Pre-order Dead Rising 4: Frank’s Big Package now and instantly receive the original Dead Rising game and an exclusive theme! Dead Rising 4: Frank’s Big Package is a special delivery that will let PlayStation 4 players unwrap the Dead Rising 4 main game, in addition to all other previously released game content. The new bundle will also introduce a game mode called “Capcom Heroes,” an all-new way to experience the Dead Rising 4 story that lets Frank West wear outfits and perform outrageous special attacks inspired by classic Capcom characters.

https://deadrising.com/

Rated Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language

©CAPCOM CO., LTD. 2017, ©CAPCOM U.S.A., INC. 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Source: Playstation YouTube
—

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/orcs-must-die-unchained-ps4/

Check out this quick overview Yi-Lin, Jade Sentinel in Orcs Must Die! Unchained!
Play now: https://www.OrcsMustDie.com

Yi-Lin is a melee hero from 1000 years in the past brought to the present to fight against the Wu Xing dynasty and the orcs. Yi-Lin relies on her two hook swords to dish out massive damage. Instilled with the power of the moon, she can regain health and energy to keep herself in the fight.

Yi-Lin can be unlocked with Skulls or Gold in the in-game store.

Watch Orcs Must Die! Unchained live on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/OrcsMustDie

Join the Orcs Must Die! Community
• Forums https://forums.OrcsMustDie.com
• Facebook https://www.facebook.com/OMDGame
• Twitter https://www.twitter.com/OrcsMustDie

For Support or Inquiries: https://support.OrcsMustDie.com

©2017 Robot Entertainment, Inc™

Source: Playstation YouTube
—

JavaScript performance has always been a core area of focus for our team. Every release, we look for opportunities to improve end users’ browsing experience on real workloads with shorter start-up time, faster execution, and leaner memory usage. These efforts are guided by invaluable ongoing customer feedback and telemetry data.

In this blog post, we will share a few new performance enhancements in the Chakra JavaScript engine, as well as updates on the availability of on-by-default WebAssembly, SharedArrayBuffer and Atomics support in Chakra and Microsoft Edge in EdgeHTML 16 with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.

More memory savings from deferring/re-deferring functions

In EdgeHTML 15, Chakra introduced the capability to re-defer functions. To briefly recap Chakra’s deferral/re-deferral pipeline, at start-up time Chakra performs a quick pre-parsing pass to check for syntax errors, and then defers the full parsing of eligible functions until they are first executed. At a later point, if heuristics determine that a fully-parsed function will most likely never be executed again, Chakra dumps its metadata generated since full-parsing and returns to a lean state as if the function is just pre-parsed and being deferred (hence the name re-deferral).

The deferral/re-deferral feature helps sites boost start-up time and save memory on redundant functions (imagine pulling a bunch of libraries and only just using 30% of the code, sound familiar?).

In EdgeHTML 16, we’ve addressed the feature’s previous limitation on handling functions in lexical and parameter scopes, and allowed functions in all scopes to be deferred and re-deferred. For example, it is common to have large chunks of scripts wrapped in giant try blocks for error handling, and functions enclosed in a block are now eligible for deferral/re-deferral.

// foo can be deferred/re-deferred after the Fall Creators Update
// example 1 - lexical/block scope
try {
  function foo() {...}
  var bar = foo();
}

// example 2 - parameter scope
function bar(foo = function(){...})) {...}

This change further improves memory savings made possible by deferral/re-deferral. The exact effect varies depending on the coding patterns of the sites. According to our experiment on a small sample of popular sites, this change along with others in the past update typically reduce the memory allocated by Chakra by 4-9%. The impact can also be much larger in some cases―such as a ~35% memory saving on Gmail.

Polymorphic inline cache for property access using square brackets (object[‘property’])

Polymorphic inline cache (PIC) is an optimization technique employed in Chakra (and many other runtimes) since Chakra’s inception. Chakra has an internal type system that maps each value to its type. When the Chakra Just-In-Time compiler (JIT) generates optimized code for hot code paths, Chakra may deploy an inline cache at each call site (location for function/subroutine calls such as property access) to memorize and store fast paths for the types encountered.

