3D printing reaches new heights with this ingenious robotic salad-tossing machine. This pre-programmed beauty has three modes of operation, one of which will surely match how you like getting your salad tossed. (more…)
Shigeru Miyamoto is the creator of Donkey Kong, Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, F-Zero, Pikmin, and Wii. In this video, he explains the elements necessary in a good video game.
So when would you NOT want the currently used application to be optimized.
Microsoft is adding a Game Mode to Windows 10. It will be rolled out to the masses with the Windows 10 Creators Update due later this year. However, braver souls can try the new Game Mode right now by installing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15019. Windows 10 is getting a major upgrade this Spring, when the Windows 10 Creators Update is released to hundreds of millions of computers around the world. This is going to be an evolutionary step for Windows 10, adding several new features, including several aimed at gamers. How the Windows 10 Game Mode Works One...
My 10-year-old son Lux is a retro videogame historian who collects and studies 1980s consoles and games with the gravitas of a PhD student working on his thesis. Last year he acquired Nintendo's NES Zapper gun controller from 1984 that was used to play shooting games like Duck Hunt. (Below, a TV commercial for the NES Deluxe Set including the Zapper and R.O.B. The Robotic Operating Buddy.) Unfortunately, the NES Zapper doesn't work with modern LCD televisions. The video above from "Today I Found Out" explains the clever technology behind the NES Zapper gun. And here's a great text explanation from How-To Geek about why it doesn't work on non-CRT screens, something my son already knew but, of course, wanted the Zapper anyway for, er, display purposes:
First, it requires extremely precise timing between the trigger pull on the Zapper and the response on the screen. Even the slightest difference (and we’re talking milliseconds here) between the signal sent to the NES and the signal displayed on the screen can throw it off. The original timing sequence was based on the very dependable response time of a CRT hooked up to the analog NES signal. Whether the old tube TV was big, small, cutting edge or 10 years old, the speed of the signal via the CRT display standard was reliable. By contrast, the latency in modern digital sets is not reliable and is not the same as the old consistent delay in the CRT system. Now, this doesn’t matter in most situations. If you have your old VCR hooked up to the coax jack on your new LCD display, it doesn’t matter one bit if the audio and video are delayed by 800 milliseconds because you’d never know (the audio and video would play in sync and you’d have absolutely no way of knowing that the entire process was lagging by a fraction of a second). However, this latency completely destroys communication between the Zapper, the NES, and the events on the screen.
This extremely precise timing was possible (and consistent) because Nintendo designers could count on the refresh rate of the CRT being consistent. CRT displays use an electron gun to activate phosphors in screen hidden behind the display glass. This gun sweeps across the screen from the top to the bottom at a very dependable frequency. Even though it happens faster than the human eye can detect, every single frame of every single video game or television broadcast is displayed as if some hyperactive robot is drawing it line by line from the top to the bottom.
By contrast, modern digital displays make all the changes simultaneously. This isn’t to say that modern televisions don’t have progressive and interlaced video (because they most certainly do), but the lines aren’t rendered one at a time (however quickly). They are displayed all at once in their respective standards. As for why this matters to the Zapper, the software driving the Zapper’s detection algorithm needs that line-by-line refresh to pull off the timing tricks which make it possible to have 5 ducks on the screen and successful hit detection all within 500 milliseconds or so.
Set off in Zurrieq, Malta late last year, this impressive chain-reaction firework is believed to be the biggest single firework ever, although it’s rivaled by a display in Kounosu, Japan from 2014. The Daily Mail has more details about the Matla display. YouTube user Janet Reed originally captured the massive single firework as well some of the show around it (the single firework begins at 1:36):
Tofugu (where my wife Carla is exec editor) has a great article about the 20 best anime movies not made by Studio Ghibli (Totoro, Spirited Away).
https://youtu.be/xGOneMdjpw4
19. REDLINE
Often times, "anime" is defined by its lack of motion. Redline punches this "limited animation" concept in its motionless face. It's easily the busiest, most overstimulating animated film we've ever seen.
