PC Gaming Tips

My current bet for an explanation for the (alledged) FTL neutrinos of the OPERA experiement at CERN

2011-10-15T02:13:00.000-07:00

A most interesting paper published via Arxiv regarding the OPERA experiment neutrino anomaly can be found here. Extremely approachable, with trivial mathematics, it offers a most palatable explanation for the observed apparent faster-than-light travel of the muon neutrinos in the CERN OPERA experiment.

N.B., there is a minor error in the paper inconsequential to the results where the authors attribute, albeit indirectly ("The Michelson and Morley experiment demonstrated the speed of light is the same in all inertial frame of reference and on this axiom Einstein built special relativity."), Einstein's impetus for his Special Relativity Theory. This is incorrect. From the master himself: "The Michelson-Morely experiment had no role in the foundation of the theory." and "..the theory of relativity was not founded to explain its outcome at all."

Give it a look.

Rob

TWI Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad, pulling the low polygon count wool over your eyes.

2011-09-22T17:11:00.000-07:00

Telling post on the Steam forums here, looks like the solution by the geniuses at TWI for their poor implementation resulting in crappy performance is to cut the game details in a patch. While of course, not bothering to tell paying customers up-front that the game will now look even crappier than what they were shown, promised, and paid for.

How would you feel if you bought a nice sports car, had some issue, and found out after servicing the dealer had swapped in an engine with half the horsepower. Without telling you. And telling you instead now the performance will be better?

One of the better retorts to the increasingly arrogant and egomaniacal attitude of TWI, and its CEO John Gibson in particular, can be seen here:

This is getting more and more ludicrous...

Edit: I came across this reply to a thread at the TWI forum. The thread is an ass-kissing congratulatory tome toward TWI, with the poster offering to take donations and then buy the developers drinks. This thread merited being made a "sticky" by TWI. Yet threads with valid concerns, complaints, and questions get deleted, locked, edited or moved. This response to the drink thread is priceless:

Rob

A twisted little troubleshooting problem...

2011-09-14T05:41:00.000-07:00

This one might have to go into my personal top ten gotcha list.

I've been playing quite a bit of the game Borderlands in co-op with a few buddies. I somehow skipped over this game, now nearing two years of age. My mistake. I've not had so much fun co-op in some time, easily comparable to Portal 2 for sheer fun. A really superb game, beautifully and artfully designed and executed. Goes on sale periodically on Steam for dirt cheap. Check it out and get it.

On to the problem: Having more spare time on my hands, I'd been "farming" the game for weapons to pass on to my buddies to aid them in their battles. At some point, I asked them to send me their game save files, so as to view their current weapons and other items, helping me to decide what to look for when farming.

Fast forward a few days, and three of us play an epic multi-hour stint, gaining many levels while having a hoot. I passed both of them several choice and rare weapons and other items I'd found. All good so far. A few days later, one of them joins me in a game. Pretty quickly, he notices something's awry. He has lost his level, and the choice items I'd supplied are gone. WTF? Well, we decided to just play, chalking it up to a possible game or Steam problem (more on that later). Now things got strange. He left the game after a bit, and rejoined in later. Same problem. The game was not saving his progress.

We scratched our heads a bit. Could it be due to my character being far ahead in the "quests" of the game? Perhaps a game bug? We knew Steam / Valve / Gearbox had just recently (as in the same time frame) added Steam Cloud save functionality, and game-play information tracking to the game. Perhaps the Steam Cloud functionality was broken or bugged? A more likely possibility to me was an error between the PC and the chair...

I had my buddy send me his current save file after he'd noted the file date was from a few days earlier. In fact, the date was the same date I'd had him send me his file. Sure enough, the file was the same, hashed to exactly the same. WTF? Did the Steam Cloud grab his file when first patched into the game, and was now clobbering his local save? Seemed unlikely, the cloud stuff is pretty vetted.

I asked my cohort if perhaps somehow, he'd accidentally overwritten his file manually. He assured me no such thing had happened. I found some forum posts of users having game issues since the Cloud / stats patch, but scant few had any such save issue.

I asked him to check if he'd accidentally set the file or folder to read only. No dice. WTF?

During this process, one of our other players joined. He had the exact same issues. And just like the first friend, his file hashed to exactly the file he'd sent me. WTF?

I knew when I saw the new EULA, and saw the functionality added, I turned off the Steam Cloud for the game: I was already manually saving my game saves (a habit), particularly since this genre of game can suck so many hours from you building characters and load-outs. Both of my buddies had the Cloud and stats enabled. So was it the cloud? We tried disabling it for their games, still no go.

The "Aha! moment" came soon after. I wanted to test a different save on one of their games, so I instructed them to rename their current save. To our surprise, access was denied. We made sure the game was not still running, Steam was not running, but still no go. WTF?

Then it hit me. We use Skype for our in-game VOIP. Nice, clear quality, and near zero latency, certainly lower than the usual suspects for gaming chat. Greater bandwidth use is the trade-off, but since none of us are starved for the latter, not an issue. For small files, we typically just send them as part of the Skype conversation. This is exactly how both of my friends had sent me their saves.

And there's the rub. Everyone in the 'conversation' got the file transfer notification (neither buddy had sent it directly to me, instead just doing it in the group conversation.) I accepted the transfers and saved the files locally, but neither one of them accepted the other's transfer, since there was no reason to.

And that my friends, was the crux of the problem. Skype, in its wisdom, decides that that conversation has not been completed. Every time each of them started Skype, it noted the uncompleted transfer, opened the local file, and waited for the recipient to accept. Which of course, never happened, because neither one of them needed the file, and the conversation notice had long since become history.

Opened file = locked file! The game could read it just fine, allowing the appearance of normalcy. When it came time to save progress, no go. The game did not throw any error, but merrily continued without saving anything. Not really the game's problem - it is reasonable to expect only the game is touching its files. And not really a Skype issue, though it would be nice if when started Skype would notify the user of actions it wanted to "continue", so as to remind the user and perhaps allow cancellation.

By finding the file send in the conversation history, and cancelling the (never to be seen) acceptance for the other player, the file was no longer locked / open, and the game functioned correctly.

A good one!

Rob

The Playlist...

2011-09-07T18:05:00.000-07:00

A quick update on games recently played:

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad
Played a few hours on the PC of the one local buddy that kept his preorder. A bit of a turd right now. Serious performance issues (we did a quick copy to two other differing machines with different CPU and GPU, all pretty high spec). Looks fair. Not horrible, but certainly nothing here justifying TWI's "cutting edge" label. Somewhat clunky game-play / movement, yet seems faster that RO: Ostfront (haven't played that in a while though). Cover system broken - it's a crap shoot whether you can cover or not. Seems faster play style by those playing compared to Ostfront.

The CODizing of the game is a success, IMHO, if you wanted the game to lean more that way. Veterans will likely not. Serious reliability issues. Crashes on all three PCs constantly (this is barely beta quality, and certainly questionable just a week from release). Server browser kaput. Music irritating (can be silenced). Weapon sounds are bordering on superb. Overall, glad I bailed on it, holds no interest at this time, and I'm not one that falls into the "pay retail for potential" crowd - a ludicrous idea from a TWI VP. I'd pass, unless you are a WWII semi-realism fanatic and / or RO & Ostfront are favorites.

Hard Reset (Demo)
Nice engine renders the cyberpunk world with attractive, though not world-beating, visuals. Game-play is quite linear, and one is unable to access areas of the environment that appear easy to get to (e.g., invisible walls trying to jump a railing, etc.) Not a big fan of that. Weapons, at least in the demo, are for all practical purposes unlimited in ammo, enemy fairly easy to clobber. Looks interesting from the rather short demo exposure, probably a decent buy for sci-fi / cyberpunk genre fans at the price.

Borderlands
As I said in an earlier entry, I'm not sure how this one slipped by me. I have not had this much fun in a game since Portal / Portal 2. FPS & RPG combined (and I'm not normally a fan of the latter), it provides engaging game-play, interesting and varied quests that thankfully have none of the "rinse and repeat" boredom factor of Far Cry 2. The humor, music, character development, and story are engrossing. Co-op play is a complete hoot. If you have even the remotest interest in the genre, and don't have the game, passing on it when Steam has one of their ludicrous sales (e.g., ~ eight bucks for the game with all four DLC) is a gaming crime. GET IT!

Dead Island
I wanted to like this game. I wanted to love it. I get a kick out of zombie games. Left 4 Dead, Killing Floor, et al, all provide loads of fun. The award winning trailer looked awesome. My friends were as hyped about it as most. The reality: at this point, a contender for turd of the summer, displacing RO2:HOS as my pick for worst game delivery of the summer.

First, the release on steam was a debug build. Riddled with bugs. The fix broke save games (though thankfully not skills progress), and clobbered the pre-order bonus DLC access. To the developer's credit, these issues were addressed rapidly, and they are hinting at some kind of compensation for those afflicted by the screw-ups.

Even without the mess, the game-play itself is not capturing me. Imagine the overly repetitive quest mechanics of Far Cry 2, insert zombies: "Go get me a cappuccino. It's all the way across the island. Fight all the zombies on the way there. And back. Wait for my wooden response upon your return. Rinse. Repeat."

Combat mechanics are a bit strange. Even with a weapon with some length, it seems hard sometimes to hit the target, while the zombie arms seem to be able to hold an invisible baseball bat, hitting you from the same distance where your character misses - and you're wielding an oar against just their arms. They also take an unreasonable amount of punishment before finally passing on to zombie heaven. Makes killing them a chore, instead of a challenge. Quests are yet more broken in the latest patch: I have quests to meet an NPC, but no NPC is to be found at the destination. Can't complete it.

A pass, at least for now, even if you are a zombie fan.

Rob

"Cutting Edge"? More like cut by an edge...

2011-09-05T06:26:00.000-07:00

I've nearly had my fill of the Red Orchestra 2 train wreck. I know that my original blog entry saved a few gamers some wasted bucks. Even now, as one sees far more negative forum posts with the 'release' of the 'open beta' for the 'deluxe edition' ~~suckers~~ purchasers, the foamers proclaim how awesome the game is, how perfect the developers are, blah blah blah.

A gaming friend sent me a link, insisting I take a gander. What is amazing is that the loyal are just now noticing this fundamental flaw in the visuals. This has been obvious since the first screen shots and videos - I just assumed it was something they did for press effect. The characters in the game are chopped down midgets! See the thread "Character is so small isn't it" for some hilarious TWI style humor.

If a broken server browser, constant crash-to-desktop for clients, buggy servers, horrible client and server performance, clunky animations, steely irritating 'mood music' and hackers galore already in game is not enough to have you thinking twice about purchasing this turd (or getting a refund before it is too late), perhaps the RO2: Oompa-Loompas of Stalingrad visuals will have you wondering.

Save your money, play some other game that works and looks good. TWI may fix this, given some time, they do have a history of decent support. You just should not be expected to pay to play a beta that is barely beta quality, and seems will be troublesome for some time to come after the production release.

Rob

Some things I've bee up to...

2011-08-25T01:40:00.000-07:00

Gaming:

From Dust: Pretty damn fun. You are effectively "God" or whatever you might call it, and you manipulate the world, the goal being to help the nascent tribe under your watch to thrive. I keep messing with them though. Can't help it. Pretty slick physics here, particularly the water. Certainly a steal for fans of the genre, and deserving of a good hard look by those that have not played this type of game.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution: I don't normally go for highly story-driven games. Make no mistake, I want some kind of story in my single-player games, but it is not critical to my enjoyment. This game has a deep story. I find myself hammering the 'skip' during player-NPC dialogue, and when offered dialogue / response choices (that undoubtedly affect the rest of the game-play and storyline), I tend to hammer the fuck you / you're an ass / I will crush you / blow me selection. This will no doubt lead to my character having sex with the boss's poodle, but so long as I get to shoot something, so be it. I have not yet been drawn into the story enough to put up with watching a movie in the middle of my game. Not the game's problem at all - I just have short attention span for these kind of things. I'm sure those that enjoy such things, particularly if it continues some story from the earlier game iterations, will find it satisfying.

The combat reminds me of a combination of F.E.A.R. with a little Splinter Cell and Crysis (avatar enhancements) thrown in. Satisfying, and reasonably difficult. You take damage pretty quickly, and recovery also takes a fair amount of time, so that tough opponents warrant respect and thought-out battle plans. I've played about six hours so far, and from what I can tell, there is much more to go, and certainly had I perused every side-quest and explored every nook and cranny, I'd have even more time to go. It's clear that on a game-play time per dollar scale, you get big bang for your bucks here.

The soundtrack by Michael McCann is an enticing blend of electronica - I enjoy it in-game greatly, and listen to it out of game. The audio of the game is good, with some genuine LF content (e.g. transport takeoff) that provides satisfying rumble for those with subwoofers. The graphics are OK - nothing earth shattering, with fair avatar renditions and some nice effects. I'm not sure I understand yet the 9/10 or 10/10 ratings I've seen, but that may well be that I have not yet a full handle on the game. I'd give it a solid 7.5 so far, and I'm happy with the purchase. Check it out.

Tramua: WTF? Not sure yet what to make of this game. A flash based exploration game inside the mind of a comatose crash victim, you explore the world as a sequence of snapshots, finding clues and chasing a 'ghost' to recover memories of what has happened. Interesting, I jump in and out of it for something different. Cheap as hell, I'd say if you like artistic puzzle games, worth a look (as well as the most excellent Limbo).

Portal 2: Playing some community developed co-op maps with a gaming friend. Some of the creativity displayed has been most impressive (and difficult to beat). Some have been good enough to have been in the original game. The hard maps need to be played with a partner that knows what they're doing (mine has been exemplary, thankfully displaying very smart and clever play and thinking), or you'll get frustrated quickly. If you have the game, check out some of the sites offering community maps. If by some bad alignment of the planets you've not played the game, get it! It is getting cheap, and is tremendously satisfying. The single-player campaign brings back the goodness of the original, and the co-op mode is probably the most fun I've had in a game in the past year or so.

Section 8: Prejudice: A diamond in the rough. Not really my kind of game in general (HALO kind of play and environments), I picked up a four-pack during one of Steam's ludicrous sales to share with some gaming buddies. The little we've played in co-op was pretty fun. The single-player is a bit wooden, but still fairly fun. Given the price of ~15 bucks, worth it, and at the sale price a no-brainer. HALO fans will likely enjoy it much, and anyone that likes frag-fest co-op should find it satisfying. Nothing earth-moving in look or feel, but when the price is taken into account, like getting a decent ice cream cone for 25 cents.

On the subject a games, take a listen to the audio blog posts at Cynical Brit titled Entitled Gamers and Honesty in Games Journalism. Refreshing and to the point. The latter should be listened to nightly by some reviewers and podcast hosts. The amount of corruption, back-peddling, and ass kissing in the industry can make it hard for the gamer to decide where their hard-earned cash should really be spent. If more journalists had the integrity talked about in the aforementioned blog, fewer gamers would end up spending money on hyped games that turn out to be turds.

Rob

Thanks, Electronic Arts!

2011-08-21T03:28:00.000-07:00

Found a message from Electronic Arts in my inbox today. A free copy of one of a selection of games as a thankyou for my Battlefield 3 pre-order. I ended up getting Dead Space 2, a game I had not gotten around to ordering, but had planned on playing after finishing up some other games I'm working on. Saved me thirty bucks, the current price of the game.

So much for the oft-repeated entitled gamer's whine of EA being the big, bad publisher out to screw everyone...

Rob

From Dust released today.

2011-08-17T16:24:00.000-07:00

The new 'I am a god' game From Dust released today. Created by Eric Chahi, the artist that brought us “Another World / Out of this World”, the game puts you in control of the world of an ancient tribe. You help the tribe to thrive by forming their environment and guiding them from afar. At least that's the idea - I couldn't help myself trying to drown my nascent tribe members with a huge blob of water. The privilege of being a god, I suppose.

The game features some pretty neat physics, particularly in modelling of water and water flow.

Pretty cheap at under $15 on Steam, worth checking out if that kind of genre is your bag. Fans of the "Black and White" series should find it particularly enjoyable, if simple.

I'm having a hoot...

Rob

F* me, now that's a game trailer...

2011-08-16T18:33:00.000-07:00

Makes the latest RO2: Heroes of Stalingrad trailer look like, well, something an addled grandpa made...check it out.

Rob

Happy birthday, IBM personal PC

2011-08-12T18:26:00.000-07:00

I still have mine. 30 years old today.

IBM 5150

TWI does the Tanya Harding with Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad

2011-08-08T15:37:00.000-07:00

If you don't get the reference (and you might not if you're a younger gamer), Tanya Harding, currently often seen on truTV Presents: World's Dumbest... (funny as hell there, if I may say), is perhaps best known for her promising figure skating career and the later collapse of her personal and professional life.

She'd make a good mascot for TWI:

Her orchestration (no pun intended) of the shin beating of her primary competitor in the Olympics mirrors TWI and their community's bullying and censorship of critical or questioning posts in ther forums.

Her "Wedding Video" reminds one of the sliminess TWI has resorted to to do marketing CYA (see my prior entries on the game and company to get an idea of how disingenuous TWI has seemed to become).

And of course, her infamous "loose skate lace" fall in the Olympics of '94 landing her flat on her ass resembles the announcement from TWI of a delay of two weeks in the release of the game, hardly more weeks than that away from the hyped official release date. This should be no surprise to anyone with a grain of intellect. Peers scoffed when I predicted this months ago. I should have wagered them.

The reasons are of course the usual suspects of "extra polish", and to "get it right".

Right..

It would be nice if they'd just tell the truth, known by the beta testers (closed of course, don't hold your breath for the "open" one if you're one of the unfortunate suckers that coughed up extra dough for the "deluxe" edition with promises of beta access).

The game is a mess. There's good reason you've not seen detailed footage of MP and tanks. And it's not because it's being saved for some magical marketing Kool-Aid bus...

Stay tuned, the leaky beta bangers are getting pissed...

In any case, the smart money among you will hold off on buying the game until it is released and you can get a non-hyperbolic review from a trusted source that matches your sensibilities. That will also give you time to see if the player counts drop as precipitously as the pre-sales position of the game. Particularly since TWI hasn't the balls to release a demo.

No one wants to buy a game that few are playing...

Rob

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad presales plummet off the radar...

2011-08-05T02:06:00.000-07:00

CEO of tripwire shot a premature wad with this tweet:

Usually, one waits to see some long-term results before making grand proclamations. You know, kind of how an announcer doesn't call the first to leave the gate the winner of the race, but waits to see the actual finish.

In not much over a score of hours, the game has completely dropped off the Steam top sellers list. Even old games like Counter-Strike: Source, widely panned recent games like Brink, and minor new games to Steam such as Limbo are beating it. So much for its blockbuster, COD:Black Ops beating (hello, PC Gamer magazine) hype.

Speaking of Limbo - even if it is the kind of game that you'd consider way off the path of your game preferences, I highly recommend you give it a look. A demo is available (unlike TWI, the developer / publisher Playdead has nothing to fear scaring off potential revenue by offering a demo of the game), and the game itself is a steal at under $10.00. Dark, ethereal, and haunting, it offers a beautiful environment with satisfying and sometimes twisted puzzles. System requirements are paltry - you can play it on a very low specification machine.

The best five hours I've spent on a game in some time.

Rob

A mouse almost transmogrifies into a rat.

2011-07-28T01:21:00.000-07:00

I'm an inveterate collector of peripherals, gadgets and toys related to PC gaming. I've got dozens each of headphones, mice, controllers, keyboards, etc. I get them to test and try, and sometimes review, but mainly for hands-on experience so I can speak from first-hand knowledge when gaming buddies seek an opinion.

Items I particularly like often get bought in multiples (mainly mice and keyboards) so that I can have the same device on my different gaming machines, and for backup in case I particularly like an item and do not want to find it unavailable in the future should I need another.

I picked up a couple of the new Razer Imperator mice recently to play with. In this case, the new mouse bug reared its head quite by accident. I'd been playing on a machine I built for the G/F, using a Razer Copperhead (a good, if not great mouse, but one I'm very accustomed to for feel) that has had so much use the finish has worn off in many spots.

Playing one night, I noticed a peculiar small sliver of what appeared to be plastic remnants, perhaps from a package she'd opened recently. I fiddled with it, bending and stretching it, folding it, using it as a toothpick, scratching an itch on the inside of my ear canal, and finally tossing it in the trash, a crunched and mangled shadow of its former self. I noticed that night the mouse seemed a bit jerky for my fine aim needs. I realized later that the mouse seemed to be 'grabbing' the mouse pad surface. Peering at the bottom of the mouse, I saw the cause: the back friction foot had come off. My toothpick was a piece of Razer engineering.

It should be noted: I'm amazed the mouse lasted this long and through this much abuse. I'm sure it would have gone several more years. I had removed this foot some time ago to disassemble the mouse and clean it out. After years of abuse, the innards had enough muck to cause some minor issues. A cleaning remedied them. I obviously should have used some glue and not assumed the remaining aged sticky goo would suffice.

Hell hath no fury like a woman gamer whose hardware you have fucked up, to paraphrase Congreve.

Rather than try to find replacement feet for the now out of production mouse, I decided to upgrade her, and get myself a twin to play with myself.

I've had only good experience with the Razer mice, owning pretty much every model sans the ridiculous pimp my mouse editions of the regular line. Never a single failure even under use bordering abusive. So I had no reason to expect any problems out-of-the-box with these new ones.

Razer, like many other vendors, has stopped including media with drivers / control software in the box. Understandable: media adds to the cost, and after release, the media is most likely out of date anyway. So the user guide directs the new owner to the web site to retrieve these things.

And there's the rub.

It appears the Razer web site has been hacked, they are having severe server problems, or their provider is suffering from one or both of the problems: most of the site links in the support / download sections get redirected to nonsense sites. Ugh! No soup for me! Fortunately, I was able to retrieve a copy of an older set of the drivers elsewhere, and get to using the mouse in earnest.

As a mouse, I'm pretty pleased so far. Quite comfortable, very responsive (even my not so game head daughter commented on this aspect), with much improved control software. Changing profiles on-the-fly is speedier than my fingers, making things like a fine aim / sniper mode switch a trifle, with none of the nagging delay and non-response of earlier Razer designs. The sensor works very well, tracking perfectly on the surfaces I tried, with decent lift-off characteristics. I won't bother with a detailed review, those can be found elsewhere, and this is not so much an entry about the mouse, but about customer service.

The lesson to be learned here is simple, vendors:

If you're going to deny the buyer media with basic drivers and other software, and only have these available online, at least provide alternate locations so one is not left wanting when problems occur on your end. The frustration of not being able to take full advantage of a new toy might well put the consumer off of future purchases of your brand.

Media is cheap. Put a friggin' mini-CD, or a tiny flash drive, in the box, FCS!

Better yet, flash is so cheap, why not just load a bit into all of your USB devices, so that the drivers and software "live" in the device, available at first plug-in? You could even make them updatable, so bringing my mouse to a foreign environment is a no-hassle proposition, and I always can have the latest drivers, software, and firmware at hand.

Rob

OCZ Revodrive 3 X2 480 GB Mini-Review

2011-07-26T22:07:00.000-07:00

One of the new toys arrived today. The latest revision of the acclaimed Revodrive line from OCZ, a Revodrive 3.

The particular model I purchased (RVD3X2-FHPX4-480G) is the X2 version with 480 gigabytes of capacity. For those not familiar with the Revodrive line, these units integrate multiple SSD units, multiple controllers, and the VCA (Virtualized Controller Architecture) hardware specific to OCZ, effectively giving you a raid SSD system on a single PCI-E card. No sata cables, power cables, separate raid card, configuration, etc. required!

The unit arrives in a compact, if not luxurious (for this kind of money, it would be nice to feel a bit more coddled) box. Included in my example are a tiny user guide (ample, considering the ease of installation) including information on where to retrieve the current drivers. A sticker bragging about the device is supplied, for those needing to make their PC case look like a weathered steamer trunk.

The card itself comes in the ubiquitous anti-static bag, with the appropriate warning to use caution to avoid static discharges that might have a deleterious effect on the unit. The unit is pictured below.

We can see the flash NAND banks on the right, two of the four (X2 models only) controllers (the latest and greatest Sandforce SF-2281), with the OCZ SuperScale controller acting as the commander in chief. The latter component, new to the Revodrive 3 line, provides the PCI-E to SAS mapping, and implements OCZ's VCA, with optimized queue balancing and DMA access. Utilizing both tagged and native command queue balancing, OCZ achieves linear scaling in a raid-like (not raid, but a proprietary array architecture, according to OCZ) fashion. VCA also provides TRIM and SCSI UNMAP (the SCSI equivalent of TRIM) that help stabilize and maximize performance while minimizing write amplification. Do note - the current OCZ drivers do not currently support Windows TRIM, but OCZ promises a solution in the future.

The performance claims are impressive (from OCZ):

Read: Up to 1500 MB/s
Write: Up to 1250 MB/s
Max Random Write 4KB (Aligned): 230,000 IOPS

This is performance at an enterprise device level, equaling and in some cases exceeding devices I have owned (e.g. Fusion IO-Drive) at a small fraction of the price.

Installation in my case took all of three minutes: open PC case, remove PCI slot cover, insert and secure the card, close the PC case. All that is required is one PCI-E 2.0 x4 (or better) slot. Driver installation takes another minute or so. That's it. If installing Windows 7 (is anyone really still using older Windows?) directly to the device, the appropriate files can be placed on a USB drive, or on an existing hard disk in the machine, and accessed when at the initial installation device selection screen for the Windows installer via the driver load option.

I installed windows (seemed a snappy install, but I didn't bother timing it), and a game I play known for lengthy load times (ARMA II / OA). As with the windows install, the game install seemed swift, but again, I did not bother timing it.

Windows black screen "Starting Windows" to the login screen takes scant seconds on my small gaming rig (2600K @ 4.8 GHz, 16 GB Ram, Z68 MB, dual GTX 580 in SLI, etc.), quite comparable to my rigs with dedicated external multi-SSD raid setups. The actual initialization of the Revodrive bios adds a few seconds (5 or so) to the wait.

ARMA certainly loads as fast as I've seen it short of a RAMdisk. Comparing it side-by-side to a high specification machine with a single high performance SSD, the Revodrive allowed me to get to the "ready" state several seconds more quickly. Not a huge increase, but I didn't expect one - this game shows a big jump in load speed going from even fast hard drives (think Velociraptor) to even a mid-range SSD. Other confounding factors result in less than linear load speed improvements with drive throughput improvements. The bottom line, however, is that the Revodrive 3 X2 equaled the performance of my dedicated 8 SSD hardware raid system in load times for the game, at roughly one-quarter of the cost. Impressive, to say the least.

On more strenuous tests, the drive really shines. Imagine running multiple installations of windows in a virtual machine (Oracle's VirtualBox for my tests) and seeing Windows 7 boot in under eight seconds, and getting a Windows Experience disk score of 7.7 in the virtual machines including the overhead and inefficiencies of the virtualized I/O! The Revodrive makes running multiple instances of high-I/O applications and virtual machines trivial and a real delight.

I won't bore the reader with extensive benchmarks, as these can be found elsewhere in droves. Suffice to say, a quick ATTO benchmark shows my device exceeding its specifications nicely:

A most impressive achievement for the price of admission.

