The fast-paced real-time strategy (RTS) game Battle Aces was inspired by an idea that game director David Kim had while working on StarCraft 2 at Blizzard Entertainment.

“Why can’t there be an RTS game that gets rid of all these tedious clicks and focuses on the fun factors?” Kim recalled thinking. “There was a point during Legacy of the Void’s development where we seriously considered cleaning up all of those things and made an RTS game that’s really focused on the fun. But the conclusion was that we should not switch up what StarCraft 2 is on the last expansion of the game.”

Legacy of the Void was very faithful to the core tenets of StarCraft 2 and is beloved because of that, but Kim hoped to return to that idea for a future Blizzard RTS game. Kim says he prototyped a new RTS game at Blizzard for about six months after Legacy of the Void, but that it was canceled “due to company goals,” joining a myriad of canceled Blizzard Entertainment projects.

Kim has always wanted to return to the RTS space to answer his lingering question about the RTS genre, so he eventually left Blizzard, like many other developers. Now, Kim is leading the development of Battle Aces at Uncapped Games. Revealed at Summer Game Fest earlier this year, it boils down the core concepts of competitive RTS into 10-minute, bite-sized matches. And without all that Blizzard-related baggage and association with the StarCraft IP restraining them, Battle Aces could be one of the most approachable RTS games ever.

Removing what’s not fun

As my Summer Game Fest preview of Battle Aces pointed out, this RTS does a great job of stripping the RTS formula back to its basics. The game clearly lays out every option available to players, making building and commanding units snappy and quick. While Kim says StarCraft 2 is still his favorite game, he admits that parts of the traditional RTS formula likely aren’t anyone’s favorite aspect of the genre and could be removed to create a more fun experience.

Upon closer investigation, Kim believes that people don’t love playing RTS games because they have to constantly remember to manage supply depots, click a build worker button, or manage their amount of production buildings in order to not fall behind and lose. Kim calls those kinds of things “tedious clicks” and stripped them out of Battle Aces. In Battle Aces, players don’t have to worry about building workers, production buildings, or supply depots. They have to keep an eye on the resources they are automatically generating and spend them properly on units they can then be offensive with.

Kim says the ultimate goal of Battle Aces is to create the “most fun RTS” that’s available. This means Battle Aces isn’t as hardcore as something like StarCraft 2 or Stormgate, but that gives it a pick-up-and-play nature that I don’t usually see from RTS games. If you’ve never played an RTS before, Battle Aces will be a good on-ramp as a free-to-play, simplified title in the space.

Building on the fun

In Battle Aces, players have to build a deck of units to bring into the battle. These units are now separated into four different types that all have advantages over one another. Anti-Big units counter Big units, Big units have an advantage over Splash units, Splash units can beat Small units, and Small units are effective against Anti-Big units. That square of unit counters is a core part of Battle Aces’ strategy, as an effective unit deck build and commanding the right kind of unit at the right time are keys to victory. Battle Aces might not be as complex as StarCraft 2, but it’s not as simple as Warcraft Rumble.

Kim has had an idea for an RTS game like this for over a decade, and it shows. Many live service games have touted themselves as the long-awaited approachable entry point to the genre. None of those efforts have panned out, but Battle Aces could because of how aggressively it focuses on stripping away any aspect of RTS gameplay that isn’t fun. It would have been interesting to see that effort pan out with Legacy of the Void, but now is better than never.

The next closed beta for Battle Aces begins for PC on November 7.

Samsung stepped into the wearable industry with its first smartwatch over a decade ago. However, this year the South Korean tech giant stepped up a little bit more with the launch of its first smart ring, the Galaxy Ring (Review), which had a great reception from the public. That’s not all, Samsung is already working on the Galaxy Ring 2, which reportedly could come early next year with several improvements.

Tipster claims the Galaxy Ring 2 is coming earlier than originally planned

Late last month, a leaked Samsung patent hinted that the Galaxy Ring 2 could have a resizing structure. Now, a Korean tipster, Lanzuk (@yeux1122), has spilled some details about the upcoming Galaxy Ring 2 on Naver.

According to the tipster’s post, Samsung could launch the Galaxy Ring 2 a bit earlier than originally planned. However, the Korean blogger hasn’t mentioned any launch window yet. Samsung announced the original Galaxy Ring in January before it launched at the July Unpacked event. Given the claim, we can expect Samsung to launch the next iteration in the first half of 2025.

