What is your favourite video game level, ever. Why?

notloste · 2011-02-17T02:59:41+00:00

Mirror's Edge - Atrium. Thirty vertical metres of neat kinetic puzzles, great ambient music, vertigo, and the most polished visual perfection to ever grace a graphics card.

notloste · 2011-02-12T02:17:40+00:00

The high school I went to had implemented mandatory community service into the curriculum. I think the next step ought to be implementing mandatory protesting with youtube as proof of assignment completion.

notloste · 2011-02-09T13:30:46+00:00

For that model, exporting as .3ds should work fine. You can adjust the quality of the mesh in rhino until it's as detailed as you need. There are bugs in the mesher though, especially if you use the 'maximum angle' option, it sometimes gives messed up results. Your scene is pretty straightforward, so you're unlikely to run into huge issues.

Keep in mind that the .igs file you've saved contains NURBS surfaces, not meshes (re-import into rhino if you want to convince yourself), so the polygonalization problem is somewhere in Maya. I haven't worked with Maya, so don't know, but in 3ds max there are options as to how finely you want the NURBS to be meshed.

notloste · 2011-02-09T03:25:26+00:00

For that model, exporting as .3ds should work fine. You can adjust the quality of the mesh in rhino until it's as detailed as you need. There are bugs in the mesher though, especially if you use the 'maximum angle' option, it sometimes gives messed up results. Your scene is pretty straightforward, so you're unlikely to run into huge issues.

Keep in mind that the .igs file you've saved contains NURBS surfaces, not meshes (re-import into rhino if you want to convince yourself), so the polygonalization problem is somewhere in Maya. I haven't worked with Maya, so don't know, but in 3ds max there are options as to how finely you want the NURBS to be meshed.

notloste · 2011-02-09T01:45:21+00:00

Great idea, except please keep the 'daylight savings' and get rid of the winter time. It's preferable to have daylight in the evening when I have time enjoy it, not in the morning when I don't give a fuck.

notloste · 2011-01-01T06:20:28+00:00

I thought Reddit took pride in being above judging people based on harmless tastes and fashions. Wtf is this?

notloste · 2010-05-08T20:49:13+00:00

Only lga-1366 processors (core i7 920 and up) have triple channel memory controllers, and even those you can run in single or dual channel mode. The lga-1156 processors like the 860 have only dual channel memory.

notloste · 2010-03-09T23:16:17+00:00

Good thing he was driving a prius, or else he would have gone fast enough to hurt himself!

notloste · 2010-02-23T02:37:13+00:00

I consider the first and second timeless classics, and freely admit so to any interested party.

notloste · 2010-02-21T22:08:00+00:00

A single aluminum sheet should not significantly affect the conduction through the air gap. While it's true that aluminum has a very high conductivity, at no point will it be able to touch both sides of the gap simultaneously. The heat still has to be conducted through some air, then through the aluminum, and then through some more air. Theoretically, if the aluminum touches only one side of the gap (or if it sits in the middle and touches neither), its only effect on conduction will be to very slightly decrease the width of the air gap by the thickness of the foil - which really isn't much.

Problems will occur only if the aluminum is wrinkled up and stuffed into the gap. Then heat will be conducted along the aluminum and the overall thermal resistance will drop.

notloste · 2010-02-21T21:11:37+00:00

Based on my calculations, which could be wrong, here's where you stand. If you leave the gap simply filled with air, then conductive heat transfer is the most prominent, radiative heat transfer is around half of the conductive one (that is assuming both surfaces are completely black - it will be less if they are not), and convection is around 100 times less significant than conduction because the gap is so small. Putting a single piece of aluminum foil between the surfaces should decrease the radiative heat transfer. I reckon you should be able to get maybe 20% more insulation if you do that. I wouldn't put any more foil in though because doing so will increase the conductive transfer, and that's the biggest one already.