In addition to outstanding performance as a storage or boot device, the Revodrive driver exposes a device that Windows (Vista, 7) sees as ReadyBoost capable. This will allow for using part of the Revodrive as a cache for your system hard disk (this assumes, obviously, that you choose to use the Revodrive as a fast storage device, and not as the system device).

This provides benefits à la Intel's SRT (Smart Response Technology) found as an option in Z68 based motherboards, but without the restrictions of requiring a Z68 chipset and a 64 GB cache size limit. I plan on investigating the benefits of this kind of configuration in the future: after all, few boot their machines so often that the few seconds off of boot time using an SSD for the system drive really becomes crucial, yet letting Windows intelligently cache hard disk activity, along with being able to use the same SSD as fast storage for selected files regardless of cache candidacy seems quite attractive and interesting. I don't expect huge benefits considering capabilities of the typical gamer's PC, but my curiosity has me planning some tests.

Do note: There has been some confusion regarding the availability of a 240 GB Revodrive 3 X2 at a much more palatable price point. This appears to have been the result of a misprint in the OCZ pre-release information, further promulgated by various pre-release reviews. At this time, however, OCZ is not releasing an X2 in this capacity. The non-X2 Revodrive 3, utilizing a configuration lacking the mezzanine card containing the extra set of controllers and flash NAND, still offers respectable gains over the prior generation of 240 GB units, just not the extreme performance of the X2 series.

Should the avid gamer purchase a Revodrive 3 X2? Only you can decide what fits your own needs and budget. At $1650 to $2300 currently on-line, it is a pricey proposition. You could get roughly equivalent performance by purchasing a dedicated quality raid card and four fast dedicated SSDs and save a few bucks. But, you'd give up TRIM support, and the solution, with all the additional cables and configuration, would clearly lack the plug-an-play, "it just works" elegance of the Revodrive. For the green readers, the Revodrive should also be more frugal in its power requirements.

If you want the current top-of-the-hill performance at this price level, the Revodrive 3 X2 480 GB (or its more capacious 960 GB bigger brother) are the only game in town at this time. You simply won't find anything else that combines the performance, footprint, and elegance of this product for now. A logical and close second option is the 240 GB Revodrive 3. At ~$650 on-line, it presents most of the performance of the X2 line (likely little subjective difference for the gamer) at a price that is most attractive.

Either choice will net the hardware enthusiast performance that was only dreamed of not long ago, and was priced at $10,000 and up just a few years ago. And neither is likely to be a bottleneck for game level loading.

Edit (07/29/11): It appears, from the Global Marketing staff at OCZ, that as of now, there is a 240GB X2 version getting ready for release. Part RVD3X2-FHPX4-240G, expect a price somewhere north of $700. Looks like stupid fast storage just got more affordable for the dedicated gamer!

Well done, OCZ!

Rob

Using graphics processing units (GPUs) to watch the heavens.

2011-07-26T02:26:00.000-07:00

As gamers, we sometimes marvel at the visual treats our GPUs provide us in our games. Few realize, however, just what a powerhouse of processing power modern graphics cards can be. I've had blog entries highlighting some uses of these "general purpose" capabilities of GPUs aside from their normal roles as rendering hardware.

A new paper "Accelerating Radio Astronomy Cross-Correlation with Graphics Processing Units" demonstrates a novel use of the hardware capabilities of modern GPUs (in this case, units from the Nvidia line of Tesla and standard GPUs) to accelerate the cross-correlation of interferometric data from radio telescope arrays. For those not familiar with this technique, allowing an array of telescopes to resolve at the level of a telescope the size of the array (implausibly large to actually realize - arrays can span arbitrary distances), a quick look at the Wikipedia article "Interferometry" provides a high-level refresher.

Even readers without a mathematical inclination should find the paper accessible, though a full understanding will require very basic calculus. There is a minor mistake on page 9, a confusion over 8b/10b encoding, that has no material effect on the contents of the paper. These are astrophysicists, not computer scientists...

Rob

OCZ Revodrive 3 X2 PCI-Express SSD 480 GB Review - Incoming!

2011-07-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

I received an email confirming shipping of my recently ordered OCZ PCI-E SSD. I wanted to pick one of these up to play with to see if it delivers on the pretty astounding capabilities (for a workstation / enthusiast consumer grade device) seen in reviews of pre-production samples. Several of my gaming machines already have dedicated RAID hardware SSD systems, and I've had earlier PCI-E based solutions (e.g. Fusion-IO) that were intended for enterprise use and were priced accordingly.

The latest OCZ offering appears to offer a level of performance equaling and in some cases exceeding these loftily priced solutions, in a form factor that gives the enthusiast gamer a hassle free, no cables, plug-and-play installation. You could perhaps beat the price by building an array of several fast SSD combined with a quality dedicated hardware raid card, but if the unit delivers as promised, why bother?

There was a puzzling delay between OCZ's announcement of availability (I ordered then) and actual availability, but it appears the device is now available at the usual outlets. Unfortunately, either because of supply and demand, or a price change by OCZ at the last minute, the price seems to have jumped almost $200.00 to nearly $1800.00. Fortunately, Amazon is honoring the price I ordered the drive at, saving a few hundred bucks. Good on them!

I chose the 480 GB Revodrive X2 model over the 240 GB Revodrive 3 since it offers dramatic performance increases over the previous generation, much more so than the non-X2 models. This is not to say the non-X2 240 GB does not offer worthwhile benefits over the earlier version, just that it is not nearly as dramatic of a boost as the X2, which has double the controllers and nearly double the IOPS capability and double the data throughput rate in some cases via its mezzanine card architecture when compared to the non-X2 240 GB model.

Unfortunately, due to some marketing typos further promulgated by pre-release reviews, gamers were led to believe there would be a 240 GB model of the X2 at a much more affordable price compared to the larger capacities. Such is not the case, and OCZ has corrected their media to reflect this.

I intend to focus specifically on any benefits the card brings to gamers as far as load times and any enhancement in game performance (e.g., streaming of textures).

Is it worth the $1800.00 price of entry, or for that matter the $650.00 cost for the smaller and lower performance 240 GB Revodrive 3 for use in games?

Stay tuned for the review in the next week or so!

Rob

Regarding Comments...

2011-07-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

I pretty much post / approve any comments. Exceptions are outright ad hominem posts, or ones patently blather from fainbois that may not agree with me.

Reasonable comments are always posted, unedited.

If you chose to disagree, well though-out comments are likewise nearly always posted.

However, if you want to be caustic, feel free to do so, but have the fortitude to post with a real name and account. You see mine, give me the same courtesy.

Do note: there is, and has been for as long as I've used it, an issue with the Google blogger comments system:

Rarely, I don't even get the comment. I don't even see something to approve. You will find similar comments on other blogs, and it has happened to me posting a comment elsewhere. It has apparently happened here, as a friend of a commenter notified me that a particular comment had not shown up, and wondered if I'd not approved it.

If you post a comment and it does not show up (even obnoxious comments usually will get a post from me referencing them and inviting a proper response), assume that may be the case and feel free to re-post it. If you continue to experience issues, feel free to email me.

Rob

A sorry heBETAting of the truth...

2011-07-20T22:19:00.000-07:00

Part of blogging something that won't please all is the expected personal attacks. Particularly from fanbois and their ilk. Such is the case with my recent post (I) Don't Believe the Hype. It seems some of the faithful need to make up fatuous motivations for by post. I make it clear - my BS meter has been steadily increasing toward the marketing versus reality picture of the game Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad, and my goal is to get PC gamers to look behind the curtain and use their heads in deciding game purchases. This is not the first game to appear to be over-hyped, and won't be the last.

The popular fabricated motivation of the day attributed to me is that I am lashing out because I was rejected from the beta test of the game. That that is bandied about by ill-informed random fans of the game is not surprising. What is, and is revealing of the credibility of some TWI staff, is that it is offered up by TWI as the sole reason for my exposé.

Seems like the truth is stretched, or broken, in more than just the current apparent reality of the game. Were I actively involved in income production in the gaming industry, such apparently slanderous and defamatory actions would warrant swift legal action by me. As it is, no one pays me to do anything gaming related, I'm just a PC gamer, and I find this laughable. A piteous example of what appears to be marketing CYA.

The fact is, I declined the beta invitation. I was not interested in being just a warm body: told that feedback was not desired, simply bodies to fill servers to show off working parts of the game to press. Marketing, in other words. Others in the candidate pool at the time were rejected, including long standing members of the Red Orchestra community that had not always toed the glowing, Heroes of Stalingrad will stop global warming line, but instead offered constructive and valid criticisms.

Those accepted received an acceptance email. I have shown mine below, with my response. I marked out certain personal information. They are otherwise unchanged. Strange to "welcome" someone rejected, and provide an NDA, don't you think?

I'll leave it to you to decide what the truth is in this. It should be patently clear. And it should give one pause that some senior members of TWI do not seem to be above promulgating such falsehoods or making attack posts (while censoring or locking out replies), instead of offering facts. Hilariously, these douche nozzles seem to prefer fighting fires with a hose attached to a gasoline pump, rather than using the water of facts to put them out.

I'd be more than happy to post a response from TWI showing anyone that was rejected, yet mysteriously received the same acceptance email.

Perhaps there's some strange black hole or other anomaly in their office, warping the truth. Maybe that same anomaly is also what's stopping them from offering a demo of the game, instead of making gamers fork over their hard-earned dollars to decide if it's great or a turd. A really great game can sell itself in demo form, and doesn't need hyperbole and secrecy. Any developer worth their salt that truly has a great game, and not just over-the-top marketing hype, should be willing and able to provide one. Do you buy your new cars without a test drive?

As a gamer, unless you've played the original and are enamored with it, I'd either wait for a trusted gamer you know to take the plunge and render an opinion (since, as already stated, reviews from magazines and press can be quite shifty), or wait for a demo. The latter is unlikely to ever happen. Wonder why?

As little as I believed the hype as of late, I believe it even less after these recent examples of the pomposity and perfidy of TWI. And it seems, so do more and more gamers.

Edit (7/21/11): Thanks to some recent messages, the story (polysemy intended) from TWI gets even more bizarre. There is now apparently another conspiracy theory there, one where old hands (guys around since the free mod days, active in the forums) of the Red Orchestra community are out to "get them" by spreading lies and innuendo and influencing others. What? Attacking your own faithful now? Perhaps the address in the acceptance email is a typo and it's not Roswell, GA but Roswell, NM instead. You know, where the aliens hang out...

Dedicated to the num nutz at TWI:

A most interesting use of GPUs, and an "infinte channels" communication scheme.

2011-07-20T01:31:00.000-07:00

Taking a break from the nonsense of the maelstrom my exposé on Tripwire Interactive's Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad (if you've not read it and you're a gamer, take a gander, it may save you some money), I checked out some recent papers at one of my favorite brain gyms, the Cornell University Library. Two particularly interesting papers piqued my interest.

The first, "Encoding many channels in the same frequency through radio vorticity: first experimental test." by Fabrizio Tamburini, et al, shows the results of recent experiments (extending work done earlier with lasers) utilizing the orbital angular momentum states of electromagnetic waves to allow a (theoretically) infinite number of channels to be simultaneously transmitted on a single frequency without resorting to any need for dense coding or channel sharing techniques. Fascinating. Do note, this is a pre-print, you will catch a few mistakes.

The second, "Real-time, fast radio transient searches with GPU de-dispersion." by A. Magro, et al, demonstrates a most interesting use of GPGPU computing (the use of GPU functionality for highly parallel computation as opposed to its traditional rendering role), in this case Nvidia's CUDA. In this example, a computational problem for exploratory astrophysics, the dispersion of radio signals from distant sources through the inter-stellar medium, is solved through compensatory algorithms. Utilizing the GPU compared to a CPU results in a 50 to 200 times improvement in processing speed, opening the possibility of moving the computations from offline into the real-time realm. As a user of GPGPU since before the term was even used, this is an exciting example of real-world benefits to science of this evolving capability.

Rob

A manufacturer doing the right thing.

2011-07-19T03:41:00.000-07:00

All too rare these days. In the thread What causes this (amp related)? in the Head-Fi forums, a poster brings up a potentially serious issue with an esoteric (though very fairly priced) headphone amplifier.

NWAVGUY responds with an engineering opinion. Watch the foamer fans of the brand go nuts. Then watch, after all their personal attacks and ad hominems toward him, as not only are the cold hard facts shown to be true but are confirmed by outside sources. Even then, the believers rant on. Reminds me of the recent reaction to some entries here: attack the blog (and me), not the facts.

To their great credit, the manufacturer (despite one of their representatives on the forum being a particularly obnoxious example of typical foamer behavior) does the right thing. Everyone is offered a way to be made whole. Refreshing.

Makes me want to buy their products just to show support for this rare behavior. So I did.

Rob

You're viewing a member of the "Ill Informed Attack Blogs" !

2011-07-18T04:07:00.000-07:00

I just picked up an e-mail from an eagle-eyed reader. It appears, by proclamation of Yoshiro, a.k.a. Jared Creasy, that my blog is officially an Ill Informed Attack Blog! You can see details in the Steam or TWI forums, assuming of course the posts have not already been deleted in the recent rash of censorship.

Here's one of the award announcements (click to enlarge):

Cool! I didn't even know that he, a senior member of TWI and also moderator of TWI forums and Steam TWI related forums even had such awards to give out! I also appreciate that Jared locked the thread immediately after announcing the award: I probably couldn't stand the accolades that were sure to follow. The idea of an open discussion is just plain stultifying.

I am honored, though I'm hoping this doesn't mean a free copy of Heroes of Stalingrad is going to show up on my Steam account.

I truly appreciate that Jared, whom previously I've never attacked personally, had the time to think out such a unique award, since I know he was much too busy to respond to my inquiries as to giving actual feedback, as opposed to being a just a warm body to show the press, when I was invited to the beta for Heroes of Stalingrad.

Thanks again, Jared, for thinking of me and my lil' ol' blog!

P.S.: If you want to debate the facts of my entries, I'd be delighted to post your response(s). Better yet, how about just responding in your own forum - I'm not the only one looking for real information on the game to back up the claims so close to release.

P.P.S.: ~~Not only have I not attacked you Jared, I admire you for what you were able to do in those Subway® campaign TV ads!~~ Edit: I've been advised you're NOT that Jared. He was obese and got skinny. You just have a big head. My bad.

P.P.P.S.: To help you out in your time of need, I think you meant "Ill-informed", not "Ill Informed". See the difference? The former means clueless, the latter means knowledgeable and not feeling well. Happy to clarify that for you!

R

Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain!

2011-07-18T02:00:00.000-07:00

Who can forget the climax of the great film "The Wizard of Oz", when Dorothy and her companions realize they'd been hoodwinked: The "Great and Powerful Oz" turns out to be an ordinary little man, until then concealed behind a curtain and using mechanisms to animate what turned out to be nothing. We as PC gamers have seen an analog in some recent games: Homefront and Brink spring to mind. Both hyped up as "the next big thing", both turned out to be largely turdelicious, and are effectively dead games scant months after their release.

Prime examples of hype meeting reality. I shared the skepticism of many at the marketing of these two games, and even with low expectations, shared the disappointment of many in what was delivered.

Now, clearly, like or dislike of a game is a personal thing. Opinions should be expected to differ. There will always be outliers of both in the overall appeal of a game. Technical objectivism aside (e.g. incredible visuals, realistic AI, realistic sound, etc.), some may find delight in another's bomb of a game. I can think of one myself: I found Frontlines: Fuel of War to be an enjoyable single-player game. No world beater, but my experience was better than I expected, by a good margin, than what I would have thought based on critical and gamer reviews.

In that vein, the subject of one of my recent entries (I) Don't Believe the Hype, Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad, will very likely have great appeal to some gamers. Certainly it will, if only through cognitive dissonance, to the Red Orchestra brand faithful.

Nonetheless, that entry seems to have hit a nerve. Comments (all but one particularly obnoxious one published at the time of this entry) lean toward support of the entry, or neutrality. The expected ad hominem or two is of course sprinkled in.

Sadly, perhaps the most interesting discussion at this time of the entry, to be found in the TWI forums, cannot reliably be used to judge the response from gamers. Even adjusting for the expected bias by forum posters there (no indictment intended or implied - one should expect a bias toward a game franchise in the game's forums), the rank censorship going on clouds the view. Posts positive toward the entry are generally summarily deleted, with threats of bans bantered about, while those negative are generally left to stand. Insults and ad hominem toward those not toeing the line are treated similarly compared to those foaming at the mouth with glowing statements. Same in the Steam forums by TWI appointed moderators. Laughable, were it not for the chilling effect it has on open discussion.

It does remind one of the movie scene. The curtain has been pulled back. The reaction of the Great and Powerful Oz is most telling.

I've been apprised of veiled threats against some beta testers for allegedly "leaking" information. Well, at least if this is happening it is information, and more than the developer themselves seem to offer the community and other potential purchasers of the game. I have been quite clear with persons I know that are in the game's beta to not reveal anything violating their NDA to me (unenforceable as it is - TWI might want to invest in proper legal counsel next time, and use care in post NDA statements to participants), and as far as I can tell, no one has violated any part of their agreement, certainly not in any actionable manner.

Perhaps if the pulling back of the curtain had revealed something appealing, such caustic reactions would not have ensued. I have no plans to purchase the game on release, as I've already stated. I will, however, be happy to respond to the many requests for a full review if at least one of the local gaming group does buy the game. Despite my distaste for much of the community shared by others, and the apparent hyperbolic marketing of the game, I won't let that get in the way of an objective review. I am always willing to take a new look, and learn new things, when it comes to games.

Case in point: Had you asked me a month ago my thoughts on ARMA II, I would have been dismissive. My only experience was with the "single player" mode of the game. Quoted for a reason: to call it such is a gross misnomer. It is more like a sandbox to familiarize oneself with the mechanics of the game. Nothing more. As a game "mode", it is horrible. Pulled kicking and screaming into the multiplayer mode, my eyes have been opened. While the game certainly has its quirks and bugs, its verisimilitude can at times be strikingly effective in its immersion. The "add-ons" and mod community provide bits and pieces that allow the game to become more than the sum of its parts, and to me represent the finest example of a "moddable" game I've yet played.

I'm not nearly deep enough into this very deep game to do it justice in (an already requested) review. When I feel like I have enough measure of the game, I will write one.

Stay tuned...

R

Ahh, Summer.

2011-07-16T21:39:00.000-07:00

I love summer. Who doesn't? When answering a question from a friend's teen about why there are seasons, I recalled an animated graphic I made for Wikipedia's article on the Equation of Time. Using the most excellent Mathematica, I modelled the Earth's orbital components and calculated the components of the Equation of Time, generating a series of graphs that were combined to form the animation. The Sun, time, and the seasons all in one...

An Engineer's Audiophile...

2011-07-16T21:23:00.000-07:00

If you have not happened across the blog NWAVGUY I highly recommend a gander. Using state-of-the-art test gear (including the yummy Prism Dscope III), he shreds audio BS seen elsewhere with cold hard science and facts. My kind of blog!

AMB Mini3 DIY Headphone Amp is a great place to start. Watch the reaction of the foamers to cold hard facts and measurements. Sound familiar to that of non-glowing PC game reviews/previews/skepticism?

Rob

(I) Don't Believe the Hype...

2011-07-16T15:04:00.000-07:00

There’s been much hype about the upcoming FPS PC game Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad from TWI, that cannot denied. I have never believed it, per se, but I did have high hopes for the quality of the game. The latter is no longer true.Most of the hype, repeated and linked ceaselessly, has been from the RO community and the developer themselves. Much of the rest has been from one publication (PC Gamer) and one reviewer there, known for uneven reviews.

Who can say how much of that positive “pre-review” might be the result of selective hiney powdering of said reviewer by the developer, the promise of ad revenue (a recent full page ad...), or other coddling à la the infamous COD reviewer junkets? Conspiracy theory? No, reality - the “review” business, whether it be PC games or anything else, is known for its corruption. Examples are rampant. Good reviews seem easily bought, or otherwise obtained.

Part of the job of marketing, frankly, is the inveigling of hapless reviewers. I myself treat any review, save those by trusted friends or critics with unimpeachable credentials, with a block of salt for these reasons.

And for the same reasons, eyebrows surely must rise with scepticism at “pre-reviews” making proclamations so grandiose as a game from a relatively unknown publisher somehow “beating” megaliths such as COD:BO.

We should not forget the many games hyped similarly that turned out to be turds.

Opinions posted in counterpoint to this tide of hype from those not part of the religion of HOS are excoriated and often locked or deleted in the TWI forums. These selfsame forums allow other threads to limitlessly suppurate their spite until it fills every available crevice so long as they involve bashing other games and potential competitors.

Similar behavior can be seen in the few other forums actively conversing about the game, often from apparent patrolling by TWI cultists: Witness the ridiculous level of “down-voting” of dissenting comments toward the alleged quality of the most recent game-play visuals on the gametrailers.com site. (You’d think these probable sock-puppets could at least be creative enough to use names dissimilar to their TWI forum monikers when doing their psuedo-astroturfing...and that TWI would at least be bright enough to use a sock-puppet moniker when actually astroturfing...)

To not toe the line is to be branded a “hater”, or “ignorant”, or “naive”.

Such censorship and bullying of dissenting opinion and warranted scepticism, either from corporate edict or inaction in corporate forums, or by fanbois elsewhere should not go unnoticed, and instead should garner a dim view by the PC gamer.

TWI has made AAA claims for the game, but there has yet to be seen AAA evidence. Few backwater developers that have made grandiose claims have delivered, and I share the view that the proof is in the pudding. We’ve yet to see anything truly justifying AAA status much less claims, a status that seems preordained by the believers.

We really know little about game, other than the paucity of information released by the developer and proclamations by the foamer faithful.

We do know that not all of the “sneak peeks” of the game have been met with unanimous praise.

Why might this be so? There are some prime reasons PC gamers buy a game:

The game has a fundamental mechanic / game-play style they particularly enjoy.
The game serves as a showcase for their PC horsepower: Crysis: Brutal for hardware and pretty!
They want to play what their friends and their community plays.

To some gamers, satisfying even one of these qualifies a game as desirable, while others require all three (and more) criteria to be met. Looking at RO:HOS in each of these areas proves enlightening.

The game has a fundamental mechanic / gameplay style they particularly enjoy.

Viewed by this criterion, HOS finds itself between a rock and a hard place. Despite efforts claimed to make the game “more accessible” to the mainstream gamer, I’ve seen little if any evidence this has been successful. Sandwiched between the more mainstream (arcade? popular style?) play of AAA titles such as the Battlefield and Call of Duty series, and the arguably superior “realism” of games like the ARMA series, HOS seems to be limiting itself to an exceedingly thin slice of the gamer pie.

The attempted COD land grab by TWI (historically implausible weapons, unlocks, etc.) has further alienated their existing dedicated community, and to my eyes is not going to be sufficient to capture any real segment of the mainstream market without losing many from the existing core.

The fact that one will find more people in their local Safeway than are actively playing HOS’ forebearer worldwide at any given time amply demonstrates the vacuum of interest in this category of play and game family (WW II “realistic”).

The game serves as a showcase for their PC horsepower.

The visuals seen so far for HOS have been underwhelming at best. Not much really can be expected from the already aging version of the engine used. Statements from the leaky beta testers have not been encouraging in this regard, excepting those of (possibly sight impaired) foamers.

Most serious PC gamers have serious investments in PC hardware. They want to show it off, if only to themselves. HOS seems unlikely to fulfill that desire.

“Gameplay AND graphics from 5 years ago” as one viewer of the game commented.

That the game is being consistently shown with less than “full on” visuals (by admission of TWI staff) when it is allegedly scant weeks from release rings alarm bells. Are the visuals seen in fact really as good as it gets? Is the performance with the apparently mythical “full on” settings so dismal it can’t be shown? Who knows.

We certainly have been told to expect great visuals. Where are they?

And why on earth with beta testing nearing its end, so close to release, would the game not be tested at its limits? Something doesn’t pass the smell test here.

Apologists saying things like “...the game is set in WWII and has a certain look because of this...”, with foamers quickly chiming in with nonsense like “People know in their heart of hearts the game is going too [sic] have pretty good graphics...” (Really? Your heart told you so?), where no one I know of has publicly seen anything remotely resembling modern hardware quality capabilities in visuals is analogous to Britney Spears fans wailing how fine her voice really is.

When was the last time a game that actually had truly kick-ass capabilities was not shown in that light scant weeks before release? I can’t think of any.

They want to play what their friends and their community plays.

This may ultimately be the killer for the game. All but one of the serious gamers I personally pointed toward the game has stated they no longer plan to purchase the game. Their reason: the community. I’ll not delve into details. A perusal of Facepunch will give one sufficient pause as to the view seen by many others. Suffice it to say, the CEO of TWI has claimed he gets ten messages a day from new community members stating they don't want to go there any more.

We want to play what our friends are playing, and meet new friends in the greater community. The latter in the case of RO seems utterly uninviting: a club no one wants to be a member of, save the overabundant churls already there. I myself have joined the ranks of “no thanks” because of the behavior there, seemingly encouraged rather than disciplined by TWI themselves.

TWI’s flippant attitudes are sewage sauce on the excrement pie. To paraphrase one example: “You just don’t get it. It is a revolution in gaming. You’ll see!” Really? How about letting the gamer decide what is and isn’t revolutionary, instead of decreeing it so as if only you are the all-seeing, all-knowing of the PC gaming community? Even hardened, long faithful members of the core community feel slighted and are turning their backs on the game because of the attitude pervading the forums from the top.

So, a game that has apparently already dated visuals, with a play style that seems to attract a limited player base, played and hyped by a community with one too many TWIrps.

It seems there must be many better places to spend my PC game monies in the near future (like the upcoming Iron Front WW 2 realism game on the ARMA OA engine, and of course BF3 and MW3, with ARMA 3 and Dead Island thrown in for good measure), and I and others I know plan to.

The fact that the game, only a few weeks away from release, did not even muster a mention in the list of the top dozen games of the most recent OTX GamePlan insights surveys of PC game purchase intents bodes poorly and is a focused magnifying glass on the (un)reality of the hype.

The fact that the recent Steam giveaway of the top ten games in 100 winners’ wish lists resulted in a grand total of three “wishes” for the game reinforces the detachment of reality from the hype.

The fact that many long-standing and devoted members of the community are not pre-ordering the game, and some have chosen to divorce themselves from the community speaks volumes.

The fact that one beta tester called the game “...shite [sic], with some interesting features...” is perhaps the most disquieting indictment of the chasm between the hype PC gamers have been fed and the apparent reality of the game.

I played the original mod. I bought OSTFRONT to vote with my wallet for an original job well done. I never even played the latter in earnest, I’d already moved on from an enjoyable time with the free mod. I just wanted to reward a tiny team for their effort. It’s a shame the heads grew so big, and too much of the community so foul, that I’ve no desire to continue my patronage of the brand.

I’ll be voting with my wallet, along with others. Elsewhere.

I may buy HOS when it is cheap, for which I do not anticipate a long wait.

Edit (7/20): The reactions to this entry (other than the largely concurring comments here and elsewhere) have become something bordering on bizarre. Like watching Bill Clinton in his infamous parsing of words. See the post A sorry hebetating of the truth, and be sure to follow the hyperlinks contained therein, for an amusing trip. The Attack Blog entry should amuse you also.

