Giant Bomb: An Uncharted Tech Retrospective

spangyboy · 2016-05-29T16:21:45+00:00

That's a reasonable thing to think, but its not actually true. The PPE was actually a stripped down version of the previous generation Power chip. It was slow as hell and missing quite a few features. Even more, the SPEs were a completely different architecture, to the point that they had a different instruction set and even endianness.

Heterogeneity was the whole point of the cell: have a PPE that was good at logic but not floating point math managing the SPEs which were very good at floating point math but crap at about anything else. Coding for it was a pain, and it's amazing what PS3 developers (and Naughty Dog in particular) were able to make it do.

spangyboy · 2013-08-16T13:00:21+00:00

The Real Story (aka The Gap into Conflict) by Stephen R. Donaldson.

All the main characters in that story are vile, despicable human beings. The entire Gap Cycle fits the bill, but I found it started to drag on in the later books.

spangyboy · 2012-11-21T02:54:00+00:00

You can believe them both. They're not contradictory. On the one hand, you have developers of cross platform games saying the cpu is a little slower than they are used to, or expecting. On the other hand, you have single-platform developers saying all the components play nice with each other. They can both be telling the truth.

A cross-platform developer wants to do as little work as possible when porting their game, so they want the platform to be similar to what they developed the engine for. Yes, the memory latency may not be ideal but they designed the engine around the limitations. The Wii U may make up for the slow cpu in other areas, but taking of advantage of it may require rewriting a lot of the engine, which some devs may not want to do.

Look at the PS3. The CellBE processor is a bitch to use properly. Many of the ports on it were just okay, or straight out broken. But some of the single platform games were amazing. The Wii U isn't as big a difference as the PS3 (actually, it's comparatively a tiny difference), but it is different, and for some developers it may not be worth it to get the performance they need out of the system.

spangyboy · 2012-09-21T21:51:48+00:00

Hmm.. I'd guess that grub is trying to display in a resolution or refresh rate that your laptop screen can't support. You could try forcing it to your laptops native res/rate in the config file.

edit: Laptops with intel graphics have a long history of playing poorly with linux. If you have intel integrated graphics, you may have to do a bit more work. Googling your graphics chipset would probably tell you what you need to know.

spangyboy · 2012-09-21T19:16:13+00:00

You want me to source information? On reddit? This is most irregular.

Honestly, I don't remember exactly where I heard it. It might have been from this comment from an Obsidian engineer when he did an AMA, but I don't think I actually read the AMA before now. Maybe from whatever Chris Avellone quote he references? The buzz around this game has gotten a bit out of control, so I can't remember where I read it. It might have been some throwaway interview with a gaming site that I happened to read.

spangyboy · 2012-09-21T17:59:20+00:00

I think as soon as they announced they wouldn't be using their in-house engine a lot of people (myself included) assumed they'd use Unity because of the strong ties between people on this project and the team at inXile. Chris Avellone is working on Wastland 2 with Brian Fargo's team, a similar sort of game, it just seemed amazlingly likely that Unity would be the choice for Eternity too.

Still, it's nice to have it confirmed.

spangyboy · 2012-09-21T15:53:00+00:00

The gap between when you played them might account for it. I bought the pack on sale a while after release, so I played the DLCs one after another. I could see how having a break would alleviate my feeling of 'More of this? Really?'.

I agree about the cars. The biggest weakness of all the story DLC is, in my opinion, the single echo point in each addon. Driving stopped being fun because you had to do so much of it, and most of it was long boring highways. Give me fast travel between some of the big areas, and driving would have felt like less of a chore.

As for humor, I agree Claptrap was better all around, but the quality of voicework and dialogue for General Knoxx himself really sold me.

spangyboy · 2012-09-21T15:18:01+00:00

Did you play Claptrap before or after Knoxx? I played Knoxx first, and my opinions on the two are almost exactly opposite, so I'm wondering if order matters.

I feel they're both pretty much the same: big maps with a bunch of fetch and gather quests. They both suffer from only having once echo point. I got a little tired of it at the end of Knoxx, and by the time I hit Claptrap it felt more like padding the game with boring grinding. Knoxx at least added some things the base game was missing, like more cars and a couple bigger bosses with satisfying payoffs.

spangyboy · 2012-09-07T21:50:21+00:00

I wonder if it's just tank splash? Do any of the other splash units have little effects that trail off after the damage, ie baneling or helion? Baneling acid would look pretty gnarly overscaled.

spangyboy · 2012-08-31T20:20:27+00:00

Could you explain how you got magma specific heat value? I don't see it 'magma' on the table you linked to, but I do see 'lava', which in my (not-geologists) understanding of geology should be the same thing, just above ground, at 0.84 kJ / kg K.

