Randox

Administrator Note: Going to be working on doing up an announcement for this, but compliments of the Beta Test Code of Conduct, found at [qfc]333-334-0-64870853[/qfc], Jagex has prohibited the posting of information gained from the beta outside their own forums under their NDA, and Tip.It will be enforcing this until further notice, under rule 1.1 of our own code of conduct which outlines our commitment to uphold their rules. My sincere apologies for the frustration this is going to cause, but at least for the time being this is going to be how it works.

Unfortunately, due to the NDA (non disclosure agreement), I have to lock this, as per the Beta Test Code of Conduct [qfc]333-334-0-64870853[/qfc]. I understand how infuriating this is going to be for people who are not a part of the beta, however Tip.It has committed to respecting Jagex rules, and will enforce the NDA until further notice. EDIT: The NDA has now been lifted. Thread lock revoked :)

I've discovered the GTA4 modding community (after owning the game for long enough). In particular, I found the LCPD:FR mod which allows you play as the police, go on patrol and arrest people and what not. Then the wider police modding communities, which has some awesome mods that massively expand on the idea. I've only just started dabbling, but I did find a youtube group that does this in multilayer, as a full out roleplay (though the newer videos are a bit more relaxed). It's kind of neat watching people actually patrol Liberty City, and some of the earlier videos are almost eerie how much they stick to the RP (it's like watching an actual police show with a magic 3rd person camera). Once I have some more free time, and finish my playthroughs of the game, I want to take some time and actually get a few of the really good mods (so that I can do more patrol and less scripted events), and get some nice models, and have some fun with this.

As horrible as the event is, at least it does tend to bring out the best in people. I've read a few news reports, as well as watching some of the footage of the blast, though I've not seen anything that shows both explosions. I found one on youtube from a spectator who was...I don't know maybe 50ft from the first one tops (you can see the fireball entering the view from the left, and it seems to be mostly people who were really close that started running right away), and the local news has a really good overhead of it. But it's things like the random bystander who helped a father act as a human shield for his kids, or the fact that civilians are still rushing to help people even after the second bomb has gone off and panic has set in. The local version of the story (from the Associate Press) can be found here, which includes a slow motion video of the first bomb as it goes off, and quite a few pictures. As a warning, some of the pictures are quite gruesome; there are definitely a few missing limbs floating around, and a LOT of blood. There is also a, I don't know how to describe it. Massachusetts rendered considerable aid to Halifax following the Halifax Explosion in 1917. It's the sort of debt of thanks you hope there is never a chance to be repaid with more than Christmas Trees.

There can't really be a downloadable client for this, at least not like the one for the Java client. That one is a standalone program that is entirely self contained, so that it doesn't require Java to run, and it also cuts out the deadweight of running thorugh a browser. You can't do that for the new client, you need a full fledged browser to run the HTML and Javascript code anyway (because they can't compile into a standalone program, not being programming languages), so if Jagex did a downloadable client they would essentially be creating a feature light web browser. Might as well use the real deal since the people developing Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari, etc all have a better idea what they are doing than Jagex would. For C++, I don't see it being feasible. Even if Jagex are magic and they can simply compile the C++ client into a windows, max, and linux version without needing to change a single thing between them (my observation is that for games, this never happens), that's an additional client that needs to be developed and maintained. Jagex seem to be aiming strongly for the most platforms with the least amount of work, which are currently Java and WebGL, as both work cross platform with exactly zero effort. I did forget mercifulls point about HTML5 being moot though, and I can't find it, if someone could point me to it. This is not really an area of expertise for me so I'm sure I'm missing something. Also, a question I just thought of. What is the standalone Java client written in? Anyone know? Just hit me that it can't be written in Java, or it would require Java to run (wouldn't it?).

The scary part is that some phones are considerably more powerful than some of the computers people are talking about. I think I still have trouble wrapping my head around that sometimes. Setting the bar high does make sense. They haven't optimized the client yet, though it looks like they have been making pretty quick progress on that front, and I doubt they are interested in finishing that process before we get a chance to have our say and demand whatever changes will be demanded, or incorporate new ideas. I suppose there is also something to be said for suture proofing, even if much of the portable hardware might not ultimately be ready, but html being around in the future is a pretty solid bet, so this seems like a decent place to invest in for the foreseeable future given their apparent goals. Also, I now want a new cell phone, because never has "computers depreciate in value at roughly the same rate as bananas" been more true than my cell phone. Apparently (it actually does just fine, though a bigger processor would allow it to play more of my video library by being able to deal with better bit rates).