Edit (7/17): It seems some readers have posted links to this entry in various forums, including TWI. I've received amusing messages regarding the (not surprisingly biased) censorship going on at the TWI forums (and Steam forums by TWI moderators) over comments toward the entry. Head on over to see great examples of the artificial view TWI wants you to believe...and the reality (before they delete those posts.)

Crosshairs' IBleedV20 goes live at Tripwire Interactive!

2011-02-02T23:57:00.000-08:00

A visit to the studio responsible for the highly anticipated Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad is planned for this weekend.

See http://bashandslash.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=4137 , and elsewhere on the BashandSlash site for details.

Should be good!

Rob

The best customer reviews ever at Amazon.com

2011-02-02T23:52:00.000-08:00

This is a cable. To connect some audio components together.

It is $500.00

That is itself is not so remarkable: "Audiophile" kooks can pay upwards of $40,000.00 for an eight foot pair of speaker cables. They think they sound better, that the electrons "know"...
A mutation at the P. T. Barnum locus in their genes, I suppose.

What makes this remarkable is that it is just a CAT6 equivalent Ethernet cable.

The ensuing reviews border on the brilliant. Have a look and a laugh.

Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable

Regrettably, if you want one, it looks like you'll need to pay at least double on the used market...

Rob

159 Degrees of Separation: One of the greatest escapes in history.

2011-01-09T17:19:00.000-08:00

I'm a huge fan of Paul Nahin. A true polymath, his areas of expertise range far and wide. Paul has written a series of books targeted at the lay reader (perhaps better said as advanced lay reader) on a wide range of subjects, from electronics (The Science of Radio), probability (Duelling Idiots and Other Probability Puzzles), to general mathematics and physics (several).

I have them all, and enjoy them immensely. One of my favorites is Chases and Escapes: The Mathematics of Pursuit and Evasion, a fantastic overview of the history and mathematics of modern pursuit theory. Pursuit theory in this context includes the analysis of optimal strategies for both pursuing (catching) a target, and evasion (losing or avoiding the chaser) by the target.

I thought of Paul recently when I caught the excellent BBC documentary Hiroshima, part of the BBC History of World War II series. If you have any interest in the history changing atomic bombing of Japan, I can highly recommend this documentary / docudrama. The film intersperses interviews with members of the allied forces, and those of survivors from Hiroshima, with superb reenactments and CGI of the events leading to, and including, the bombing.

In the documentary, it is mentioned that after the release of the bomb, the pilot of the B-29 Enola Gay, Colonel Paul Tibbets, made a "159 degree diving turn" to maximize the distance from the bomber to the detonation point of the Little Boy Uranium gun-type bomb. It had been determined that the plane could be damaged and possibly crippled if the distance was less that eight miles. As it turns out, Tibbets put 10.5 miles between the detonation and the plane (according to science officers analyzing data after the bombing.)

Why 159 degrees?

Tibbets had said to Oppenheimer (the father, in essence, of Little Boy and the subsequent Fat Man Plutonium implosion bomb): "I told him that when we had dropped bombs in Europe and North Africa, we'd flown straight ahead after dropping them - which is also the trajectory of the bomb. But what should we do this time?"

According to Tibbets, Oppenheimer replied "You can't fly straight ahead because you'd be right over the top when it blows up and nobody would ever know you were there."

Tibbets continues "He said I had to turn tangent to the expanding shock wave. I said, 'Well, I've had some trigonometry, some physics. What is tangency in this case?' He said it was 159 degrees in either direction. 'Turn 159 degrees as fast as you can and you'll be able to put yourself the greatest distance from where the bomb exploded.'"

I'm quite sure that something got lost in the translation here, either by the interviewer, or in Tibbets' memory of what was said (I'm quite sure Oppenheimer would not have said such a thing!): As we'll see, the statement "I had to turn tangent to the expanding shock wave" doesn't make much sense, and I'm sure what was meant is more along the lines of "Turn until the line from the detonation to the plane is tangent to the turning radius..."

We can do a simplified version of the problem with simple trigonometry. We want to maximize our speed and distance away from the detonation point, within the reasonable limits of the aircraft (i.e., no Split-S maneuvers, though I think the plane could tolerate one, and it might have been even more effective at getting maximal distance.)

Viewed from above the bomb run, we can diagram the problem as below (most certainly not to scale):

D represents the distance from the release of the bomb to the detonation point.

R represents the turning radius of the B-29 Superfortress (I am not aware of any actual data on Tibbets' aircraft: having been lightened by removal of non-essential components, I would venture a slightly smaller number than a standard B-29.)

Plugging in some rough numbers garnered from various sources, we find R/D ≅ 0.19

Since the tangent of angle a is defined as that value, we find that a = Tan^-1(0.19), or a = 10.8 degrees.

a is half of angle b, making b = 21.6 degrees.

We know from basic trigonometry that angle c is 180 - b, or 158.4 degrees. Close enough for government work!

Hence, a turn of this angle will point the Enola Gay directly away from the detonation point, maximizing the distance over time from that moment of flight.

In reality, the problem is a bit more complex, since it really is a problem in three dimensions (the drop height, actual detonation height of ~ 1900 feet, the time from drop to detonation, and the speed of the aircraft and the effects of the dive and turn must all be taken into account.)

In a personal communication, I asked Paul Nahin if he was aware of any such analysis. His reply was negative. Perhaps in the next printing of the book...

Rob

COD:Black Ops - One of the best war movies I've seen recently...

2010-12-27T23:51:00.000-08:00

Now past the billion dollar sales point, Call of Duty: Black Ops, the seventh game of the series, and the third by developer Treyarch, has been a huge success, At least sales wise. But what to make of the game itself?

I preordered the game, based on my enjoyment of several of the past games in the series. Not something I do often - too many recent games have turned out to be turds in a punchbowl, so I now wait until I've heard from my 'buy everything' gaming pals, or get some hands-on time with a new game before shelling out my shekels.

I figured the online MP experience would be plagued with issues on release (it was), and did not even bother to install the game or play it on release day. I ended up so busy playing other games, I'd not gotten around to it until recently.

One of my constant gaming buddies got the game as a gift, and I watched a bit of his game play in single player. It sparked my interest, so here's my nutshell review.

First, a note on my biases: I am mostly interested in single player these days. I retired from competitive gaming, and pubbing is filled with far too many cheats / hacks / noodle-heads to have much fun. I limit my online play to games where my close gaming cohorts are the only other players. They're all good enough that cheating is out of the question for them.

I fired up the single-player campaign, to be met with the typical, long (looooooonnnggg) 'intro' video that the player is forced to watch before getting into the action. Ugh.

And therein lies the crux of my complaint with this game. Far too much of the game is cut-scenes, most where the player is unable to skip viewing. F.E.A.R. got this right: you had to watch such scenes on first play, but after that, you could elect to skip them. Added to this, some of the scenes are ridiculously long. Seriously. One of them is so long, I'm quite certain I could cook myself a nice breakfast, and eat it, before the scene is over.

A few of the scenes can be skipped (too few, in my opinion) but sometimes it's with a mouse click, sometimes with a space bar hit. What? Did anyone Q/A this thing?

To add insult to injury, at the conclusion of one cut-scene (one of those, like in a lame movie, where they run out of time / budget, so they end with the "it was really a dream in the mind of the dog owned by the sister of the neighbor that lived behind the house where the ghost of the axe murderer was seen by the uncle of the bank president that loaned the money to the owner of the pet shop the dog came from in return for sex with what turned out to be his long-lost sister"...you get the idea), you as the player have to endure a long sequence of slow-motion navigating of a government building, interspersed with more cut-scene flashbacks, where your only action is to move your avatar through what feels like air made of clear gelatin. Slow, slow, slow, and boring as hell.

If that kind of 'play' is not irritating enough, there are plenty of cut-scenes that are long enough to put you to sleep, only to find that the instant the cut-scene ends, you were supposed to press some key, or click some mouse button, to rescue your avatar from certain death.

Even when you are actually playing, there are far too many places where you must follow an NPC, and you are strictly limited to a narrow corridor of play, with no way to 'pass' the NPC, as if they had a ten foot wide Plexiglas sheet strapped to their back. More of an 'interactive' cut-scene than real game play.

That aside, the campaigns are challenging enough, particularly on the highest difficulty levels. But there's nothing really fresh here.

If you've played past recent releases of the series, you've played this game already: shoot a bunch of baddies, blow up this and that, get this or that important thingy, cut some wires, slap some fools around in the name if interrogation, etc. Same game, different scenery.

That graphics are fine, actually quite good: humans look and act pretty human, the AI of the NPC (friendly and enemy) seldom does anything really stupid, though you certainly won't be fooled into thinking there's anything human about them. Avatar movement is also pretty well done.

A nice assortment of weapons is available, so you mostly get to choose how to accomplish your slaughter to your liking.

The full single player game is rather short (I'd guess 4-6 hours for a player familiar with the series), and leads you to the best part of the game, in my opinion: a very well done, very funny scene with banter between several luminaries from the times of the game, resulting in battle with Nazi zombies. The Zombie mode of the game provides a challenging and fun game, sure to please fans of games like the past COD Zombie modes or Left 4 Dead.

Overall, the game feels, to me, like one where an epic, detailed game was planned, that might have provided 20+ hours of single-player involvement, but someone said "No way!", and too many key elements were turned into arduous cut-scenes.

The game, apart from that, feels lovingly made. But, I wouldn't eat a lovingly made shit pie, nor would I recommend it to my friends. Fans of the series will find it a must play, just as fans of Star Wars will buy every DVD in the series despite some of the films being turkeys.

Really, if the developer / publisher continue on this route, why not just make the next game in the series a theatrical release, where moviegoers get a fake game controller, and can pretend they're 'playing' the new COD?

B- on a good day, C+ on days when I'm grumpy.

Rob

The Father of Modern Gaming: An excellent profile of Shigeru Miyamoto in The New Yorker.

2010-12-20T06:18:00.000-08:00

If you're a gamer, you owe it to yourself to acquire a copy of the December 20 & 27 2010 issue of the magazine The New Yorker.

An excellent, lengthy article on Shigeru Miyamoto, arguably the father of modern gaming and gaming consoles will be found starting on page 86. A delightful read, even if you are not a console gamer.

If you are unable to peruse a physical copy, the complete article is available at the time of this blog entry's writing at The New Yorker Online.

Rob

Sushi For Your Gaming: Hamachi VPN for LAN multiplayer over the internet.

2010-12-20T05:51:00.000-08:00

I've recently been playing some older games (Rainbow Six series) in co-op multi-player mode with some gaming buddies. An issue often faced when playing online, particularly with older games, is the availability of the various servers (log-in / authentication / etc.) from the publisher to enable this mode of play.

Sometimes, the servers are unavailable for maintenance or other reasons, sometimes they've been completely shut down when the game is at "end of life" by the publisher. What's a gamer to do that still enjoys playing with geographically dispersed friends for games that fall into these holes?

So long as the game incorporates a LAN multi-player aspect, this can be easily accomplished with the most excellent Hamachi VPN from LogMeIn.

In a nutshell, Hamachi provides a painless, zero-configuration (95% success) Virtual Private Network facility ideally suited to online gaming (unlike a typical VPN, Hamachi will pass broadcast and multi-cast traffic, vital for proper functioning of most LAN games.)

Non-commercial use is free, setup is quick and painless. The service provides a web-based interface to create networks, manage clients, and deploy customized client installers. The latter facility enables players with no technical expertise to easily become a member of your private gaming network without any Hamachi configuration - just a simple installation is required.

Mesh (all members can 'see' all other members), Hub-and-Spoke (Members are connected to hubs, hubs 'see' all members, members see only the hubs), and Gateway (members 'see' the entire physical network, and share its address space) networks are supported, Mesh being the most appropriate for most WAN based LAN gaming.

A really fantastic free service with very respectable performance and reliability, and security (encryption of data flow) when desired.

Its use is of course not limited to gaming: it makes a fine VPN for accessing your LAN while out on the road for general use.

A few caveats for gamers (these apply to the 'host' or originator of the network, and the clients / members):

Most games will use the 'first' LAN network adapter found on the machine for traffic. You must ensure that the Hamachi 'adapter' (actually a virtual adapter installed by Hamachi that is treated by the operating system as a real, physical adapter) is 'first' in the list. Failure to do so may result in an inability to connect the participating PCs together in the game (clients may not 'see' the server / host, etc.) You can adjust this by going to the advanced settings in your network connections control panel window (see image below), and using the arrows next to the connections window on the adapters and bindings tab. Move Hamachi to the top. You might need to reboot your machine for the changes to take effect.

Recent versions of Windows (7, and probably Vista though I've not verified this) have changed the behavior of broadcast traffic routing. This one had me head-scratching for a bit! Before, such traffic would be sent on the adapter used for the connection. In recent Windows, this order is ignored, and the adapter with the lowest interface metric will be used, regardless of its order in the adapters connections list. The result is symptoms similar to the adapter itself not being seen as 'first': clients will likely not see the server / host, or not be able to connect successfully. To remedy this, right-click on the Hamachi adapter in your network connections control panel window, select properties, double-click on the Internet Protocol Version 4 item, and click on the advanced button in the lower right of the dialog. Set the Interface Metric to 1 and reboot your machine (you can also try just disabling and re-enabling the Hamachi adapter in lieu of rebooting.) The default metric used by Hamachi of 9000 causes broadcast traffic to route over your 'real' NIC, causing connection issues for the games. Network internals savvy users may recognize there are other means to accomplish this end. Feel free to experiment - you won't permanently break anything.

Give it a look and a try. As long as a game supports LAN multi-player, you will always be able to enjoy it with friends in the cloud using this nifty tool.

Rob

One of the funniest persons I've read.

2010-12-20T05:00:00.000-08:00

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

I laugh hard every time I visit.

Rob

Aimbots In Real Life: DARPA's Advanced Sighting System.

2010-12-19T05:46:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a SpecOps buddy for ringing me up with information that pointed me to the sources for this post.

One of the biggest banes of snipers is wind. It is difficult to estimate speed and direction of winds between the shooter and a potential target, and not unusual for there to be currents and eddies going many directions and speeds along the route of the bullet. This can cause gross inaccuracies in the shots: even under just 10 MPH crosswinds, accuracy of snipers is seen to drop dramatically at ranges over 300 meters.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) put out an RFP some years back for a next-generation sight system to enhance the capabilities of snipers. Known as the Advanced Sighting System (later simplified to the "One Shot" system), this technology will soon be in the hands of test soldiers, with a contract awarded to Lockheed Martin for the initial units. Lockheed Martin had been the winner of the original early prototype contract in 2008, where units showed a twofold to fourfold increase in first shot hits, and a halving of target acquisition time.

The units utilize a ~50μJ, 10ns pulsed laser to 'slice' samples of the air between the shooter and the target (getting the exact range to the target for 'free' in the process.) The aerosol back-scatter of the slices is analyzed by a sensor (either an array, or a single sensor with the laser placed in multiple sample positions per slice) to produce a time cross-correlation. This correlation of the scintillation provides information about the air movement at that slice. The system then calculates the resulting ballistics corrections, and the data is used to 'zero' the reticule for the shooter.

The benefits are myriad, chiefly:

No need for a spotter to guess the range.
No guessing of wind velocity, direction, variation and thermal effects down range.
No math calculations for spotter or shooter, nor manual adjustments.
Vastly reduced sniper training requirements.
<1 second from target acquisition to trigger pull.

It's an aim-bot for real life.

Boom. Head shot. At 2000 Meters.

Scary.

Details of the award can be found at the article in Military & Aerospace Electronics.

On the subject of rants...

2010-12-16T06:30:00.000-08:00

Here's a good one, by Jeff Roberts, a developer for the hugely popular RAD Game Tools. It discusses aliasing in C (more precisely, problems that strict aliasing rules in compilers cause that screw up his code results).

Strict aliasing can result in large performance benefits via compiler optimizations, but it can 'break' otherwise valid code (even the Linux kernel doesn't follow the rules: see lkml.org for a post by Linus Torvalds regarding the insanity.)

The original post from Jeff titled Strict Aliasing... makes for amusing and illuminating reading, as does the rest of his blog. I think he and I would get along swimmingly.

Rob

Oops!BSD? We might need to re-evaluate our beliefs in the security of OpenBSD.

2010-12-16T01:24:00.000-08:00

OpenBSD is widely hailed as the most secure of the generally available non-hardened operating systems (that is, excluding operating systems designed to specific security constraints, such as GEMSOS, and LOCK).

A recently released email might change this view, if found to not be a hoax.

See http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236621626462&w=2 and prepare to don your conspiracy hats...

As an aside, I can highly recommend the book "Operating System Security (Synthesis Lectures on Information Security, Privacy, and Trust)" by Trent Jaeger for an excellent review of trusted operating systems to the interested reader.

Rob

Bailing on BASH, forum idiocy, Et cetera.

2010-12-16T00:27:00.000-08:00

It has been a long time since I had a rant post. Or any post, for that matter: Busy with other projects, my daughter (accepted into Stanford early admission, congratulations JC!), and other miscellanea. So, if you're easily offended, best skip this one...seriously. For that matter, if a rant itself will bother you, just skip reading. This is not the typical post here (I think I've really ranted only once before.) You have been warned.

Ramming Speed! (nod to Ben Hur...)

Anyone that has followed me in forums (or knows me personally) knows that I'm a thermonuclear bomb directed at stupidity / unctuousness / marketing snake oil. I really do think the world would be a better place if more took aim at such nonsense: embarrass most fools enough, they'll go away, leaving a better quality pool in the end.

I directed readers to the excellent forum and podcasts on BashandSlash many posts ago, and have been a lightly active poster there since. A recent podcast, however, raised my hackles with its fulsome (not in a good sense) interview of a 'community representative' for DICE. Simply put, no hard questions were asked, and the interviewee exhibited the (unfortunately all too common these days) sliminess of a used car salesman. I said it in a forum post there, and I'll repeat it here: Anyone that can fling BS in the name of their 'job' is a perfidious douche nozzle.

And letting them get away with it is a disservice to the PC gaming community. It lowers the bar yet further. I may be Patton to the host's Gandhi, but really, if all one's journalistic intent is is to be a conduit for the game publisher's advertisements, why bother?

Now, in my post (I'd link it, but it appears the thread is gone (from an edit updating the content, not from any kind of 'get rid of his post' action)), I replied to someone that contrasted this 'community representative' to a podcast of a different sort (Crosshairs), where recent shows have had the most interesting John Gibson from Tripwire Interactive as a guest.

John's honesty and openness is a refreshing change from the marketing BS, and outright lies, that the PC community has seen from several of these 'community representatives'. (As an aside, just who do they represent? The cowering, sugar-coating PC public that will take the recent crap labeled as games and eat it with a smile? They certainly don't seem represent the best interests of me, or any of my gaming friends...)

My reply contained the quote above, along with the statement (contrasting the typical 'community representative' with John Gibson) "Most serious gamers would more likely punch lame-toe and IQ_20.20 in the face if they met them..."

Somehow, this was twisted into a 'threat of personal violence' (by my hands) toward one 'Robert Bowling' by the host. Huh? I never used that name, nor have I ever had any interactions with or about that person. Beats me. Maybe Canadian English works differently than mine. In any case, I was issued a warning in the forum by the host. A perfervid response, I think.

Last straw for me: I will not walk on eggshells, much less imaginary ones, for people I don't even know (one Mr. Bowling), so I asked to be immediately removed as a member. No milquetoast clubs for me.

I want to be clear - I have no intrinsic qualms with the host (Jockyitch) - he seems like a straight shooter, and it is his board / forum / podcast, and his rules. I simply think being Mother Teresa as a journalist does us in the PC community little good in putting pressure on the developers and publishers to reverse the rapid downward spiral of the last few years in PC game quality and their rush to powder the hineys of the console crew. It is the action I have an issue with: it results in silencing dissent that further enables the marketing BS behaviors of developers and publishers with no benefit to PC gamers.

Squelching views not to one's liking, or not to one's tea-and-crumpet politeness standard has the same chilling effect. Worse has been said directly at the same interviewee in their very own forums where they have moderator status. To their credit, such posts remain, excluding of course seriously out of line "I'll kill you if I find you" kind of posts. Not that I need that to justify my sentiments to myself: Marketing BS pawns are the plague of the earth. Well, at least one of the plagues.

Spirited, sometimes harsh, occasionally rude interaction is just a part of free speech. I myself have been guilty of less than parliamentary politeness in interchanges with idiots (see below). Then again, maybe that's a poor example of a standard - have you ever watched the verbal volleys fired in the House of Commons?

Saying someone might punch someone is not a personal threat of violence, it is a metaphor for the level of displeasure many PC gamers feel.

At the same time, I advised the host of the companion show Crosshairs of this action, and that I should probably not participate in future podcasts: there is no way I can interact like some sodium thiopental laced patient, bleary-eyed with a drool festooned grin mouthing "Oh, yeah, Isn't it all just grand!" because it 'fits' the peace-loving agenda of the host. Or in this case, actually, the host's parent host: Crosshair's host Iblleedv20 can be a contrarian sometimes: he is just much more civilized at it than me.

I will miss being a member of Crosshairs: some very cool, very smart people are regular participants. I highly advise that you take a listen, if you haven't already, and also to the parent Bash casts.

I wish both hosts the best in their endeavors.

Rant, part Deux: Forum Stupidity.

For Christ's sake, is it that hard, if you disagree with someone in a forum post, to at least know what you're talking about before posting a retort? Anything else just spreads misinformation to the naive reader, and makes the reply look like that of a fool to those that do know what they're talking about.

Case in point, one of the last threads in the forums involved, having to do with the miserable sound quality of a game soundtrack demo. You can see the thread here. Now, I'm pretty sure a monkey could discern that the 'strings' are fake. And poor ones at that. Like a 'real' Ming vase found in a box of Cracker Jacks kind of real.

I stated such. This inane response followed (to which I did not reply - my account was deleted per my wishes):

Clearly you are not a musician.

1. A high school orchestra wouldn't be professional enough to tackle a full soundtrack. They'd come in late, they'd come in flat or sharp, the string section would have tuning issues.

2. What I've heard here sounds nothing like a $29.99 Walmart keyboard. I have no idea what you're talking about. You might need better speakers or headphones, though.

3. No one uses a "synthesizer" for orchestral music production anymore. Professional composers use samples, recorded off of REAL instruments. Synthesized implies that the sound is created synthetically, mathematically. I am fairly certain what is being used here are samples, at least from what I can hear. Actually it sounds pretty convincing to me, I'm not sure what you're listening to, Rob.

Let's take this piece by piece, and see why I think it's a pretty stupid response (and unfortunately typical of self-proclaimed experts in all too many forums.)

Clearly you are not a musician.:

And the relevance of this is...what? This is a typical tactic of the weak-minded / unarmed with facts poster. A type of straw man argument (fictitious persona) to attempt to cloud the reader's sense of the real argument. Of course, this person knows nothing about my musical background. Even if they did, it has no relevance.

Audiophiles have long noted musicians having really terrible audio systems that 'sound fine' to the musician. Some have theorized it is due to the constant exposure to real instruments allowing those listener's brains to compensate for the poor sound, though I know of no academic study ever done to test this. I can speak from personal experience - I've seen this to be the case often with musician friends of mine, one particularly excruciating system belonging to a world-renowned conductor. If anything, not being a musician might be an advantage based on these observations.

A high school orchestra wouldn't be professional enough to tackle a full soundtrack...:

And your evidence is? You were in a crappy one, perhaps? Anyone that has heard a truly outstanding high school orchestra (and they do exist) will spot this as ridiculous.

What I've heard here sounds nothing like a $29.99 Walmart keyboard. I have no idea what you're talking about. You might need better speakers or headphones, though.:

This kind of reply content toward me, or others, particularly tickles my funny bone. Again, a fictitious persona is created, and the implication is made the the replying poster's argument must be correct because he/she has 'better equipment', or is otherwise better 'equipped'. You never know when you might be addressing someone that has headphones worth more (and of higher quality) than your entire system. Or speakers worth more than your house, with concomitant quality. And in this case, ears to match.

It should be noted, this poster, nickname "golden_ear" (a self-labeling of many that think they have magical abilities in listening skills), joined and posted their one and only post supporting a prior reply to me in the thread by poster "X", nearly immediately followed by one of those "oh, yeah, you are soooo right!" posts by the same poster "X". Please, if you're going to resort to using Internet Sock Puppetry, try and do a better job of making it look legit...

No one uses a "synthesizer" for orchestral music production anymore. Professional composers use samples, recorded off of REAL instruments. Synthesized implies that the sound is created synthetically, mathematically. I am fairly certain what is being used here are samples, at least from what I can hear. Actually it sounds pretty convincing to me.

Now, here's where the poster shows how clueless they are. Anyone knowledgeable about music synthesis of course knows that sampled / multi-sampled synthesizers are still synthesizers. A quick ring to Ray Kurzweil, the father of modern synthesizers that can fool many will confirm the correct terminology - don't take my word for it. As for it sounding pretty convincing? Well, dear reader, take a listen to the audio in the referenced thread. I would personally be stunned if more than 20% of listeners could not immediately discern the 'strings' are not real. As for the alleged, self-proclaimed musician(s) in the thread (I qualify the plurality in light of the likely sock puppet involved) that are convinced by it - perhaps a different line of work might lead to better success.

Ahhh, I feel better now.

Rob

I Hear You!: A fantastic DAW (Digital Audio Worstation) application previously unknown to me.

2010-12-15T19:58:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I've done any serious mixing work, Cubase and Acid being my workhorses. A recent conversation with an audio engineering buddy pointed me to Reaper. In a nutshell, after a few days of experimentation: what a fantastic piece of software!

This is a serious piece of software, a worthy replacement in most cases for Cubase / Acid / et alia (at least for my needs), and at a ridiculously low price for professional use. The non-professional license price is so low, one might feel like 'donating' a few extra shekels to the developer in appreciation for a great product, with a no-nonsense licensing scheme.

Well done, Justin Frankel and Cockos!

I See You!: How clever optics are letting us image planets around other stars.

2010-12-15T19:45:00.000-08:00

A quick note on an interesting and very accessible paper titled "An apodizing phase plate coronagraph for VLT/NACO" that discusses the emerging technology used to allow direct imaging of remote planets that would normally be difficult at best due to the (relatively) overpowering brightness of the planet's parent star.

The meat of the result can be seen in the point spread function graph, lower right, on page two: note the distinct reduction of the Airy disk and associated diffraction pattern on the right section of the graph.

Check it out at: An apodizing phase plate coronagraph for VLT/NACO on arXiv.org.

Schannel Event 36888 ( 10 / 10 ) When Playing BFBC2 / MOH / Etc. - WTF?

2010-10-27T19:54:00.000-07:00

Since the beta of EA/DICE's Battlefield Bad Company 2, forums have had a myriad of posts with game problems, with this symptom included in the posts. Since retail release of the game, and the subsequent release of Medal of Honor by the same publisher/developer teams, the same has been seen for the latter game.

Specifically, the event log entry in the windows system log is:

Event 36888, Schannel
The following fatal alert was generated: 10. The internal error state is 10.

When I first saw the error myself, I recognized it from my network programming days as an informational error, indicating some kind of barf-o-rama on the server side of a secure connection handshake. Unlike most of the other Schannel event IDs, this particular one seems to remain undocumented. Nonetheless, the Info opcode and 10 / 10 Alert Description and Error State hint strongly at it being server side.