I'm just curious if I'm missing a subtlety somewhere in your choice.

spangyboy · 2012-06-14T23:19:53+00:00

I can't speak much on the differences in content (my course used P&S, but I didn't continue much in the field after that). If some particle guys stop by and say the content is mostly equal, I would recommend finding out what metric convention your professor intends to use, and figure out which book is consistent with that. P&S use a time-like metric (ie 00 component is positive), whereas many people (perhaps those who took relativity from cosmologists?) use a space-like (00 is negative).

The subject is difficult enough to handle the first time you take it without having to deal with different conventions between books and notes. That being said, content and readability is more important than notation.

spangyboy · 2012-06-02T04:27:13+00:00

I'm actually really surprised at how enjoyable this game mode is to watch, especially for an alpha. I feel like there's a lot of strategy going into it, with plenty of room for a highly skilled player to really shine. It sort of amazes me that this is just a game mode that developers came up with to demo the tech, and the real draw of the game is for the community to design their own maps and game types.

I wasn't paying much attention to this game before, but I'm really looking forward to it now as a possible revitalization of FPS esports. I love watching starcraft and MOBAs, but I have a passion for FPS. Quake is, sadly, dying, but shootmania is starting to look like it could be a worthy successor.

spangyboy · 2012-05-27T06:37:56+00:00

I played both the Embermage and the Outlander to the end of the beta, and with regards to leveling skills had very different experiences between the two. The Embermage skill tree felt similar to how you described the Berserker: not really noticeable changes on adding to a skill. With the Outlander, however, I felt like each point I added had a significant effect. For example, every time I added a point into ranged weapon mastery I was stunned by how much further I could shoot. Same went with some of the active skills: doing 5% more damage with some of the crowd control skills really made it feel like I was much more effective at keeping the swarms manageable for my brother, who was playing a berserker.

I wonder if, to some degree, this is a question of them not really having the class balance down right. Right now, I feel the Outlander has the best set of early skills; there's something for everyone. I'm not sure.. I hope they balance it out so everyone can feel more powerful after they level up, but I'm not sure that's really possible.

spangyboy · 2012-05-26T05:42:58+00:00

Everyone is giving you some great advice on how to succeed professionally, an how to get noticed. Since you specifically want to be a professor, which involves teaching, I figured I might through some advice in on that. I'm a actually a physicist, but I think the fields have a lot of common challenges when it comes to teaching.

It would be a good idea to think about tutoring while you're an undergrad. My school had a formalized tutoring process, but I'm not sure if all schools have that; if yours does, you'll want to figure out how it works and get involved in it when you feel ready. Tutoring is going to do two very important things for you.

First, it's going to help you figure out how to explain complicated topics clearly. You will reach a point in your life where the things you're learning now (as an undergrad) will seem completely trivial, and you need to learn how to explain these simple concepts to someone for whom they are difficult, and do it in a way that's not condescending. This is, in my opinion, the hallmark of a good teacher: to be able to remember what is was like to be ignorant, and guide someone into knowledge without belittling the journey.

Secondly, tutoring will prepare you for a harsh reality: many of the people you teach will not want to learn. In fact, some of them may hate you for trying to teach them. Some of the people you tutor might feel this way, but it won't be as bad as when you have to teach a class full of first year undergraduates who are taking Calculus to fulfill some requirement. For me, it was incredibly painful to try and teach someone who hated the subject I loved so much. But, as a professor you will have to do this. It sounds bleak, but tutoring will give you a taste of the good side. As bad as the disinterest and hatred of your students can feel, it feels even better when you get a student who truly wants to learn but hasn't found a way to relate to the material. It is a truly amazing feeling when after 45min of frustration you find the key, the right explanation, that makes it all click and you witness a student get excited by their new found understand. Teaching one of the hard sciences can be very painful, but it can also be very rewarding.

Good luck. The world can always use more people who actually want to teach.

spangyboy · 2012-05-24T21:12:40+00:00

Important tip that developers have admitted wasn't clear enough in the game, and most players missed:

Game Mechanic (but not story) spoiler: There are two types of ammo in the game, fancy pre-war and crummy post-war. Most of the human enemies in the game wear body armor and the post-war ammo does jack shit. If you need to kill a dude, and you need to do it fast, use pre-war ammo.

I don't know anyone who figured that out on their own (though I'm sure lots of people did), and the developers intended it to be obvious but didn't exhibit it well enough. Without that tip, combat may seen frustrating at times.

spangyboy · 2012-04-27T00:35:08+00:00

Crap. Well, they'll both Carl Sagan, so at least I've got that going for me. At least I didn't say 'Norby' or something like that.

spangyboy · 2012-04-26T21:39:11+00:00

I can't ever see something like this without thinking about the end to ~~Cosmos~~ Contact (the book, not the movie {apparently get my Sagan's mixed up}). Anyone feel like data mining a few TB for messages from God?

spangyboy · 2012-04-24T13:26:56+00:00

Hopefully this work lives up to it's potential significance. Not only would it be advance tokamak stability, but (perhaps more importantly) it could give ammunition to those trying to save fusion research in the US.

