What would the world be without its maker community? While the giants of the tech industry have begun playing around with all sorts of AR and VR tech, one enthusiast has already built a functioning prototype of their own vision of an AR future.

Miroslav Kotalík has been showing off his latest creation on Twitter—a set of AR glasses powered by a Raspberry Pi (via Tom’s Hardware). What’s really impressive here is the dedication to the “build-it-from-scratch” ethos, as while the frames are 3D printed—as you might expect from a maker community build—Kotalík has gone one step further and figured out a way to cast the lenses from scratch, too.

In a new interview with former Industrial Light and Magic concept artist Iain McCaig from StarWars.com (via Variety), the illustrator revealed that there was initially supposed to be a wild twist at the end of the divisive first prequel film, The Phantom Menace: Liam Neeson’s character was to be the original “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” with Ewan McGregor as Qui-Gon Jinn. McGregor would have taken up the name after Neeson’s character’s death at the hands of Darth Maul.

“It’s interesting how things evolve,” McCaig said of designing the characters’ appearances. “For a time, the older Jedi was named Obi-Wan and the younger Jedi was named Qui-Gon. It was very poignant that at the end, as Obi-Wan dies and Qui-Gon defeats Darth Maul and stays with his Master as he passes away, he not only takes on his Master’s quest, but he takes on his name.

Baldur’s Gate 3 YouTuber SlimX has released a 25-minute video about all the offscreen tricks and shortcuts Larian used to make Baldur’s Gate 3’s first act work. Among them are a holding pen for plot-critical NPCs to hang out in, and a “magical teleporting death journal” to point you in the direction of Act 2 should you kill all the NPCs who would otherwise direct you there.

One consistently impressive thing about Baldur’s Gate 3 is how elastic and responsive it is to player choice. Part of this comes from having more consistent rules than any RPG I’ve ever played⁠. For example, items and characters never appear or disappear out of thin air. If you sell Dammon a +1 Dagger in Act 1, he’ll still have it in his inventory come Act 3, because BG3 uses the same NPC data across the entire game rather than separate instances or copies like you might see elsewhere. To help support all of that, BG3 has some fairly unique and strange digital machinery whirring away behind the scenes.

These Dev Secrets Are Hidden Out of Sight in BG3 Act 1 – YouTube

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“China,” observed Charles de Gaulle*, “is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese people.” You can’t knock the guy: he was right. There are loads of Chinese people in China, it turns out, and they’re all upset with me specifically. My strategy of allying with the most widely despised people in the nation has not paid dividends. The wars I have gotten us into? Unpopular. Loosing the army on a funeral? An ambitious, some might say courageous move, and yet not one that has earned me friends.

But that’s the way it goes in China: Mao’s Legacy, a rickety political strategy game from the same studio that put out such bangers as Crisis in the Kremlin, Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall, and Collapse: A Political Simulator. Canny readers will note a theme here—simulations of historical epochs that you might politely call ‘transitions’ or honestly call ‘disintegrations’.

Mao’s Legacy is no different. The game kicks off in April 1976. Former premier, consummate diplomat, and archetypal reformer Zhou Enlai has been dead for three months. Mao Zedong—the chairman himself—is visibly ailing. Factions are already vying for control over the post-Mao direction of the country like dogs over a T-bone steak.