Since it seemed to have no material effect on the playability of the game(s), my interest in investigating it stopped there. A recent poster, however, indicated that disabling their AV (Trend) caused the apparently related game issues to be remedied. While it appears that the game itself runs correcly despite encountering the Schannel error, it may be that some A/V that muck with everything on the wire might take drastic action in the face of it. Strange if some do, but plausible.

In any case, barring some other application / utility causing problems (e.g., said A/V), the error itself can be safely ignored. If it really bothers you, you can change the logging level via a registry change by modifying (or adding if needed) the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL

DWORD value EventLogging with a value of 0 will eliminate such event log messages. Note that current versions of windows seem to be more voluble for these errors - on older (e.g. XP), the error may occur without a log entry being generated.

I became interested again in this event / error recently while tracing the traffic activity of the game debugging a separate issue. Both games are built on the same engine / network infrastructure, so it is not surprising they share the same frailties.

From an outsider's view (since I have no access to the game source code, nor the EA master or game servers, my view must be the result of probing and testing theories, using debuggers and traffic sniffers), the network infrastructure for these games is a bit of a wreck. In the same way one might surmise their neighbor is a slob from observations of the trash bags thrown on their front lawn, the mishmash of connections and traffic these games generate is appalling. The possibilities of problems due to one piece failing or being unavailable are surely a source of grief for many attempting to play these games online.

If this system was designed this way from scratch, someone should be publicly whipped with a length Ethernet cable. If it is the result of 'evolution' of features and functionality by adding servers to the 'master' pool, the time has come perhaps for EA to rethink the infrastructure and rebuild it from scratch.

In any case, the Schannel error in these games appears to be generated by an improperly configured EA server that provides them with hardware information à la Steam's hardware survey.

Another way to eliminate the error (and stop spying by EA, if that's your stance), is to add the following to the file \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts:

127.0.0.1 bf1943hwtelemetry.ea.com

This prevents the game(s) from even starting the handshake process, short-circuiting the error path.

In summary: The error is harmless, it is not the cause of crashes / etc. in the game itself per se though it appears it might throw programs such as A/V into a tizzy (when I feel like it, I may investigate this further.) You can just ignore it, or if it bothers you having it in your event log, take one or both of the steps outlined above.

Where's Rob?

2010-06-25T22:57:00.000-07:00

I've been getting a surprising amount of e-mail asking what's up with the lull. Fear not, I'll be actively posting again, but as I said in an earlier entry, I've been busy with other things. Perhaps I should add 'irregular' to the banner - might also increase my audience of readers with bowel problems when they Google for cures...

In case you wonder, I've been busy with:

1) Summer. My High School junior daughter is at Stanford doing research for the whole summer, cutting down our face time a lot. So any real spare time I have that matches her schedule, I'm there with her.

2) New games:

Just Cause 2 (micro-micro-review posted).
Sniper Ghost Warrior : So far, so not good. I had very high hopes. I'll do a micro review when I form a final opinion.
Portal Prelude; Very tough mod of Portal. Marred by inane dialogue, but some seriously hard and advanced portal use. If you have portal, check it out.
BFBC2, Splinter Cell Conviction, COD: MW2: Replaying these using three displays in ultra-wide screen mode via eyefinity. Pretty immersive.

3) The big time sinks:

Understanding Information Transmission (IEEE): A high-level overview of many facets of communication and information theory. Used as a textbook by many schools. Not super deep ( I own dozens that are seriously deep in my library of ~1500 technical books), but a good addition to my 'loaner' shelf - books I loan to interested friends that want to get a basic background and to stimulate them to pursue deeper studies. Hideously expensive at $65.00 for a slim paperback, but I've not seen a better overview to date.
Two volume set of (The Tenseless)/(The Tensed) Theory of Time: A Critical Examination by W.L. Craig. Traipsing from Special Relativity to A/B-Theories of time, a philosophical work that demands hours of hard thinking for each page, to answer "What is time, is it even real...". Fun.

So, when I'm back, I'll publish the pending articles and some new ones. Thanks to the many that have suggested subjects - do continue to do so!

Rob

How long until OnLive is OnDeathRow then OnDead? A µ post.

2010-06-16T17:14:00.000-07:00

The OnLive gaming service supposedly goes 'live' tomorrow. As I've said in the past, this is destined for an 'epic fail' in my opinion, perhaps to rise from its future ashes as an acquisition by a google, netflix, or some such ilk as a mechanism for streaming movies perhaps, and very simple games. As a medium for FPS games, it requires a leap of faith of Star Trek proportions to believe it will service serious FPS gamer's needs.

See the most interesting article Why OnLive Can't Possibly Work for a sane and reasoned critique.

Now, back to some real gaming...

Just Cause 2. Get it.

2010-06-02T14:48:00.000-07:00

The blogosphere has been quiet here: I've been busy with upcoming posts, hanging out with my daughter, and playing a new game. Just Cause 2 by Avalanche Studios, published by Square Enix / EIDOS.

Take Far Cry (the original, not the über lame second version) with the wisecracking Jack Carver mixed in with a little Antonio Bandares ala "Once Upon a Time in Mexico", throw in some Grand Theft Auto, and fold in some S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl missions, factions, and goodie finding.

All played out on a completely open (no loading when moving around the map) 400 square mile chain of islands navigable by foot, swimming, boats,cars, motorcycles, helicopters, commercial jets, fighter jets, private jets, tuk tuks, etc.

Those elements alone would make for a pretty good game, but when you add in a humor component that many times had me laughing so hard I died (in game) because I couldn't see the screen, and you've got a sure fire winner.

I won't even bother with any kind of micro-review, it wouldn't do justice to a game that is rapidly heading up my chart of personal favorites.

If you liked any of the games mentioned above, get this one. You won't regret it.

Nim Chimpsky Plays A Game: A Simple Game Played With Simple Recursion

2010-05-19T06:22:00.000-07:00

Nim Chimpsky, named as a pun of Noam Chomsky the brilliant linguist, cognitive scientist and philosopher, was a chimpanzee that researcher Herbert S. Terrace of Columbia University claimed had learned a form of sign language and was able to communicate intelligently. Whether or not this was in fact true is still hotly debated in the research community.

If one believes that Nim had the intelligence to learn and use language, one might think the chimp could play one of the simplest of children's games, also called Nim. The game of Nim is a game of extensive form and perfect information that comes in many flavors. We will be using perhaps the simplest form, often called the subtraction game. This version consists of two players starting with a number (usually represented as a pile of objects like coins or pebbles), where each player in turn removes one, two, or three objects. The player to take the last object is the loser.

It can be trivially shown that such a game reduces to a player avoiding being left with n ≡ 1 (mod 4) objects, in other words, a player should try to remove enough objects to leave the opponent with 1 (mod 4) objects. In the usual game, where the moves are limited to {1,2,3...m), this becomes 1 (mod m+1), i.e., if a player can take one to six objects in a turn, they want to leave the opponent with 1 (mod 7) objects. If a player finds themselves in such a position already, they cannot move to a winning position, and the usual strategy is to remove only one object in the hope that the more objects that remain, the more likely the opponent will make a mistake.

When she was a toddler, the game amused my daughter. It didn't take long for her to figure out the strategy however, and then it became boring. I came up with a variation that I called "Nim with holes". In this variation, instead of the moves being the positive integers with some upper limit, the moves can be any member of some set X of positive integers agreed upon by the players. So a game might start off with a pile of objects of size fifty, with "legal" moves being the removal of say n∈{2,4,7,9} objects. Or perhaps "Prime Nim" where the moves are limited to n∈{2,3,5,7,11}. The "holes" version of the game can be analyzed in a similar fashion to the original, the closed form strategy is left as an exercise for the reader.

Instead, let's look at solving the problem using a simple recursive program. Common in the functional programming style (and usually preferred over imperative/iterative methods for this style of programming), a recursive program (or routine or function) is one that references itself in its body.

For example, a simple function to calculate the factorial of a number n, usually denoted as n! and equal to the product of all positive integers less than or equal to n could be written in the iterative and functional styles (using c for this example) as:

Factorial function in C language, written in iterative style (left) and functional style (right).

As can be seen, the iterative version of the function "iterates", or steps incrementally, toward the goal, starting with a value of one for the variable fact and stepping through each integer and multiplying the value of fact by that integer, until the integer of n, the input value has been reached. The functional style, on the other hand, does away with the need for any intermediate variable. Instead, it "winds up" to the return value by taking the input value n and multiplying it by the value of the factorial function of n-1. In a recursive style of programing, the "stop" or "base case" must be defined to allow the "unwinding" of the recursion. In our example, we see that when the factorial function is passed a value less than or equal to one, it simply returns 1. This returned value is used in the multiplication by the caller, and so on back up the recursion chain until the final, initial caller returns the ultimate result.

The same factorial function, written using Scheme, would have the following form:

(define factorial (lambda (n) (if (= n 1) 1 (* n (factorial (- n 1))))))

Recursion can be a difficult concept to get one's head around initially, especially for non-programmers (and even some programmers!) An excellent introduction to the thought process can be found in Thinking Recursively by Eric Roberts. A deeper examination can be had in the landmark book by Douglas Hofstadter titled Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Anyone interested in recursion should have these books on their shelves. They are certainly must-haves for any self-respecting programmer.

We can see how solving our game of "Nim with holes" lends itself to a recursive solution by thinking about the possible plays going backwards, that is, starting with a losing position. Let's consider a game of "Nim with holes" where the players have agreed the legal moves must belong to the set {2,3,5}. We immediately see that a player finding themselves with one or two objects is in a losing position, and a player finding themselves with 3,4,5,6, or 7 objects can leave their opponent in that losing position. As we move away from the goal, reversing the possible game play steps, we would find that having eight or nine objects, or fifteen or sixteen are "losing positions", that is, the player faced with these cannot remove a number of objects that allows them to leave their opponent with a losing position, nor leave a position where the opponent cannot leave them the next losing position closer to the end game.

With a simple set of legal moves, this is easy to do in one's head. As the set of legal moves becomes more complex, the difficulty in determining winning and losing positions in the game becomes more difficult. Algorithmically it is trivial, and using a recursive and functional style of programming, elegant.

We want to build a simple function that can take the game state (the number of objects) and the set of legal moves as its arguments, and return "True" if we've won already, "False" if we're in a losing position (meaning we'll just move the minimum allowed), and the position we need to move to (if we can) that will put our opponent in a losing position (that we can then maintain for the rest of the game: once there, perfect play means the opponent is ultimately doomed.)

A trivial realization of this using Scheme is shown below.

"Nim with holes" move analysis function written in Scheme with example results (click to enlarge).

The winning position (winpos) function takes the game's current state (number of objects left) and a list of the legal moves. If we've already won (no objects left) #t (true) is returned. Otherwise, for each move in the legal move list (using the map function in Scheme), the function tests if any of the reachable positions are a losing move by testing each of them for the ability to reach a losing position, by testing each of them...until it winds recursively down to the base case: we have won. If the recursion is able to reach this state, when it is "unwound", the final result is the first position presently reachable that can lead us to the ultimate winning position. If the recursion results in not being able to reach the ultimate winning position, it returns #f (false) indicating we a presently in a losing position, and should take the minimum allowed move.

The operation of this recursion can perhaps be most simply imagined by first thinking about the game in what surely must be the simplest case: the only legal move is to take one object. Clearly, the winning positions alternate, with all odd numbers of objects being a losing position, and all even numbers being the winning positions. Pick some position, say five objects. The function tests for zero, which fails, resulting in the function calling itself for a value of four objects, which goes through the same sequence to call itself for three objects...until we arrive at the call to itself for zero objects.

This is our "base case", where the function returns #t (true). As this return is "unwound" or "percolated" back to the original first caller, note that it will have the logical not applied for each return for each nested call. This is where in our function the move positions are alternated between player and opponent: what is a winning position for a player is a losing position for their opponent and vice versa. In our example case, we are in effect seeing the result of not(not(not(not(not(#t))))), resulting in #f (false), meaning our position of 5 objects is unfortunately a losing position in the case of the only legal move being removal of one object.

We can see in the lower part of the IDE the results from asking the function to evaluate a game state of 17 objects with legal moves of 2,3 or 5. The result indicates taking 2 objects and leaving 15 will put us in the winning position. The second example uses a simple map to map the winpos function onto a list of possible game states from 0 to 19 using 2,3 and 5 as the legal moves. The result is the list of results from the winpos function.

Readers can download the excellent (and free) Dr. Scheme environment from PLT Scheme should they want to experiment with Scheme, functional programming and recursion. The site has excellent tutorial materials and references for those interested in learning the details of this superb Lisp dialect.The trivial game solving function example (which can of course be extended to any similarly solvable game) can be found at NimWithHoles.scm.

Read This Or I'll Punch You: Media and Societal Hype vs Violent Video Games

2010-05-17T22:44:00.000-07:00

"It was almost frightening, the reaction... from teenage boys"

"a threat to the moral well being"

"fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people"

"deplorable"

"definite danger to the security of the United States"

Reactions to video games considered violent? No, these are quotes from things said about Elvis Presely, and "rock and roll" music only a few decades ago. How quaint, and how ridiculous the hype and overreaction seem to us now.

The same kinds of overreaction and hype have been seen from society at large and "experts" before: Television, violent movies, comic books, "professional" wrestling to name a few.

The current poster child of the extremists these days seems to be "violent" video games, that is, video games that graphically portray violence, gore, criminal behavior, or other material considered by some to be "provocative" or otherwise objectionable. Opinion and studies have attempted to link such games to actual aggression and addiction by the players.

In this blog entry, I'm going to argue that these opinions and "studies" do not hold water.

According to statistics reported by the Entertainment Software Association 68% of US households play video games, but only about a quarter of video game players are under the age of 18: the majority of players are adults, which in fact represent the fastest growing demographic of players at around 35% of U.S. households. In fact, the average age of players is 35, and the most frequent game purchaser is one 39 years old. An amazing fact to this author is that by 2009, 25% of video game players were over 50 years old - we might have to add a key for "walker" in addition to the sprint key...hardly children, I think you'll agree.

In addition, 92% of the players under 18 (children) report that their parents are present when the purchase or rental of video games are made, and nearly two-thirds of parents believe video games are a positive part of their children's lives.

And yet, studies such as "Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: A meta-analytic review of the scientific literature" by Anderson, "Aggression and psychopathology in adolescents with a preference for violent electronic games" by Funk et al., and "Violent video games: The newest media violence hazard" by Gentile all claim to show links between the playing of violent video games and actual aggressive and violent behavior by the players.

Is there such a link? As in any kind of investigative science such as this, there will be differing views. I believe a careful examination of reports such as those listed and a comparison with those holding opposing views must lead one to the conclusion that reports linking video game violence to actual violence suffer from poor methodologies, ignoring negative results, failing to cite academic research with differing views, and improper use of meta-analytical techniques. Craig A. Anderson, author of one of the more comprehensive papers supporting the hypothesis, and a witness before the U.S. Senate on the issue, seems to be a particularly egregious offender toward scientific accuracy and journalistic integrity.

Major studies by groups such as The Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health, The Journal of Adolescent Health, and The British Medical Journal have shown no significant link between video games and actual player violence. As is made clear in these studies, the old adage "correlation does not imply causation" holds true here, as it should in any honest scientific study. It appears to the author that most if not all of the authors of reports supporting the hypothesis have fallen into the logical fallacy of Post hoc ergo propter hoc: "After this, therefore because of this". The mistake of this is in coming to a conclusion like these authors without considering confounding factors that could rule out any actual connection or causality. Correlations prove very little, if anything, other than a correlation exists. Is it more likely that a violent game begets violence, or that violent children prefer violent games?

Constructing a scientifically valid test of the hypothesis that violent video game play begets actual violence may be nearly impossible: The very definition of "aggression" is difficult to measure objectively. Some studies done with college students in an attempt to measure aggression objectively by allowing players to blast their "opponents" with noise bursts as "punishment" are flawed for example because of the very fact that it is viewed by the participants as a game. There is no real "punishment", the noise bursts cannot cause any real harm. There is little if any remorse in punishing your opponent if they punish you.

In addition, an accurate definition of "violence" in video games themselves is hard to come by. Is the Madden football series really violent, as some studies state, considering the societal acceptance of the real game of football, where nearly 23 deaths per year are reported on average. Is the children's game Kirby violent? After all, the protagonist swallows their enemies whole, absorbing all of their powers.

I agree wholeheartedly with Nathaniel Edwards in his blogcritics posting: "No matter what a study's results show, the media can be counted on to warp it enough to make it interesting. Typically, this means that headlines claim a greater link between violent media and aggression. There are few details in the actual news stories, and instead there are lots of sweeping claims which don't allow the reader to interpret anything."

There can be no doubt that tragedies such as The Columbine High School massacre and The Virginia Tech massacre are calamities beyond the imaginations of most of us. Expressions of condolences to the victims and their families and friends seem hollow, so horrible were the events. Nonetheless, the immediate links to violent video games made by the media and "experts" were scientifically unfounded.

A particularly bright light of reason and scientific integrity is Christopher J. Ferguson of the Behavioral, Applied Sciences and Criminal Justice department at Texas A&M International University. Professor Ferguson has done extensive research on violent behavior, and published landmark papers specifically covering the aspect from a video game play standpoint, along with various lay articles on the subject.

In his paper titled "The School Shooting/Violent Video Game Link: Causal Relationship or Moral Panic?", Ferguson states "Some scholars have attempted to draw links between laboratory and correlational research on video game playing and school shooting incidents. This paper argues that such claims are faulty and fail to acknowledge the significant methodological and constructional divides between existing video game research and acts of serious aggression and violence. It is concluded that no significant relationship between violent video game exposure and school shooting incidents has been demonstrated in the existing scientific literature, and that data from real world violence call such a link into question."

In the paper shows how the conclusions reached by the research he studied that support the hypothesis of violent video gaming being causative of real violence are faulty. A most interesting fact revealed in the paper is that while video game play has grown explosively among children and adults, violent crime over the same period has decreased significantly, both for police arrest data and crime victimization data in the U.S., with similar results found in studies from Canada, Australia, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. The interested reader is referred to the link for the paper for details of Ferguson's study.

A more approachable article for the lay reader was published by Ferguson in the September/October 2009 issue of Skeptical Enquirer titled "Violent Video Games: Dogma, Fear, and Pseudoscience" In this article, Ferguson reviews and distills research on both sides of the argument, reaching the same conclusion as found in his academic research and publications: There is no proven link between the playing of violent video games and actual violence by the players of such games, and current research and studies that claim otherwise seem to suffer from severe methodological and other issues that compromise their scientific integrity and usefulness.

In particular, Ferguson shows how these studies typically suffer from severe "citation bias", that is, a failure to honestly report on research that do not support the author's hypothesis. Even more concerning are papers, such as the aforementioned Anderson study, where the authors appear to ignore their own results in order to forward their a priori hypothesis. In particular, Anderson used four measures of aggression in his laboratory studies, and only found a very weak significance for one of them. Had proper statistical techniques been employed by the author, even this weak link would have been shown to be statistically insignificant. Nonetheless, the author chose to ignore the results that did not support his hypothesis, and published a paper based on the single, intrinsically flawed, result set.

Ferguson sums this kind of behavior, unfortunately typical on the side of the argument supporting the hypothesis with "I believe that these authors have ceased functioning as scientists and have begun functioning as activists, becoming their own pressure group. Indeed, in at least one article, the authors appear to actively advocate censorship of academic critics and to encourage psychologists to make more extreme statements in the popular press about violent video-game effects"

With respect to the links made between the tragic school shootings and the fact that the perpetrators played violent video games, Ferguson retorts "It is certainly true that most (although not all) school shooters played violent video games. So do most other boys and young men. Concluding that a school shooter likely played violent video games may seem prescient, but it is not. It is about as predictive as suggesting that they have probably worn sneakers at some time in the past, are able to grow facial hair, have testicles, or anything else that is fairly ubiquitous among males."

That legal nut cases such as Jack Thompson, a particularly troublesome and misinformed activist, have been disbarred for their antics gives a glimmer of hope that sanity will prevail. Just as Elvis is the Devil chants that were the norm now seem ludicrous, it appears the media and science are coming to their senses with respect to video games and violence. A recent paper in the medical journal The Lancet suggests "the time may have come to move beyond professional research focusing on media violence, generally, as a cause of serious aggression."

U.S. courts have blocked laws that attempt to outlaw violent video games, and most recently the U.S. Supreme court justices have agreed to review a California law that attempted to restrict the sales of video games.

We may finally get the legal protection we deserve to allow us to purchase and play the games we chose. And as more researchers like Professor Ferguson present the facts backed with proper research and scientific integrity, the spectre that the media has portrayed regarding violent real life behavior and video games will fade into oblivion.

Doing the Jitterbug: Lag, Latency, Jitter and Throughput and How They Affect Online Gaming (Part I)

2010-05-17T07:40:00.000-07:00

Consistency: In an ideal online online gaming world, every player in the game would see the same consistent game world, and every client of a game server would have access to exactly the same game state information at any given instant. No player would suffer from seeing actions in the game world at a later time than other players, or losing a shooting duel because the opponent has a faster, lower lower latency connection to the game server. In the real world, this is of course impossible to achieve with existing technology.

Perhaps the greatest impediment to reaching this goal is caused by the vagaries of the underlying infrastructure that provides the communication between the game clients and servers: the Internet. The path to the goal of perfection is washed away by two primary effects in game communication over the Internet:

Throughput limitations - the connection between server and client has some maximum throughput.
Network delays - even with unlimited throughput, server messages do not arrive instantly.

The first, throughput limitations (bandwidth), means that the game state transmitted to game clients is at best a sample, or approximation, of the actual complete game world. The bandwidth and processing power simply do not exist in typical environments to allow all of the information required to completely represent the game state to be communicated. Just as the typical music CD has less information than the master recording from which it is made due to the sampling of the audio signal to match the constraints of the CD audio format, so too do the messages that the game clients and servers interchange. By careful crafting of the structure of the messages used, game developers can provide an approximation that is sufficient for realistic game play, so long as the minimum throughput requirements of the game are met.

The second, network delays, means that regardless of the available bandwidth, there is always a delay between the servers sending a message and the client receiving it and vice versa. In effect, the information in the message is time-shifted to a later wall-clock time: an event may happen at actual time X, but by the time the client receives the message of the event, the actual time is perhaps X+2. When the possibility of time-shifting is present, the possibility of causality violations rears its head: events may seem to occur in the wrong order for game clients. For example, a player may open a door, but that door isn't there in the game world because it was destroyed by a grenade (and seen as such by another online player), an event that the client component of the first player was not yet aware of due to the delays in message arrival. Other players might see the first player's avatar "opening" a door that isn't even there.

We will review the details of these problems, the effect they have for players of online games, and the techniques commonly used to minimize the unfairness between players that can result if these problems are left untreated. We will cover the definitions and details of the problems in this blog entry, with part II to cover the effects these have on players and the techniques used in games to minimize their impact.

Throughput and Latency:

The throughput requirements for online PC games vary widely, but in general are far below the available bandwidth of the typical client (we will only be discussing the client side and impact, obviously, running a server for a game dictates a much higher aggregate bandwidth requirement). Recent studies (Feng 2002 & 2005) using games such as Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and Unreal Tournament 2003 showed a client load ranging from 6400bps to 8000bps for client to server packets and 20800bps to 36000bps for server to client communications. These are far below even lower-tired ISP services typically used by online gamers.

Congestion of the network may cause throughput to drop to a level that is insufficient for smooth game play. Congestion typically occurs in one of three primary areas: the last mile near the user, the middle or Internet cloud, and the last mile on the server side.

In the case of the user-side congestion, they may simply have a service tier that does not provide sufficient bandwidth. This can of course be remedied with a service upgrade. At a minimum, a service with 600kbps down and 50kbps up should suffice. The faster down link speed while not strictly required to play online will ensure faster downloads of game items such as server hosted maps.

The gamer should also ensure that other activities on their local network are not causing congestion. Other users gaming, streaming audio or video, using services such as torrents, etc. can all adversely affect the overall available broadband bandwidth for the player.

Problems in the last mile on the server side can be caused by too many players joining a specific game server, causing a bottleneck on the network link to that server. Game servers typically employ a player count limit to avoid this occurrence. Any other congestion in this link of the game communication network (router congestion or failure modes, etc.) is likely to be out of the control of both the player and their server provider.

Congestion in the Internet cloud is usually temporal: Perhaps a widely viewed sporting event is viewed by large numbers via streaming technologies. As with most last mile issues on the server side, these are out of the control of the server provider and game player. In cases where Internet cloud congestion is the cause of game play issues, the only remedy is to wait until the problem "goes away".

Any kind of congestion, whatever the cause, can cause throughput degradation that may adversely affect the consistency of game play. If the game client is starved of message packets due to actual throughput issues or congestion related throughput issues, the synchronization between the client and server will be lost, resulting in "laggy" game play, "rubber-banding", and other temporal effects. Severe throughput problems can result in the game client "giving up" and disconnecting from the game server.

There is no accepted and commonly agreed upon definition for latency (Delaney 2006). The latency of a network is commonly measured using the ping command. This however measures not the one-way trip from client to server or vice versa, but instead measures the round-trip time. Since the routes from client to server and server to client are usually asymmetric, simply guessing at half the value arrived at from a ping measurement may be grossly inaccurate, and provide incorrect information for making client and server timing decisions. In addition, such a measurement does not account for processing and other delays at the client and server endpoints.

A more useful measurement is the endpoint-to-endpoint measurement of latency that accounts for time needed for client-side processing, bi-directional network delay, and server-side processing (Stead 2008).
This is important: It has been found in studies that much of the delay in the overall game processing loop is caused by the game client handling and processing of messages.

The sources of network delay fall into four basic categories (Kurose 2009):

Transmission delay: Packet time to physical layer.
Queuing delay: Packet time waiting to be sent to a link.
Processing delay: Packet time spent at routers along the route.
Propagation delay: Packet time in physical link (bounded by the speed of light).

Transmission delay occurs during the movement of the packet to a physical link. For example, if you are using a 1Mbps WAN connection, each bit takes 1 µs to send, and a 500 byte packet takes 0.5 ms.

Queuing delay can occur at routers along the path of the packets. If a router is is under heavy utilization or the required outbound link is busy, the packet will be queued into a buffer until it can be sent.

Processing delay is also incurred at routers, since these must handle routing table checks, possible firewall rule application, packet check sum and error checking.

Lastly, even if delays in packet transmission due to processing overhead , transmission delays and queuing delays could be eliminated, we are still bound by the laws of physics. No signal can travel faster than light (2.998x10^8 m/s in vacuo). Speeds in actual transmission media will be lower (e.g. 1.949x10^8 m/s in typical optical fiber, significantly lower for twisted-pair copper). This means we are bounded by an absolute minimum round-trip latency of roughly 2 ms client endpoint to server endpoint and back for a client to server distance of 200 km.

Jitter:

Jitter is the variation in network latency caused by changes in the state of the network. Packets that comprise the communication between the game client and server seldom follow the exact same route endpoint to endpoint. This can cause packets to have different latencies. In addition, network congestion can result in changes in the routing and router buffering behavior, changing the queuing delays for the affected routers.

We can visualize this effect with the aid of a diagram.

In this diagram, packets are sent from the server represented by the lower solid line at regular intervals (time ticks) to the client represented by the upper solid line. If we were able to construct a network with none of the four causes of latency outlined, and in addition discovered a way to violate the laws of physics and send our packets with infinite speed, the green line results: there is no latency between the server sending a packet and the client receiving it.

