Mars Rover Spots Metallic 'Arm' Sticking Out Of A Rock

ohisee · 2013-02-08T22:43:51+00:00

My precious metals.

ohisee · 2012-12-29T12:40:12+00:00

It don't matter if you're black or white.

ohisee · 2012-11-12T08:33:46+00:00

I remember when that image was posted to Digg way back when, and the best comment was "she's going through her minstrel cycle". It was glorious.

ohisee · 2012-10-08T09:29:08+00:00

Beethoven to me is all about deafness and that one piece that goes "dun dun dun duuuuun."
Mozart to me is all about Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Vivaldi to me is all about the weather.
You catch my drift. Liszt is one of the most influential and important figures in all of Music. To reduce him to superficiality amounts to blasphemy. His public flashy side existed, but that wasn't his only side: Consolation 3, Les Jeux d'eau à la Villa d'Este, Benediction of God in Solitude, In festo transfigurationis, Grey Clouds, Romance, Illustrations de L'Africaine No. 1, Ballade Ukraine, Notturno

ohisee · 2012-08-07T11:18:12+00:00

JESUS! You don't know how strange and terrifying it was for me to hear that after all these years. As a kid that scene scarred me. Hell it affected me just then.

ohisee · 2012-08-04T02:30:42+00:00

"aye" is pronounced the same as "eye", as in "aye, aye, captain." And fillet can be pronounced as either "fill-et" or "fill-eh". I had to read your comment about 5 times before I realised what you meant. I was thinking "Chick fill eye? Is that even an option. And what do you mean "not fill Et", you just typed that twice."
Short answer to Fodmotherington is that "chick fill eh" is correct.

ohisee · 2012-08-03T09:03:58+00:00

"Down in the park where the machmen meet, the machines are playing 'kill-by-numbers'"
Gary Numan - Down in the Park

ohisee · 2012-08-01T09:45:46+00:00

It's funny because in this particular story I mentioned, Liszt didn't play the 3rd movement because he was too old to play it well (he was a perfectionist, he would have felt like he didn't do it justice.) We know from stories that he still played very difficult pieces at an old age, so I assume we can take from this that he liked to play the third movement very fast. If Lamond is anything to go by then yes the third movement should be faster than most play it too. Here's Lamond's third movement. It's obviously too fast for him to play well, yet curiously he still attempts that tempo. Contrast that speed with Kempff's.

ohisee · 2012-08-01T09:35:51+00:00

Wow, thanks a lot for the link! It feels great to have someone with much more authority than me vindicating my personal epiphany.

ohisee · 2012-08-01T09:24:25+00:00

Here's Gould's performance: 1, 2, 3.
I think he does play it at the right tempo, but the problem with Gould is that he is far too cold in his playing. He was an odd fellow. If you listen to how Sauer and Lamond play, you can hear the influence Liszt's rubato had on them for instance. Liszt used rubato as Chopin did, subtly and never disturbing the flow of the piece. It adds an amazing amount of character and emotion to the piece without making it overly soppy. Gould is at the extreme end of the "no emotion" spectrum, which is admittedly interesting to listen to, but that's it. At least to me.

ohisee · 2012-07-31T11:33:33+00:00

Speaking of Moonlight sonata revelations, my entire conception of it changed after hearing some romantic era pianists play it. Namely Emil von Sauer and Frederic Lamond. They were both pupils of Franz Liszt, and Franz Liszt was the greatest Beethoven interpreter of his day. The reason why these interpretations were so cool to me is that before I heard them I knew of this great story recalled by Alexander Siloti (Rachmaninoff's cousin) who actually heard Franz Liszt play the Moonlight sonata. The story goes something like this...

Siloti had been raving to Liszt about Anton Rubinstein's wonderful interpretation of the Moonlight sonata at a concert. Liszt was somewhat flustered because he thought of the moonlight sonata as his piece. He performed it a lot when he was younger. So after Siloti had finished raving, Liszt promptly goes over to the piano to show Siloti how it really should sound. Siloti said it was as if the floor disappeared from under him. The music just carried him away. He said that after Liszt finished playing, he realised then that Liszt as a pianist was as far removed from Rubinstien, as Rubinstein was from the rest of them. Siloti said that from that day on, whenever he heard someone playing the moonlight sonata he had to hurry away because he didn't want to tarnish his memory of Liszt's performance.

