In the news: http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/wrap-ho ... light.html Production begins in February.

In the "cultural oddities" department: http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2010 ... the-rings/ (Or not.)

In the "cultural very, very odd oddities" department: Ballad, uncut (Yes, that ballad. You Have Been Warned. Quoting one of the comments: "You don't hear many bassoon solos anymore.")
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

From a response post by Developer Matt Stults "The Television":
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthre ... ost3266124

Quote:2. Technical questions

a. What
kind of database does CoH use? (aka, relational, custom, open source
like postgres etc, object oriented, flat files, some mix?) Is there a
dev in charge of the data access layer of the code and if so, who is it?
(I am particularly interested because in the early months of CoH, they
did several data mining tasks that took ... exceedingly long times to
run, and it made me curious to a degree that still has not much abated)
When you joined the team and saw how they managed the data, what was
your reaction?

b. What programming language is used for character management?



These questions are going to require some technical specificity, so please bear with me. Please also understand that I don't really know why data mining tasks used to take so long, but the following is better than accurate/true, so I'm going with it.

How we used to do it:

Before what we now know as
Mapservers, CoH used a set of machines called Minkowski Cartographs to
store data and model characters' interactions with the world.

What is a Minkowski Cartograph?

The Minkowski Cartographs -- or
MCs -- were built in the early 1970s by a team of Nobel laureates in
Mathematics and Cartography. The team's goal was to build a functional
map or "road atlas" of Minkowski Space -- a pseudo-Riemannian manifold
identified around 1907. Each MC is a room sized device constructed of
thousands of independently sliding looms and millions of strings running
between them. The strings are made of several tightly braided filaments
composed of a patent blend of Polyolefin and Kevlar, inter-loom
segments ranging in length anywhere between 10^-32 mm and 1 mm.
Approximately half of the strings run between pernambuco-wood looms. The
rest are incorporated into a vast conveyor mechanism that drags against
the loom strings, causing them to vibrate at specific resonant
frequencies, effectively "playing" them like millions of the worlds'
tiniest violins. When played, each string produces a unique four-space
wave signature which resonates through its particular loom until it is
converted by transducer into an electronic analog signal. Part of this
signal is then recorded in a wax disk in much the same way as
conventional sound is recorded by the displacement of the spiral groove
in a LP record. The other part was filtered and sent through the network
for real time exploration of the model by mathematical cartographers.
When first created, this was the Network Control Program of the early
ARPANET.

Outcome of the MC experimentation of the 1970s:

Though the MCs proved fairly
unsuccessful in providing a functioning map of Minkowski space, the MC
experiments resulted in two emergent and unpredicted consequences.
First, they were very clearly the inspiration for String Theory. Second,
as part of their efforts to map Minkowski space through the MCs,
scientists began to uncover and chart what appeared to be various
sections of a modern city complete with pedestrians and airship implied
by the mathematical definition of Minkowski space as portrayed in the
MC. Due to the use of hyperbolic quaternions in Minkowski space, physics
as modeled by the MCs was significantly more flexible than what we
experience.

MC Use by early CoH:

Intending to capitalize on the
pre-existing city simulations provided by the MCs, City of Heroes
purchased and reused the now renamed "Mapservers" to provide the
persistent world of Paragon City. This created a number of problems.
First: game engineers and even game administrators on the project
required doctorates in math or physics as well as extensive textile
industry experience just to maintain the Mapservers, let alone add new
features. Second: due to the wear of continuous vibration in four-space,
critical strings often broke or became "snagged" resulting in bugs and
"Lost Connection to Mapserver" messages that were almost impossible to
track down. Third: as you note, data collection was extremely time
consuming as the entire mapservers had to be shut down and the wax
recording disks carefully removed from each loom on every mapserver.

What happened to the MC devices?

Due to the above and many other
problems, the CoH team eventually realized that the Minkowski
Cartographs were un-maintainable. Sadly, once dropped by the game, these
great loomed-machines were inexplicably destroyed by a group of
self-proclaimed neo-luddites. The same group of history-deniers has
virtually erased all record of the machines by continuously deleting
Wikipedia articles written about them.

What we use now:

Now our mapservers are written in C
and use everything from SQL databases to various in-house flat file
systems to represent our data. Characters are pretty much created and
maintained by SQL queries, but the specifics of the queries are
generated by C.

Please let me know if the above raises any more questions.

Ain't bad for what it is, the last hurrah prologue to a decent game series. I finally finished a normal play through of the campaign today, I've obviously spread it out since it came out to do other stuff - Civ V, work, sleep, etc - it's actually the first Halo game I've ever finished, H:CE I stopped somewhere in the first act, H2 never played, H3 did the first chapter, HW got frustrated with it by fourth mish or so, and ODST I'm still wandering 'round New Mombasa looking for the next vidclue and contemplating doing the third chapter.

I can see why people think the story's a bit meh, as it is a bit but its understandable for the endpoint was always set in stone. How we got there wasn't on the page.