The more realistic example is represented by the blue line, which shows the slight delay the packet experiences traversing the network from the server to the client. The orange line depicts the next packet in the sequence, which is delayed by the same amount as the packet of the blue line. In the ideal world, the latency from the server to client and vice versa would exhibit this constancy. This would simplify any "compensation" for latency the game developers might wish to utilize, and even without compensation, humans tend to have an easier time adapting to latency in a game when it is relatively constant, even when the latency is rather large (Claypool 2006).

More typically, the game packets experience changes in latency from routing and congestion problems. This is illustrated with the final train of three packets colored red, magenta, and dark brick red. For these packets, it is clear any semblance of packet arrival at relatively regular time ticks is completely lost. There is currently no standard measure for jitter in game traffic. Jitter in networks tends to exhibit randomness, but can be characterized by a Gaussian distribution for inter-packet arrival times (Perkins 2003). Since we are bounded by conditions such as some minimal amounts of processing, queuing, and transmission delay in addition to the absolute bound due to the propagation delay, the actual distribution is biased: there is some absolute minimum that can be realized, and network congestion and related issues can cause delays to be skewed. This is illustrated in the following graph.

Graph of Gaussian (Red) and skewed/biased distributions (Blue) for inter-packet arrival times.

The fit is sufficient that we can use this model for predicting the likelihood of specific inter-packet times for use in the design of compensatory mechanisms for games.

In part II of Doing the Jitterbug, we will investigate what effects these issues have on game play, and what techniques can be used to minimize these effects.

Interested readers can find references for further study after the jump break.

References (informal: This is not an academic paper, enough is provided so that the reader can Google for PDF archives of papers, or purchase the textbooks):

Cited in the text:

(Claypool 2006). Latency and player actions in on-line games.
Communications of the ACM (49)

(Delaney 2006).On consistency and Network Latency in Distributed Interactive Applications...
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 15.

(Feng 2002). Provisioning on-line games. An analysis of a busy Counter-Strike server.
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Sigcomm workshop on internet measurement.

(Feng 2005). A traffic characterization of popular on-line games.
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (13).

(Kurose 2009). Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (5th Edition)

(Perkins 2003). RTP: A/V Transport for the internet.

(Stead 2008). A simple method for estimating the latency of interactive real-time graphics simulations.
Proceedings of the 2008 symposium on virtual reality software...

Other references used but not cited in the text:

(Armitage). Networking and Online Games: Understanding and Engineering Multiplayer Internet Games

(Comer). Internetworking with TCP/IP Vols. 1-3

(Comer). Computer Networks & Internets

(Gregory). Game Engine Architecture

(Kozierok). The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference

(Smed). Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games

(Steed). Networked Graphics: Building Networked Games and Virtual Environments

(Stevens). TCP/IP Illustrated Vols. 1-3

(Tanenbaum). Computer Networks

See Your Way Out - Using mathematics and image processing to quickly pathfind

2010-05-16T00:37:00.000-07:00

As I outlined in my blog entry Earning Your Pathfinding Merit Badge: How Game Characters Navigate Their Game World, pathfinding (or path finding) is a critical component in PC games.

Pathfinding refers to the techniques used in games to allow Non-Player Characters (NPC) to navigate the game world.

Most games use some variant of Dijkstra's algorithm, a technique pioneered by Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra. Dijkstra's algorithm produces a shortest path tree for its result by solving the shortest path problem for a graph with non-negative edge length (the distance between the vertices of the graph are never negative). It is one of a myriad of graph search (or graph traversal) algorithms.

Dijkstra's algorithm is often used in routing problems, such as network routing protocols, most notably IS-IS and OSPF (Open Shortest Path First), and transportation map shortest path solutions.

Perhaps the most commonly used variant in games is the A* search algorithm. Instead of using the distance from the start node (vertex) of the graph, this variant chooses nodes based on an estimate of the distance from the start node to the destination node. This estimate is formed by adding the known distance to the start node to a guess of the distance to the destination node. This guess is called the heuristic of the algorithm.

By utilizing such a technique, the A* algorithm provides improved performance when compare to the behavior of Dijkstra's algorithm. If the guess is set to zero, the two algorithms are equivalent. When the guess is made positive but less than the true distance to the goal, A* continues to find optimal paths, but because fewer nodes are examined, performance is improved. When the guess exactly matches the actual distance, A* finds the optimal path and does so while examining the minimal possible number of nodes. If the guess is increased yet more, A* continues to find paths, examining fewer nodes still, but no longer guaranteeing an optimal path. In most games, since it is not practical to guarantee a correct heuristic at all times, this is acceptable due to the increase in algorithm performance.

With extremely complex environments (like the maze we'll be looking at), these algorithms can prove to be impractical, with other solutions preferred. A nice overview of such issues can be seen at Sean Barrett's Path Finding blog entry.

I'm going to go through a technique that is conceptually beautiful to me: Using image processing to solve a maze path finding problem.

I'm sure every reader is familiar with mazes. Perhaps some of you have found yourself lost in a particularly fiendish one, having to ring the nearby "rescue bell'!

I'll be using the superb Matlab system from Mathworks.

From their web site: "MATLAB® is a high-level language and interactive environment that enables you to perform computationally intensive tasks faster than with traditional programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran."

It most certainly is! Along with the equally superb Mathematica it is the staple of my tool set for doing complex mathematical programming, analysis, graphing, and data manipulation. These two products would be my desert island choices to take with me if I could only have two programming environments.

I'll be using the Matlab image processing package DIPimage, developed by Cris Luengo, Professor in multidimensional image analysis at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Uppsala University. I've borrowed copiously from his examples. Users of Matlab can obtain a license for DIPimage free of charge (normally a $3200.00 and up cost) for academic, non-commercial use. I highly recommend it!

Let's begin.

We will start with the following simple (no holes, loops, etc.) maze:

Note the entry and exit apertures in the lower right and upper right areas of the outer call of the maze. Try solving it manually if you'd like!

Next, we use our image processing functions to convert our maze to grey-valued, and threshold it to obtain the binary image. The maze walls are now shown in red, with the path areas in black:

maze = colorspace(inputmaze,'grey');
maze = ~threshold(maze)

We use image processing functions to "label" any found walls and show them with differing colors. In this case, we clearly see the maze comprises two walls:

maze = label(maze);
dipshow(maze*2,'labels')

From this we can easily see the path is the area between the two maze walls. By applying a little mathematical morphology, we can isolate one of the walls:

path = maze==1

We then can do a binary dilation on the wall and fill in any holes (effectively a smearing of the wall):

pathwidth = 5;
path = bdilation(path,pathwidth);
path = fillholes(path)

Next, let us erode this smeared version of the wall. This operation effectively "shrinks" the wall by subtracting components smaller than the erosion radius and in the case of a binary image such as ours by removing the perimeter pixels. We then take the difference of the eroded image and the original image:

path = path - berosion(path,pathwidth);

Finally, overlaying the result with our original maze shows our desired goal:

overlay(inputmaze,path)

I think you'll agree, a most fascinating use of tools to solve a problem from a domain you'd not likely think to be image processing.

The interested reader can find details of techniques such as these in these excellent references:

The Image Processing Handbook by John C. Russ

Digital Image Processing Using MATLAB by Rafael C. Gonzalez

Feature Extraction & Image Processing by Mark Nixon

Happy trails to you!

The Alpha and The Omega of "Search" Engines?: WolframAlpha

2010-05-15T05:41:00.000-07:00

You might have noticed I've embedded WolframAlpha into the heading area of the blog. You might not know what it is.

Stephen Wolfram is one of the brightest people you could ever meet. Most certainly a genius. Educated at Eton, and later attending the University of Oxford he had by the age of eighteen already written cited papers in particle physics and quark production. He received his PhD in particle physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he became a faculty member. There he pursued research in computer science, cellular automata, physics, and cosmology, earning him one of the first awards of the MacArthur Fellows Program, commonly known as the "Genius Award".

While at Caltech, Wolfram worked on the implementation of the computer algebra system SMP, essentially version one of what later became the widely used standard for technical computing, Mathematica. Irascible, opinionated, brash and forceful, Wolfram is not one to shy away from imposing his world views on others. His recent years of research led to the publication of A New Kind Of Science, outlined in my blog entry Life Goes On: Further Ruminations on Conway's Game of Life.

WolframAlpha is Stephen's attempt to provide a generalized "computational knowledge engine". Based on the prodigious capabilities of Mathematica, WolframAlpha simultaneously provides a hyper-capable calculating environment and the ability to query for data, either for the sake of the returned data or for use in calculations. The data used is "curated" by Wolfram Research, providing for a much more reliable level of quality compared to existing search engines.

This is no Google. Asking some generic question is likely to be met with the WolframAlpha equivalent of "Huh?":

Ask the engine something more precise, such as "United States population growth", and the character of the system begins to emerge:

Combine this with calculation capabilities second only to actually purchasing a copy of Mathematica to run locally, and you have truly phenomenal capacity for data gathering, analysis, and calculation at your fingertips.

Here, WolframAlpha shows us the integral of a complex equation integral (sin(theta)/cos(theta)^2^pi):

Give it a try, and visit the site at WolframAlpha for more details.

To give it a whirl right now, try typing "ISS now" (without the quotes) into the WolframAlpha box at the top of the blog entry, and pressing enter or clicking on the equals sign. Be prepared to be impressed!

Bar Bets and Thermonuclear Bombs

2010-05-15T03:13:00.000-07:00

Stanislaw Ulam, along with Edward Teller, fathered the thermonuclear bomb or Hydrogen Bomb as it is more commonly known. Ulam is one of the many great mathematical minds of Polish descent. Known as a rather cantankerous fellow, he made major contributions in the fields of Set Theory, Topology, Ergodic Theory, Biology and Physics. A true polymath.

While residing in the United States during World War II, Ulam was invited to join a secret project in New Mexico by his close friend John von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematicians in history and an epic contributor to the the fields of mathematics, economics, set theory, game theory, logic, quantum mechanics, computer science and nuclear physics. Neumann created the field of Cellular Automata (see Life Goes On: Further Ruminations on Conway's Game of Life for examples) with a pencil and graph paper as tools to build the first self-replicating automata.

With his typical scientific curiosity, Ulam checked out a book on New Mexico from the University of Wisconsin–Madison library, the campus where he was a faculty member at the time. In it, he found the names of all those that had previously disappeared from the campus on the check-out card. He subsequently joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where the development of the first atomic bomb was progressing.

As the atomic bomb project was nearing fruition, Teller had turned his attention to the creation of a vastly more powerful tool of destruction, the Hydrogen Bomb, or "Super" as it came to be known. Ulam, made aware of the "super", showed that Teller's design was faulty and devised a much more suitable design. While the design took on the moniker of "the Teller-Ulam design", most involved in the project credit Ulam with being the true father of modern thermonuclear devices, as contrasted to Teller's rumored contribution as the character model for Dr. Strangelove in the eponymous film by Stanley Kubrick.

A particularly interesting contribution of Ulam's to mathematics and topology specifically is the Borsuk-Ulam theorem, first conjectured by Ulam and later proved by Karol Borsuk in 1933. The theorem is stated as follows:

Call a continuous map f:Sm→ Sn antipode preserving if f(−x)=−f(x) for all x∈ Sm

Theorem: There exists no continuous map f:Sn→ Sn−1 which is antipode preserving for n > 0

In English, this states that any continuous function from an n-sphere to Euclidean n-space maps some pair of antipodal points to the same point.

In even more plain English, I'll try to explain why this results in things that can sound incredulous to most non-mathematicians, and why it provides for the opportunity of a "bar bet" that at the very least might get you a free beer.

Take the circle above with the two labeled points A and B. This will be the only drawing here, to start us off. I'm no artist, and my meager attempts at drawings for the steps would likely confuse rather than help. Get out your pencil and paper, put on your thinking caps, and follow along!

Imagine this is a line drawn around a sphere, such as the idealized Earth. The equator is an example of such a line. In this case, we only require that it is maximal in size, that is, it is drawn around the Earth in a way that it is as large as it can be, like the equator or any of the lines of longitude that run north to south on the globe.

You've perhaps heard the term "Great Circle" used for navigation. A Great Circle is a circle around the earth that is maximal. Any segment of such a circle that connects two points is the shortest distance between those points on the globe. So taking the great circle path is always the shortest route between points on the surface of the Earth.

A shape such as the circle we are using is known mathematically (at least by topologists) as a 1-sphere or Disc: it is a one dimensional surface embedded in two dimensional Euclidean space. What non-mathematicians call a sphere is known as a 2-sphere or ball: A two dimensional surface embedded in three dimensional Euclidean space.

We want to show that we can always find two points, opposite (antipodal) to each other on the planet, that have exactly the same temperature. If we find that points A and B in fact measure the same temperature for the circle we've drawn, we have made our point. But suppose the temperatures are different.

Let's call A the colder measurement point, and B the hotter measurement point. Now imagine moving the measuring points, keeping them diametrically opposed, around the circle until they have exchanged places. Let us assume that the measurements never share the same temperature. Because of this assumption, measurement point A must remain colder than measurement point B for the whole trip, and measurement point B must remain hotter than measurement point A.

But after rotating the measurement points 180°, we know that measurement point B must be measuring a colder temperature than measurement point A and vice versa. This contradicts our assumption, and by the mathematical technique of proof by contradiction we now know that there must have been some point along the path where measurement points A and B showed the same temperature.

The same proof technique can be extended to any 2-sphere/ball like the Earth. When moving to the higher dimensions, we are allowed more degrees of freedom in our chosen path for the antipodal points. We can choose any arbitrary meandering path, so long as the two measuring points remain antipodal.

Imagine we choose some path, again resulting in the exchanging of the positions of the two measurement points. By the same methods, we can see that again, there must be two antipodal points somewhere on that path that share the same measurement. This is critical to our emerging bar bet. This means that every path taken by measurement point A on it's way to measurement point B, with measurement point B following along by remaining diametrically opposed (antipodal) on the opposite site of the Earth must have a point where the two points shared the same temperature.

Let's consider the set of all possible pairs of antipodal points on the Earth with the same temperature. These points need not have the same temperatures, they must only have the same temperature as their matching antipodal point on the opposite side if the Earth to be a member of this special set.

You may be thinking that the result might be some myriad of dots scattered across the surface of the ball where the matching antipodal dot shares the same temperature. But this would be wrong!

If this was the case, we could always find some path from the original measurement point A to measurement point B without needing to touch any of the dots in the set. But as we have already shown, this set must contain a pair of the dots opposite each other on the Earth that share the same temperature along whatever path we take from A to B.

From this, we can make the conclusion that the set of dots must contain some set of dots that result in a continuous path dividing our ball (the Earth) into two sections, one containing the original measurement point A and the other containing measurement point B.

Now imagine applying the same line of thinking to this path, except we'll use some other continuous function such as barometric pressure. We pick two antipodal measurement points, call them C and D, and take our measurement. If the result is the same, we are finished showing the same fact that we proved for temperature holds true for barometric pressure. If they differ, we again let measurement point C follow the path to measurement point D, with point D following along on the opposite side of the globe. As with temperature, we will find some point along the path that has matching measurements for measurement points C and D.

But as we know, this point is on the path that contains all of the points where the temperature measurements are equal for the matching antipodal points of the path.

This means that that point, and its matching antipodal point, simultaneously have the same temperature and barometric pressure! Such points can always be shown to exist on a 2-sphere/ball, in our case the Earth, for any two continuous functions on its surface. We could have just as well used temperature and wind speed, wind speed and barometric pressure, etc.

The Borsuk-Ulman theorem proves that this is true for any pair of continuous functions on any 2-sphere! As can be seen in the theorem, it can be extended to any number of dimensions, with a corresponding increase in the number of continuous functions that will share a pair of antipodal points with equivalent values for each function.

This means for example that when that big plump helium-filled party balloon diffuses to death and is lying on the floor in a crumpled mass, there is a pair of points that were antipodal when the balloon was inflated that are now lying precisely on top of each other. Always.

So the next time you find yourself at the local watering hole with your bright companions, bet them a beer that there are two places on the opposite sides of the Earth, right now, that have exactly the same temperature and barometric pressure.

The bet is almost surely to be taken, and you'll earn yourself a free beer. Or maybe have one tossed at you!

While you might curse Ulam for his contributions to nuclear weaponry, remember to raise a toast to him before drinking your free beer!

For more uses on this most interesting theorem, the book Using the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem: Lectures on Topological Methods in Combinatorics and Geometry by Jiri Matousek and published by Springer provides a rewarding overview in an approachable text at the elementary level.

Excellent introductory topology books can be had in Topology by K. Jänich (also from Springer) and the classic Topology by James R. Munkres, published by Prentice Hall.

Topology and Its Applications by William F. Basener published by Wiley provides more examples of useful results from general topology.

The Topology entry at Wolfram Mathworld provides a one page description of the field with copious references. You may find yourself wandering the site following one interesting link after another.

I've Got A Stalker: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl, that is.

2010-05-13T23:37:00.000-07:00

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Scavenger, Trespasser, Adventurer, Loner, Killer, Explorer, Robber.

Sounds like my neighbor. I remember sometime in 2004, after an all night gaming session on the classic Far Cry in my LAN room, one of my gaming buddies turned to me and asked if I'd seen the web site for an upcoming game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. I hadn't, so we took a look.

I was blown away by the description and the screen shots shown, the graphics looked amazing compared to any shooter we'd played up to that time. The rumored release of the game was soon, so the juices started flowing for what looked to be a most excellent addition to the game collection.

Unfortunately, the game faced delay after delay, eventually resulting in a ninth place finish in Wired's Vaporware '06 contest. In January 2007, a contest for players to experience the game beta in a marathon session collapsed when the THQ staff (publishers of the game) that had organized the event were themselves unable to obtain copies of the game.

The game finally made its public debut at the end of March, 2007.

The game is played in an area known as the Zone, based on the Exclusion Zone around the area of the Chernobyl Disaster, which components borrowed from the novel Roadside Picnic. In the game, a second disaster occurs twenty years later, leading to mutations, anomalies, and the associated valuable artifacts, prime scavenging material for the game characters.

This was the first game I'd ever played that had any kind of real "scavenger" aspect, that is, the "gatherer" part of "hunter-gatherer". This aspect of the game is in fact central to game play. The character you play (I'll not reveal details, as that would be a plot spoiler) starts the game basically buck naked as far as weaponry and protective clothing.

By fulfilling mission requests provided by all sorts of NPC in the game and by obtaining or otherwise finding valuables in the game, the player builds a stock of goods that can be sold or traded for items such as food, weaponry, clothing, ammunition, artifacts, etc.

The artifacts in the game play a key role in trading and player protection:

"As a result of the second Chernobyl disaster, The Zone is littered with small areas of altered physics, known as anomalies. There are several different variations, each one having a unique impact upon those who cross its path. They can be potentially deadly to the player and other NPCs, delivering electric shocks, or pulling them into the air and crushing them.

Most anomalies produce visible air or light distortions and their extent can be determined by throwing bolts (of which the player carries an infinite supply) to trigger them. Some stalkers also possess an anomaly detector, which emits warning beeps of a varying frequency depending on their proximity to an anomaly. The guide in the film Stalker, and his predecessors in the Strugatsky brothers' book Roadside Picnic, test various routes before proceeding. In the film, metal nuts tied with strips of cloth are used.

Anomalies produce Artifacts, the valuable scientific curiosities that make the Zone worth exploring monetarily. As well as being traded for money, a number of Artifacts can be worn so that they provide certain benefits and detriments (for example, increasing a stalker's resistance to gunfire while also contaminating him with small amounts of radiation). Artifacts are found scattered throughout the Zone, often near clusters of anomalies."

At first, I found this aspect of the game boring and time consuming. Little did I know I would soon become addicted to the hunt, particularly for the more rare items. I soon came to appreciate this type of game play, common in the MMORPG games such as World of Warcraft that I'd poked fun at.

Game play covers a huge area of many square miles. Originally, the game was to be completely open, but by release, the map had been subdivided into eighteen areas, each reachable through specific passages. Nonetheless, the game play always feels expansive, with superb draw distances.

The ultimate goal of the player is to reach the Chernobyl reactor itself, to reach the most curious of all of the strange items in the game. The actual end game depends on how the player has progressed through the game.

This, combined with the wide range of choices in interactions and missions (Who do I want to befriend? Who do I decide to trade with? What items do I want for my character?) leads to excellent replay value in the game.

The game is based in the in-house developed X-Ray graphics rendering engine. From the Wikipedia entry:

"The X-ray Engine is a DirectX 8.1/9 Shader Model 3.0 graphics engine. Up to a million polygons can be on-screen at any one time. The engine features HDR rendering, parallax and normal mapping, soft shadows, motion blur, widescreen support, weather effects and day/night cycles. As with other engines that use deferred shading, the X-ray Engine does not support anti-aliasing with dynamic lighting enabled. However, a "fake" form of anti-aliasing can be enabled with the static lighting option; this format utilizes a technique to blur the image to give the false impression of anti-aliasing."

Even in 2010, the graphics hold up well, especially on high-end machines.

The A.I. system was also built in-house. The "ALife" system originally was to have NPC constantly active in the game world, regardless of player interaction. By release, this had been reduced in functionality. Nonetheless, the capabilities are quite robust, as described in the Wikipedia entry:

"GSC Game World's proprietary ALife artificial intelligence engine. ALife supports more than one thousand characters inhabiting the Zone. These characters are non-scripted, meaning that AI life can be developed even when not in contact with the player.

The NPCs have a full life cycle (task accomplishment, combat, rest, feeding and sleep) and the same applies to the many monsters living in the Zone (hunting, attacking stalkers and other monsters, resting, eating, sleeping). These monsters migrate in large groups. The non-scripted nature of the characters means that there are an unlimited number of random quests. For instance, rescuing stalkers from danger, destroying stalker renegades, protecting or attacking stalker camps or searching for treasure. The AI characters travel around the entire zone as they see fit.

Numerous tactics can be employed to complete the game, such as rushing or using stealth and sniping. The NPCs will react in a different way to each of them. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s NPCs plan ahead by "Goal-Oriented Action Planning" to achieve this."

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. uses a modified version of the ODE physics engine to provide rag doll physics and accurate bullet ballistics: Bullets are affected by gravity and ricochet off of surfaces.

Adding to the realism is a completely dynamic day / night progression of time, including weather effects such as rain, lightning, showers and sunlight.

An eerie soundtrack completes the palette of game play. This was the first and only game I've played that had parts that really got the creep-o-meeter rising for me. There were many moments exploring the bowels of some haunted deserted underground laboratory where the anticipation of terror had my pulse rising.

Even at an age nearing four years, still a most worthwhile game, both for FPS fans and RPG players. That it is now available on Valve's excellent Steam system for under $20.00 makes this a no-brainer if you have not already played it. Since the version is the latest patch, most of the niggling bugs that were in the initial release have been remedied.

The follow-up games from the same developer, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky released in September 2008 for North America, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat released in February 2010 fail to capture the magic of the original in my opinion. The former was an unmitigated disaster, bug ridden and having none of the flavor that made the original so engaging. The latter returned to more of the game play mechanics of its progenitor, and is arguably the least bug plagued of the three. Recommended for players that loved the original, but for others only if it can be had at a bargain price.

All three games in the series have an active "modding" community, providing new maps, characters, game and character abilities, and modifications of difficulty levels. This adds considerably to the game play value and longevity of the game.

Like many things in life, this is a case where the original is the best.

Highly recommended, grade A material.

The Official Unofficial Bigfoot Challenge: Throwing Down The Gauntlet of Science at Marketing BS.

2010-05-13T21:53:00.000-07:00

I decided to move this from my blog entry She Blinded Me WIth Science: Tuning Up Your BS Detectors to make it more easily findable by Bigfoot Networks.

Bigfoot: All ribbing aside, I'm quite serious. Let's put your outlandish claims under the harsh light of scientific scrutiny. Win or lose, a school gets a nice PC, so think of it as an educational opportunity combined with worthwhile charity. You can comment here or e-mail me for the contact information for my counsel, where the contract for the challenge can be fine tuned based on the outline in the challenge below and then finalized.

I look forward to your response.

The Official Unofficial Bigfoot Challenge

(1)

Bigfoot networks ("Bigfoot") will supply a ~~trained network performance expert~~ player (at their expense) of their choice from their pool of ~~network performance experts~~ shills.

(2)
I will provide a newly built, high performance gaming PC, configured with components typically used by gamers with budgets, not to exceed $2000.00 in total costs. Certainly a machine far below what the highly compensated and sponsored professionals would have. You know, the pros making all the glowing statements on the Bigfoot web site.

Such a machine would of course be handicapped in performance compared to the machines of a pro gamer, so any benefit from the Bigfoot technologies would be expected to be magnified. The machine will have a fresh, unmolested installation of Windows 7 64 Bit operating system, patched to the current patch and update state at the time of the challenge.

The tester (me) will install the game to be used for the challenge on the day of the challenge. The game will be patched to the patch level available at that time. Any customization of the game other than that available via normal in-game interfaces will be provided to the tester for review and approval, and will be applied by the tester, subject to verification by the ~~network performance expert~~ player.

(3)
The ~~network performance expert~~ player will play a series of games, not less than 20 games or twenty hours, whichever is greater time. At the start of gaming, and between games or once every hour, the network interface will be switched between the NIC interface provided by the test PC, and the Bigfoot "Killer 2100" NIC. This will be done by an appropriate random selection, known only to the tester (me.)

(4)
At each game or session start, the identity of the correct and current NIC in use will be noted and placed in a time stamped envelope by the tester.

(5)
The ~~network performance expert~~ player will at the end of each game or session write their guess as to which NIC was in use. In addition, the appropriate score metrics will be noted to provide data on ~~network performance expert~~ player performance during the game. This will be placed into the same envelope, which will then be sealed and be placed into a locked slotted box to prevent tampering.

Alternately, utilizing accepted data security techniques as outlined by Carnac the Magnificent and in light of Bigofoot's likely concerns of this data being 'leaked', the envelopes can be hermetically sealed, placed in a mayonnaise jar, and at a time no later than noon the following day the aforesaid jar shall be placed on Funk & Wagnalls' porch.

(6)
At no time will any employee of Bigfoot be allowed contact or interaction with the test PC, other than access supervised and approved by the tester to allow Bigfoot to validate the correctness and specifications of the test PC build. The ~~network performance expert~~ player will similarly not be allowed access to the machine other than through the mouse and keyboard(s) provided by the ~~network performance expert~~ player.

Specifically, the ~~network performance expert~~ player will not have access to the network connections, which will be switched via a switching unit utilizing a two-into-one topology, so that both NICs on the PC will have cables attached for the duration of the test. The switch box will be viewable only to the tester, and accessible only to the tester.

Any indicators or other applications that provide notification of NIC or network status, performance, or related information will be disabled or made otherwise unavailable.

(6a)
Any and all non-standard or non-default utilization of the network "stack" or operating system by the Bigfoot "Killer 2100" NIC and associated software will be specified in writing and certified as encompassing any and all such utilization by Bigfoot. Such documentation will be provided to the tester at least three days before the challenge test to allow configuration of the alternate NIC and OS as appropriate. This includes, but is not limited to, changes in use of "Nagling", packet fragmentation or coalescing behaviors, any other interaction with the underlying OS environment and network facilities, any interaction with the OS that affects process priorities or other characteristics that may affect system, network, game or process performance that are advantageous to the Bigfoot NIC and that can also be utilized by the alternate NIC but may not be in the default settings for Windows. Such documentation must include any and all system changes made by the installer(s) for Bigfoot related software components, and any and all system changes made by the utilization of Bigfoot related software components.