Polymorphic inline cache is a kind of inline cache that can remember multiple types at a given call site. In EdgeHTML 16, Chakra added the ability to place polymorphic inline cache for the object[‘property’] syntax, allowing cases where object may be of different types to be optimized.

// example - obj can be of {a: Number} or String type
let arr = [{a: Math.random()}, Math.random().toString()];
arr.forEach(obj => {
  for (propNames in obj) {
    if (obj.hasOwnProperty(propNames)) {
      // without PIC, multiple types lead to generic slow path
      // with PIC, both types for obj
      console.log(obj[propNames]);
    }
  }
});

This change should benefit typical users browsing sites using bracket notation and shows up as up to 8% speedup on tests utilizing Angular and React frameworks.

Enable optimizations for functions with try/finally

In JavaScript, it is a best practice to use the finally clause to gracefully clean up resources following a try block. Until the latest update, Chakra did not optimize functions that include a try/finally block because it was a non-trivial job to account for exceptions and unwinding in JIT optimizations.

Starting with EdgeHTML 16, when the Chakra JIT analyzes functions and builds the flow graph, it separates the excepting and non-excepting cases and creates two paths for a try/finally block, allowing general optimizations to be applied on the non-excepting path and forcing a bailout in case of an exception.

More optimizations for try/catch/finally are just on the horizon. ChakraCore recently added support for inlining in functions with try/catch/finally and you can expect this change to propagate to Chakra and Microsoft Edge in the next major Windows update.

WebAssembly, SharedArrayBuffer, and Atomics on by default

In the previous update, Chakra and Microsoft Edge debuted WebAssembly Minimum Viable Product (MVP), SharedArrayBuffer and Atomics support behind the “Experimental JavaScript Features” flag. With a bit of tuning in the past few months, these features are now stable and enabled by default in EdgeHTML 16.

Several changes also help improve WebAssembly performance in Chakra by 20-25% on workloads we have been tracking. Try it out for yourself! Point Microsoft Edge at a fun WebAssembly game like Funky Karts to see the improvement with no flags required!

Demo of Funky Karts in WebAssembly in Microsoft Edge (demo by Ross Smith)

Microsoft has been and will continue to work closely with Mozilla, Google, Apple and others in the WebAssembly community to move the technology forward. Impactful post-MVP features such as threads and GC are currently being explored in the WebAssembly Community Group.

Get involved

We are excited to share these new performance optimizations as well as on-by-default WebAssembly, SharedArrayBuffer, and Atomics support in Chakra and Microsoft Edge.

As always, we’re making more enhancements in future releases, and your feedback is one of our key signals for what to do next. So stay tuned and be sure to share your thoughts with us on the ChakraCore repo, or via @MSEdgeDev and @ChakraCore on Twitter!

― Limin Zhu, Program Manager, Chakra

Source: Windows Blog
—

Hello, Xbox Insiders, and welcome to the brand-new Xbox Insider Blog! We’re pleased to announce that we’ve partnered with our friends from Xbox Wire to make sure all Xbox Insider-related news is in one convenient location. Moving forward, you can look to the Xbox Insider Blog for the definitive word on what’s new with the Xbox Insider Program.

While we have a lot of exciting content planned for the future, we’d like to take this first post to celebrate how the program has grown and continues to grow in 2017. We’ll also provide some helpful links for those of you who want to learn even more about what it means to be an Xbox Insider.