I like four threads. It's been bugging me for a while that RuneScape uses only one. It's a nice leapfrog too, most of the games I own wont support more than two, and the ones that do have to be manually configured for it (Skyrim can do at least 6, not sure how high it can go). I am certainly interested to see what the computer load looks like on Wedensday, since unless the new client is considerably more work, at 4 cores I would expect any quadcore and up to have a fairly easy go at this, GPU permitting. Still, I expect the minimum requirements to be a lot lower. There wouldn't seem to be much point going out of your way to make this compatible with mobile devices if the client can't lighten itself enough for them to handle it.

I was a little underwhelmed looking at the new graphics, from a texture point of view. I had actually been under the impression that they were globally improving all that, but obviously not. No matter though, because seeing just a few seconds of the game with an actual render distance (your render distance doesn't count when it's being beaten by Super Mario 64 several times over) has pretty much ruined the entire experience for me (in a good way). I thought it was difficult to look at the game in the little fixed screen box after HD, but that is nothing compared to getting rid of that blasted fog. I also have a soft spot for water shaders and textures. Like, a real soft spot for them, and while I can still remember the HD ones being a bit of a wow factor for me (actual wow, not the game), and I still like them, I pretty much squeeled when I saw reflections, though the terrible reflection resolution does put a bit of a damper on it. I do hope that can go up to a non pixelated level of detail. Also, with Stev. That super bad FPS is not confidence inspiring, since that is presumably coming from a local or in house server where latency better not be an issue, and on a pretty decent dev computer that I would assume blows mine out of the water.

By the power vested in me, I now declare you Omar, and you Kaida, to be city buddies. You may now hug your friend.

Ah, that works too.

That awesome moment when you remember :^_^: Welcome back.

Reminds me of something I remember seeing on some of those joke lists of 'rules that guys wish girls knew' that aren't particularly hard to find: I've heard the same sentiment from a few guys as well.

So a while back I found a TV show from way back. I used to watch it in pre-school, which would make it my first favorite TV show ever, called The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin. Anyway, I watch it from time to time when I have nothing in particular I feel like watching (among a couple other old cartoons I've been able to find out youtube), and I have to say, sometimes the logic of childrens shows is baffling. In particular, I like the arc where the heroes visit the castle that rules the country, and finds out that entire area is suffering massive food shortages. By this point in the series, they have discovered a crystal that allows them to make things bigger or smaller, and another that allows them to duplicate stuff, which you might notice are two things that could be very effective in creating more food (the first one even having been used in a previous episode to turn a strawberry into a 400 some odd pound version of itself). You would think that the first thing they would do when they find out people are starving is bring this up, and you know, help the people out. Instead we go through three episodes before the fact that they have these magic crystals that could really be useful comes up, and only because someone explicitly asks them about the crystals they heard these people have, at which point they remember the magical famine crushing magic they ahve been carrying around for the last few days. They then top themselves by playing the cruelest practical joke in history. See, the duplicating crystal isn't perfect, and at this time the things it duplicates last for about a day before they break down and vanish. So perhaps this might not be the best way to make more food. Rather than finding something that wont spoil for a while and super sizing it, they use the crystal to turn a peanut into many many peanuts and plant this, heroically ignoring the fact that the problem is they can't grow jack in the soil because there's not enough rain, and that by dawn the next day the peanuts they planted will have vanished back into the ether, and no one will plant crops that actually exist in that field because they will be waiting for the freaking peanuts to grow. It's an odd logical gap to be making considering that the B story for this episode is that one of the bad guys steals a whole bunch of jewelry that the duplicating crystal was used on as an example, and that it vanishes when he tries to give it to his boss to pay off his debts. Baffling cartoon logic aside, I like seeing some of the episodes because a lot of it is still familiar to me. Going in I could only remember vague snapshots of the show, but every once in a while my memory gets a real jog, and 17 years later, I am doing a much better job of actually following the story arc.

