Briefly: Fresh GTAV Details, Vegan Superfoods, Microsoft Banishes Red-Ring-Of-Death

Brief news items of note for Lifehacker readers including: Grand Theft Auto art director sheds light on new world creation, top 5 foods every vegan should eat, Norway blocks Apple from taking aerial photos of Oslo for 3D Maps.

• Grand Theft Auto’s long-time art director Aaron Garbut has spilled the beans on the latest game in the series and it sounds like they’re really pulling out all the stops. “In terms of raw man-hours, this has been way in excess of any project we’ve done at Rockstar before,” Garbut explained in an interview with Buzzfeed. “From the outset, we wanted to ensure that not only was the world big but that it was absolutely packed with character and life. It’s levels of magnitude above Grand Theft Auto IV in terms of what we’ve done on the environment side.” According to Garbut, absolutely everything in the world is handcrafted and unique, with none of the usual copied buildings and trees you often see crop up in sandbox games. You can read more of Garbut’s musings over at Kotaku.
• PopSugar Health & Fitness has published a list of five essential foods that vegans should eat every day. Morsels on the menu include kale, flaxseeds and peanuts. Click here to read the article.
• If you’ve been the sad recipient of the Xbox 360’s Red Ring Of Death, Microsoft has some good news for you: its new console will be able to tell when it’s overheating and adjust to fix it. “With the architecture of the Xbox One, is that we can dial back the power of the box considerably,” explained Xbox’s General Manager of Console Development, Leo del Castillo. “We had a little less flexibility with the 360. And so basically, if we couldn’t dissipate the heat, there wasn’t a whole lot of leverage we could pull to keep the heat from being generated, so we had a limited amount of time before it just shut down. Xbox One can actually dial it back to a lower power state, so low in fact that it can in a mode that uses virtually no air flow.” Head over to Gizmodo for more details.
• Norway has reportedly blocked Apple’s attempts to take aerial photos of Oslo for inclusion in its 3D Apple Maps product, citing security risks, particularly in military areas. You can read the original Aftenposten newspaper report here.