their size, and move them wherever you’d like? One screen for entertainment, one screen for work and, if someone tries to call you, you can create a third screen to take the call and chat with them in video. If a screen becomes more important to your workflow, simply make it bigger and move it in front of you.
We see workstations in software development with multiple screens, but if you could start with one screen and then add a nearly limitless number of displays with differing sizes and even shapes? Once you begin to think about a truly virtual environment you can begin to play with the idea of what’s possible: What about lights around you that gradually change color as you receive more e-mail, or blink when it’s time for an important call? What if you work better when your desk is floating underwater, or in an asteroid belt?
Many of these things are further out than I would like, or don’t all happen in one program — although if you have an existing Development Kit 2 from Oculus you need to check out Virtual Desktop — but these ideas and more are coming. While gaming is, of course, the initial push for the technology and things like education may be a close second; virtual reality has the ability to completely change how we view existing content while giving us the tool needed to adjust our own virtual environments to react to data and workflow in real time.
It’s that ability to display whatever I want, in whatever size, shape and placement I prefer, that has me the most excited about virtual reality.

But don’t hold your breath for getting inside Hall H Comic-Con International’s streaming service, Comic-Con HQ, will be headed to a free beta in May and will officially launch in June — just in time for San Diego Comic-Con.
The organization announced today that it will be partnering with Lionsgate to launch a new subscription video on demand service featuring scripted and unscripted comedy and shows, reality competition shows and, naturally, streamed and archived video of panels and events from Comic-Con International’s slate of conventions.
Comic-Con HQ will offer pop culture commentary shows from ex-G4 hosts Adam Sessler and Kevin Pereira, along with the scripted comedy Kings of Con from Richard Speight and Rob Benedict of Supernatural. On the reality show side, Ashley Eckstein of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the women’s nerd fashion label Her Universe will host a series following designers through the process of crafting “geek couture" for a live fashion show at San Diego Comic Con this summer. Programs will be available in browsers, as well as on iOS and Android devices. Comic-Con International has not announced pricing for the subscription.

"The new platform will provide a year-round destination to enjoy all facets of the community and access the vast diversity of content the world has come to expect from the largest and longest-running pop cultural celebration of the year," said Seth Laderman, executive vice president and general manager for Comic-Con HQ.
What the world might expect the most from a Comic-Con VOD service is access to panels at the world’s biggest comic con. The press release promises "airings of select Comic-Con panels," without further elucidation. So maybe expect to be able to tune in for some smaller panels during San Diego Comic-Con this July, but don’t hold your breath for anything in Hall H.
Comic-Con International did promise that the Masquerade and the Eisner Awards would be livestreamed on Comic-Con HQ, however. San Diego Comic-Con’s cosplay/performance contest and the Eisners, the closest thing American comics have to the Oscars, have never before been open to the public.
Users can join Comic-Con HQ’s free beta — beginning on May 7, 2016, Free Comic Book Day — here, and use it for free until service’s subscription model launches sometime in June.

Pop open some Pinot Noir Kimmy has discovered the beauty of adorable cat videos in the first trailer for the second season of Netflix’s original series, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
The show, which follows lead character Kimmy Schmidt after she’s rescued from an underground bunker where she was being held captive, debuted last year to nearly unanimous critical acclaim.
In the new season, she’ll learn even more about living in modern day New York City while dealing with daily shenanigans from her roommate, Titus.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which stars Ellie Kemper, Jane Krakowski and Tituss Burgess, returns to Netflix April 15.

They’re still fighting, y’all This Korean trailer for Batman v Super: Dawn of Justice has a few new scenes, if you’re into that sort of thing. Including this Mad Max-style shot:

My fan theory? I bet the two heroes decide to become friends before the movie is over and we’ll never really find out who would truly win a fight, even though the answer is Batman. In fact, we see Batman take a punch and then return a head butt, and Superman does not look like he won that exchange:

Also, this is the most intense pre-hug scene I’ve ever watched:

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is coming to American theaters March 25.