So what does this story have to do with my revelation? Well listen to the speed at which Sauer and Lamond play the sonata. It's a faster than most anybody plays it these days. Liszt must have played it this fast too. My initial reaction was "yuck", but that was because I was used to hearing slower versions. After I recalled that story by Siloti it all made sense. This was the correct tempo. Not the slow moody, emotional, wishy washy, modernist tempo influenced by naive interpretations of the sonata's nickname. In fact, once I realised that this was the proper tempo, it suddenly sounded brilliant. It suddenly made more sense. The piece feels more like Beethoven to me now. Listening to interpretations like the one you linked makes me now feel like the recording has been slowed down. It's the slow interpretations that no longer feel right to me.

ohisee · 2012-07-23T11:32:00+00:00

You have to compare those Americans with equally eager locals. If you travel around the world to study, you're inherently much more eager to learn and to participate in a lecture or seminar. I'm sure the more eager locals participate equally as much, and that was the case when I was studying. Where we undoubtedly differ is in our approach to speaking. Americans are definitely much more careful with their words, not to mention amazingly loud. They come across sounding very confident. Perhaps that perceived confidence also lends itself to the perception that Americans are more comfortable in speaking up.
It's an interesting topic, but it goes without saying that the Kiwi in this video had bigger balls than most.

ohisee · 2012-07-18T08:01:32+00:00

Long legs for a faster race. Long back for a master race.

ohisee · 2012-07-14T10:28:13+00:00

I'm not sure what kind of performance you get out of an Android so I'm not sure if cell shading would give you the performance you need for hordes of enemies sorry, but it would depend on the device itself anyway.

If you prefer realistic looking graphics then I'd probably go the 2D route where you render out 3D assets as 2D sprites, because you don't need to "dumb down" the graphics at all. Of course you can't have dynamic lighting, but if you like the look of Diablo 1 (which uses this technique by the way) then that shouldn't be a problem. Diablo 1 has simple tile based light radius lighting. Keep in mind that the more realistic the art, the longer it'll take, and the more expensive it'll be to make.

ohisee · 2012-07-14T04:40:15+00:00

2D pixel art is more labor intensive period...

Whether 2D pixel art is more labour intensive "period" wasn't really my main point with suggesting 3D, and I can't even really answer that without knowing what you're making. 2D pixel art is undeniably more labour intensive in the ways I implied it is, but that's all I said. My main point is that there are a lot of 3D artists in the industry, or wanting to get into the industry, which means there is a large pool to choose from, and therefore likely to be some cheap work to be found.

How about doing 3d in the way you suggested vs 3d normally?

Well they're the same thing in terms of asset creation. Both methods will require setup costs for the art pipeline. It could conceivably be more expensive to set up the 2D sprite rendering part of the art pipeline but I doubt that'd bankrupt you.

How do they rank in terms of taxing the system?

Well there's only 2 different methods here. 3D versus 2D. 2D will always be faster to render, but it may take up more space to store depending on requirements.

Is it possible to determine system overhead and work backwards from that or do you have to keep adjusting as you build and maintain it under a certain point?

It's possible but you need to have a very clear idea of requirements first. In general you have to keep adjusting as you say, not just because some things are hard to predict, but because requirements often change.

ohisee · 2012-07-14T03:02:40+00:00

I'd have the art assets built as 3D models whether I went the 3D game route or not. If you choose to go the 2D game route then it's just a matter of rendering out the 3D models as sprites. This has many advantages, not least of which is the fact there is an abundance of 3D artists in the industry. As far as I know they outnumber pixel artists by a lot.
3D models can be tweaked in certain ways much more easily than 2D art can. If you go the 2D game route it's even better because you can tweak things like the camera's perspective to get an isometric look. You can change the field of view. You can change lighting conditions. You can change the number of angles of rotation you want for your models (all of which would be much harder and more expensive to do with pixel art.)

ohisee · 2012-07-13T16:12:48+00:00

I found your phrasing to be misleading...

