The Secret World delayed until July 3
Daily Filter: Sleeping Dogs, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron
Kingdoms of Amalur needed 3 million sales 'to break even,' RI governor says
Former Modern Warfare devs wanted to give Call of Duty series a 'rest'
Konami accused of bank loan fraud over Def Jam Rapstar
werd
by Steve Gibson, Feb 05, 2003 7:43am PSTOh man, so I was subjected to watching the movie Simone last night and I'm pretty sure I'll be crying all day today for the MPAA. Havent seen something that pisspoor in a while, yeesh. Hard to tell if that Matrix game will be any good, ok well it's impossible to ever tell if a game will be good from screenshots... but those shots certainly didnt help the cause.. so lets just hope it plays good I guess? Today seems like an excellent day for Chinese food, agreed? movie: I am the death of real.
How many shackers lift weights with some level of commitment?
There's 2 threads going now about lifting, I'm curious.
Non-lardasses, step forth and unite!
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http://www.shackspace.com/~virus@shackmail.com/ZMatrixSetupNT_1_4_8.exe
turns your desktop into streaming matrix code
and if its been around for a while, so what - its good for the people who have never seen it before
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DOOO EEEEET *chugs maple syrup*
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When I get the system back up I'll start planning some tweaks to aiming and the core of item pickup code. If you want some interesting algorithm problems, here are the two things I'm working on now:
Weapon Aiming Feedback:
The only gripe about the previous Brainworks beta was that the machinegun accuracy was too good. The bots were really realistic with all other weapons, but machinegun was too good. I spent a lot of time thinking about the problem, and I figured out why this is.
Players constant process feedback for how good their aim is. The primary feedback mechanism is the crosshair. But whenever a player fires their weapon, they get additional feedback. When you fire a railgun, for example, the rail trail helps you understand how your aim needs to change. Similarly, it's far easier to aim the lightning gun while firing than not firing. This is because the lightning bolt graphic acts as an aim assistant. Even firing rockets helps-- you can see the rocket's trajectory and use it to help understand how you're actually aiming. Your mind subconsciously mixes all of this information together (cross hairs, fire feedback, pain sounds from hits, etc.) to determine how aiming must be adjusted next frame.
Now here's the trick. The machinegun also has feedback-- it has bullet marks it makes on the wall, plus the pain DING sound when you hit a player. But the machinegun has a reasonably large spread. Every 100 ms, the player gets extra feedback from the machinegun. Unlike the other weapons, the machinegun information MIGHT BE INCORRECT. For example, suppose you are not aimed perfectly at the target (eg. a railgun shot would miss). But you fire the machinegun and the bullet goes off to the side hitting your target. Part of your mind thinks you're aiming correctly. Similarly you could miss even while the target is perfectly lined up in the crosshairs. So every time you fire, you get false information from the machinegun. Multiply this by 10 different pieces of false information per second, and it's just harder to aim the machinegun while firing than it is without firing.
Incidently, the Shotgun also has a spread including 11 bullets. But the bad information from the shotgun hurts your mind much less than the machinegun. The shotgun only gives you one piece of information every second (not ten per second). So if the information is wrong, it won't affect your aiming for most of aim cycle. And second, there are 11 bullet shots-- your mind automatically computes the center of the pellet pattern. Statistically, this center will have a much tighter spread than the machinegun spread, even though the individual pellets in the shotgun have a wider spread.
Anyway, I've concluded that the aiming code needs an "aim adjustment feedback" mechanism. Each weapon needs a spread value and a feedback visibility. Spread value is the greatest angle a shot could be off from your center (0 for everything but shotgun and machinegun). The feedback visibility is a measure of how much mindspace the weapon firing occupies. Higher visibility means your mind values the input more. So a weapon with a drawn beam would have high visibility, while a bullet weapon would be lower.
Any ideas how I could combine these values into an aiming adjustment modification?
Nearest Point Algorithm:
So if that algorithm was too easy for, or too hard to understand, here's another problem. It's very easy to explain but the solution is much harder.
Suppose I have a static list of points 'P' in 3-space. This list will have somewhere between 20 and 200 points in it. Suppose I have an input point 'a'. Which point 'pi' in 'P' is nearest to point 'a', using the standard Euclidean metric?