A daredevil speedster named JP enters the Redline, a high-stakes, weaponized space race that nearly took his life. But first, he's gotta get back into racing shape to challenge the best in the universe with pure speed and guts. Along his comeback trail, JP meets Cherry-Boy Hunter, a young female competitor who unearths old memories. Can JP return to form in time for the Redline? Is Cherry-Boy Hunter friend or foe? Can JP survive the intergalactic conspiracy that saturates the race?
Sure, Redline's plot plays like a giant stone soup of anime tropes: space, vehicles, aliens, and giant pompadours. Check, check, and check. The film took seven years and 100,000 hand drawings to create, all that hard work paid off. Down to its pop-art presentation, Redline is anime pulp fiction at its best. What it lacks in depth, it makes up for with an adrenaline-fueled circus of speed and action.
This is apparently a Chinese pirated edition of Star Wars: Episode III, but dubbed using the English subtitles offered on that disc. It's amazing, not least because the voice actors are so good I thought for a moment it might have been a TV segment with Ewan, Hayden, Samuel and co. [via]
OBI WAN
The front is a lemon avenue flying straightly
More:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAoOOqOKLW8
Here's clips from Episode II:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJYoIMsAbgw
The English subtitles on Chinese Star Wars discs are already legendary as the supposed source of the Do Not Want meme; the scene thusly subtitled is easy to guess.
We dropped out of hyperspace somewhere near the edge of the outer rim. I was looking at the scanner, so I was the first to see the freighter. It was inside the Ghost Nebula, and appeared to be disabled.
The comm crackled to life. Between bursts of static, we heard “…distress … oxygen … please help…”
Our mechanic wanted to help the ship. I was convinced it was a trap. Before we could come to blows about it, the captain ordered me to run another scan, which confirmed that the ship was, indeed, venting oxygen into space.
“I’m a droid,” I reminded them, “I don’t care about oxygen the way you meat sacks do. Pull up close to the ship and I’ll go investigate.”
Cap pulled us up alongside the freighter. We attempted to raise them on the comm, but they were silent. A quick scan showed weak life signs. “If anyone is alive in there, they won’t be much longer,” the medic said. The captain decided that we’d connect our airlocks, so we could evac the survivors more quickly. I volunteered to go first into the ship. I’m big, I don’t need to breathe, and I’m built to kill, so if it was a trap, I wanted to be first in, to protect my crewmates.
The airlock attached and I cycled through. The ship was dark inside, except for flickering lights.
“IG, what do you see?” The captain asked me.
“It looks empty, at least on this deck,” I replied.
“What’s the oh-two situation?”
“Irrelevant to my existence,” I said. I sometimes make jokes. I’m not very good at it and my timing is usually bad, they tell me.
“Just check the level, Iggy,” he said. That’s not my name. My designation is IG-426. They call me Iggy. Biologicals are curious that way.
I looked at a scanner. “It’s … one hundred percent. The ship is perfectly pressurized,” I said. Before the captain could reply, a group of humanoids revealed themselves, blasters drawn.
In under a second, I scanned them all and identified their leader. In the next second, I raised my disruptor rifle. Before the third second had ticked by, I fired.
+++
Last night, I started a Star Wars RPG campaign with some friends. We are playing as a small rebel cell, five years before the events of Rogue One. My character is a reprogrammed imperial assassin droid (yes, because I think K-2SO is cool) who was given to this cell by a mysterious Rebel agent, which allowed me to drop into the campaign three sessions after it began, and fits into my real life situation of knowing one of the players very well, and being barely acquainted (until now) with the rest of the players.
I haven’t been a PC in a campaign in years, and I’ve never played a Star Wars RPG until now, and I’m already looking forward to playing next week, because it was so much fun. We’re using the Edge of the Empire and Age of Rebellion rule books. Our GM has us focused on narrative, instead of tactical minis combat, which is my favorite way to play any RPG, because it’s about the collaborative storytelling experience, rather than the boardgame experience.