Maybe everyone's looking at the games the wrong way, maybe one's the in-universe action movie version, ones the History Channel doco, ones the reality and so on. Which one is which has been left up to us to decide.

Still, one thing that happened during my play through that bugged me; repeatedly getting killed by a failed mongoose jump, it's the only way you can complete a level and it was like a 1 in 10 chance of it being successful! Yes, you could jump the gap yourself by a sprint-jump, but your AI buddy driving the mongoose kept on trying to get it over.

GAH!?!

I managed to record one fail & one success when I should've recorded all the fails & the one success for after I save quit to use the theater and save a flying off the map mongoose and resumed play. Fail loop restart!

--Rod.H
"Joy, now I've gotta do some of that all over again just to unlock some cosmetic items"

He had built it a few years ago.  It had been played with and tested and tinkered with.  And yet nobody could ever seem to figure out what was the last of Benjamin Rhodes's Blue Hair Moments.  (And, without a doubt, the most epic one ever.)  No less a personage than the Norse Goddess of Technology herself had analyzed the thing with the assistance of Washu Hakubi.
THE Washu Hakubi.
Accept no substitutes.
And for all their knowledge, all they could do was scratch there heads, shrugg, and say, "Well, it goes somewhere."
With that said and done, Benjamin locked it away deep inside 36 Atalante, where hopefully no one would get at it.
Times passes.  It still worries at Benjamin, like a sliver wedged between his conscious thought processes and his subconscious.  There was a reason that he built it.  He knew it somehow.
Gina found him in the Memorial Sector, looking at the names of friends and loved ones - lost in combat or to natural causes.  It never mattered to them - everyone deserved to be remembered.  Ever-so-keen to his persona after centuries of being at his side, she gently slipped an arm around him.  Even so long after he converted himself into a software AI and moved into a bio-android body, he still loved the physical sensations of intimacy.
And at long last, he spoke.  "It doesn't matter how well my body functions.  I feel old.  Almost ancient, even.  Like I have accumulated the sands of time I have lived in satchels and had them laid upon my shoulders.  Gina, my beloved.  It is time for us to move on."
"Another walk-about?" she pondered aloud.  "You know that the TSAB doesn't like it when we cause trouble in other Universes, no matter how much good we do or what great friends we were of Nanoha's."  She left out everyone else, but when associating with The White Devil it went without saying - they were all one big family over there.
"No, love, something else entirely.  I think we should begin again by going where truly no one has ever gone before."
From there, it was a simple matter of settling their affairs.  The estate was left for the family, and the family business had been running smoothly without their interference for almost two centuries.  Benjamin didn't really worry about being forgotten or, worse, being deified.  But he made sure that everyone in the family understood this.  He was a builder, a leader, a fighter, and most of all, a lover.  For he left his indelible mark on the universe not so he could be remembered (though it has a nice side-effect) but so that others could live a better, if not perfect, life.

DS and Star Ranger and a few others have expressed an interest. (DS Saw the character name I claimed and said "you Magnificent Bastard"! Which, with the character in question, can only be considered the highest compliment! ^_^)
So - for those few who haven't seen him, but might be interested, here's a couple of comparison pics.

And here's my recreation. (Sadly I can't do both the beard AND the cigar at the same time. But in all other respects, I'd say I've gotten pretty damn close. ^_^

Just what it says on the tin, no worries.
===========

===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

It appears Microsoft is giving away free downloadable copies of Fable 2. No guarantees on how long this will work:

http://marketplace.xbox.c...0-4000-8000-00004d5307f1

"Don't Let Your Feet Touch Ground", performed by Ask Koley. http://www.onlylyrics.com/hits.php?grid=1&id=1036253]Video and lyrics

Lets Doug walk on air (not fly, walk), as long as it's at least a pleasant day. Effect lasts until the end of the song or until Doug looks down, whichever comes first. He's got a ceiling of 100', but that's plenty for getting from building to building, if not rooftop to rooftop...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

There's a thread over on the SJGames Forums about how to write in clear English. Basically, the original poster wanted examples of good writing, and it's evolved into a "how to write clearly" thread.

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=73800]High-quality English: your advice?

Just thought some folks might like the thread, both for what it recommends and for what it doesn't recommend. (The works of Shakespeare, for example, are in the "not recommended" list.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

While talking with friends in the SD Paragon group last night in-game, one of them mentioned that the server farms were re-located in July from East and West coasts to Dallas TX. I had not heard about this and decided to check it out. Looks like it's true. Here's the link.
And apparently at least part of their offices are located here in Dallas as well. I thought to look them up and see if they might be hiring. (Hey - I have both computer customer service experience and I'm a good design artist) But unfortunately I found out that the Dallas office has laid off 9 people as of last week. Including the guy behind the screen name of Back Alley Brawler(!!!!). So it seems unlikely that they'd be hiring new people at this point. But I'll try and keep an ear to the ground now that I know at least part of Paragon Studios operation is in my area.
I thought I'd pause for a bit and post about this. About to go look up some more info, but even this much is quite interesting.