It’s Easier than Ever to Get Started as an Xbox Insider

Back in August, we announced some big updates on the Wire. You can read all about them here, but for some quick highlights:

1. We’ve defined how Insiders are selected for our Xbox One Preview Update rings. This means it’s clearer than ever how to gain access to the newest system updates, how many updates you can expect per month and what you need to do to gain access to the next ring.
2. Switch between any of the Xbox One Preview Update rings you’ve unlocked faster than ever before. Whether you’re moving from Alpha to Omega or vice versa, you can now easily enroll in any of the System Update rings available to you in the Xbox Insider Hub. This gives you more control over the number of updates you’re receiving and how quickly you’re gaining access to brand new Xbox features. Not only is this process easier and more flexible than ever before, but since August, we’ve introduced an update that makes changes to your enrollment status nearly instantaneous.
3. Provide feedback on 1^st and 3^rd party games as an Xbox Insider. We’ve partnered with a variety of game studios to bring you even more exclusive content. With our playtests, Xbox Insiders are now able to test out unreleased games and the latest game updates on Xbox One consoles and PC.

Xbox Insider Hub Comes to PC

With all the exciting new changes we’ve made to our program, you may have missed that the Xbox Insider Hub app is now on PC. Download the Xbox Insider Hub from the Windows Store today and check out content available only on PC.

Once you’ve had the chance to try out the PC version of the Xbox Insider Hub, make sure to complete the “Xbox Insiders on PC” survey – not only will you be providing us with valuable feedback, but you’ll also be grabbing an additional 10XP!

Want to Know More?

Interested in learning more about the Xbox Insider Program or have a question that needs answering? Take a peek at our “Xbox Insider Program FAQ” or reach out on Twitter, Reddit or the Xbox Forums.

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

Related:
You Asked, We Listened: Fans Can Now Opt into the Xbox Insider Program
The Xbox Insider Program is the Next Step in Providing Feedback on Xbox

Source: Xbox Blog
—

Today we’re excited to celebrate the launch of Rush: A Disney·Pixar Adventure and Disneyland Adventures on Xbox One and Microsoft Store.

We recently had the opportunity to have an in-depth chat with Jorg Neumann, Head of Production, Global Publishing, Microsoft Studios to talk in greater detail about the re-imagining of Rush: A Disney·Pixar Adventure.

What is Rush: A Disney·Pixar Adventure and what makes it different from the 2012 Xbox 360 title Kinect Rush: A Disney·Pixar Adventure?

Rush: A Disney·Pixar Adventure invites families and fans of all ages to experience the worlds of six beloved Disney•Pixar films, teaming up with characters such as Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Dory, or Lightning McQueen to overcome puzzling obstacles and find hidden secrets.

You will explore six different Pixar worlds: The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Up, Cars, Toy Story, and the brand-new world of Finding Dory, only seen in this new version.

The game was initially available in 2012 on Xbox 360 and Kinect as, Kinect Rush: A Disney·Pixar Adventure and this time around we are bringing it to you for the Xbox One family of devices and Windows 10 PCs, as well as still being available for Kinect.

Will this game look and feel any different on Xbox One X or high-end PCs?

Absolutely – we reimagined this game in 4K Ultra HD and HDR and supporting Xbox Play Anywhere, so fans can now experience the immersive sights and sounds of each Pixar world in stunning 4K Ultra HD and HDR on Xbox One X and compatible Windows 10 PCs.

The game’s graphics actually look strikingly like the movies the game is based on, because we used many of the same rendering techniques as were originally used by Pixar – which enabled us to make game look as beautiful and high fidelity as the full-length feature films.

Was there anyone specific you collaborated with at Pixar and how did you come up with a park as the main hub of the game?

We worked closely with Pixar’s creative leads and franchise guardians to make sure we hit the right tone with the art direction and story for each movie. Together, we wanted to expand the worlds and create new storylines for the first time since some of the films were released — like the possibility of returning to Nomanisan Island and Syndrome’s lair from The Incredibles, that definitely required Pixar’s involvement and guidance

The ‘Pixar Playground’ that serves as a hub for the game was the result of the collaboration too. It started as an idea for a simple playground where kids pretend to be their favorite Pixar characters. When Pixar’s creative director Roger Gould weighed in he suggested the playground exist on the Pixar campus itself. Roger suggested the addition of the campus main gate with the Pixar logo since it is such an iconic landmark at the studio.