It’s a really fun system, and there’s a ton of material that I’m looking forward to reading and incorporating into my character. I shouldn’t like the primary dice mechanic, because it requires proprietary dice, but it’s so well-designed, I don’t mind. Check it out:
The core mechanic of the Age of Rebellion is the skill check. At times, the GM will have the characters roll pools of dice to determine whether their actions succeed or fail. Whenever you roll a skill check, you compare a pool of “positive dice” and their results against the results of a pool of “negative dice.” Positive dice help your character accomplish a task or achieve beneficial side effects. These dice may reflect his innate talents or abilities, special training, superior resources, or other advantages that he can apply to the specific task. Negative dice represent the forces that would hinder or disrupt him, such as the inherent difficulty of the task, obstacles, additional risks, or another character’s efforts to thwart the task.
If your character’s successes () outnumber his failures (), the action succeeds. However, the situations of Age of Rebellion are rarely simple, and the game’s custom dice do more than determine whether an action succeeds or fails. Even as the dice indicate whether an action succeeds or fails, they determine if the character gains any Advantage () or suffers any Threat () as the result of the attempt. The sheer number of possibilities provides opportunities to narrate truly memorable action sequences and scenes. Nearly anything can happen in the heat of the moment; even a single shot fired at an Imperial Star Destroyer might hit some critical component that results in its destruction. Players and GMs alike are encouraged to take these opportunities to think about how the symbols can help move the story along and add details and special effects that create action-packed sessions.
Even for someone like me, who has the legendary ability to roll dice in a statistically improbable and terrible way, the dice don’t get in the way of the fun, and instead of simply deciding if you succeed or fail, they sort of land you on a spot that’s in a spectrum between total success and rolling two 19s in a row doesn’t get you out of the acid pit for some reason not that I’m saying Chris Perkins deliberately murdered Aeofel because he is a monster.
cough
I really owe a lot to Rogue One, because it reawakened a love of Star Wars that I’d forgotten I had, after the disappointment from the prequels and the cluttered mess of the EU that never managed to land on me in a meaningful way. But after seeing Rogue One twice, The Force Awakens twice, and playing in this game last night, I have this desire to not just watch the original Star Wars films again (get the despecialized editions if you can because they are amazing), but to also dig into Rebels.
This bundle is here to help – not only to create the game you’ve been dreaming of, but to get your act together while you create! You’ll find software to build, design, organize, and secure your ideas. And then, who knows? Maybe your game will be the next big Humble hit!
Pay $1 or more for Clickteam Fusion 2.5, PyxelEdit Beta, and Spriter Pro.
Pay more than the average price and you’ll also get the Clickteam Fusion HTML5 exporter, Marmoset Hexels 2, a 1-year subscription to Todoist Premium, and PICO-8.
Pay $10 or more for all of that plus Spriter Pro Art Packs, Spriter Pro RPG Heroes and Radius Wing SHMUP Art Packs, a SpriteIlluminator Lifetime License, Voxatron, and a 1-year subscription to 1Password Families for new users.
I can help if you want to try it. Whenever you use Regedit, you have to be extra careful. Take a baseline FPS reading first.
Windows 10 was supposed to be a gamer-friendly operating system, and I suppose if you compare it to Windows 8 then it did succeed. But there are a handful of quirks that are more annoying than helpful, like the Game DVR feature. The new feature in Windows 10, called Game Bar, makes it very easy to record your gameplay for use in YouTube videos and what not. This feature is provided by the native Xbox App that comes installed on Windows 10 (which some consider to be bloatware). The problem is that Game DVR, also called Xbox DVR at times,...
This is important, learn the better way to use your tablet safely.
Many of us use our phones, tablets, and computers day in and day out. Unfortunately, the postures we hold when we’re using these devices are contributing to serious problems for our spines. While it’s unrealistic to suggest we stop using our electronics entirely, there are some easy changes out there. By taking a load off your neck, shoulders, and back, you’ll see immediate improvements in your posture and health. Not only that, but you will also be saving yourself from tons of musculoskeletal problems down the road. Why does posture matter? Which gadgets are causing real problems? And, most importantly, how...
A thirty year old joke by Will McLean in the first edition of the Dungeon Masters Guide features a group of fantasy adventurer types crowded around a table playing an RPG where they pretend to be "workers and students in an industrialized and technological society."
(more…)
Click through to see titles. Lots of game development books
Code your own games with Humble and Apress in our newest book bundle! You’ll get titles like The Game Maker’s Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners, The Business of iOS App Development, and Program Arcade Games: With Python and Pygame. Go forth and develop!