Apart from the early launch, the tipster adds that the Galaxy Ring 2 might come with a bunch of improvements. According to him, the next Galaxy Ring could feature a thinner design, longer battery life, and more unspecified features. It’s worth noting that the Korean tipster has a good track record with Samsung-related leaks. Still, we want you to take these details with a grain of salt.

Claims about Apple Ring still in development

Besides the next Galaxy Ring, the tipster has made some claims related to some wearable devices Apple is working on. He adds that Apple is still working on a device that he calls a “ring-type wearable” in his blog post. There are claims made about “band-type” and “smart glass-type” wearables in the works.

We can’t confirm whether these details are accurate because the popular Apple insider, Mark Gurman, had previously hinted that Apple has no plans to launch a smart ring. Time will tell if we’ll see a smart ring from Apple. But, one thing is sure, the Galaxy Ring 2 is definitely coming.

US-based glass manufacturer is the company behind Gorilla Glass, a break-resistant glass used to protect screens that’s used on essentially all of the most popular smartphones. Today, the European Commission Corning for anti-competitive practices, alleging that the glassmaker is preventing competition through exclusive supply agreements.

According to the press release, Corning requires mobile phone manufacturers to source all or nearly all of their alkali-AS glass from it, and it also grants rebates to these companies if they do so. Additionally, these phone makers must tell Corning if they receive competitive offers from other glass manufacturers. They aren’t allowed to accept these offers unless Corning cannot match or beat the price.

Similarly, Corning has agreements with companies that process raw glass, forcing them to get all or most of their alkali-AS glass from Corning. They also aren’t allowed to challenge Corning patents.

These charges reinforce how aggressive Corning is in defending its dominant position in the smartphone glass screen market. The latest Apple and Android devices, like the , usually have Gorilla Glass screens, as they’re scratch-resistant and prevent cracking or breaking. While not indestructible, the glass does hold up well against damage. However, Corning’s market dominance coupled with these practices are enough to get the EU’s attention.

A new learning AI has been left to its own devices within an instance of Minecraft as the artificial intelligence learns how to play the game through doing, says AI development company SingularityNET and the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI Alliance). The AI, named AIRIS (Autonomous Intelligent Reinforcement Inferred Symbolism), is essentially starting from nothing inside Minecraft to learn how to play the game using nothing but the game’s feedback loop to teach it.

AI has been set loose to learn a game before, but often in more linear 2D spaces. With Minecraft, AIRIS can enter a more complex 3D world and slowly start navigating and exploring to see what it can do and, more importantly, whether the AI can understand game design goals without necessarily being told them. How does it react to changes in the environment? Can it figure out different paths to the same place? Can it play the game with anything resembling the creativity that human players employ in Minecraft?

VentureBeat reached out to SingularityNET and ASI Alliance to ask why they chose Minecraft specifically.

“Early versions of AIRIS were tested in simple 2D grid world puzzle game environments,” a representative from the company replied. “We needed to test the system in a 3D environment that was more complex and open ended. Minecraft fits that description nicely, is a very popular game, and has all of the technical requirements needed to plug an AI into it. Minecraft is also already used as a Reinforcement Learning benchmark. That will allow us to directly compare the results of AIRIS to existing algorithms.”

They also provided a more in-depth explanation of how it works.

“The agent is given two types of input from the environment and a list of actions that it can perform. The first type of input is a 5 x 5 x 5 3D grid of the block names that surround the agent. That’s how the agent “sees” the world. The second type of input is the current coordinates of the agent in the world. That gives us the option to give the agent a location that we want it to reach. The list of actions in this first version are to move or jump in one 8 directions (the four cardinal directions and diagonally) for a total of 16 actions. Future versions will have many more actions as we expand the agent’s capabilities to include mining, placing blocks, collecting resources, fighting mobs, and crafting.

“The agent begins in ‘Free Roam’”’ mode and seeks to explore the world around it. Building an internal map of where it has been that can be viewed with the included visualization tool. It learns how to navigate the world and as it encounters obstacles like trees, mountains, caves, etc. it learns and adapts to them. For example, if it falls into a deep cave, it will explore its way out. Its goal is to fill in any empty space in its internal map. So it seeks out ways to get to places it hasn’t yet seen.