We were thrilled to get a design from Pixar production designer Bob Pauley, who created the original character design for Buzz Lightyear, for the toy robot player character in Toy Story.

We also had a great partnership with Disney Character Voices and re-cast most of the original voice actors in their original roles.

Tell us about the exclusive new Finding Dory world in this game.

When we were working with Disney on re-imagining this version of the game, we wanted an idea for this new release to add something completely new. We asked ourselves, “What if we did something with Finding Dory?” and were enthused that Pixar was fully supportive, as there is so much to show in a bright, beautiful ocean, especially in vivid 4K, with all the colorful coral reefs and ocean wildlife. The movie was such a great success and it’s exciting for me to say this is the only game where you can actually play as Dory.

Is the gameplay different for each world and game and does it include multiplayer?

Each game has its own unique objectives and goals that are very similar to the plotlines you would see in the movies – for instance, in the Ratatouille level you try to save the restaurant from being shut down, in The Incredibles level you need to fight and defeat the Omnidroid. You and your Pixar character will interact on-screen and play cooperatively to solve challenges, moving from fast-paced puzzle-solving to moments of pulse-pounding agility and speed.

Additionally, all the games bring something that all the family can enjoy together – including Cooperative play so you can team up at home and play on the same screen or through Xbox Live with a friend.

What is it like to work with Pixar Animation Studios?

Microsoft Studios and our developer, Asobo, were granted amazing access to the Pixar crew, often working directly with creative leads and designers to ensure that every detail of our game worlds is as faithful as possible to the films that inspired them. This sometimes resulted in content that never made it into the movies being realized in Rush: A Disney∙Pixar Adventure. For example:

• Characters like Celine and Twitch who didn’t make it into the film Ratatouille were brought to life in the game’s Ratatouille
• The Tokyo race course in the game represents an expanded course planned for the Cars 2 film, which runs into the countryside with views of temples, cherry trees and Mt. Fuji. While this didn’t make it into the film, it’s well suited for the game.
• Pixar animators described a scene where the dreaded Omnidroid jumps from one skyscraper to another far above the city streets. While that particular moment didn’t end up in The Incredibles, Asobo has crafted a take on it in the game.

Is there anything else you want to share?

I am incredibly proud of the work that has gone into re-imagining Rush: A Disney·Pixar Adventure and Disneyland Adventures and I invite fans of all ages to buy now for $29.99 USD each – you can pick them up at any major retailer, on Xbox.com, or in the Xbox Store or Microsoft Store.

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

Related:
Chris Evans and Guests to Play Middle-earth: Shadow of War on Xbox Live Sessions November 1
Rally the Troops: Play the Games You Love and Support a Good Cause
Inside Xbox One X Enhanced: Titanfall 2

Source: Xbox Blog
—

MINECON Earth, a livestreamed, interactive showcase of all things Minecraft, is on the horizon, and to celebrate, we’re inviting the Minecraft community to join us and watch this one-of-a-kind event at Microsoft Store viewing parties across the U.S., Puerto Rico and Canada. Also, for those of you in Atlanta, we’ll be hosting a pair of Build Battle competitions in early November, with winners taking home tickets to MINECON Earth itself!

MINECON Earth Viewing Parties – Coming to a Microsoft Store Near You

Viewing parties will take place across Microsoft Store locations on Saturday, November 18 at 9:00 a.m. PST. Visit our MINECON viewing party page to get more information and find the location closest to you. Attendees will be admitted 30 minutes prior to the broadcast start time, so come early to ensure you get a seat!

In addition to taking in the show itself, attendees can participate in costume contests, giveaways and competitive and collaborative gameplay with other members of the Minecraft community. Watching the MINECON Earth festivities with local Minecraft players is sure to be a blast, and we hope you’ll join us!

