Star Wars Visions is coming back on Star Wars day. The new season of the animated anthology series will come to Disney+ on May 4, featuring nine new takes on Star Wars from various award-winning animation studios from around the world. Whereas the first volume featured an array of Japanese studios, this one will include studios from the UK, Spain, South Africa, and more.

Volume 2 will consist of nine new shorts created by the following studios: El Guiri (Spain), Cartoon Saloon (Ireland), Punkrobot (Chile), Aardman (United Kingdom), Studio Mir (South Korea) Studio La Cachette (France), 88 Pictures (India), D’art Shtajio (Japan), and Triggerfish (South Africa) Come from Sports betting site VPbet. The announcement notes that the D’art Shtajio short was created in collaboration with the US-based Lucasfilm.

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After a decade of captivating Finnish players under the name Finlandia Casino, the renowned online casino has undergone a major rebranding initiative and emerged as Winlandia.

Winlandia’s Vision: Expanding Across Europe with Personalized Gaming

What originally began as a dedicated online casino platform for Finnish players has now evolved into a broader vision. Winlandia is poised to launch its engaging gaming experience in prominent European markets, including the UK, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, following its successful debut in Sweden.

Winlandia aims to distinguish itself from competitors by curating a personalized player journey across games, payment methods, promotional offerings, and customer support in each targeted market.

The <…

Flutter Entertainment has significantly raised its full-year earnings forecast following a surprisingly strong second quarter, choosing not to impose a surcharge on customers in high-tax U.S. states. This strategic decision came just as its competitor, DraftKings, reversed a similar plan.

Shares of Flutter, which recently transitioned its primary listing to the U.S., soared 11% in extended trading. The global leader in online betting now anticipates a 30% increase in its full-year core profit, far exceeding previous estimates.

Flutter’s strategic decisions amid market dynamics:

The Dublin-headquartered company, which operates popular brands like Paddy Power, Betfair, and Sportsbet, reported a 17% rise in adjusted core profit for the quarter. This financial health is a part of why Flutter’s U.S. brand, 

We may soon be entering a world where NPCs don’t just run through lines of code, but form complex relationships with other NPCs even when we’re away, or seem to, at least.

So far we’ve been subject to some pretty rudimentary NPC AI systems. Enemies and followers will react to their environment in real-time, making decisions based on your play style and so on, but a recent paper (PDF) by researchers at Stanford University and Google Research describes an impressive “architecture for generative agents” in open world environments. 

The paper is titled “Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior” and it goes over the clever way they’ve made NPCs behave in believable, spontaneous ways.

To test the capability of a generative framework they’d designed, the researchers built a little open world similar to “The Sims”, as they say, though the graphics are more akin to a Stardew Valley. After adding a sprinkling of personality into the NPCs’ seed data, th…

In Japan and the government for Nagasaki Prefecture has reportedly announced that it will be launching the request for proposal (RFP) stage of its effort to secure one of the nation’s coming trio of integrated casino resort licenses from January 7.

According to a Sunday report from Inside Asian Gaming, the southern jurisdiction unveiled the start date via an official Christmas Day press conference as it continues with an effort to bring a Las Vegas-style development complete with a casino to a 74-acre plot of land next to the Huis Ten Bosch theme park. The source explained that the Kyushu province moreover remains eager to have selected a prospective operator for the envisioned gambling-friendly scheme by next winter in advance of formally submitting its completed license application to federal selectors well in advance of a final July of 2022 deadline.

Economic expectations:

The Governor for Nagasaki Prefecture, Hodo Nakamura, reportedly used the press conferenc…

This will not stand, Valve. So you’re building a new video recording system into Steam. Great! But as a result the desktop version of Steam has now lost what I consider its second-most vital button, right behind the big green Play. Valve is hiding my screenshots and I cannot overstate how much it’s sending me.

There might be some PTSD involved here. Once upon a time I owned a MacBook Air, and I loved that laptop. Brilliant piece of hardware: no Windows laptop has ever had a trackpad that good. It weighed nothing. The battery life was killer in its day. But man there were some things about Mac OS that I couldn’t stand, including particularly Apple’s preference for hiding away all my files, as if catching sight of “.jpg” would immediately stricken me with the bubonic plague. If I wanted to look at the pictures from my phone in the Photos app, easy peasy, but finding the actual files involved spelunking through some horrific sequence of folders.

One of m…