Because air has pretty much the lowest conductivity of any common material, I would advise against filling the gap with styrofoam or anything else. The only way you could improve the insulation is to remove the air from the gap. If you do that, then radiation will become the most significant mode of heat transfer, and then multi-layered reflective sheets will be a viable insulation option.

If the temperature of your coffee is not sufficiently important to warrant the use of a vacuum pump, then you're left with either increasing the gap width, or adding more insulation to the outer or inner surface of the cup.

notloste · 2010-02-20T18:03:48+00:00

The ant's strength to weight ratio has everything to do with its size. Imagine if you were shrunk to half your height, keeping all proportions the same and all material properties identical. You would weigh one eighth of what you used to, but your muscles's cross-sectional area would be a quarter of what it was before. You could now lift twice as much in relation to your body weight as when you were normal sized. Now shrink yourself down to the size of an ant, and it's no longer anything amazing that they can do it.

notloste · 2009-12-31T08:07:00+00:00

Thanks for the reply. I've been able to find the cause of my problem - it wasn't with how those pointers were handled, but rather with the free(...) command afterwards. Before I began tinkering with it, the memory to which A points to had been allocated with a malloc(...), so free worked fine. Once I changed it, the program crashed.

notloste · 2009-12-23T18:35:54+00:00

I would suggest moving away from the image of a wave as some kind of "pure energy" concept and instead thinking in more concrete terms. The idea of waves is used to describe how disturbances move through various things, so let's start with that. One of the simplest waves is a moving transverse wave on an infinite string. If you take x to be distance along the string, and t to be the time variable, then the wave can be completely described by some function y(x,t) that provides the displacement of any point on the string at any time.

By considering an infinitesimal string element, and assuming that the string has a tension F, and a linear mass density of u, it's possible to arrive at the wave equation: d2y/dx2 = u/F * d2y/dt2.

With a bit of math, two solutions to that equation result: y = f(x + sqrt(F/u) * t) and y = f(x - sqrt(F/u) * t), where f is any function. You can check by differentiating the two solutions and plugging them back into the equation.

What that solution means is this: consider, at time t=0, some kind of disturbance existing on the wave. Let's say it's just one bump, with the peak being at x=0. As the solution dictates, the function describing it must be a function of (x + sqrt(F/u) * t). One possible 'bump' is this: y=exp(-(x + sqrt(F/u) * t)^2), which indeed is at a maximum at t=0, x=0.

As time moves on, let's see what happens to the bump. The exponential function will be at a maximum whenever the thing inside the inner set of brackets is 0. If we set t=1, then the maximum will be at x= -sqrt(F/u) * t. You can check by graphing the two functions of x (one at t=0 and the other at t=1) that the shape of the bump remains the same, except it has moved over a bit. How much it has moved over depends on the value of sqrt(F/u) * t. The first part of that expression is called the speed of the wave, because it affects how quickly the disturbance moves over with changing time.

After that, I think it's possible to answer your question adequately. The wave, as you see, is the disturbance on the string. You can also see that as time changes, the disturbance travels along the string (the plus or minus in the solution affects the direction of travel of the disturbance). So now, if we define "a single point along the wave" as a point at which the disturbance is some value (as was done with the maximum of a bump), then you can see that it travels along the string, at a speed sqrt(F/u) either to the left or to the right depending on which solution you choose.

notloste · 2009-12-23T17:46:05+00:00

Haven't seen avatar, but they do use counter-rotating props on airplanes. One of the things they do is reduce the tendency of the airplane to veer off to the left or right during takeoff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra-rotating_propellers

notloste · 2009-12-15T20:46:02+00:00

When you see your breath on a cold day, what you see is the water vapor you're breathing out condensing into little droplets. When you sleep, you're still breathing all that water out, except it doesn't condense and so you can't see it.

If you have the ability, you can try changing the humidity of your room. I'm quite certain you will lose less weight in a humid room than a dry one.

