Monday, March 30, 2020
Yoúr accoúnt has sígns of hackíng and blockíng. Please contact wíth Secúríty Department of blogger.com
Í have very bad news for yoú.
07/01/2020 - on thís day í hacked yoúr OS and got fúll access to yoúr accoúnt avvaitamilsangam.noida@blogger.com
So, yoú can change the password, yes... Bút my malware íntercepts ít every tíme.
How í made ít:
Ín the software of the roúter, throúgh whích yoú went onlíne, was a vúlnerabílíty.
Í júst hacked thís roúter and placed my malícíoús code on ít.
When yoú went onlíne, my trojan was ínstalled on the OS of yoúr devíce.
After that, í made a fúll copy of yoúr dísk (í have all yoúr address book, hístory of víewíng sítes, all fíles, phone númbers and addresses of all yoúr contacts).
A month ago, í wanted to lock yoúr devíce and ask for a not bíg amoúnt of btc to únlock.
Bút í looked on the sítes that yoú regúlarly vísít, and í was shocked by what í saw!!!
Í'm talk yoú aboút sítes for adúlts.
Í want to say - yoú are a BíG pervert. Yoúr fantasy ís shífted far away from the normal coúrse!
And í got an ídea...
Í took a screenshot of an adúlt sítes where yoú had fún (yoú únderstand what í mean, ríght?).
After that, í took a screenshot of yoúr mastúrbatíon (úsíng the camera of yoúr devíce) and glúed them together.
Túrned oút amazíng! Yoú are so spectacúlar!
Í'm know that yoú woúld not líke to show these screenshots to yoúr fríends, relatíves or colleagúes.
Ít wíll be a húge shame for yoú!
Í thínk $1490(USD) ís a very, very small amoúnt for my sílence.
Besídes, í have been spyíng on yoú for so long, havíng spent a lot of tíme!
Pay ONLY ín Bítcoíns!
My BTc wallet: 1HBxxRcb38Q8xmfsGsJAqvgHi4GZBzwM6K
Yoú do not know how to úse bítcoíns?
Enter a qúery ín any search engíne: "how to replenísh btc wallet".
Ít's extremely easy!
Í wíll gíve yoú exactly two days (48 hoúrs) to make thís payment.
As soon as yoú open thís letter, the tímer wíll work and tíme wíll pass.
After payment, my vírús and dírty screenshots wíth yoúr mastúrbatíon wíll be self-destrúct aútomatícally.
Íf í do not receíve from yoú the specífíed amoúnt, then yoúr devíce wíll be locked, and all yoúr contacts wíll receíve a screenshots wíth yoúr "enjoy".
Í hope yoú únderstand yoúr sítúatíon.
- Do not try to fínd and destroy my vírús! (All yoúr data, fíles and screenshots ís already úploaded to a remote server);
- Do not try to contact me (thís ís ímpossíble, sender's address was randomly generated);
- Varíoús secúríty servíces wíll not help yoú; formattíng a dísk or destroyíng a devíce wíll not help, sínce yoúr data ís already on a remote server.
P.S. Yoú are not my síngle víctím. so, í gúarantee yoú that í wíll not dístúrb yoú agaín after payment!
Í also ask yoú to regúlarly úpdate yoúr antívírúses ín the fútúre. Thís way yoú wíll no longer fall ínto a símílar sítúatíon.
Do not hold evíl! í júst do my job.
Have a níce day!
Saturday, March 28, 2020
Chaikin Curves
Sometimes I want to draw Voronoi or similar polygons in a rounded form:
I use a process called Chaikin's Algorithm for this.
Start with a polygon:
Mark the midpoints of each side:
Then construct quadratic Bezier curves. Each original vertex becomes the control point of the quadratic Bezier, and the two adjacent midpoints become the two end points of the Bezier:
Super simple to implement! If you don't have a quadratic Bezier drawing function, you can use the De Casteljau Algorithm to subdivide the original line into smaller lines. Repeat this until you get line segments that are fairly close to the quadratic Bezier.
I used this for this project and this project.
Satellite, Short Film, Review And Interview
DE: Black Heart Might Be The Best Kabal
At first, I was afraid, I was petrified. |
That's right folks, you heard it here first. While I was balls deep in Flayed Skull in the beginning of all the rumors and previews, but now I think I might be some kind of Black Heart convert. OK, hear me out, I can justify it I think.
