Tech

Ottawa based company brings a new level of gaming to tabletop RPGs – CTV News Ottawa

Published

12 months ago

July 10, 2021

Harry Miller

OTTAWA —
Tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) like Dungeons and Dragons are more popular than ever and one Ottawa company is trying to take that experience to the next level, literally.

Ottawa-based MythBerry Studio has created a revolutionary modular tile system that can snap together to create anything the mind desires.

“So far, every single person that has got their hands on it is blown away,” says cofounder, Geoffrey Lockett, who explains the system can be used for any type of tabletop RPG. “It’s a little bit more involved than just having a map drawn, and you’re playing out on it.”

“We created one that actually connects together and is structurally sound in a format that allows you to actually lift it up off the table,” adds cofounder Sean Pearson.

The system is a hit with tabletop RPG fans.

Nick Carroll has been a tabletop gamer for more than 20 years

“I’m a huge fan of miniatures for wargaming and board gaming,” says Carroll, who has used the MythBerry system for his own games.

“While I was building, my brain was rolling over and I was like, ‘Oh, it would be really cool if this room led into this,” he says. “This could be like a room with a hidden door or a trap door, or I could put something down underneath.”

It’s also portable, the designers add.

“This allows me to build it in my office,” says Lockett. “Then, when people come to play, I can just bring it, set it down, and away we go.”

This new perspective in tabletop gaming is also bringing in completely new gamers who might not otherwise try it.

“This allows for people like my wife, who is not a huge gamer, to see something visually that immediately immerses her into the game,” says Pearson.

The tiles are injection molded, strong and durable.

“The more we get support with stuff, the more we will give fantastic tools and ideas and whatever else we can give,” says Pearson. “This is huge passion for us. We’re just having a blast.”

A custom built cube by Nick Carroll using MythBerry tiles.

“Seeing what the creative community can do with this swappable cap system, it’s just going to be mind blowing once it starts getting into more people’s hands,” adds Lockett.

Now that Carroll’s tabletop games have this new 3D perspective, he says it would be near impossible to ever go back to the old school way of playing.

“The actual audience are going to create things that this team has not ever imagined would be possible,” says Carroll. “And I think that’s the beauty in this.”

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Tech

Java News Roundup: Classfile API Draft, Spring Boot, GlassFish, Project Reactor, Micronaut – InfoQ.com

Published

10 hours ago

June 27, 2022

Harry Miller

This week’s Java roundup for June 20th, 2022 features news from OpenJDK, JDK 19, JDK 20, Spring point releases, GlassFish 7.0.0-M6, GraalVM Native Build Tools 0.9.12, Micronaut 3.5.2, Quarkus 2.10.0, Project Reactor 2022.0.0-M3, Apache Camel Quarkus 2.10.0, and Apache Tika versions 2.4.1 and 1.28.4.

OpenJDK

Brian Goetz, Java language architect at Oracle, recently updated JEP Draft 828039, Classfile API, to provide background information on how this draft will evolve and ultimately replace the Java bytecode manipulation and analysis framework, ASM, that Goetz characterizes as “an old codebase with plenty of legacy baggage.” This JEP proposes to provide an API for parsing, generating, and transforming Java class files. This JEP will initially serve as an internal replacement for ASM in the JDK with plans to have it opened as a public API.

JDK 19

Build 28 of the JDK 19 early-access builds was made available this past week, featuring updates from Build 27 that include fixes to various issues. More details may be found in the release notes.

JDK 20

Build 3 of the JDK 20 early-access builds was also made available this past week, featuring updates from Build 2 that includes fixes to various issues. Release notes are not yet available.

For JDK 19 and JDK 20, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.

Spring Framework

Spring Boot 2.7.1 has been released featuring 66 bug fixes, improvements in documentation and dependency upgrades such as: Spring Framework 5.3.21, Spring Data 2021.2.1, Spring Security 5.7.2, Reactive Streams 1.0.4, Groovy 3.0.11, Hazelcast 5.1.2 and Kotlin Coroutines 1.6.3. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Spring Boot 2.6.9 has been released featuring 44 bug fixes, improvements in documentation and dependency upgrades similar to Spring Boot 2.7.1. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

VMware has published CVE-2022-22980, Spring Data MongoDB SpEL Expression Injection Vulnerability, a vulnerability in which a “Spring Data MongoDB application is vulnerable to SpEL Injection when using @Query or @Aggregation-annotated query methods with SpEL expressions that contain query parameter placeholders for value binding if the input is not sanitized.” Spring Data MongoDB versions 3.4.1 and 3.3.5 have resolved this vulnerability.