The advice is still valid. The idea is to approach things in a way that doesn't kill things before they ever have a chance. You can't control if someone likes you or not, that's up to reality, so really you're just modifying your target criteria I think.

Yeah, it does feel good to be that angry. Just be warned, from someone who has been down this road, that it's a defense mechanism, and it doesn't last forever. Your body has given you a blank cheque to handle this as poorly as you want to, but sooner or later you're going to have to come to terms with the choice you make, and that this will impact how you form relationships until you deal with this, if you ever do. That said, you need to exit the rage mode first. Even if you managed to let her have her bit while you're like that, you would only turn it into more fuel.

I think I have to start off with this. You made the choice to get super drunk, so you are responsible for what you did. You can't lay that on anyone else, and I hope you understand that asking her out twice more (whether you knew you did or not is totally irrelevant because she knows), including an emotional outburst, is doing your level best to make things so awkward between the two of you as to ruin any chance of any kind of friendship. It's active sabotage, and apparently drunk you is an idiot, so you should probably have a stern talking to with yourself about that :P Moving on, and accepting that drunk people do stupid things and everyone is going to have to contend with stupid drunk people sooner or later, and also accepting that I have no interest in taking anyone's side. If she did what I think she did, the story getting out is still on her, and you might as well admit that you both did bad things and go from this point of mutual acceptance if possible, and not worry about who is more to blame and all that, because what's done is done. While I wouldn't rule out that what you think she did is true, it doesn't add up to me. If she wanted to get back at you, there is no reason to wait. The fresher the event is in peoples minds the better, it helps the rumor mill work at it's finest. If it were me, after your drunken emotional outburst I would definitely be talking about that with a friend so that I could vent. In my experience, when you screw up big with a girl, it's not just her you have to contend with. The girl friends can be just as, if not more, vicious and vindictive than she is, and there are certainly people out there who if they thought she was letting you off too easy would spread the story themselves to get back at you on her behalf, because they are going to see you as that drunken ex who wont stop harassing her (and I don't believe this is what you are like, but I think it's certainly how her friends might see it). I guess, my point is that before you turn this into something you get to carry around with you for the rest of your life (and surprise, this is not going to turn into anything that helps you maintain a stable relationship down the line), at least talk to her. Confront her, get her version of events, and see where the two of you stand. You don't need to make up, you don't need to take her at her word, and you don't need to ever speak to her again afterward. But if you're going to pack this kind of emotional baggage, hearing her out and getting the other side of the story can only help you. Reality is probably someplace between your imagination and her perspective.

Was thinking about this again last night, and aside from realizing that I think we have both seen each other's point and are just arguing for the sake of it, I did also think of something that a computer can't do. It's a mathematical limitation to how they work, and to our own understanding of mathematics. I would consider it not unlike how it's not possible to accurately represent 1/3 as a base 10 decimal (or any fraction that causes a repeater), where a base 9 counting system can perfectly represent the same fraction as 0.3 Now, the random number generators we use are arguably a lot more useful for most applications, and there are work arounds if you need truly random data which can be better approximated by incorporating the closest thing to random phenomenon you can find (radio active decay tends to be a good one), but you can't do it mathematically. If you could, it wouldn't be random. If you wanted to produce truly random outputs, your best bet is probably a quantum computer, because they don't operate on the strict mathematical rules we are used to. The quantum states that a quantum computer uses to represent bits (qubits) are probabilities, so I think you could run the exact same situation multiple times and get different answers, though in truth my understanding of quantum computing is superficial at best.

Locks keep honest people out of your house. However, most people also try not to rob a house when people are home, because a good way to avoid jail time is to not be caught in the act. But I would think that unless your house is constructed entirely out of concrete and steel plates,you would have to be crazy to risk starting a gun fight in your own house. At best, your house now has holes in it. At worst, you or other members of your family have now been shot because gypsum hardly even qualifies as bullet resistant. If you shoot them, then you now get to fight a second degree or attempted murder charge, which even assuming you successfully get ruled as self defense, still is going to mess up your life a lot more than dealing with your insurance company, unless your insurance company is the triads. As a curiosity, is it actually legal to defend your property with lethal force in the states?