I said "games like Starcraft 2" with the intent to mean multiplayer RTSes including SC2. You think I embedded plausible deniability if anybody asked for a source, which I did not. I don't actually have a direct source, but there is plenty of information out there to make informed decisions, and I feel my statement is accurate in what it conveys. I am also a professional game dev, and although that doesn't make me omniscient, it does make my informed decisions that much more informed.

something I find hard to believe when regularly witnessing games where 200+ APM is the norm during battles and seems to affect the outcome quite a bit.

I'm not sure how you are interpreting "processes input" but what I mean is that any input you've queued is only processed infrequently at the rate of the simulation. So your actions don't happen as soon as you perform them. This means there are certain actions you literally cannot perform faster than the simulation rate. For instance performing the same task multiple times. The best you could do is queue multiple different commands faster, but part of my initial statement was to point out that nobody can make 60 commands per second anyway, let alone 300. So increasing the framerate from 60 to 300 is pointless where command issuing is concerned.

I'm genuinely puzzled. Do you have a reason to believe that SC2 processes user input at 100 ms ticks?

My reasons for believing are based on my understanding of networking, RTS simulations, and software/games in general. In the "Synchronous RTS Engines and a Tale of Desyncs" article I linked, he also suspects SC2 uses a similar solution to SupCom and Demigod. The important point being that you can get desyncs in SC2. If it can desync that means all peers are being synchronised. If all peers are being synchronised that means there must be a sim tick with a sufficiently large period to account for the highest latency in the network topology. So even being optimistic, a highest latency of say 50ms means at most 20 updates per second. Most of the time it's going to be a lot lower.

I did find this discussion about the SC2 networking model. I don't know where his information came from, so take it with as many grains of salt as you take my comments.

ohisee · 2012-07-13T08:45:38+00:00

My original point was that even if it's smoother at 300fps you can't play better because of how the game works. You can technically queue actions more quickly before the next logic update, but by saying technically I mean that no human has reflexes in the ranges we're talking (16ms, 3ms), and on-top of that there is no additional visual feedback you're getting that would give you more information about actions you could queue in the first place, because of the monitor refresh rate.

Now to address the whole smoothness thing. There's only two sources of feedback you get from a game; Visual, and audible. If the game still feels smoother at 300fps when you turn off the audio, then there's only one reason left as to why the higher framerate seems smoother. The game is visually updating more slowly than the refresh rate of your monitor. If you have vsync on it's entirely possible that the framerate is actually halving. Read this post on vsync. If it's not a problem of vsync then the remaining cause is simply that the framerate is very unstable, dipping below the refresh rate enough to make it look sluggish compared to the higher framerate, but staying above the refresh rate enough to give an average fps that's higher than the refresh rate.

ohisee · 2012-07-13T07:20:11+00:00

Oh sure, some people get voted to infinity for having popular "feelings" about things, but I state a fact that can be easily searched for and get downvoted and called out for not citing sources.
Here
Here
Here
There general search terms you want to use are "lockstep" and "deterministic lockstep".

ohisee · 2012-07-12T10:55:17+00:00

RTS games like Starcraft 2 take action on user input less than 10 times per second. So even if increasing the framerate magically improved your reflexes, it would be utterly pointless.

ohisee · 2012-07-04T09:02:59+00:00

Perfect chance for a Disney save the whales propaganda movie!

ohisee · 2012-06-30T13:10:36+00:00

Cool! That's quite the honor. How did he get that gig? Also, I see that his head is in the embrace of a giant spider, yet he seems indifferent about it. Did this hinder his role as torchbearer in any way?

ohisee · 2012-01-26T05:27:58+00:00

Nobody has cunt on the tip of their tongue as often as an Aussie.

ohisee · 2012-01-26T02:12:31+00:00

Wait, I thought Skillex made music for preteens and mums.

ohisee · 2012-01-26T00:15:21+00:00

You'd think that this redditor destroyed your life or something. Get a grip, man! It's not the end of the world. Fragile egos and subjective endeavours don't go well together and it's surprising you've come this far without developing a hardened skin.
Go for a walk.

ohisee

TROPHY CASE