(6b)
The tester reserves the right to install and utilize monitoring applications to determine system changes made by the installation of any and all Bigfoot related software during the installations process and during the game play testing. This includes but is not limited to Windows registry, process control, and network object monitoring. In addition, the test reserves the right to utilize packet analysis tools during game play testing to ensure that the comparison between NICs uses packets of similar nature.

(6a) and (6b) ensure that the installation and use of the Bigfoot NIC and related software do not cause covert or overt changes to normal Windows OS, Network, or process behavior that would have performance impact that could also apply to the alternate NIC but may not be used by default in Windows. In other words, they ensure that it is the card and associated driver and only the card and associated driver that is affecting performance, if any such effect exists.

Since it would obviously be trivial for an installer, application, or driver to make such changes covertly (e.g., my installer could manipulate the on-board NIC parameters unfavorably, and/or manipulate the parameters for my "super nic" favorably to produce favorable results) and no prior "test" of the Bigfoot products has to my knowledge eliminated this possibility, we will ensure this for this challenge.

The tester reserves the right to install and utilize network performance monitoring tools to record quantitative data to be included with the primary score and NIC identification data. This data, if gathered, will be statistically analyzed to determine if any statistically significant differences exist between the Bigfoot NIC and the alternate NIC. Only open source monitoring tools will be utilized, such that Bigfoot can assess the correctness of the monitoring tool(s). By the same token, any tools that the tester chooses to utilize that are supplied by Bigfoot must be provided with complete source code and build environments, allowing independent validation and compilation of the tool(s). This ensures that no manipulation of measurement or output data is done by the Bigfoot supplied tools.

(7)
At no time when at the PC will the ~~network performance expert~~ player be allowed to utilize any application other than the game played, or directly access any programs, commands, or other services or applications intrinsic to Windows. No performance measurement device or application may be used, nor will the use of any in-game measurement related to network performance be allowed. This is to avoid the ~~network performance expert~~ player from attempting to discern which NIC is in use by means other than game play performance.

The only interactions allowed with the test PC for the ~~network performance expert~~ player will be for activities directly related to the playing of the test game, game configuration, and score data recording.

(8)
I and Bigfoot may agree to a 'disinterested' third party to conduct the actual testing, to include but not limited to the switching of the NICs and recording of data.

(9)
The test will be held at a mutually agreed on location with sufficient network bandwidth. The servers for the games will also utilize providers mutually agreed on by Bigfoot and me. For any game, at least ten providers will be specified, half by the tester and half by Bigfoot. The provider to be used for the tests will be selected by the appropriate random selection process by the tester at the time of the test. If it is determined there will be a LAN component to the challenge tests, the PC used for the server must use a standard retail NIC other than Bigfoot products. Any LAN server PC if used will only have a fresh, default Windows 7 installation and the default installation files and configuration for the game. This is to reduce the possibility of collusion with game server providers and to eliminate the possibility of any covert or overt use of communication techniques dependent on any form of endpoint cooperation and only available when Bigfoot products are at both endpoints of the network.

I humbly suggest the Google campus for the test. Sergey and Larry will surely accommodate us, and they both enjoy a good scientific venture. Heck, they might even help us televise it!

(10)
The Bigfoot "Killer 2100" NIC will be a retail model, purchased by the tester, as part of the test PC build.

No information, such as the MAC of the NIC will be made available to Bigfoot until the termination of the test. Both NICs will use a 'spoofed' MAC during game play, provided and controlled by the tester, to ensure that no identification of which NIC is in use can be attempted by packet analysis.

(11)
The data will be independently analyzed by an agency approved by both parties as to statistical significance of the data gathered.

(12)
The results will be published on the home / front page of the Bigfoot Networks web site. They will remain there for a period not less than one hundred eighty (180) days.

Any changes to the domain name or other infrastructure that would prevent access to this information by visitors to the site will provide for the needed changes to the published results to ensure they remain visible.

(13)
This item is not part of the challenge requirements. It's just a place holder for a "Hello!" to the apparently underpaid lawyers of Bigfoot that will surely be asked to review this and figure out a way to have some kind of "take down" issued so Bigfoot doesn't have to explain why they didn't take up the challenge. Hello!

(14)
If there is a statistically significant ~~network performance expert~~ player performance benefit shown when using the "Bigfoot Killer 2100" NIC, and the ~~network performance expert~~ player shows a statistically significant ability to correctly identify the NIC that was used for each session, I will donate the complete PC to the school or other educational facility of Bigfoot's choice.

(15)
If no statistically significant ~~network performance expert~~ player performance benefit is seen when utilizing the Bigfoot "Killer 2100" NIC or the ~~network performance expert~~ player is unable to identify which NIC was in use for each session to a statistically significant level, Bigfoot agrees to reimburse the author (me) for all costs incurred for the test PC, which I will then donate to the school of my choice.

(16)
Any violation of the rules, specifications and stipulations agreed upon will constitute a forfeiture by the violator.

Taking a Bite from the Poison Apple: Gaming on a MAC.

2010-05-13T20:07:00.000-07:00

I like Apple. I like the Macintosh in all its current incarnations, from mini to laptop to traditional deskside form factors (am I allowed to call it Macintosh, or is it just Mac now? I'm not sure what the current cult protocol dictates.)

I like the marketing of the company: it is consistently slick, polished, and clever.

I like the superiority complex that emanates from Apple's cultish leader Steve Jobs and that seems to ooze out of the corporation and infect many of the consumers of the products. It gives my daughter and me endless fun to watch the iMonkeys at the Apple stores work their conversion magic on prospective cult members, like Kaa working Mowgli (for some reason, things like this seem funnier to me in German.)

I like Steve. Steve Wozniak, that is. Without him, there would be no Apple. A hilarious guy, as down to earth as they get. And brilliant. I like the Jobs version of Steve too, but he couldn't code his way out of a paper bag, and I just have no interest in having a coffee and shooting the breeze with him like I do with "The Woz". Woz has donated huge sums of money and technology to local schools. Education for our children is important to him, and I admire that deeply. He dated Kathy Griffin. That must have been a hoot.

I've enjoyed the rage tantrums of the Jobs incarnation of Steve since my own personal experience with one twenty some years ago when he asked me the wrong question.

"What do you think of our super cool NeXT hardware?" he asked me. I responded with something like "It's an already outdated steaming turd that is only falling further behind Intel based stuff each day. Dump it. Dump any of the business that's hardware. Put NeXTSTEP on Intel, it's so much better than Windows, you'll rule the world." You'd have thought I'd told the Pope that God was a phony.

By the time NeXT got their act in gear and dropped the hardware facade and made NeXTSTEP available for commodity hardware, it was too late: Windows had evolved and had grown in market share to an insurmountable lead. What a disaster, a ship steered by an ego blinded captain. Not his first flop, nor will it be his last in my opinion. But make no mistake: Jobs could sell $50.00 bags of ice cubes to Eskimos, and have them believing his version tastes better. You've got to admire that.

I like that since hardly anyone uses the Mac product (under 4% of the market), hackers don't waste their time on attacking the machine. I don't like that Apple markets this under the guise of their machine being more secure than Windows machines: security through obscurity is useless, and the fact that Apple hardware is consistently the first to fall at white hat security hacking contests demonstrates this. Nonetheless, in the same way that no city burglar is going to go out of his way and drive a hundred miles into the countryside just to rob you, the platform is much less likely to find itself under attack. For now at least.

I like that the very narrow range of hardware options used (and controlled) by Apple makes life easier for their OS developers. Stuff just works. That Windows works so well with the innumerable combinations of hardware it can be installed on is miraculous, Apple chose to simplify the problem and has done a superb job of it.

I like the support infrastructure of Apple. This is one area that I've yet to see anything even close in the traditional PC world. The Apple store staff knows their stuff. The genius bar really knows their stuff. A user of the product can get face to face, quality technical support for zero or minimal cost, instead of spending hours talking or on-line chatting with tech support via some version of the typical cookie cutter outsourced staff.

All of this boils down to this: The Mac is the machine least likely to be bought by me, and the most likely to be recommended by me. Except to serious gamers. Allow me to explain.

When friends come to me seeking advice for a PC (I'll use the term generically to mean both traditional hardware and that of the Apple persuasion), I ask them some pretty simple questions.

If the answers indicate that they do not have a need for the latest and greatest hardware, add-in cards, etc. I usually point them to Apple. The machines are easy to learn and use for the novice. They tend to "just work" due to Apple's vice-like grip on the narrow range of hardware components allowed in the machine. The support infrastructure Apple provides means if I'm not around to answer a question, a quick phone call to Apple or a visit to the local store will usually result in rapid resolution. Keeps them off my back.

But for the serious gamer? Well, as Apollo 13 hero Jim Lovell said, "I believe we've had a problem here."

There are a few things standing in the way of the gamer using a Mac that wants state of the art hardware for maximum performance with modern games.

Firstly, excepting the deskside Mac Pro models, there is no real means to update the anemic graphics hardware in the Apple machines. Some of the higher-end MacBook models are capable of running games with acceptable frame rates, but the really sophisticated bleeding edge titles are off-limits if acceptable performance is expected.

Even with the Mac Pro, graphics hardware options are severely limited if the user wants to retain the full range of Apple specific functionality and sensibilities in the interface from the time of powering up the machine: the cards used by Apple require proprietary firmware (for EFI and the OS), meaning non-certified cards will not function properly in OSX, nor will proper boot screen functionality be retained.

This means the user is limited to Apple specific cards if they wish to retain these capabilities and functionality, and these cards tend to severely lag behind the current state of the art as far as performance capabilities. By way of example, the fastest card at the time of writing on the Apple Mac Pro web page is the ATI Radeon HD 4870, a card released two years ago.While there are some third-party cards of higher specification available, these too are at least a generation behind the state of the art. And of course, either solution carries the burden of the "Apple tax": you will pay more for the same card compared to the PC version.

It is possible to do what is effectively "brain surgery" on more modern cards via firmware manipulation to enable use in a Mac Pro, but the likelihood of reduced functionality and performance or of producing an expensive paperweight by such antics far outweighs the benefits. See the entries at everymac.com and the Expansion Cards and Hardware Compatibiltiy sections of the Wikipedia entry for the Mac Pro for a glimpse into the grief faced by users that need more GPU horsepower in the Mac environment.

Yet even then, the Mac user is boxed in: the latest high performance GPUs are quite power hungry. One may tax the power supply of the Mac Pro, dual cards (SLI or Crossfire) would be out of the question without cobbling some sort of Frankenstein power supply to supplement or supplant the one that comes in the machine.

Secondly, the Mac gamer is faced with the reality that mirrors the disinterest in the Mac by hackers: By and large, game developers don't give a hoot about the Apple environment. The Apple store lists 70 titles. Total. A tiny handful of FPS games.

This means that the Mac owner, if they want to play most any current game, will need to do so using Microsoft Windows. No need to rush out and buy a PC to supplant your Mac because it can't do something you want, however. There are a few ways a Mac owner can play Windows games utilizing their Mac hardware. We'll outline these here.

For simple games (2D, scrollers, etc.) with lightweight graphics performance requirements. a virtual machine environment such as Parallels Desktop or Vmware Fusion will allow the user to install Microsoft Windows and the games they desire into a Virtual Machine. This effectively creates a "computer in the computer", and for simple games will allow the user to play the game without leaving the OSX environment. My own experiments show reasonable performance on a higher-end Mac Pro, so long as the game's graphical requirements are kept reasonable. For games with more rigorous requirements, the performance in a virtual environment severely lags behind that of running on native hardware.

For these kinds of games, the user will need to install Windows in a fashion that allows for native booting. This can be accomplished with Apple's own Boot Camp or in a more flexible but more involved implementation using rEFIt.

Boot Camp provides a trivially simple mechanism for the gamer to get up and running on Windows games on their Mac hardware. The "Boot Camp Assistant" of the installer will walk the user through automatic repartitioning of the disk and installation of Windows. The current OSX install discs contain the hardware drivers for Windows components of the user's Mac, simplifying the installation and configuration of Windows considerably: no need to ferret these out from the web. The details and guides for using Boot Camp can be found at the Apple support page for the product.

rEFIt is an open source EFI boot loader and toolkit for the Mac. Unlike Boot Camp, which is limited to one alternate installation of Windows alongside OSX, rEFIt gives the user the functionality of a traditional boot manager, allowing the installation of multiple OS systems. On power up, the user is presented with a boot menu showing what operating systems are available for selection.

rEFIt Boot Screen

I use rEFIt to run Windows, Linux and OSX. The installation of rEFIt does not have the typical Apple hand holding: it's not an Apple product, after all. That said, the installation and configuration are fairly trivial, and any gamer that has built their own machine should have no trouble getting up and running under rEFIt. The canonical source for installation and configuration is the Sourceforge page for rEFIt.

For either the Boot Camp or rEFIt solutions, I would recommend the gamer determine the precise hardware configuration of their Mac and acquire the latest Windows hardware drivers from the appropriate sources before starting the OS installation process. Often only the most current drivers will provide the desired gaming experience for the newest games (graphics card drivers being particularly fickle.). At the very least, ensure that you have the needed network (NIC) driver, so that once Windows is installed and booted, you can retrieve other needed drivers from the Internet.

You'll also want to get your hands on a decent keyboard and mouse. While the Apple realizations exude a Bang & Olufsen elegance, they're utterly useless for any kind of real gaming.

See you on the battlefields!

Earning Your Pathfinding Merit Badge: How Game Characters Navigate Their Game World. A µ post.

2010-05-13T03:09:00.000-07:00

As most gamers probably have, I've pondered what mechanism must games use to allow the NPCs in the game to find their way around the game world. Why did games like F.E.A.R. and Halo seem to exhibit more realistic NPC movements?

I was exposed more deeply to the problem when I embarked on building a simple FPS game from scratch including AI, rendering, and netcode. I'd originally planned on a game that mirrored my neighborhood so my friends and I could run around familiar territory and maim each other. It ended up being a shoot-the-aliens sci-fi game: I'm no artist, and it was easier for me to make characters that didn't look like pale imitations of humans.

I'd pulled out all my references in preparation for writing a blog entry outlining the basics of the techniques used for pathfinding in games, when I happened upon a most excellent overview written by a game developer.

They do a much better job than I think I could have, you can view the overview at Fixing Pathfinding Once and For All at the Game/AI blog. Nice graphical explanations, with videos demonstrating the differences in pathfinding strategies.

Other useful background information can be found at A* Pathfinding for Beginners and a short entry at Wikipedia.

My own personal references are the superb four volumes of AI Game Programming Wisdom, and the equally excellent Game Programming Gems, now up to eight volumes with the most recent 2010 release. I was heavily influenced by reading the more academic treatments found in both Artificial Intelligence for Games by Ian Millington by and Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI by Dave Mark.

If you have any interest in how realistic character movement is accomplished in games, I highly recommend taking a look at the links, and if you decide to program your own, I can't think of better reference works than the book series I've used.

I Know What You Did Last Summer: Omniscient Debugging.

2010-05-13T00:19:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some coding using the recently released Visual Studio 2010 from Microsoft to experiment with some of the new features and capabilities added since the release of version 2008, my day to day coding platform.

One of the more interesting and very useful features added (only in the Ultimate edition, unfortunately) is IntelliTrace historical debugging. The ability to debug an application while in effect manipulating time (going backwards in the execution history, for example) is known as Omniscient Debugging. The term is properly used when referring to the eponymous open source debugger by Bill Lewis, a computer scientist at Lambda Computer Science and Tufts University, but has become part of the vernacular and a synecdoche for such debuggers.

For readers that are not programmers, the "debugging" of programs is part of the life of any developer. Any sufficiently complex application is likely to have a few "bugs", cases where the expected behavior of the application is not observed to happen. This can be caused by any number of things, from incorrect specification of the design, mistakes in translating the design into program code, use cases that were not considered, bugs in the very tools used to produce the application, etc.

By way of example, let us consider the following tiny application (written in a form of psuedocode):

(define add_two_numbers using Number1, Number2 as (return Number1 * Number2))

The developer hands this off to the users, who start using the new routine add_two_numbers:

add_two_numbers 0,0 → 0

add_two_numbers 2,2 → 4

add_two_numbers 4,4 → 16

Oops! The first two test cases return the proper expected results, but the third returns 16 instead of the expected 8. In our admittedly trival example, we can see from visual inspection the programmer mistakenly put the multiplication operator "*" where the addition operator "+" should have been.

In real applications, mistakes may be buried in hundreds of thousands of lines of program code, and visual inspection is seldom practical. This is where the traditional debugger comes into play for the developer.

A debugger allows the programmer to observe the execution of the application under consideration, by showing exactly where in the execution stream the application is, and allowing the viewing and changing of variables and storage for the application, setting "breakpoints" where the programmer wishes to temporarily halt the execution, stepping through the execution one step at a time, stopping when certain conditions are met, and in some cases even allowing the changing of the program's state.

Workspace for a typical debugger, in this case the WinPDB debugger debugging itself.

These capabilities greatly assist the developer in the determination and correction of problem cases. In our example, one could imagine the developer has determined the problem lies in the add_two_numbers routine (imagine of course that the routine is sufficiently large that simple inspection is not an option). By utilizing the debugger, the developer could execute the application, requesting that execution be paused when the add_two_numbers routine is entered.

At that point, the developer could step through the execution of the routine, observing the flow through the source code step-by-step. The source of the problem would of course become apparent, and could be quickly remedied.

In the case of severe bugs, an application may "crash". In some cases, a "crash dump" will be produced by the execution environment. This contains information about the state of the application at the time of the crash. This information can be used by the developer with the debugger to analyze the state of the application when it crashed, and observer the contents of variables, the place in the source code the execution was at the moment of the crash, and basic information about the path by which the application came to that place.

A core problem with this model of debugging, however, is that detailed information about the execution path and program states leading up to the bug or crash is generally not available, even in a detailed crash dump file. This forces the developer to deduce where the problem might be and then test that hypothesis with the debugger by setting conditions and breakpoints while analyzing the application flow. This will usually lead to a more refined hypothesis, leading to further debugging, leading to a more refined hypothesis, nearly ad infinitum (or at least it can feel that way) until the problem is found. In cases where the bug is sporadic, the programmer may have difficulty even reproducing the problem.

This can be a very time consuming and taxing practice for the programmer involved!

Ideally, the programmer would be able to observe the state of execution for the application at any point in time of the execution lifetime.

That is precisely the capability that omniscient debugging brings to the tool set of the programmer. The concept of such historical debugging has been around for decades, but implementations proved impractical for most of this time. The first truly practical and usable example is surely the Omniscient Debugger (ODB) of Bill Lewis. A very detailed paper by Bill can be seen in Debugging Backwards in Time, and a most interesting video lecture of the same name is hosted by Google. You can view these to garner details on how this functionality is achieved, with examples of the kinds of bugs that are vastly simpler to find by taking advantage of this kind of technology.

With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft has incorporated and extended this capability and technology, calling it IntelliTrace. Supporting the historical debugging of managed C# and Visual Basic, with experimental support for F#, the product promises to make the work of developers on the Microsoft platform vastly more productive. Details of the new capabilities can be found in the MSDN articles Debugging With IntelliTrace and Debugging Applications with IntelliTrace.

Open source developers can avail themselves of historical debugging with the aforementioned ODB, TOD and GDB debuggers.

I know what you're thinking. More importantly, I know what you were thinking...

Life Goes On: Further Ruminations on Conway's Game of Life.

2010-05-12T19:40:00.000-07:00

Conway's Game of Life, as I noted in an earlier blog entry An Alien Message? is an utterly fascinating example of Cellular Automata, capable of mind boggling complexity from an incredibly simple set of base rules.

As a further example of how the game can "compute" in the same way that a traditional computer and programming language can be used to execute programs that compute, I loaded up the recently created seed pattern by Jason Summers for a new type of "Primer" pattern. These patterns in the game will in some fashion "output" the sequence of prime numbers. This particular pattern emits the type of prime number most familiar to us: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11,13... ad infinitum.

Start the video, and observe the area where the "gate" is in the lower left middle. Passing through it will be Life "Spaceships" spaced precisely as the sequence of primes.

As discussed in my earlier entry, patterns for the game exist that create a Universal Turing Machine, meaning the game can "compute" in the same way that any program can. If it can be done in any programming language, so it can be done in the Game of Life using such a pattern. Mind blowing!

Stephen Wolfram, polymath extraordinaire and creator of the widely used mathematical, programming, and graphing workbench Mathematica has written extensively on the subject of cellular automata in his book A New Kind of Science.

In all fairness, while well received overall the book was the target of some rather excoriating reviews by experts in the various related fields, and accusations of intellectual thievery have been raised. Perhaps the most scathing of these and an interesting read on its own can be found in Quantum Information & Computation with the review by Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist and member of the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department.

The book is good read nonetheless for a view into the wide applicability of cellular automata, and the five pound nearly 1300 page tome will make a fine doorstop if you find it not to your fancy.

Wolfram extensively discusses the relationship of these objects to nature, modeling complex behaviors and results with simple basic starting seeds. A good example is that of certain seashells, where the complex patterns of their shell is generated by natural cellular automata.

Wolfram's central point in the book is that complex behaviors and results do not require a complex system for their production.

This culminates in the core of his "new science", the "Principle of computational equivalence".

As eloquently described in the Wikipedia entry for the book, "The principle states that systems found in the natural world can perform computations up to a maximal ("universal") level of computational power. Most systems can attain this level. Systems, in principle, compute the same things as a computer. Computation is therefore simply a question of translating inputs and outputs from one system to another. Consequently, most systems are computationally equivalent. Proposed examples of such systems are the workings of the human brain and the evolution of weather systems."

To get your own hands-on feel for how simple systems can generate incredibly complex results, get yourself a copy of the most excellent Golly cellular automata application where you can explore Conway's Game of Life and other types of cellular systems.

You may find yourself as addicted and fascinated as I am!

A Bathroom Reader for Computer Science. A µ post.

2010-05-11T22:40:00.000-07:00

Poking around for some pictures for my blog entry that talked about the programming language APL and showcasing an implementation of Conway's Game of Life in one line of the language, I came across an implementation of the Universal Turing Machine in The Game of Life.

As I outlined in that entry, the implications for this are deep. The game, a prime example of cellular automata, consists of a tiny rule set of just four rules yet it can 'compute' anything that can be done by any program you could write for a traditional computing environment using more familiar programming languages. I am honestly awestruck every time I think about this.

The author of this particular pattern for the game has a piece in the book Collision-Based Computing edited by Andrew Adamatzky. The description of the book, published by the top notch academic publisher Springer:

Collision-Based Computing presents a unique overview of computation with mobile self-localized patterns in non-linear media, including computation in optical media, mathematical models of massively parallel computers, and molecular systems.

It covers such diverse subjects as conservative computation in billiard ball models and its cellular-automaton analogues, implementation of computing devices in lattice gases, Conway's Game of Life and discrete excitable media, theory of particle machines, computation with solitons, logic of ballistic computing, phenomenology of computation, and self-replicating universal computers.

Collision-Based Computing will be of interest to researchers working on relevant topics in Computing Science, Mathematical Physics and Engineering. It will also be useful background reading for postgraduate courses such as Optical Computing, Nature-Inspired Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Smart Engineering Systems, Complex and Adaptive Systems, Parallel Computation, Applied Mathematics and Computational Physics.

Yummy! As with most Springer books, prepare to have your wallet 'Springered', in this case to the tune of $130.00. Ouch! I've spent enough already on their superb publications in computer science, physics, and mathematics to purchase a nice car, so I suppose I'll spring (ugh! I couldn't help myself!) for this one too.

I you're interested in computation by non-standard methods, some bordering on incredulousness, this sounds like a fun read.

I figure one chapter per visit.

She Blinded Me WIth Science: Tuning Up Your BS Detectors.

2010-05-11T20:59:00.000-07:00

PCs, operating systems, specialized hardware, 'tweaks'. Just some of the pieces in the FPS gamer's world. Like any field with such esoterica, there's plenty of snake oil to go around.

Vendors of software tempt the player with promises of improved game performance, while hardware is presented as being able to improve your pings. Mice are made with DPI ratings that need to use scientific notation. The list goes on and on.

What is the intelligent FPS gamer to make of these, and how can they be sure that their money is well spent on things that really can make a difference in their gaming acumen?

We'll tear into a couple of examples in this blog entry, and show how a healthy dose of skepticism toward many of the claims bantered about the Internet by producers of these products and posters in forums could save the gamer time and money.

I've chosen two areas that have in particular pegged my BS detector.

Game Booster, and other software that alleges to 'speed up' your PC for gaming.
Specialized 'gaming' Network Cards, that make claims of reduced pings and latency.

When deciding whether something might be a worthwhile addition to their gaming arsenal, the educated gamer should ask themselves the following:

Is there a valid reason this should improve my gaming experience?
Is there a repeatable, scientific test and measurement to validate the claims, or are they largely anecdotal and subjective?
Even if there is a measurable difference, does it make a difference for gaming?

Game Booster is a piece of software that claims to improve your gaming experience by "... defragmenting game directories, temporarily shutting down background processes, cleaning RAM, and intensifying processor performance...".

What? How exactly does this piece of free software know how to manage these things better than Microsoft's own OS? Each of the techniques used have been shown to have little if any merit.

It has been shown repeatedly that file fragmentation has little bearing on the performance of Windows and applications for any modern version of Windows. In the days of the FAT file system, defragmentation could make a noticeable difference, but that was because of a file system design that had outgrown its usefulness.

With modern file systems on Windows (NTFS), defragmentation is frankly a waste of time, and its biggest effect is likely physical wear and tear on your hard drive. Defragmentation is strictly a no-no for Solid State drives, and garners absolutely no benefit.

I am not saying defragmentation of the file system under certain corner cases cannot show some measurable change. It can. I am saying such a change will have no material impact in the performance of a game. I invite any reader that can show otherwise with a repeatable test that will pass muster for scientific validity to comment with references to such a test. I know of none.

The 'shutting down of background processes', whether done manually or with some program has long been a 'tweak' recommended in enthusiast forums. In particular, recommendations are made to disable Windows intrinsic services and processes. Utter BS! There is again no test I've ever seen that shows this to have any material effect on game performance. Messing with Windows facilities can have very deleterious effects on the performance and reliability of the OS, and should be considered off limits by any informed gamer.

Now doing this can certainly affect boot times: these Windows components are typically loaded during the boot processes, so this will take some time obviously. But once booted, Windows manages these components quite efficiently, moving them aside if an application such as a game needs resources. There is no material penalty leaving these alone for a gamer.

Of course, if the gamer has tons of junkware or other software installed on their gaming machine, these may cause issues. In these cases, shutting down or disabling these could benefit game play. But seriously, what sane gamer that cares about game performance plays on a machine burdened with junk?

The solution to problems like this is to have a proper gaming environment, and not install crud in the first place. See Swimming in the Septic Tank with my Gaming Buddies for how I set up my gaming machines, a model that I believe is ideal for the serious gamer.

I'm not even sure how to comment on the claim of 'cleaning RAM, and intensifying processor performance'. Windows manages memory. The way it should be managed. 'Memory Cleaners' and 'Extenders' have long been known to belong to the snake oil camp of PC 'tweaks'. Enough said.