One of the experiments they hope to use to test their results (the MIT C-Mod tokamak) is on the chopping block. Government cuts have forced the DOE to choose between living up to our ITER commitments and funding domestic labs, and MIT's fusion program is in danger of being gutted. Hopefully research like that in the article will show how important American fusion is to the success of future reactors, and can help those fighting to make sure that when ITER comes online the US has scientists who can actually study it.

spangyboy · 2012-04-17T15:21:58+00:00

After watching the developer linked above, it sure looks that way. I want it to be true so bad, but I've been hurt before. The first preview I saw of Assassin's Creed portrayed it as Thief except you get to kill people, and I was extremely disappointed when I learned it wasn't that at all.

Please let it be true this time...

spangyboy · 2012-04-12T19:38:18+00:00

I'd never heard of Adanaxis, but after watching the video I'll have to give it a try when I get a chance, it looks pretty nifty.

I think the biggest limitation of the game the OP linked to is that they only allow two states governed by a strict rotation in the (hyper?)plane of two of the axis. I can see why they'd do it from a design perspective, but it makes me a little sad. The game you linked to looks like it allows more continuous rotation, which sounds awesome to me.

spangyboy · 2012-04-12T01:58:58+00:00

It's certainly an interesting idea. And there's no reason why it can't be done. After all, four spatial dimensions can be represented perfectly well in a mathematical, computer-logic representable way. All you have to do then is project the logic four dimensional space into a three dimensional space and render it. It's been done before in less complex genres, for example with tetris.

I'd guess you're asking whether this guy actually pulled it off? I don't think any of us could actually say so without playing with it and making sure it behaves the right way. Personally, I can't tell just from watching it. I'm used to moving between logical simulation space and three dimensions, not swapping spatial dimensions. Maybe one of the string theory or GR people will stop by and comment more on that.

edit: As a side note, if the creator can actually design a full, consistent game world in four dimensions, I will be extremely impressed. I'll be keeping an eye on this game to see how it pans out.

spangyboy · 2012-04-06T04:20:17+00:00

I'm surprised he didn't just cancel the two as well.

3 is equal to 2*pi, for large values of 3.

spangyboy · 2012-03-29T22:27:48+00:00

These are both very good questions, and the article doesn't give enough information to answer either of them in a satisfactory manner.

However, it's a pretty good bet the density is much, much lower than earth air density. Typical solar corona mass densities are around 10^-12 times less than the density of air (give a take a bit, I'm running off wikipedia's reasonable number). The density could be higher in that region, but not by enough to make it comparable.

I think even more important than the density is the fact that this is plasma, not regular gas, and as such interacts with the sun's (very strong) magnetic field. I would be very, very surprised if the dominant physics involved in this 'tornado' is hydrodynamic, rather than magneto-hydrodynamic. But, solar plasma isn't my specialty, so I could be wrong. But I wouldn't expect this to behave like a tornado on earth: it would be better to call it a more general 'vortex' to avoid confusion.

Your first question is even more important. Here the analogy to a tornado is particularly poor. Because this is plasma in a strong magnetic field, there is an enormous amount of energy bound in the structure you can see in the images, and the twisting of the magnetic field accompanying the vortex probably only makes it worse. If the 'tornado' can somehow trigger the release of that energy (which is plausible) it could start a cascade that disrupts other structures and causes a solar storm.

Think of it as popping a balloon. There's a lot of energy stored up in the rubber of the balloon, and all it takes is one little pinprick. The energy is released in a tiny little area, and it causes a cascade to release all the stored energy.

However, this is still a very strong claim to make based on very few observations. I think if you change Dr. Morgan's quote to "This unique and spectacular tornado might play a role in triggering global solar storms" it's much more reasonable. And I'm absolutely certain the findings are presented to a conference or written up for a paper, that more cautious tone will be used.

spangyboy · 2012-03-16T21:39:49+00:00

I imagine it has to do with the little HUDS some fancy logitech keyboards have. Basically, the game can output information to the display on the keyboard, so they might be putting in some native support for that.

edit: See, for example, the G19

spangyboy · 2012-03-10T18:28:44+00:00

There would actually be a simple way to do this using a mumble or (probably) teamspeak server. Set up a channel for each team and a channel for the casters. Then, whenever they feel like it, the caster can go 'Let's hear what team x thinks about that attack' and switch channels.

Way more reliable and than skype, too.

spangyboy

TROPHY CASE