Your market is a limit. Games like Crysis are rare for a reason, the market wont support much of the practice of releasing games intended for consumer computers that don't yet exist. We are probably running up against a human capital issue too, unless games want to get more expensive, which they might. If you want to be profitable, you can only spend so much effort on a game, and the top games are ever more demanding to create. Games like GTA4 already show that they are hitting that limit, where Rockstar obviously threw more money into the world than the game (and then used that mega expensive world in two more smaller games).

After looking around a bit, I am finding it harder to side against guns. Homicides with guns are pretty much plummeting, and have been since around the mid nineties. No one has been able to find a common link between the people who commit shooting sprees, other than depression tends to be pretty common in school shootings, so there is really no way right now to predict who would be at risk. If you look at suicide stats, you also have to wonder what is going on at all, since suicide by gun absolutely dwarfs homicide (accounting for more than 60% of gun fatalities). We know from experience that making suicide marginally more inconvenient causes suicide rates to plummet, and that most people who are talked down from a suicide attempt never try again. In other words, we know that if the suicide victims hadn't owned guns, probably 80-90% of them would have never killed themselves. It also means that if you'r going to die from being shot, roughly 2:1 odds are it's the gun you own, and you'll be the one pulling the trigger. Oh, and Canada already went ahead and proved that gun registries are a fantastic waste of everyone's time and money for you, and Canada isn't exactly known to be brimming with guns. This is not an idea that is likely to get better as you scale it up. Also, as cold as it sounds, school shootings are like the tiniest blip in gun violence you can find (and I am picking on them because they generally drive the gun debate), right after 'people who accidentally shot their nuts off' (though if people keep guns in their wasteband as much as movies suggest, that number is probably higher annually at least some years). Reason would suggest tackling problems in order of significance, and things like going after assault rifles and trying to tailor laws to stop school shootings is totally backwards to that. These are the smallest problems. The largest is suicide, the second is almost certainly gang murders, then your homicides related to illegal activity but not gangs, and then everything else of which school shootings are a sliver. You're looking at a little over 6,000 homicides a year in the States (by guns), and more than 12,000 suicides. It's possible there are more important parts of the issue that need consideration.

But the whole point is to not script it at all, to give the user total freedom of creativity :lol: you can actually do it with less. In fact, it could be done in a slightly limited fashion using all conventional hardware I'm sure, though I haven't a clue how to solve the issue of texturing. Computers suck major wazoo when it comes to pattern recognition, so while extrapolating a new ship or landscape from some samples is relatively easy with some awesome math and random numbers, it's quite a pain to do the details. You could perhaps treat an object as a whole bunch of objects in a relative formation, and with a library of texture patterns you would make something work. Couple that to a a nice image processor (I'm not sure how fast a processor can do this, or how it's currently done. If a CPU isn't up for this, some modification to the GPU driver would allow access and use of a far superior set up for edge detection), and you have a good start. Some cool math that I am not versed in later, and a random number generator, and you could build new objects from samples, and also perhaps create areas from samples, using other objects as replacements. Physics tweaks would be entirely different, and I'm not sure about designing gameplay. It's really more a fancy asset creation engine using the computer as a design assistant rather than using a CAD type program to make things. I don't have an idea for gameplay creation yet. As I learn more programming, I actually would love to impliment the last bit. A program to break down an image into profiles, and then recombine them. I think such programs do exist at least for 2D images, but I've never seen hint of one for 3D modelling (not that I have looked). If it works, I think the neatest application would be shape morphing, like corssing a fire truck with a car by linking the constituent parts to each other (front wheel to front wheel, rear to rear and so on) and stuff like that to see what it makes. Not as awesome as having your own Jarvis (from Iron Man), but would be quite cool.

Hardware is a limiting factor though, if you consider power consumption and space to be limiting factors. The transistor can not be made infinitely small, thus a computer with a certain transistor count (which limits computational power) can only ever be so small. To compete with the full power of a human brain, in real time, you're talking computers that use mega watts of power, and a computer running that many transistors is going to be pretty much the size of a small house. You don't need quite that much AI for what I had in mind, but not that much less (maybe half?), and it's still way beyond what any desktop could handle conventionally. I'm talking about an AI on the level of Jarvis out of Tony Stark, minus the ability to talk back (though that would be nice, so there could be a back and fourth in the design process). Anyway, you asked what a conventional desktop couldn't do. Artificial Human Intelligence is one of those things, and I've outlined a possible use for this AI in a gaming environment that a conventional desktop could not do as well (the AI would be able to design and render the models pretty much the moment you stopped telling it what to imagine, just like a human. A conventional based AI would take much longer to work through this).