Here is my reasoning:
- The 6+++ bonus literally affects everything, from flesh to metal, right from the get-go to the rest of the game. You always have it.
- You don't need additional Archon tax to access the best Strategems, Warlord traits and artifacts in the book. Instead of paying Archon tax, you're one step closer to buying a Warrior unit in a Venom.
- With the improvement to our weapons, our damage certainly went up for the points. However, one thing remains unchanged and that's our durability. Spirit Stones on everything will help keep our important pieces alive longer so we don't attrition as hard.
- The Living Muse artifact makes that one Archon the single biggest damage amplifier in the codex (gives all Black Heart units within 6" of the Warlord re-roll 1s to Wound). It affects every weapon type and is super good, but you have to walk around like a baller.
Just one little note about Writ of the Living Muse: It's a huge damage amplifier but keeping everything that I can within 6" of the damn Archon might be a huge challenge. It also makes that particular HQ a huge pain in everyone's ass and everyone is going to be gunning for him. However, I'll just have to play him well and use all the long-range firepower that I have to really deliver some results in the opening phases of the game. Otherwise, I'm kind of screwed!
Now when I look back at Flayed Skull, I think that the 3" extra move is the single best bonus it provides. The re-roll 1s for Rapid Fire only really kick in with Splinter Rifles and if I'm not taking many Venoms or Warriors double-tapping, I'm not getting the best out of it. The ignore cover part is also really nice since there's always some crap out there like CW Rangers, but I've been thinking back to all the 8th games where cover was game-changing. Can't really think of times where it decided the game if I'm to be honest.
With that being said, I could argue that Agents of Vect and Labyrinthine Cunning was enough to win me over, but the sustained durability of all our units really did it for me. Not paying additional Archon tax means that I can fit in more units and I think my next game will be full Kabal of the Black Heart.
Case in point, I'm going to roll with this in my Weds game this week:
2000 // 7 CP
Black Heart Battalion +3 CP
HQ:
Archon, Agonizer, Blaster = 91
Archon, VB, Blaster = 89
TROOP:
5x Warriors, Blaster = 47
Venom = 65
112
5x Warriors, Blaster = 47
Raider, Dark Lance = 85
132
10x Warriors, 2x Blaster, Dark Lance = 114
Raider, Dark Lance = 85
199
10x Warriors, 2x Blaster, Dark Lance = 114
Raider, Dark Lance = 85
199
10x Warriors, 2x Blaster, Dark Lance = 114
Raider, Dark Lance = 85
199
10x Warriors, 2x Blaster, Dark Lance = 114
Raider, Dark Lance = 85
199
HEAVY:
Ravager, 3x Dinsintegrators = 125
Ravager, 3x Dinsintegrators = 125
Ravager, 3x Dinsintegrators = 125
+++
Black Heart Air Wing +1 CP
FLYER:
Razorwing, 2x Dinsintegrators = 135
Razorwing, 2x Dinsintegrators = 135
Razorwing, 2x Dinsintegrators = 135
>>>
Firepower:
15 Disintegrators at BS3+
9 Dark Lances at BS3+
10 Blasters at BS3+
2 Blasters at BS2+
1 Splinter Cannon at BS3+
44 Splinter Rifles at BS3+
3 Razorwing Missiles at BS3+
If you look at the firepower arrangement of this list compared to the other ones I've poured out over the last couple of days, I think this is the most optimized and most balanced. I got my command Raider where my Archons can go chill and I'm able to fit an extra Venom in there due to the points gained from not having a third detachment. This also allowed me to take 4x full gunboats instead of the previous 3 while still having my 3/3 ratio of Ravagers and Razorwings.
I think tomorrow, I'll talk about shoving Wyches into someone's face at the start of the game because why not. It only costs 160 points for 20 of them and Succubi are much cheaper now!
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
Dealing with Corona Virus Crisis!
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Monday, March 23, 2020
Super Adventures With The Xbox Game Pass, Part 4
Once again I should point out that I only played most of these games for an hour or so, long enough for me to get distracted by something else and turn them off, but not long enough for me to accurate assess the majority of their content or the intricacies of their gameplay. I'll also point out that these aren't just Xbox games! I played most of them on PC, and a lot of them can be played on lots of systems.
You can find part 1 here: Part 1.
Part 2 is here: Part 2.