Let's answer our three questions for this product.

There's no valid reason this product should have any material affect for a properly configured gaming environment. If you have junk software baggage getting in the way of your gaming pleasure, uninstall it or just build a proper environment in the first place.
I've seen no repeatable, scientifically valid test to validate the claims for this product when installed in a proper gaming environment. Only anecdotal claims, about as valid as the miracle cures claimed for colon cleansing.
Since there does not appear to be a measurable difference on a properly setup PC, I'd expect the product to have no material effect. So it doesn't matter to the gamer.

Next, let's look at the specialized 'gaming specific' NIC hardware offered by Bigfoot Networks. This company burst into the PC gaming scene in 2006, offering a product called the "KillerNIC" with claims of improved pings and game performance. I mentioned them in my earlier blog entry Perplexed Execs Dissect PhysX.

The marketing materials and hype that surrounded this initial product were mind numbing. Oral Roberts, Tony Robbins, and Billy Mays combined. There was (and still is) however at the same time a suspicious lack of any tests with reasonable protocols and environments showing any material improvement. This kind of hype should always raise an eyebrow. Their current campaign is filled with outlandish testimonials (how many of these players paid for their cards, you might ask) that they remind me of a revival meeting. No scientifically testable numbers to be found anywhere. Big surprise.

The tests I've seen, both in-house and out, seemed to all have been done on hardware that was borderline at best for a serious gamer. While offloading the network processing from an overloaded OS and hardware platform with a mediocre on-board NIC chip may demonstrate measurable performance benefits in network response and even frame rates due to reduced CPU utilization, no gamer with the $300.00 to spend at the time was likely to be running games on such hobbled hardware. And if they were, the money could have been spent far more effectively elsewhere to improve hardware performance (RAM, CPU, add-in NIC, etc.)

I am not aware of any rigorous, scientifically valid test of these products on a modern gaming machine that show any material effect on performance in areas that matter to the gamer. Reviews by magazines and tech sites reflect this view.

In their most recent incarnation, the company has moved the performance metric to a measurement of their own creation, using tools defined and built by them. "Trust me. See the difference it makes in the flow rate of the Flux Capacitors?'' This is starting to smell like some of the marketing done in other hobbies with kook esoterica, like high-end audio products.

Let's look at our BS detector questions for this item:

Pings are important to gamers. They're also largely out of the gamer's control. Once the gamer's packets are on the WAN, there's nothing they can do to improve pings. Probably the reason the company dropped this as their marketing silver bullet, and moved to new nonsense. There's no valid reason improvements in the new metric should result in a material improvement of the gaming experience.
The only test with any sort of measurement for the current product ("Killer 2100") extant at this time is the in-house test of the in-house created metric using the in-house created tool. There have been no scientifically valid tests showing any material benefit to a gamer. Suspiciously, there are absolutely no details in the marketing diarrhea found on the company site describing the hardware configuration used for their comparison. Lots of "testimonials" though. Sound like a late night TV commercial to you?
Even if the results of the in-house test are valid, that this would make any material difference to game play strains credulity. Like audio cable makers that charge tens of thousands of dollars for a pair of speaker cables, claiming the incredible improvements wrought by the 10 MHz bandwidth of their cable. Problem is, human hearing drops out orders of magnitude lower in the spectrum, and there has never been a scientifically valid test to show any benefit of such cables. The numbers look good in their own tests for the NIC, as they do for the speaker cables. They just don't matter.

The answers to all three of these should raise red flags for the gamer considering laying out their hard earned cash for a product such as this.

If the gamer applies these three simple questions when considering a new piece of hardware, software, or the application of some 'twaek' seen in a forum, I think they will save themselves time and money, and avoid going down the rabbit hole of nonsense.

I try to look at the PC and gaming world, and the world in general, through glasses colored by logic and rationality. Take a look at my thoughts on other areas where I think the manure is deep at I Can See CXLVI Frames Per Second!, I Read it in a National Enquirer Survey, it Must Be True!, Mutation on the Bounty, and Port Forwarding: Slaying the Mythical Dragon of Online PC Gaming.

For a great overview of how to think using logic, rationality, and healthy skepticism, check out the materials at The James Randi Educational Foundation and their Million Dollar Challenge, most recently applied to ultra-expensive high-end speaker cables (well, almost applied: the cable vendor chickened out!)

There's also an amusing snippet How to be a Skeptic on WikiHow, check it out!

Update:

After reviewing some of the grotesque marketing tactics at the pages of Bigfoot Networks, I have made a public challenge.

I invite readers to e-mail them with a link (I wanted to put a cool "mailto" link here, but strangely the contact information for the company headquarters doesn't have an e-mail. For that matter, it doesn't have a phone number. The "Texas Office" has a phone number, but I'm not clear if the address has a suite number or a self-storage shed number. In any case, no e-mail there either. If a reader finds one, let me know! I want to donate a PC to a worthy school.)

Their lawyers (must be pretty cheap, if "Grubby" the master Warcraft player they use as a reference "earns more in a year than your average lawyer.") can contact me and my lawyers for details.

In the spirit of my earlier "Bounty" blog entries Mutation on the Bounty and I Can See CXLVI Frames Per Second!, I will open this up to a public challenge at some future date. I first want to give the Bigfoots at Bigfoot a chance to accept it.

"Grubby". That's a good one. I wonder how much pings really matter for flashing pink hooves on the royal mount, or whatever they call them in those kind of games like Warcraft where cat-like reactions are required. Not!

The challenge has beeen moved to its own entry here.

As an aside, as per the earlier bounties, I'll not be posting any anecdotal comments from readers claiming they've "seen" this particular bigfoot. If you think you can meet this challenge and are able to demonstrate the ability and willingness to suffer the penalty of a loss, or if you have an idea for a challenge related to this that you want to propose, do so via a comment or email. Again, I'll not be posting any of the "Well, I can tell the difference 'cause my cat says so" genre of comments.

Perplexed Execs Dissect PhysX.

2010-05-10T23:18:00.000-07:00

PhysX, the accelerated game physics technology from the 2002 upstart Ageia, has officially been taken off of life support by Nvidia, the GPU behemoth that acquired Ageia in early 2008. While the PhysX API continues to be actively supported and developed, the actual acceleration will only be supported by utilizing the GPGPU capabilities of the Nvidia graphics cards moving forward. The dedicated specialized add-in cards, first produced by Ageia and later licensed by other companies such as BFG, ASUS, etc. are effectively dead.

This was in my mind a case of the light at the end of the tunnel turning out to be an oncoming train. As I predicted in the HardOCP forums during the early days of Aegia, this was a dead man walking. GPGPU was at the time already coming into its own, and it was patently clear that graphics cards would be able to do the same types of calculations as the pricey Aegia add-in card on hardware already owned by the gamer. Perhaps not as rapidly at the time, but just as Apple found themselves hobbled by the glacial rate of performance progress for the PowerPC CPU they used in the past compared to Intel's rapid pace, it was clear that the performance progress of GPU hardware would rapidly surpass that of the custom hardware dictated by Ageia.

Owners of Nvidia GPU hardware can continue to enjoy the benefits of the PhysX technology, but owners of the various dedicated add-in cards now find themselves with expensive paperweights, unless they choose to never update their Nvidia drivers.

Accelerated game physics remains the red headed stepchild of the gaming world. The list of games that utilize the proprietary API is rather limited, with developers more likely to use their own physics technology or one of the middleware packages such as Havok.

Long term, Microsoft will surely incorporate a game physics component into DirectX with abstractions similar to the audio and graphics components. This will allow game developers to utilize a common API that shields them from the vagaries of the underlying physics 'engine', be it GPGPU based (Nvida or ATI), or middleware based (Havok, ODE, etc.)

Gamers will see better and better implementations of accelerated, complex physics in their games for certain, but we've really only seen baby steps up until now.

My prediction for the next piece of dedicated hardware that will fall by the wayside? The ridiculous voodoo-ware by Bigfoot Networks, producers of the ludicrous 'Killer' network interface card series.

One look at their marketing hype should raise red flags for any intelligent gamer. I've yet to see any of their 'tests' that are plastered all around their site contain any details of the protocols and systems involved, giving them more of the appearance of some late night infomercial for Miracle Magnetic Healing Shoe Inserts than that of a truly valid scientific test.

Surely, hardware that is about as useful to a gamer on a modern high performance gaming PC as a diamond encrusted platinum swastika is to a rabbi. I'm sure they'll find some special customers for these products, just like the makers of overpriced ($55,000.00 a pair!) speaker cables do, even though it has been shown audio kooks couldn't discern the difference between expensive cables and wire coat hangers.

I hope my favorite 'Minimum BS' PC magazine gets their hands on a recent model and puts it through the wringer. PC gaming enthusiasts have a myriad of better things to spend their hard earned cash on.

Heck, I may go buy one myself and put and end to this nonsense with a controlled scientific test.

Z9$^&$^03H#$^90efjdv28e0^#%$*( dR - Oops, sorry, I just slipped on a puddle of snake oil...

Always Be Reading A Book That Will Make You Look Good If You Die In The Middle Of It.

2010-05-10T18:13:00.000-07:00

When I was doing the start up thing in the Silicon Valley, there was an engineer the I'd always see reading some pretty esoteric books. I queried them one day when I noticed they were carrying a rather large book on quantum mechanics. Having an interest myself, I welcomed the chance to discuss the subject. Turned out he wasn't even really reading the book. It was, in his words, "bait for the smart ones over at the Stanford campus." He would spend his lunch time over there at the commons, hunting his prey. I never did find out if the bait actually worked...

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. " - Groucho Marx

A good bookshelf is a must for any serious devotee of hardware and software. Myself, I stopped counting when I crested the 1000 book mark for my computer science related texts. As learning tools, reference works, and sources of pleasure, a good computer book is hard to beat in my opinion. With that in mind, I thought I'd make an entry listing the top tenish books that I think every serious programmer should have in their shelves.

These are not listed in any particular order other than that which they came to mind, and are operating system and language agnostic for the most part.

The Art of Computer Programming; Donald Knuth
All three volumes of course, plus the five fascicles that presage volume 4. Never has so much CS knowledge been packed into such a small space. This truly is a CS degree in a box.

Elements of Programming; Alexander Stepanov
Programming is mathematics. Seldom is this fact given proper treatment. This book remedies that brilliantly.

Introduction to Algorithms; Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein
A standard reference for professionals, and a widely used university text. Half of a CS degree is in this book.

Modern Operating Systems; Andrew Tanenbaum
The classic all-around reference and learning resource for the details of the inner workings of operating systems. From the creator of Minix, a Unix like teaching OS that was the template for the first Linux.

Beautiful Code; Andy Oram, Greg Wilson
See how luminaries in the programming world have created elegant solutions to difficult problems in a variety of programming paradigms and languages.

Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages; Federico Biancuzzi, Chromatic
A superb 'behind the scenes' look at how historic and influential languages came to be, told by their progenitors.

Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction ; Steve McConnell
A classic, recently updated. Certainly one of my 'desert island' picks for instruction on the proper design and construction of software.

Programming Windows; Charles Petzold
It's dated. It's also still the classic reference for Windows programming. "Look it up in Petzold!"

Windows Internals; Mark Russinovich, David Solomon, Alex Ionescu
There is no better publicly available reference for what makes Windows tick than this tome from the 'ghostbusters' of the Windows world.

The Algorithm Design Manual; Steven Skiena
Implementations and explanations of all of the important algorithms, and humorous to boot.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman
This classic, often called 'the wizard book', was the text for MIT's introduction to programming classes. A rigorous lesson in how to think about programming.

Compilers: Principles, Techniques, & Tools ; Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman
The best survey, in my opinion, of the inner workings of compilers, with a sharp view of how design decisions affect the user.

I think if I awoke to my house on fire, after getting my family out, these would be the books I'd want to save from the blaze. I could happily settle for them being the only books on my personal shelf.

What's on your own list that you'd bring to a desert island?

An Alien Message?

2010-05-10T04:17:00.001-07:00

This just may be the ultimate 'tweetable program' that does something interesting. I first saw this kind of conciseness in a pamphlet sized book back in the seventies that highlighted the efficiency of the language used, APL (A Programming Language). The author had taken the winning code from a programming contest, where conciseness and correctness were highly scored, and adapted it to APL. One line to do the classic brain teaser puzzle Instant Insanity.

If I recall correctly, the original code was either in C (fairly new at the time) or BASIC (some pretty powerful versions existed even then), and the winning code was something like eighty lines of actual code (not counting the required comments for the contest.)

The particular piece of code heading this entry produces the generations of the board for Conway's Game of Life.

The game is 'played' algorithmically, by applying simple rules to an initial matrix of 'creatures' set up to the player's desired configuration:

Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by underpopulation.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.

The complexity of the patterns that result, and the 'behaviors' that appear can be mind boggling. One pattern might result in every cell quickly dying. Another could result in fantastic evolutions of patterns and shapes. Some patterns produce 'gliders' that crawl their way across the matrix. Some even birth copies of themselves (none have been seen yet, but the proof of such patterns in the game is available in Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays by Berlekamp, Conway and Guy).

The list of possible patterns is endless, as are the results they generate, and aficionados of the game actually host contests where players supply initial patterns that 'fight' each other until a winner is decided.

An example of a pattern known as a 'gun', that produces 'gliders' is seen in the animation below:

You can view other more complex patterns, including some that do useful work, at the video link at the end of this article.

The game is perhaps the first widely known example of a cellular automaton, and exhibits Turing completeness, that is, the game is sufficient to simulate the Universal Turing machine. This means a sufficiently complex initial game board, given a sufficient time span, can perform the same 'program' as a computer with infinite memory and no time constraints. If that doesn't startle you, it's time to fill up your coffee mug!

All of this complexity captured in one line of APL code.

Take a moment to absorb these two morsels you've been handed. In one line of APL, we have the Game of Life. In the Game of Life, we have a Universal Turing Machine. That one line of APL could conceptually (given no constraints on memory or time) run any program you could possibly write, or even imagine. Any program that could ever be written. What an amazingly concise language!

I quickly fell in love with APL, particularly because of my mathematical bent, which the language is ideally suited for. I suffered many a time from the denseness of the language though. A running joke of the time was that the language was 'write once, read never', capturing the difficulties that the author of particularly terse APL might have deciphering their own code when returning to it after some time.

The language uses a family of special characters to represent various monadic (taking the result of everything to the right of the symbol as the argument) and dyadic (accepting an additional argument, the first data to the left of the symbol) functions. It is in fact based on a mathematical notation developed by Kenneth Iverson for array manipulation that he used with his students at Harvard University.

In some cases, functions are represented by overstrikes, that is, literally typing a symbol and then typing another symbol over the original. The use of this depended on the system involved, and in general the same functionality could be accomplished without needing overstrikes. There are also versions of APL that provide special character input using combinations of standard characters via input method editors to represent the symbols.

The concise use of functions applied using the language's simple recursive precedence rules (the right argument of a function is the result of the entire expression set to the function's right) and the incredibly high level of abstraction possible makes for ridiculously rapid, interactive and iterative solutions to even the most fiendishly complex problems.

Functional programming before functional programming was cool.

Soon after I learned the language, this beauty came along:

Oh Man! This was a computer lover's dream machine. Arguably the first 'portable' computer (at over 53 pounds wet), the IBM 5100 represented a giant leap in movable computing power.

Fully equipped with a whopping 64KB of memory and tape drive, with BASIC and APL programming languages (selected by flipping a toggle switch on the front panel), and a giant 5" CRT display of 16 lines of 64 characters each, it cost about $20,000.00 in the mid seventies. That's roughly $80,000.00 in today's dollars.

A sophisticated digital wristwatch likely has more processing power today, and certainly most smart phones would leave the 5100 in their dust. I still lust after one!

I found one some time ago that had been uncovered in a garage. Perfect condition. With all the trimmings, including the rare external tape unit and printer. The last example I'd seen sold for somewhere north of $15,000.00, and it was in only fair shape, with only BASIC on no peripherals. I called the seller, and he indeed still had the unit. The price? Under $2,000.00. He'd had no calls (no surprise to me: the ad he placed was in a place no one would possibly look for one of these.)

I didn't have the heart. Or the lack of one, I suppose. I pondered it for a day, then called the seller and filled them in on the rising collectible value of these units. My feeling was his unit, as perfect as it was, belonged in a museum. I'm sure he thought I was nuts for spilling the beans. I felt good about it. After weeping...

Enough already with the trip down memory lane! Back to the subject at hand: APL. Functional programming in the seventies. Preceded only by Lisp.

The more things change, the more they stay the same!

You can watch an expert APL user building the game of life from scratch in the video below. Fascinating and frankly still jaw dropping to me after all this time.

In addition, an interesting five minute video that shows many different initial starting patterns and their results including one where prime numbers are part of the resulting behavior can be seen at Amazing Game of Life Demo on YouTube.

If you want to experiment with the game and try your own patterns, the open source, cross platform implementation of the game in Golly is superb. Golly also provides a large library of already built patterns ranging from simple to complex, amusing to beautiful, and useless to startlingly capable.

So You Wanna Be A Programmer?

2010-05-10T01:13:00.000-07:00

A recent comment gave me the impetus for this entry. Often, as I answer a question about computers and computing fielded by non-programmer friends, I'm asked 'How hard would it be to learn simple programming?'

It goes without saying that to become truly expert in programming takes much time and experience. Researchers in the field quote 10,000 Hours as the average tipping point, echoed by a personal hero of mine in the world of computing, Peter Norvig, currently Director of Research at Google and one of the truly great minds of computer science and artificial intelligence.

But one can easily do most useful things with far less time, and the hobbyist programmer can easily be writing simple programs in a short time, and then enjoy the unfolding learning process as they progress in their knowledge.

That said, allow me to list some resources for the budding programmer. These are meant to be accessible to those with zero background in the field. I've assumed the reader is on the ubiquitous Windows operating system on a PC, since that covers about 93% of the market at the time of writing! Nonetheless, interested readers can avail themselves of the recommended Scheme and Ruby language choices in other environments such as Linux.

Step right up! Pick a language, any language!

The first decision you'll need to make is which language to start with. I've picked three that I've seen success with by novice programmers. These are Visual Basic and C# ('See Sharp') from Microsoft, and Ruby.

All three of these languages offer the opportunity to learn cutting-edge programming techniques such as Object Orientation and Functional Programming. Purists may object that none of these is 'pure' in either sense, and that is of course correct. Nonetheless, as a framework for learning the concepts involved, all three choices are excellent.

All of these languages are available as free of charge downloads.

I've had great success recommending the following books for autodidacts for each of these languages:

In addition, there are a myriad of nice web based tutorials. A few I can recommend include:

Visual C# .NET Programming
Visual Basic .NET Programming for Beginners
Learning Ruby (Various nice short tutorials at the home of the language.)

Once your interest is whetted or perhaps while starting down the road to programming bliss, you'll want to take a read of Beautiful Code, where experts in the field explain elegant solutions to difficult programming problems. You'll probably need some programming time to fully grok the whole book, but it is an absolutely superb read.

Another most enjoyable book that will give one insight into the 'cool' of programming is Hackers & painters: big ideas from the computer age, by one of the most brilliant thinkers in programming (in my opinion), Paul Graham. Paul delves into the world of Lisp, arguably the most 'beautiful' language extant.

The book is a wonderful read even for a non-programmer: most of any discussion relating to programming is done using well explained examples. The author writes with a sharp wit, and will certainly get your juices flowing over esoteric programming problems.

One might wonder why I haven't recommended Lisp for the beginner, being as I consider it so 'beautiful'.

Two luminaries of the world of Computer Science, the aforementioned Paul Graham and the brilliant Gregory Chaitin seem to agree with me on the beauty of this language, the latter saying "...the original LISP, the conceptual heart of LISP, a core which is a jewel of considerable mathematical beauty, austere intellectual beauty."

Another Lisp lore favorite of mine is Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

It's a fair question though. I actually have used Lisp to teach programming one-on-one, I think it makes one a much better thinker in the realm of programming, and even if Lisp is never used by the learner once on their way, it will have profoundly changed the way they think about programming.

But the edifice of Common Lisp is deep. And wide. And tall.

I think that learning Common Lisp on one's own, without any prior background, is like a fast-food diner deciding to learn how to cook. But learning to cook in this case includes learning how to manufacture a rifle, learning how to stalk your prey and properly dispense with it, then figuring out how to butcher the beast, next learning how to smelt iron to make the cooking utensils, followed by a lesson in the production of an oven, and finally instruction in proper Chef de Cuisine antics. You get the idea.

But if you're bent on really expanding you mind in your learning adventure, try something like PLT Scheme, a simplified dialect of Lisp. There are excellent learning resources at the PLT Scheme Learning page, I highly recommend the book How to Design Programs should you take this route, it is centered around PLT Scheme. An amusing overview and good tutorial is provided at Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days.

You might just find yourself repeating an observation of a student of mine at the end of a course in Scheme:: "Why on earth would I ever want or need to use any other language?"

You might also want to take a peek at my blog entry What programming languages should you learn?, where I describe what I think would be an ideal course of languages for someone seriously interested in programming.

Any of these learning routes should prove rewarding, and start you on the trail toward programming wisdom.

(begin
(display "Hello, Budding Programmer!")
(newline))

It's a Small World.

2010-05-08T22:35:00.000-07:00

Ugh! I hated that ride at Disneyland when I was a kid! My brothers and sister loved it, so I was forced to sit through it multiple times every visit. I'd rather pass a red hot branding iron through my cranium than hear that cloying tune again.

A few years back, I thought I was on an episode of the Twilight Zone when a friend asked me to troubleshoot their PC. The machine would randomly start playing that very song through the built-in speaker. It took a while to figure that one out!

Believe it or not, it was a feature of the BIOS used as a thermal warning. Certainly one of the more obscure troubleshooting issues I've ever worked (see Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music for a Microsoft Knowledge Base article that resulted from this behavior, and my blog entry One of the more interesting game problem cases I've worked on for another set of really strange symptoms).

Happily, that the Internet makes this a small world delights me. In the short time this blog has been live, we've had visitors from 53 countries spread around the world! Lots of great e-mails have been sent (please, put your thoughts in the comments: let everyone see where we agree, disagree, or where you've found help with game or other technical problems!)

As Dean Martin, the King of Cool used to say: Keep those cards and letters coming in!

Spies Like Us.

2010-05-08T22:09:00.000-07:00

I'll be participating in another Bash webcast tomorrow. The subject is the increasingly cryptic goings on at GKNOVA6, the viral marketing website that appears to be related to the upcoming release of Treyarch's Call of Duty series, Black Ops. You can see the progress evolve by taking a look at GKNOVA6 at the Call of Duty Wiki.

Clever sleuthing by interested gamers around the world has led to the analysis and decipherment of a host of messages, including some craftily hidden steganographic text (see my blog entry Steganography, GKNOVA6 Style for the first example and details on how this can be done).

I've been invited to participate with Jock the host and his guests Josh Peckler from planetcallofduty.com and Carbonfibah, one of the seven recipients of the mystery packages with the USB keys that started the whole ball rolling and a major contributor to the code breaking efforts. Having a background in cryptography and secure systems, I hope to add some value talking about the various methods seen as this has unfolded, and the techniques applied to extract the results. We'll also be discussing the evidence pointing to this being a campaign from the minds of Treyarch.

This is the second recent instance of some very clever marketing by game developers: a few months ago, the popular game Portal from Valve Software had an update. The only material change seemed to be more of the cute portable radios were to be found throughout the game. What soon unfolded, however, is that each new radio had some kind of message. Some were normal sounding transmissions, a few were Morse code, some sounded peculiar, almost like an old FAX machine (turned out to be Slow Scan TV signals, a technique used by HAM radio operators), yet other radios only gave up their secrets when brought to just the right place in the game.

Careful ratiocination by followers of the game led to the decipherment of the various messages, which led them to a web site, done in an old-school bulletin board style, that when logged into led the user to Aperture Science Laboratories. Portal 2, anyone?

Stay tuned for updates on the webcast, I'll update this entry when it goes live! I can't tell you anything more about the details at this time.

"We could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you." - Dr. No

Update 05/09/2010: Had a blast, again, with Jockyitch and his cohorts on the BASH cast. Learned much from Josh and Carbonfibah about the evolution of the messages from GKNOVA6, and how the swarms of gamers worldwide went about deciphering them. Look for the cast at BashandSlash soon!

Update 05/10/2010: Webcast / Podcast is live, here!

647 Grains of Diplomacy: When you care enough to send the very best.

2010-05-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

Sniping. Snipers. Often the most despised activities and roles in online FPS games. Myself, I seldom play the role: I find it rather boring. In games like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 it is so easy to get frags as a sniper while remaining basically untouchable, a trained monkey could do it. Not my style.

That said, a few years back, having played all of the FPS games that interested me until my fingerprints had worn off and facing a dearth of new FPS games, I came across an unopened copy of a game I'd not heard of at a local discount bookstore. The game was called Sniper Elite. For nine bucks I figured what the heck, even if it's a dog of a game it would be something new to play. Much to my surprise, I quickly became a fan of the game. The well modeled bullet ballistics and challenging single player missions kept me amused for some time, highlighted with the slow motion bullet's-eye view of a 1000+ meter head shot.

The online play was equally rewarding, and made me appreciate the tactics and strategy involved in the hide-and-seek game of sniping. For those that appreciate this kind of play, it is the best of the genre. The game still has a small but fiercely loyal following. At times, copies of the game were selling for over $100.00 on eBay. Recently, the game has become available on the most excellent Steam system of Valve Software. It's ten bucks. If you even have the slightest inkling you might enjoy a sniping game, it's well worth this meager price. You too might become addicted! For certain, you will either love it or hate it - I've not seen a reaction between these extremes yet. Be forewarned: the graphics are a bit dated (they were when the game was released), and the controls can take some getting used to, but it really is a great game.

Sadly, once I was hooked on a proper sniper centric game, I found that the few other games that shared this bent were but shadows of Sniper Elite. It looks the five year drought for quality sniper centric games may be over soon. City Interactive, the largest producer of video games in Poland (home to some of the greatest mathematical minds of history) is set to release Sniper: Ghost Warrior. From the information available and the videos and screen shots at the game site, it looks like a game that could be a worthy successor to Sniper Elite: Properly modeled ballistics and environmental effects for shots, free exploration and non-linear game play, with a variety of mission types. The environments shown remind me of the original Far Cry's lush jungle scenes.

The game is scheduled for release in Q2 for PC and Xbox 360.

I for one can't wait!

Persistent vegetative state: Has a Do Not Resuscitate order been put on PC game development?

2010-05-08T02:42:00.000-07:00

PC gaming, as we have known it over the past many years, is dying. It may already be brain-dead and we just don't know it yet. Certainly many of the developers that produce games for the PC platform seem to have gone comatose. By PC gaming, I mean the games where the basic game from the developers could be configured and modified ('modded') into a game that fit the players' desires.

New custom maps? No problem! New characters? You got it! New scoring modes or kit restrictions for competitive play? For certain! Custom dedicated servers with admin controlled settings? Check! LAN based private servers? You bet! In-game console? Of course! Build a completely new game from scratch using the core that can become wildly popular? Been there, done that!

Some games provided the tools to do these kinds of things, others needed clever reverse-engineering, but it could be done. Those days, I think, are drawing rapidly to a close. The market realities (depending on who you talk to, consoles such as the Xbox, Playstation, and Wii enjoy a six or seven to one sales revenue advantage overall compared to PCs) dictate this.