The ingenious design of the dippy bird heat engine is revealed in this thermal imaging video.
The liquid inside dippy birds is called Dichloromethane. Commenters who were alarmed about the grave hazards posed by laser landscape projectors will enjoy complaining about the dangers of dippy birds. From Wikipedia: "Symptoms of acute overexposure to dichloromethane via inhalation include difficulty concentrating, dizziness, fatigue, nausea, headaches, numbness, weakness, and irritation of the upper respiratory tract and eyes. More severe consequences can include suffocation, loss of consciousness, coma, and death."
Yoda's never been so funky as he is in this amazing 4-minute music video for "SEAGULLS! (Stop It Now)," a masterpiece from the Bad Lip Reading project, whose virtuosity is so great that "lip reading" a puppet doesn't even seem like a cheat. (via Waxy)
This was in teh humble bundle I recently picked up
While at Make: for many years, I had the pleasure of working with and getting to know Shawn Thorsson, author of Make: Props and Costume Armor. Shawn was one of the first serious amateur prop builders that we featured. He and one of his Space Marine costumes even made it onto the cover of the magazine. When Shawn launches a project, he’s like a torpedo in the water. You either get out of the way or you prepare for impact. You can feel this passion for what he does (and how he does it), in person, on his project blog, and thankfully, in the pages of this wonderful new book from Make:.
I love the way Make: Props and Costume Armor is organized. There is an amazing set of sci-fi costume armor and a prop gun (from a comic book called The Final Hunt) on the front cover and a Wolf Warrior costume on the back. The bulk of the book is taken up with each chapter detailing one of the elements of each costume. If you make all of the projects from the book, you will end up with these two very different types of weapons and armor, one sci-fi, one fantasy.
Each chapter examines a different prop-making technique, from vaccumforming to 3D modeling using Pepakura software, to working with EVA foam, and finally, finishing, painting, and weathering. While the book is an amazing introduction and beginner’s guide to prop construction, the text is peppered throughout with enough expert tips and tricks to make this relevant to prop makers and cosplayers of any level of expertise. And Shawn’s trademark snarky and quick-witted sense of humor perfectly leavens the writing, making this book as fun to read as it is educational.
Make: Props and Costume Armor Shawn Thorsson
Maker Media
2016, 296 pages, 8 x 9.7 x o.5 inches (softcover)
$18 Buy Astronomy on Amazon
An introduction to DM crafting and some of the more popular game terrain YouTube channels.
How one maker created an incredible castle-themed dungeon master screen for D&D.
) outnumber his failures (
), the action succeeds. However, the situations of Age of Rebellion are rarely simple, and the game’s custom dice do more than determine whether an action succeeds or fails. Even as the dice indicate whether an action succeeds or fails, they determine if the character gains any Advantage (
) or suffers any Threat (
) as the result of the attempt. The sheer number of possibilities provides opportunities to narrate truly memorable action sequences and scenes. Nearly anything can happen in the heat of the moment; even a single shot fired at an Imperial Star Destroyer might hit some critical component that results in its destruction. Players and GMs alike are encouraged to take these opportunities to think about how the symbols can help move the story along and add details and special effects that create action-packed sessions.
You have to see this amazing Death Star drone mod! It's huge and it's taking on planets and rebel fighters in this video from Flitetest.
We still can't wrap our heads around how this guy is running the actual Atari version of <em>Donkey Kong</em> using only standard Minecraft blocks. The post Super-Hacker Builds Atari 2600 Emulator... In Minecraft?! appeared first on WIRED.
If you want a plane that can survive just about anything, open your wallet. The post Mr. Trump: Here’s Why You Really Want to Spend $4 Billion on Air Force One appeared first on WIRED.
This animated short explores the beauty (and frustration) of the unexpected The post Watch an Absurdly Lovely Film Dedicated to the Unexpected appeared first on WIRED.
Get your dice rolls under control with one of these handy DIY gaming accessories.
How much havoc can a sore loser wreak? Legally, not much. The post If Trump Loses But Doesn't Concede, He Still Loses appeared first on WIRED.