No, I think you misunderstand. To do what I am thinking of, you need an AI capable of understanding casual spoken language, and ideally pictures and hand sketches, and it needs the problem solving capacity to deal with abstract problems (which humans can't do until around teenage years). You are essentially making possible a sandbox which is just made up of a very robust game engine and physics engine (in an effort to be able to deal with scenarios no one has thought of), and let the AI create the content to user specifications, bypassing things like modeling. Want grass in your world? Go take a picture of someone lawn and show it to the camera, and now you're computer knows what grass is and what it looks like, and you ahve something you can change and modify further at whim. Want a space ship? Show it some pictures of some federation ships from star trek so it can learn that artistic style. You want to do a cutscene with a hollywood style space fight? show it a few movie clips. And I'm not saying that this can't be done on conventional hardware. By their nature, anything a neural computer, or quantum computer, or any other information processor can do, a conventional computer can do too as long as it is sufficiently powerful enough to simulate it. I am saying that if you want to fit it in a consumer desktop sized package, not cost millions of dollar, and not consume more electricity than a small town, you need to use the real deal. Oh, and those text adventure games don't understand language. They only know the words and phrases specifically programmed into them, and have no ability to understand anything they were not coded for at creation. This would be one of those shortcuts I am trying to avoid, to allow you do things that were never imagined by the programmers. @ Saq - Siri I think it depends on if it has web access or not. The phone isn't powerful enough to run the full voice recognition suite on board, so it normally uses an apple server for that I think.

The requirement does make sense.I feel the completionist cape should be just that, totally complete, and so require someone to earn all rewards from all mini games. It's not a cape meant for ordinary people, so it makes sense that it would be well out of reach for most of the population. The whole idea of the trimmed comp cape is supposed to be that you have nothing left to earn in the game. It's not supposed to be reasonable, as games like this aren't really intended to ever be completed. Their scale is supposed to be larger than most people could ever wholly consume, and for most people that holds true. The trimmed comp cape is really supposed to be unobtainable to all but the most fanatical players. As for castle wars, I don't see this making it worse, though I'm not sure it will be better. I think encouraging consumables was a good move at least, since they were sort of wasted. Also, wouldn't the easiest form of anti stacking be to not allow large groups of players in the same chat to enter the same team, at least on the official worlds? Assuming the game can track which chats you were in for say the last 5-10 minutes, it would at least make stacking substantially more annoying, and less accessible to the average player (and with a lower volume, less effective).

I think the coolest thing you could ever hope to do with neural based computing, likely working with traditional computer hardware, is self modifying programs. Why program a new biome into minecraft when you can just tell it what you want. You want a biome that forms a bowl shaped depression, with orange water forming a lake in the middle, and trees that are shaped like arches? Just tell the game that and it can make a custom biome. This is ability for a program to make new content and assets that have never been defined for it in the program. A perhaps more useful application of that ability would be in dealing with bugs. If you have a neural based program that understands how a program is supposed to work, and knows how to code or has some other means of modifying the program, then it should be able to observe when the program messes up, and either patch it, or for a game like Skyrim, perhaps use the concole commands to work around the problem. Autonomously self correcting software. EDIT: One I forgot, because I like the idea of a computer that understand language. Take any RPG, and imagine what it would be like if instead of choosing what to say off a menu and listening to predefined responses, you just said what you wanted to say and the computer responded appropriately. Imagine the holodeck, minus the 3D virtual environment, where the charecters in your game are fully simulated personalities. In the near term, none of this happens though. It's mostly useful for making existing computers better, since neural networks are many orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of power. By using them to handle the tasks they excel at, your reducing load on the other parts of the computer, allowing for computers that don't burn hundreds of watts, or just as a way to leapfrog what you can do with computers without needing to build faster processors. Everything above is simply to illustrate something you can't do with conventional home computers because no computer that could do that with transistor based technology would fit in your room.