“If we give the agent a set of coordinates, it will stop freely exploring and navigate its way to wherever we want it to go. Exploring its way through areas that it has never seen. That could be on top of a mountain, deep in a cave, or in the middle of an ocean. Once it reaches its destination, we can give it another set of coordinates or return it to free roam to explore from there.

“The free exploration and ability to navigate through unknown areas is what sets AIRIS apart from traditional Reinforcement Learning. These are tasks that RL is not capable of doing regardless of how many millions of training episodes or how much compute you give it.”

For game development, a successful use-case for AIRIS may include automatic bug and stress tests for software. A hypothetical AIRIS that can run across the entirety of Fallout 4 could create bug reports when interacting with NPCs or enemies, for example. While quality assurance testers would still need to check what the AI has documented, it would speed along a laborious and otherwise frustrating process for development.

Moreover, it is the first step in a virtual world for self-directed learning for AI in complex, omni-directional worlds. That should be exciting for AI enthusiasts as a whole.

Renting in Latin America is restrictive. Most landlords require three months of rent as a deposit and a guarantor that owns property in the same city to co-sign the lease. Santiago Morales, the co-founder and CEO of proptech MoradaUno, said this dynamic makes 40% of prospective renters ineligible. His company wants to get more tenants into rentals by underwriting their risk.

“That’s the largest pain point in the industry today,” Morales told TechCrunch. “People not being able to rent where they want, or they have to, like, rent with roomies, roommates or basically can’t rent. So we said, let’s go fix that. Let’s go solve that problem.”

The result was MoradaUno, a Mexico City-based company that looks to upfront tenant risk for landlords. The company works with real estate brokers by screening and underwriting potential tenants and agreeing to take on their rent payments if the tenants stop paying. Morales said the company’s thorough vetting process, which includes background checks and income verification, weeds out a lot of bad actors from the start. MoradaUno also provides additional optional broker services like legal and home insurance.

The company decided to target brokers, as opposed to landlords themselves, due to the fragmented nature of Mexico’s rental market, Morales said. Unlike in U.S. cities where there is a concentration of large landlords that manage a ton of units, in Mexico, it’s the opposite. Most landlords only own one property.

“It’s all mom and pops, like 97% of the market is mom and pops,” Morales said. “They really depend on this income. So they’re like, ‘Oh, who am I renting to? What happens if they don’t pay?’ There’s a lack of trust there. We say, we can help solve that or bridge that lack of trust with technology.”

The MoradaUno founding team knows the LatAm real estate market well. Morales said he moved to Mexico in early 2020, right before the pandemic, because he was working with proptech Loft, the LatAm marketplace for buying and selling real estate. He was supposed to help them expand into the country but when COVID-19 hit, those plans dried up.

The experience gave him a good foot in the door to LatAm’s real estate challenges and introduced him to Ines Gamboa Sorensen and Diego Llano, his now co-founders. MoradaUno was formed in 2020 and formally launched its product in 2021. MoradaUno has since worked with more than 4,500 brokers and helped close more than 20,000 rentals. Santiago added that the company is processing about 1,000 leases a month and wants to hit 3,000 leases a month by next summer.

The company just raised a $5.6 million Series A round to help with that. The round was co-led by fintech-focused Flourish Ventures and Cometa, a VC firm focused on backing companies building for Spanish-speaking populations. Clocktower Ventures, Picus Capital and Y Combinator also participated. Morales said the capital will be used to help with expansion.

The proptech startup market has been growing in LatAm. There are a few other startups looking to tackle rentals too. Aptuno is one that helps people find and apply for apartments online that is based in Bogota and has raised $7 million in venture funding. Houm is another that looks to bypass the region’s tough rental market by acting as a digital broker. Houm has raised more than $44 million in VC money.

MoradaUno is currently live in four cities in Mexico, but the company wants to boost that by adding six more cities in the near future. Morales added that underwriting tenants is just the beginning and in the future they’d like to be able to offer fintech services like advanced rent payments or even build an AI model for brokers.

“It’s really cool to be able to give access [to] people that otherwise would have not been able to rent,” Morales said. “Now you’re giving them an option. That’s very powerful and exciting. That kind of fuels us every day. And we’re also making the lives of thousands of real estate agents better because they have better tools and more efficient technology.”