Developers either decide not to even develop for the PC, or do so in a lowest common denominator fashion. More and more, the development environment is a 'write once, deploy many' environment. That means the developer builds the game using the meta-environment of the development tools, and these in turn produce the 'run time' executables and assets for the deployment platforms simultaneously. In some cases, this will result in games that are the same across platforms, except perhaps for input device support. In other cases, some 'customization' can be done for each specific platform to the core (bulk) of the generated game, such as server browser functionality for the PC version that may not exist for the console versions.

In any case, this 'customization' must be fairly limited, else it starts to intrude on the whole purpose of building games using a 'write once' model: rapid development, deployment and easy updating of the core game. We see more and more laments from PC gamers about some new game being a poor 'port' from the console version. The problem is not bad ports - a port can in fact be quite excellent, with platform specific functionality added during the porting process.

The problem is the emerging model of game development no longer revolves around porting of games, but around the deliberate dumbing down of the core game design and development to fit the commonalities of the chosen deployment platforms. There is no longer any real porting done, just the gluing on of some limited platform specific functionality to the core game code vomited out by the development tools. And even more unfortunately, it seems developers put amateurs on to the job of adding these PC specific features: see Pings? We Don't Need No Stinking Pings! for a recent example of this.

The net result of more and more game developers adopting this kind of development model means more and more games are going to be built to this 'lowest common denominator' of functionality for the platforms the developer decides to deploy to.

The reality is developers are moving to this model, or are using it already. Once the development tools and environments are deemed mature, the result for them is faster, easier, and less expensive development, with vastly simplified deployment and maintenance. The complexity of these tools and environments, combined with the deep abstraction they use to enable their functionality, means making these tools available to the end-user is most unlikely, and reverse-engineering of games has become more and more difficult.

So, the developers can make a game at a lower development cost, designed and built to a lower standard of functionality and capability, and sell it at a very profitable price to a willing (mostly console playing) public. We should certainly be able to understand the reasons and motivations for the game developers and publishers to move to this model. They're in the business to make money, after all. Sadly, as this model is adopted by more developers and publishers the importance of the PC player community diminishes with each passing day.

The situation reminds me of the near death of the classic mechanical wristwatch: Introduced in the early 70's, Quartz wristwatches seemed like the Ebola of the mechanical watch making world. Soon, manufacturers of the hand made mechanical works of art were dropping like peasants during the Great Plague. Most switched over their primary manufacturing to quartz movement based watches. Simpler to make, cheaper to build, and profitable to sell. And yet, a few of them recognized that there was a market for truly well executed 'old school' technology, and that buyers would pay a premium for the privilege. This has resulted in pieces like the one from my blog entry Things Unexpectedly Technical, which sold out instantly to seven fortunate buyers for seven figure prices.

The end seems near for 'old school' PC gaming. We can only hope some developers will realize there is a market of PC connoisseurs that are willing and able to take advantage of PC games built and deployed in a PC centric fashion. Even if it means a pricier game, I for one am willing to pay for excellence.

Steganography, GKNOVA6 Style.

2010-05-06T03:47:00.001-07:00

The recent viral marketing campaign of GKNOVA6, believed by many to be related to the upcoming Call of Duty game has used cleverly disguised messages to hint at something. What, no one is sure of at this point. One of the messages, itself some kind of hint, has a message hidden within it, revealed by temporal frequency analysis. Details of this can be seen at the entry at BashandSlash. Hiding information in plain sight (plain 'hearing' in this case) like this using techniques such as changing bits of sound or image files or otherwise embedding the information is known as Steganography.

Frankly, it's pretty obvious listening at GKNOVA6 that there's something under the covers. I decided to try my hand at this in a less obvious way. Here's a clip of Amazon Rain Forest Sounds. Click to listen, or right click and 'save as' to download if you want to analyze it. There is a repeating message hidden in it: the name of the site that first made me aware of GKNOVA6. The message is hidden as sounds that when appropriately analyzed reveal the actual text of my message. I think the low-level synthesized audio I used for these 'messages' would pretty easily pass the natural sound test and be undetected for most listeners. The louder one stands out a bit on purpose, so you can hear what the 'message' sounds like embedded with the real rain forest sounds.

My message signal was produced in short order using Matlab and Mathematica and was then injected into the real jungle sounds. Basically, imagine scanning a 2-D array that represents the characters you want to inject, where one dimension maps into signal time (the left to right of the message) and the other maps to frequencies (the points occupied by the message in the vertical for a given point in time). As you scan the array in time, you generate some combination of one or more frequencies for that point in time that you inject into your 'cover' signal. Playing a bit loose with the terminology, you are in essence doing an inverse short-time Fourier transform.

The spectrogram you can use to recover the message is doing the reverse: mapping the frequencies and amplitudes for a narrow (in the time dimension) window scanning the signal in time overall. The resultant is nothing more than short-time Fourier transform of the signal: snapshots of the Fourier transform of the windowed signal stacked in time. The video below is a screen recording of the WavePad sound editor with the clip loaded and analyzed. All three message repeats of BASHANDSLASH stand out plain as day in the spectrogram.

Pretty cool, I think! If you have something that can do temporal frequency analysis (many sound editors have this functionality), or have a package like Mathematica, Matlab, or Maple and know your way around the Fourier transform, have a look at the clip yourself. For a readily accessible, well written book on the basics, see Mathematics of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) with audio applications by Stanford researcher Julius O. Smith III.

[Update: While making the effort to learn the low-level mathematics and techniques to do this sort of thing is great exercise for the brain, you may not have the time or interest to do so. If you just want to play around with the concepts, I've located a program that you can use to experiment with synthesis of signals from shapes. While the intent of this program is research into analysis and synthesis via partials, it provides a simple means of experimenting with the concepts involved. See S P E A R - Sinusoidal Partial Editing Analysis and Resynthesis for details. ]

Simple shape drawn in S P E A R then converted to audio, with temporal frequency analysis of that audio done in WavePad. (Click to enlarge)

If you'd rather view some results instead of making your own, click on the video below to see the amplitude envelope, temporal frequency analysis, and frequency distribution of the Rain Forest clip.

Rain forest sounds recording with secret message embedded analyzed, showing amplitude over time, STFT (Spectrogram) and frequency distribution. Click on the video while playing to see a larger version in a new window on YouTube.

[Update: Reading the first comment, it occurred to me that an analogy might help some visualize what's happening here.]

If you've ever seen a player piano (I mean a real player piano, with the perforated paper rolls, not a modern digitally based one), you've basically seen a sort of 'mechanical' transform at work (I'm really going to be playing loose with terms and analogies here to simplify this). The roll has positions across the paper that correspond to each note of the piano. As the roll is drawn over the sensor, any place there's a hole, the corresponding piano key is actuated.

So if you look at a point along the length of the roll, going at right angles to the length you would see what note(s) were actuated at that time. The length of the roll is the time dimension, the width is the frequency dimension. You could almost map the holes in the roll as it is wound on to the take up spool as the piano plays into the points of a spectrogram recording the piano (not literally, but surprisingly close).

Let's imagine you had a special 'punch player piano' that would take a blank roll of paper and punch the holes corresponding to the keys you played over time. That roll would be like the transforms over time of the notes you played. Just like the spectrogram, but having far less detail and not accounting for anything other than key press and duration. Now, if we took the roll the 'punch player piano' made and put it on a regular player piano, it would play your 'song' perfectly, mimicking the keys you pressed as time flows. Keys to holes, holes to keys.

Now imagine we take a blank roll, and we manually punch holes in it to make letters and shapes. We could still put that roll into our player piano, and it would play the notes corresponding to your manually made 'song'. It might sound like trash, but who cares. That 'song' would correspond to the 'sound' of my letters and shapes. We do this and record it. This is like my 'hidden' message sound. We could mix in some other real notes or melodies on the paper if we wanted, we could still see our shapes and letters.

Next, say we had someone that could hear any combination of notes and press all the right keys on a piano to mimic them. We play them this 'song' we recorded from our player piano that played the roll we manually punched to form shapes and letters. As they manually 'replay' our song, their piano punches the holes corresponding to the keys they press into a fresh paper roll. They are effectively acting like a 'human spectrogram recorder', producing a spectrogram (the punched holes on their roll). The end result? Their roll of paper will have the same shapes and letters as the one we manually made. We went from holes (time) to keys (frequency) then from keys (frequency) back to holes (time). Shapes and letters to sounds, sounds to shapes and letters.

So in the main part of this blog entry, we knew what 'shape' we wanted the spectrogram of our hidden message to be (what holes in the roll we needed to make our shapes), and from that made the 'sounds' of it. We mixed that in with real sounds to mask it, and passed it along. Given the right tools, we can take the sounds and see the shapes. Our hidden message sounds produce the shapes we wanted in the spectrogram (the holes in the roll make our shapes). The real sounds that mask our hidden message matter not, but our shapes (the message) are revealed.

Zzzap-a-Dee-Doo-Dah!

2010-05-05T04:51:00.000-07:00

Helping a gaming buddy with an upgrade recently, I encountered behavior that reminded me that all the options should be kept open when troubleshooting problems, particularly with hardware. He has a good solid mid-range gaming machine, perhaps slightly handicapped by an aging Nvidia 8800GTS 320MB GPU. He upgraded to one of the new ATI 5850 from ASUS (the most potent card in the price range he wanted that would fit into his case).

The card was installed, and after driver installs and some quick game testing, it appeared that a very worthwhile upgrade had been made.

The next day, when he booted the machine, he noted the fans seemed to be running 'louder' at boot time than the prior evening. In addition, the boot time took an unusually long time, upwards of 45 seconds to get to the Windows start sequence after BIOS post, rather than the normal few seconds. Puzzling.

The first thought was an under performing power supply, but everything checked out fine. Curiously, if the machine was warm started, the fans ran quietly on the GPU but the boot sequence was still agonizingly long. Cold starts resulted in the GPU fans running at top speed, and even longer boot times.

A quick perusal of forums showed multitudes suffering the same issue. Many using the same motherboard as my friend, but no fixes. I decided to violate my normal rules with regards to BIOS updates (if it ain't broke, don't fix it!), and checked the ASUS site for any updates. Sure enough, there was a recent one, and one of the release note items specifically mentioned a fix for slow boot times with certain 5000 series ATI video cards.

Bingo! We cobbled up a quick and dirty DOS boot CD with the latest BIOS and flashing program, and proceeded to flash the BIOS.

The result? The fans of the GPU now ran quietly at boot, and boot times improved for certain, but they were still quite a bit longer than before. I opened up the machine, checking for any seating problems, etc. on the card. All was well. Then I noticed that one of the six pin PCI-E auxiliary connectors (the card uses two) was not using a modular cable to his quite capable power supply, but was using a two-into-one four pin peripheral to six pin PCI-E adapter that came with the card. Both of the four pin ends were connected to one cable of the modular power supply, the only connections to that particular cable.

Now looking at this, I thought it should be okay, though I figured at maximum load (if the card actually draws as much as is allowed), there would be about a quarter volt of voltage drop from the wiring involved. I had thw owner dig up the original power supply box to find if any additional original cables were left, and found exactly what was needed: a correct six pin PCI-E modular cable.

After plugging this in, the machine behaved as expected. No more loud fans on boot (BIOS related), and no more slow boots (BIOS and power delivery issues).

The moral of the story? Never assume anything when troubleshooting, and always leave your options open.

Mutation on the Bounty.

2010-05-05T03:07:00.000-07:00

What James 'The Amazing Randi' Randi has done in debunking nutjob psychics, fringe audiophiles and other forms of pseudoscience goes mutatis mutandis for much of the 'expert advice', 'facts', and 'tweaks' often seen in gaming enthusiast forums.

Some of my posts have dealt with just such things (see I Read it in a National Enquirer Survey, it Must Be True!, I Can See CXLVI Frames Per Second!, Port Forwarding: Slaying the Mythical Dragon of Online PC Gaming. for some examples). I do this for a few reasons. I hate bullshit. I hate even more bullshit from the clueless (the truly ignorant can be forgiven - they're too clueless to know they don't know). There's enough BS in enthusiast forums to fertilize the entire planet. (As a side note, if you enjoy seeing this kind of thing blown out of the water 'boom headshot!' style, catch some episodes of the hilarious Penn & Teller: Bullshit! series).

I laid out a challenge bounty in my frames per second entry, which I'm quite sure will remain standing until we as humans are genetically altered or evolve into some kind of über gaming race. I've got another one in mind, prompted by recent posts in a myriad of Battlefield Bad Company 2 forums regarding a tweak to the MCSS (Multimedia Class Scheduler Service) for windows Vista/7, alleging greatly improved game performance. The fact that this mechanism only comes into play with respect to network throttling at rates over 10,000 packets per second seems to be utterly lost on the Jim Jones like posters of this 'miracle tweak'. This is far beyond the actual rate used by the game.

BS! I say! I firmly believe this is a classic placebo combined with a sort of mass delusion often seen with 'tweaks' like this. This facility of Windows does not even come into play in the typical gaming environment, and any gamer worth their salt is not even trying to watch streaming videos and listen to streaming music while gaming (not that even that would necessarily invoke this feature's use).

So here's the challenge: I publicly state that the first person to demonstrate a measurable and statistically significant difference in game performance (including but not limited to ping and FPS rates, measured using metrics and tools acceptable to both parties) and a statistically significant change in player score (frags per minute or some other metric agreed to by both parties) or the ability to even recognize whether the feature is enabled or not to a statistically significant level while playing Battlefield Bad Company 2, playing only the game and optionally using some VOIP communications such as Ventrilo or Teamspeak on a fresh installation of Windows 7 with no other applications installed or running other than those present in the default Windows installation, will garner a bounty of a $100.00 U.S. gift card from the author.

For a twist on the last challenge, where a challenger has nothing to lose and everything to gain by showing fault in my statements, any challenger agrees that once the detailed conditions outlined above are agreed upon by both parties, and the challenge is accepted, failure to produce supporting evidence for the hypothesis that this 'tweak' has any material affect will require the challenger to pay $100.00 U.S. within 30 days of conclusion of the challenge to the charity of the author's choice.

As before, my Shekels are safe, perhaps I can however enrich the coffers of some charities!

As an aside, I wil NOT post any comments of the 'Well, I can see the difference!' genre for this blog entry. You think you can beat the challenge? Then post your public acceptance of the challenge. Put up, or shut up!

Splinter Cell Conviction µ-review. A µ post.

2010-05-04T21:08:00.000-07:00

My game biases: FPS shooters are my preferred game.I despise most FPH (Flashing Pink Hooves, e.g. WOW, Guild Wars, etc.)

Played on: Mid and high-end PC.

Other nano-review info: Based on single player campaign only, I'll update with MP/Co-op.

Likes:

Improved graphics for characters.
Interesting game play.
Improved enemy NPC AI.
Grim is built like a chain smoking bowling alley regular that would polish your balls with her tongue. Bowling balls. Get your mind out of the gutter.
Ties up most of the story from the prior games.
Well laid out movement system, cover-based.
Animations adapt to player positions in environment.

Dislikes:

I kind of miss the old movement system where I decided exactly what cover was.
Graphics for everything other than characters is starting to look primitive. Modified Unreal engine just not up to snuff anymore.
No ability to 'switch shoulders' for aiming.
Less Splinter Cell stealth and more Rainbow Six shoot at the hoards.
Seems the game cannot even be played completely 'stealth'.
Far too much mouse 'inertia'. Weapon aiming, particularly if zoomed seems like you're connected to the sight via slinkies. Inertia adds realism, but this much is silly.
Can only use one stickycam at a time.
Far too short SP campaign. If you take eight hours, Sam's in a wheelchair in your game.

Grade: B

Buy it if you're a fan of the series, or MP and co-op is your thing (I'll flesh out the nano-review with these later - I tend to prefer SP what with the droves of cheats in most MP shooter games). If the SP campaign is your primary interest, there are much better bang for the buck (i.e., longer campaign) games out there, like Modern Warfare 2.

I P in the Pool.

2010-05-02T22:58:00.000-07:00

Internet Protocols and address pools, that is! IP, the Internet protocol, is one of the foundational support structures of the Internet that supports our gaming. IPv4, the first widely adopted version, was specified in RFC 791 during September 1981. IPv4 is a connectionless protocol for use on packet-switched networks such as Ethernet. It is a 'best effort' delivery protocol, that is, there is no guarantee of packet delivery, nor assurance of proper sequencing of packets, nor any guards against packet duplication. These aspects, usually important for useful network communication, are handled by higher-level protocols on top of IP, such as TCP. UDP traffic, the most common for online games, is also a protocol that rides over IP.

At the core of the IP protocol is the concept of addresses. You've probably seen these on you gaming machine with references to things like 192.168.1.2, etc. The IP address consists of four Octets (less pedantically known as Bytes). So the same example address can be written as 0xC0.0xA8.0x01.0x02 in hexadecimal notation or 11000000.10101000.00000001.00000010 in binary (usually done when manually calculating subnet information).

The IP address, since it consists of four octets, has a total of 2^32 available addresses. There are actually fewer available for actual use, since parts of the specification allow for specialized addresses for use by things like broadcast traffic, loopback, testing, etc. Even so, there are a bit over 4,000,000,000 unique addresses available for use.

Early on, the bodies (most notably the Internet Engineering Task Force, IETF) involved in the design and specification of Internet protocols and technologies realised that an address pool of this size would likely become insufficient at a future time, and designed mechanisms to effectively extend the size of the available address pool. The almost universally used mechanism is known as Network Address Translation, or NAT. NAT allows Local Area Networks (LAN) to reside on some segment of addresses defined in the protocol as private while providing bidirectional access to public WAN addresses. Your PC, using a 192.168.#.# address, is on one such private address. Among other characteristics of Private addresses is that they are non-routable, that is, once they reach any router, they are kept on the LAN - no information is leaked to the WAN side of the router, and packets with addresses confined to the LAN will not be routed via the WAN. This ensures such packets from private networks stay on the private network.

So how does a PC on a LAN with a private address gain access to the rest of the Internet WAN residing at public addresses if their own traffic must remain on their LAN? That is of course the primary function of the router via NAT. Any traffic from a LAN PC destined for a public WAN destination has the address information in the packet manipulated by the router to appear to have originated at the public address of the WAN side of the router. Any return traffic is directed toward the public WAN address of the router, whereby the router manipulates the address information of the packet and forwards it to the appropriate PC on the LAN. For an excellent overview, see Network Address Translation in an unusually well written Wikipedia entry.

Using NAT, we can have tens of thousands of PCs on a LAN residing on one single public WAN address. Other groups of PCs can be residing behind other routers with other public WAN addresses, where the PCs on different routers may have the same private addresses, but there will be no conflicts: the WAN outside of each router cannot even 'see' the LAN since it is composed of private addresses, so no source of conflict can exist.

Even with this 'multiplication factor' of addresses provided by NAT, there is a growing shortage of available addresses: there is a growing number of services that need public addresses, and an explosion of devices (phones, media devices, even refrigerators!) that use addresses. Technologists in the field predict we will run out of IPv4 addresses sometime in 2011-2012.

The IETF realized early on a better solution would be needed, and started work in earnest in 1991. By 1998, RFC 2460 resulted, defining IPv6. The biggest change in this new version of IP is an address space consisting of 16 octets, or 128 bits. This means, compared to the roughly four billion (4,000,000,000) addresses available in IPv4, IPv6 has over 340 Undeciliion. That's a huge number, written out in its full glory, it's:

340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

That's roughly seven IP addresses for each atom in each body of every human on the planet today.

Or about 3,120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (~3 Octillion) addresses for each man, woman and child that has ever lived on our planet (thanks, Population Reference Bureau). I think this will suffice for some time!

How long? To put this enormous number into perspective consider this: The age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years. If we had been assigning IPv6 addresses for this entire period at the rate of 1,000,000,000 (one billion) addresses per second, we would have used a little over .00000000004% of the available address pool! It's BIG!

How big? If you imagine all of the IPv4 addresses mapped into the area of a space the size of one typical pixel of the display you're reading this on, the IPv6 address space would need a square about 52,500,000 miles on each side (thanks, WolframAlpha), roughly the surface area of 14,000,000 Earths.

An address space that large ensures every device on our planet can have a unique address, and completely eliminates any need for troublesome mechanisms like NAT (though there are proposals to retain such functionality for specific purposes).

IPv6 offers many other improvements compared to IPv4, such as much simplified address configuration options, much improved and intrinsic multicast support, mandatory network security support (IPSec), vastly simplified and improved handling by routers (no fragmentation by routers is allowed, PMTUD is mandatory), no header checksum is utilized (reducing processing load on routers), TTL replaced with Hop Limit (routers no longer need to make time in queue calculations), and vastly improved mobility components (no proxy/triangular routing, devices and whole subnets can move between router points without renumbering), jumbogram support (packets up to 4,294,967,295 bytes long), and vastly improved extensibility (options are implemented as extension headers, effectively meaning unlimited protocol extensibility without requiring any changes in the basic protocol design).

Being the protocol newborn, adoption rates are in the early adopter stages: only a fraction of a percent of current Internet traffic at the time of writing is IPv6. Nonetheless, technologies to ease the transition to IPv6 such as Teredo which tunnels IPv6 over IPv4 NAT using UDP, point-to-point tunnel services, etc. ensure that the migration to IPv6 will happen. It is not question of if IPv6 will be the predominant standard, but when. Behemoths such as Google are leading the charge, offering IPv6 interfaces to their search engine at ipv6.google.com and support for Google Services over IPv6 to compatible networks.

So why should we as gamers care about this? NAT is one of the primary culprits in connectivity issues for on-line gamers. Often, problems with the behavior or configuration of NAT in consumer routers result in spotty connectivity and sporadic connection problems. Additionally users that play peer-to-peer games or need to run a game server suffer all the slings and arrows of router configuration and port forwarding in attempts to attain proper game functionality.

IPv6 will eliminate the need for these machinations, providing a much more reliable, higher performance, more flexible infrastructure for on-line gaming.

Black Holes Stephen Hawking Knows Not. But You Will.

2010-05-01T18:21:00.000-07:00

Black Holes. Undoubtedly the most enigmatic titans of our universe. Prodigious consumers of all matter that finds itself too near their inescapable gravitational grasp, a force so powerful even light itself cannot escape, never to be able to return to the known universe. By Einstein's Theory of Relativity, they are time machines through gravitational time dilation. Perhaps more exotic time travel is possible for those of the species fitting the Kerr solutions to the field equations, allowing travel through time and space, even to other universes.

Through the work of the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking, master of all things "black hole", we know that we may even be surrounded my tiny, microscopic primordial black holes, and should the geometry of the universe be appropriate, we may find ourselves producing our own microscopic black holes at the rate of one a second through experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Fortunately, these will evaporate nearly instantly. Recent work by astrophysicists points to the tiny primordial black holes as a likely culprit for the ultra-high energy cosmic rays occasionally observed on earth.

But there are back holes lurking here on earth already. You may be closer to one than you might imagine. They will gobble up your network packets as efficiently as their cosmic cousins quaff matter. I am of course referring to Black Hole Routers and their cohorts in the crime of packet theft, overly restrictive or misbehaving firewalls. What is a black hole router, and why should it matter to a gamer? After some preparatory material, we'll cover that in this blog entry.

In the typical network environment, IP provides the basic Internet layer mechanism on top of the nearly universal Ethernet V2 frame. The commonly used TCP and UDP protocols ride on top of the IP layer. Each Ethernet frame can have a data packet up to 1500 Bytes in size (we'll not go into exceptions for our examples here). The primary purpose of network devices is to route these protocols from senders to receivers, and back. Along any given path between a sender and receiver, there may be devices that are unable to process packets beyond a certain size limit. Usually, the device sending packets to such a device will simply break the packet into smaller packets, a process called fragmentation.

Fragmentation of packets has undesirable side effects, including a performance impact, so ideally we want to minimize this for a route. The same holds true for packets traveling the return path (which may differ from the send path) to the sender. A mechanism that will allow the sender to determine the ideal maximum packet size to avoid any fragmentation will maximize performance and minimize network overhead. The standard mechanism for achieving this goal is known as Path Maximum Transmission Unit Discovery, or PMTUD.

Devices along the path (usually exclusively routers) that must impose a limit on the packet size by fragmentation when the sender has explicitly disallowed fragmentation by using the IP "Do not fragment" (DF, the normal default behavior in modern systems) flag are expected to notify the sender of this limit. This is done thorough a standardized ICMP "Fragmentation needed and DF set" message, with the required limit encapsulated. A sender receiving such a message can adjust the outgoing packet size accordingly. All would be well if everything worked as it should, but in the real world there are routers that misbehave and do not respond with the needed ICMP message, and firewalls that block these needed messages. These are known as Black Holes.

The result is senders appearing to establish a proper connection (the three-way TCP handshake is successful), but having sporadic problems sending and/or receiving data. For a game, this can result in the appearance of lagging, connection loss, etc. (N.B., the PMTUD is normally reserved for the TCP protocol. While it can be used for UDP, it is seldom utilized due to difficulties in determining proper sender behavior for packets dropped by black holes.) Since most games use a combination of UDP and TCP, it is quite possible that black hole on the path between the game client and server(s) will adversely affect game play and connectivity.

Fortunately, there are steps the gamer can take to diagnose and remedy problems with black holes. The Ping utility provides a ready tool to aid us in our diagnosis. Using ping -f -l#, where # is the packet size, we can send probes toward the desired destination. The "f" flag denotes setting the "DF" flag in the IP header.

For example, the command:

ping -f -l 1450 74.125.19.103

will send packets of length 1450 to the destination IP of 74.125.19.103. The returned results will tell us much about the characteristics and behavior of devices along the path of the packets.

If the ping command returns with the expected results, we know that all is well, and no device in the path is requiring a smaller packet size than the length specified (with the addition of the IP overhead).

If the ping command returns with the ICMP "Fragmentation needed and DF set" message, we know that some device in the path needs a smaller packet size to avoid it fragmenting our packets. We can modulate the value of l until we find a length that passes the path with normal results.

If the ping command returns "Request timed out", we know that some device in the path requires a smaller packet size, but is not returning the needed ICMP message or that message is being blocked. As with the second case, we can modulate the value of l until we get the expected return results.

A good starting point for l to work down from is 1472, and 1464 for PPPoE connections. In particular, users of PPPoE should check their environment for proper MTU and PMTUD behavior: in some cases, when PPPoE is done on the router, the PC or responding server may only see the router MTU of 1500, causing dropped packets and connection issues. Check with your ISP to determine if your required MTU is other than the typical 1492 for PPPoe.

Once armed with the appropriate MTU value (l+28, 28 is the overhead for the IP and ICMP headers), we can configure our PC and router as required. Other more drastic measures may be used to diagnose or bypass black holes, such as enabling PMTU black hole detection, disabling PMTUD, and hard setting the MTU (MSS clamping) for the interface device. The details of these steps vary by device and OS, by router make/model, and are beyond the scope of a blog entry.

Consult the documentation for your hardware and OS environment for details, or use the web: there are many excellent detailed descriptions for configuring these settings. Or give Stephen Hawking a call. But you now probably know more than he does on the subject!

Boo! I have you now, child of Satan!

2010-05-01T04:20:00.000-07:00

I haven't laughed so hard in a while. This guy might have a heart attack if he played the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in the dark...

Caution: Not safe for work / kids content!