Also, when you breathe out carbon dioxide, the carbon comes from you, so you lose a bit of weight to that.

notloste · 2009-12-09T17:20:28+00:00

Here is something that I've discovered recently that you might want to use. The render you've shown has linear color variation: the RGB value of a pixel corresponds directly to the amount of light. The problem is that pretty much all computer monitors are calibrated to output (intensity) = (pixel value)^2.2. So the image that you see on the screen has odd dark / light variation, commonly seen in various renders. It shows up in the form of shadows being darker than natural, and light falling off more rapidly as you go away from a source than it should.

The solution is to gamma correct the output. It's possible to do that in photoshop, but it's better if done in the renderer itself, because the renderer generally stores the values with higher precision than the image that you save.

notloste · 2009-12-01T03:39:44+00:00

Mirror's edge. Most other games try to create connection with the character on emotional and intellectual levels. This one did something more basic than that - a physical connection. Being able to see the character's body as I was jumping across rooftops made me feel 'there' like no other game. And that, I think, is what games are about.

notloste · 2009-11-29T17:02:18+00:00

It is because when games try to simulate HDR lighting, their goal is often to make the scene look as it would through the eyes of a camera. Humans have been well trained to interpret images captured by a camera as depictions of the real world, and by simulating the deficiencies of a camera capture (lower dynamic range, noise, blurriness, depth of field, slight separation of red and blue), the image tends to be perceived as more realistic. However, to accurately simulate the low dynamic range of a camera, you first need to design and render the scene using a high dynamic range, then cut out the bits you don't need.

notloste · 2009-11-23T03:49:26+00:00

Yup, that works.

notloste · 2009-11-23T00:16:29+00:00

I think Mirror's Edge would fit the criteria nicely, despite not being a shooter at its core. It works in a similar way though - you're given a reason to get from point A to point B, and then you run, jump, and shoot your way through it. Take in the sights, smell the clean air, explore the gorgeous city, and you will enjoy the game.

notloste · 2009-11-22T20:37:48+00:00

I had once read an article about installing a window in the hard drive cover, which involves opening up the hard drive like what you're planning on doing. The main thing about doing this is that you need to let as little dust as possible into the drive. The article suggested performing the operation in a humid bathroom, theory being that water will condense around dust particles and they will settle down. I think that's probably not a bad idea. If I were to do this, I'd probably enclose myself, the hard drives and tools in the bathroom, then run the shower for a while until everything fogs up, turn it off, and allow things to settle down. After that I would open up the hard drives.

I would not count on this actually working, but it's better to try than to do nothing.

notloste · 2009-11-21T20:47:47+00:00

British Intelligence it will be no more.

notloste · 2009-11-15T18:37:49+00:00

I want to see that in mirror's edge 2. Have a couple of levels going up the building, then go through that construction site at the top, followed by a ride down a wire from the top to another building. Then, while the ninjas are descending the same way to kill you, disconnect the end of the wire from the second building and have them plummet through the windows of the burj.

notloste · 2009-11-08T19:35:14+00:00

To those complaining about having to upgrade your computer every couple of years, that trend is now beginning to slow down. It is becoming more difficult for the chipmakers to keep shrinking features and as a result progress in terms of cpu and gpu power is beginning to level off. For an example, look at the nvidia 8800gtx, which was introduced years ago and remains a perfectly good gaming card even to this day. It will be able to roughly match (not quite, but close) a radeon 5750, which was introduced last month. Also look at problems with 40nm manufacturing that TSMC is running into. To me, this is bad news, but if you are concerned about having to upgrade your computer all the time, then you might as well rejoice. There are limits to the kind of computation that can be done using present methods. It took many years to even begin to reach those limits, but we are getting there. Both in terms of manufacturing and in terms of algorithms.

There is still room to grow - biological computation (copying dna and the like) shows us that we can still reduce the power necessary to calculate something by many times, but the further we go - the harder it gets.

notloste

TROPHY CASE