I will probably do this point check many times per seconds, but the point list is always static, so a precomputed data structure would be helpful. I'm pretty sure that a linear search through the list will be too slow.
I think the optimal solution is to look up the (N choose 2) planes that bisect the line segments between every pair of points in P. Then have each of these planes clip each other until you are left with a a convex hull around each point pi in P. Note that some of these hulls will be unbounded. Anyway, you could then in theory create a BSP tree of these hulls and do a point search in logarithm time.
Unfortunately, that's an awful lot of work. I'd prefer another sub-linear algorithm with much easier setup. Does anyone have ideas for this?
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Cause his music doesn't fit the OMG I WANNA CRUSH THE INDUSTRY theme of his THe last DJ record.
and
RATM kinda lost their hatred towards the end of the band.
So RATM.feat Tom Petty - CRUSH THE GREEDY RECORD INDUSTRY NOW !
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1.) In order to change wireless networks, you have to reboot. This is annoying when I connect to something like 4 wireless networks daily.
2.) Trillian and Quicken 2001 both work great with Crossover Office + Plugin!
3.) It's configured to read NTFS partitions out of the box. In fact, it shows up as your "C" drive in "Your Computer". This is kickass because I don't have to copy over my MP3's or anything to listen to tracks.
It's doubly cool because I can open my XP drive and edit documents, spreadsheets, and (simple) Access Databases. Although I can't save them to the drive, it's still pretty awesome. I can't wait till they get that NTFS-WRITE stuff worked out. Knoppix did it, I don't quite know why Xandros hasn't yet.
4.) Anti-aliasing (Cleartype) works great. However, when you enable anti-aliasing, Xandros defaults to 6 total fonts, not the Truetype fonts you can install through Crossover. This sucked until I did a quick search on the Xandros forums for "anti-aliasing" and found the fix (you have to edit the XF86tconfig - or something like that, I can't remember - and add a font directory for them to be seen). A quick restart of X and you have fully anti-aliased true type fonts. It's not quite up to the level of cleartype yet, but it's good.
5.) Software installation is a damn dream. I have always loved apt-get, and I still do. BTW, Debian people, do a apt-get install pysol* - it's a great package of something like 78 solitaire style games. Great for when you are on hold for an hour.
6.) Boot times are fast compared to other Linuxes (Redhat, SuSE and Mandrake), but still slow compared to Windows and especially BeOS.
That's it for now. I'll check in later.
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ER is UP!
wtf?
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Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus
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i went in today to reserve wind waker and saw they were giving away tshirts for reserving tenchu: wrath of heaven. i haven't looked much at the game lately (although i liked tenchu 1+2) so i don't know if i'm going to end up picking it up when it comes out, but for $5 down i'll get the shirt.
http://members.cox.net/m-palmer/front.jpg
http://members.cox.net/m-palmer/back.jpg
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however a few brave mods have decided that they dont mind being known, so here's a partial list of the active mods for you guys. you may feel free to SHACKMSG these people about particular stuff if you like. there are still a few other mods who are personal friends of mine that you guys wouldnt know etc, but this is a good portion of the guys you see every day who enjoy oppression.
steve gibson
maarten goldstein
andy hanson
jack mathews
sander pilon
flawless cowboy
odoyle
allyourbase
kenmis
geedeck
zerologik
andromeda
haiku
pupismyname
piotyr
fat mike
remember keep your questions about moderation to shackmsg or email to these people. Also, just to make sure the accusations of favoritism fly, any posts even insinuating that a particular person didnt get nuked/banned because they are a mod will be nuked/banned. there have been cases of mods being nuked/banned for lapses in judgement, and mods removed. we'll leave it at that.
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"S.F. man's astounding photo Mysterious purple streak is shown hitting Columbia 7 minutes before it disintegrated"
Think this could be legit?
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Is there alot of $ to be made?
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Hi Portax........
http://www.theta-g.com/kit/shatner/
i got my wireless desktop in the mail yesterday.
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New enterprise on tonight (well maybe last night for some of you), starting shortly.
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I never win shit in fact once on a scratch ticket I scratched off a you owe us spot..
I threw it away.
You ever win anything good?
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