Microsoft Store locations will also host some Minecraft content creators, YouTubers and streamers you may be familiar with! They’ll be taking a break from creating videos and streams to experience the MINECON Earth stream as spectators, along with the rest of the Minecraft community. They’ll be hanging out with attendees at the following locations:

Flagship Microsoft Store in New York

• Thinknoodles

Microsoft Store at Lenox Square Mall (Atlanta, GA)

• xNestorio
• Tylarzz

Microsoft Store at SouthPark (Charlotte, NC)

• CavemanFilms
• BlackieChan
• Guude

Microsoft Store at Prudential Center (Boston, MA)

• Carnage The Creator
• AntVenom

Microsoft Store at NorthPark Center (Dallas, TX)

• Jojopetv
• AviatorGaming
• RyguyRocky
• MeganPlays
• BurtDude
• BAHMLounge

Microsoft Store at The Florida Mall (Orlando, FL)

• FireRockerz Studios

Microsoft Store at Oakbrook Center (Oak Brook, IL)

• Aureylian
• MangoTango

 

Throw Down in Build Battle to Win Tickets to MINECON Earth

If you’re in the Atlanta area, you can join us in the leadup to MINECON for our Minecraft Build Battle competitions, where the winning team will walk away with tickets to the MINECON Earth show on November 18! Players will be tasked with projects revolving around a series of fun Minecraft themes, so imagination and quick thinking are a must. Like the MINECON Earth viewing parties, these events are great for meeting up with other local players (and putting your building skills to the test).

Players will have to successfully navigate three different Build Battle challenges, with the team that wins each challenge receiving points. At the end of the three challenges, each member of the team with the most total points will win two tickets to MINECON Earth apiece! Even if you aren’t competing, you still have a chance to win tickets, so come cheer on your favorite team and get entered to win a pair of tickets to the MINECON Earth show!

The Build Battles will take place on Friday, November 3 from 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. EST at the Microsoft Store at Lenox Square and Saturday, November 4 from 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. EST at the Microsoft Store at Perimeter Mall. Players can begin registering for the Build Battle outside each Microsoft Store location one hour prior to the start of the events.

We can’t wait to see the Minecraft community’s passion, talent and creativity at Build Battle and the MINECON Earth viewing parties. See you there!

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

Related:
Get Hands-on With Xbox One X at Microsoft Store
Choose How You Game with Four New Xbox One S Bundles
gamescom 2017: World’s Most Powerful Console Makes European Debut and Kickstarts Global Pre-orders

Source: Xbox Blog
—

Xbox fans! We have some awesome news for you. Next up in our Xbox Live Sessions is none other than actor and Captain America himself, Chris Evans! A few surprise celebrity friends will join him as they get their hands on the world’s most powerful console, Xbox One X, as they play the recently released Middle-earth: Shadow of War. The interactive livestream hosted on the Mixer Xbox Channel is airing tomorrow, November 1, at 4 p.m. PT.

I’ve talked to Chris and he is super pumped for him and his friends to play Shadow of War, the epic follow-up to Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, on the Xbox One X. They’ll look to forge a new Ring of Power to amass an army and fight against the full power of the Dark Lord, Sauron and his Ringwraiths. I can’t wait to see them go behind enemy lines to try and conquer fortresses and dominate Mordor from within.

I’m really looking forward to this Xbox Live Sessions because I think our fans are going to love interacting with Chris and his surprise guests during a night of gaming. Also, be sure to tune-in to the livestream for the chance to submit questions and win special prizes. This episode of Xbox Live Sessions will be hosted by Microsoft Studios Community Manager, Rukari Austin.

Make sure you tune in tomorrow, November 1 at 4 p.m. PT on Mixer and stay tuned to Xbox Wire for future episodes of Xbox Live Sessions!

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

Related:
Rush: A Disney·Pixar Adventure Q&A
Rally the Troops: Play the Games You Love and Support a Good Cause
Celebrate Our National Cat Obsession with the Cast of Super Lucky’s Tale

Source: Xbox Blog
—