Part 3 is here: Part 3.
Read on »
Friday, March 20, 2020
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Oceanhorn For Mac Appstore - Out Now!
Oceanhorn looks great on Mac, especially with Ultra settings! |
We are proud to announce that today we released a remastered version of Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas for Mac Appstore, together with our buddies at FDG Entertainment! Just like in iOS version, the soundtrack is composed by Nobuo Uematsu and Kenji Ito. We did the port for OSX ourselves to make sure everything will be perfect when Mac gamers set on their journey in Arcadia!
Here's the link to the Appstore:
https://itunes.apple.com/fi/app/oceanhorn/id1044375067?mt=12
So if you're a Mac gamer and haven't yet played remastered version of Oceanhorn yet – now's your chance.
Happy adventures!
Verb-noun Vs Noun-Verb
I went to the Roguelike Celebration over the weekend and enjoyed Thomas Biskup's talk about Ultimate ADOM. Among the many interface improvements they're making based on user testing is they're simplifying the controls from the traditional roguelike controls to W A S D + E F. I don't know how roguelike game players will respond to that but I'm a fan! This reminded me of two things from my past, so I thought I'd say a little about those.
Sometime in my teens I got to meet Lord British (Richard Garriott) and Iolo the Bard (David Watson). My mom was shopping, and I went to the computer aisle to browse the games I couldn't afford. Richard and Iolo were talking about Ultima 6. Nobody else was there, so I got to talk to them for half an hour! I learned about OOP, UI, testing, systems thinking, and more. Really cool!
They told me about how they coded puzzles to look for the state of the world (nouns) instead of the player actions (verbs). For example, there was a puzzle where they expected players to cast Telekinesis (ᚩᚣᛕ ORT
POR
YLEM
) on a lever on the other side of a chasm. Instead, during playtesting, they saw that one player killed a party member, tossed the body over the chasm, cast Resurrect (ᛁᛗᚳ IN
MANI
CORP
), then have the party member pull the lever.
Wow! That wasn't something I had ever thought of in the simple games I had written at that age.
Another thing they told me about was the simpler control scheme. Previous Ultimas had a control scheme similar to what roguelike games have. W to wear armor, I to ignite a torch, K to klimb a ladder, D to descend a ladder, B to board a ship, etc. You specify the verb such as J to jimmy a lock and then after that you can choose a noun such as the lock to jimmy.
In Ultima 6 they reversed the order so that the noun came first and then the verb. This meant the game could tell whether you were trying to J jimmy a lock or B board a ship or K klimb a ladder because the game knew that it was a lock or a ship or a ladder. And that meant they didn't need separate keys for these verbs, but instead one key, U use object. There are times when they had multiple verbs for a noun but for the most part they could get away with just one.
I haven't closely followed Ultimate ADOM but I'm guessing they're doing something similar.
The noun-verb thing comes up in another context. After I stopped making games for a living I went into programming language research. My main topic was studying how functional programming languages and object-oriented programming languages can be combined. Something I noticed at the time was that the syntax for functional languages tends to be verb then noun: f(x)
, whereas the syntax for object oriented languages tends to be noun then verb: x.f()
. At some level these can be considered equivalent. You can express with one what you can express with the other. There's a big difference in usability though: auto-complete.
What happens when we auto-complete f(x)
? First we need to know all possible f
that are valid in this context. Since the programmer has just started typing in the expression, any function is valid, and that means there's a very long list to choose from. It takes many keystrokes to pick one. Second we need to know all possible x
that are valid in this context. These are usually local names, so there aren't that many. Knowing the type of f
narrows down the list but the list was already small, so there's not much to gain.
What happens when we auto-complete x.f()
? First we need to know all possible x
. The programmer has just started typing, so any local name is valid, but there aren't many. Typing just one character can narrow down the list to one or two elements. Second we need to know all possible f
that are valid in this context. These are methods defined on the type of x
, so there aren't that many compared to all possible functions. Knowing the type of x
narrows down the list substantially, so there's a lot gained.
The two syntaxes seem equivalent in theory but they aren't in practice. I wonder if people who use regular text editors end up believing the two syntaxes are equivalent, whereas people who use IDEs prefer the object-oriented syntax, even if they're not taking advantage of object-oriented programming (inheritance, subtyping, etc.).