Spring Data versions 2021.2.1 and 2021.1.5 have been released featuring upgrades to all of the Spring Data sub projects such as: Spring Data MongoDB, Spring Data Cassandra, Spring Data JDBC and Spring Data Commons. These releases will also be consumed by Spring Boot 2.7.1 and 2.6.9, respectively, and address the aforementioned CVE-2022-22980.

Spring Authorization Server 0.3.1 has been released featuring some enhancements and bug fixes. However, the team decided to downgrade from JDK 11 to JDK 8 to maintain compatibility and consistency with Spring Framework, Spring Security 5.x and Spring Boot 2.x. As a result, the HyperSQL (HSQLDB) dependency was also downgraded to version 2.5.2 because HSQLDB 2.6.0 and above require JDK 11. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Spring Security versions 5.7.2 and 5.6.6 have been released featuring bug fixes and dependency upgrades. Both versions share a new feature in which testing examples have been updated to use JUnit Jupiter, an integral part of JUnit 5. Further details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 5.7.2 and version 5.6.6.

Eclipse GlassFish

On the road to GlassFish 7.0.0, the sixth milestone release was made available by the Eclipse Foundation that delivers a number of changes related to passing the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) for the Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection 4.0 and Jakarta Concurrency 3.0 specifications. However, this milestone release has not yet passed the full Jakarta EE 10 TCK. GlassFish 7.0.0-M6, considered a beta release, compiles and runs on JDK 11 through JDK 18. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

GraalVM Native Build Tools

On the road to version 1.0, Oracle Labs has released version 0.9.12 of Native Build Tools, a GraalVM project consisting of plugins for interoperability with GraalVM Native Image. This latest release provides: support documentation for Mockito and Byte Buddy; prevent builds from failing if no test list has been provided; support different agent modes in the native-image Gradle plugin, a breaking change; and support for JVM Reachability Metadata in Maven. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Micronaut

The Micronaut Foundation has released Micronaut 3.5.2 featuring bug fixes and point releases of the Micronaut Oracle Cloud 2.1.4, Micronaut Email 1.2.3, and Micronaut Spring 4.1.1 projects. Documentation for the ApplicationContextConfigurer interface was also updated to include a recommendation on how to define a default Micronaut environment. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Quarkus

Red Hat has released Quarkus 2.10.0.Final featuring: preliminary work on virtual threads (JEP 425) from Project Loom; support non-blocking workloads in GraphQL extensions; a dependency upgrade to SmallRye Reactive Messaging 3.16.0; support for Kubernetes service binding for Reactive SQL Clients extensions; and a new contract CacheKeyGenerator to allow for customizing generated cache keys from method parameters.

Project Reactor

On the road to Project Reactor 2022.0.0, the third milestone release was made available featuring dependency upgrades to reactor-core 3.5.0-M3, reactor-pool 1.0.0-M3, reactor-netty 1.1.0-M3, reactor-addons 3.5.0-M3 and reactor-kotlin-extensions 1.2.0-M3.

Apache Camel Quarkus

Maintaining alignment with Quarkus, The Apache Software Foundation has released Camel Quarkus 2.10.0 containing Camel 3.17.0 and Quarkus 2.10.0.Final. New features include: new extensions, Azure Key Vault and DataSonnet; and removal of deprecated extensions in Camel 3.17.0. Further details on this release may be found in the list of issues.

Apache Tika

The Apache Tika team has released version 2.4.1 of their metadata extraction toolkit. Formerly a subproject of Apache Lucene, this latest version ships with improved customization and configuration such as: add a stop() method to the TikaServerCli class so that it can be executed with Apache Commons Daemon; allow pass-through of Content-Length header to metadata in the TikaResource class; and support for users to expand system properties from the forking process into forked tika-server processes.

Apache Tika 1.28.4 was also released featuring security fixes and dependency upgrades. More details in this release may be found in the changelog. The 1.x release train will reach end-of-life on September 30, 2022.