This asymmetry is orthogonal to whether you're using functional or object-oriented programming. It is better for programmers if they can choose from two medium length lists than to have to choose from a very long list (where a lot has to be typed before it's useful) and then a very short list (where not much is gained). You see this in other contexts too. Command line interfaces like DOS, VMS, and Unix shell typically specify a verb first and then the noun(s). GUIs such as Mac and Windows typically specify a noun first by clicking an icon, and then the verb by choosing from the right click menu. In text editors, vim's commands like d0
are verb then text selection (noun), whereas in more conventional text editors (including Emacs) you'd first select some text (the noun) and then invoke a verb like delete. Kakoune is a modal editor that uses noun-verb instead of verb-noun.
In games it seems like it'd be better for players to first choose an object from the environment and then choose from a small set of actions, than to first choose from a large set of actions and then choose from a set of objects. However I haven't surveyed enough games to see what's more common. The next time you're playing a game, look at the structure of commands to see if it's verb-noun or noun-verb.
Crime Pays, As Long As You Don'T Get Caught
Each floor of the building is represented by a 4x4 grid of face down tiles. Players reveal them by moving onto them, or they can play it safe by spending extra movement to peek ahead at an adjacent tile before moving. Movement between tiles is somewhat hampered by wall pieces that are placed between certain tiles (depending on the game setup). The tiles represent different locations in the building, some helpful and some not. Alarms can be tripped, computer rooms can be hacked, but the ultimate goal for each floor is to find two tiles: the safe, and the stairs to the next level.
Once the safe is found, the combination needs to be cracked by rolling dice and matching the numbers to those printed on the tiles in the same row an column as the safe (so even if you get lucky and find the safe and the stairs right away, you still need to explore at least some of the other tiles). The player who opens the safe draws a loot card, which will most likely do something to make movement more difficult, and a tool card, which generally gives a helpful ability.
Lest this all seem too easy, each floor has a wandering guard and a deck of cards that randomly determines his destination. The guard takes the shortest path to his destination tile, then draws another destination and continues moving. If a guard moves onto a player's tile (or vice versa), the player has to discard a stealth token or be caught! Players start the game with three tokens, and once they're gone, if the guard catches you again the whole team loses the game.
It's as much a puzzle as it is a game, with the primary strategy being how to move around the tiles without being caught by the guard. Some tiles set off an alarm when you move on to them, which can be used tactically to change the direction the guard is moving (when an alarm goes off, the guard immediately changes his destination to the tile with the alarm). The characters chosen by the players each have a unique ability as well -- some can move through guards or slow them down.
The graphic design and artwork have a refreshing retro 1960s look, and the "crime caper" theme makes for a nice change from fighting orcs or being driven mad by Lovecraftian horrors.
Rating: 4 (out of 5) You know it's a good cooperative game when after you lose you immediately start talking about what you could have done differently, and then set up to play again.
- Burgle Bros. Official Website
- Burgle Bros. on BoardGameGeek
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
Cancelled: Seminar on "Fundamental Geometry..." on Sunday 22nd March 2020 at Seminar Halls 12&3 at, IIC, New Delhi
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Monday, March 16, 2020
Sunday, March 15, 2020
Storium Basics: Playing Off Each Other
Storium games are stories, and that means that scenes work best when they feel interconnected. It's easy to lose sight of that when you are writing independently, often at different times from the other players. However, it is important to make a conscious effort to tell a continuous story between your moves and those of other players. You're not just writing the tale of your own character - you are writing the story of the challenge, and the scene, overall.
When you write a move, look back at what has happened so far in the scene and call upon it to set the stage for your move or give you things to react to. Is a statue falling over? Show it crashing to the ground. Did a friend just get hit? Call out if he's okay, or go to his aid. Did someone just do something totally awesome? React to it!
Tell the overall story, not just your own actions.
Additionally, I encourage you to leave openings in your moves for others to use. You don't have to call out specific other players to use them - in fact, unless you have a very good relationship with a player I advise against doing that - but it's very helpful to your fellow writers if you raise a situation in your move that you do not resolve or close.
This could be noting that a bandit escaped and you couldn't get him, or that you got kicked into something heavy and now it is starting to fall, or that there's an enemy starting to draw a bead on you and you don't see it, or an enemy wizard casting a spell...as appropriate for the situation and story, of course, but you get the idea. If you are writing something other than the final move of a challenge, leave cues out there people can pick up on.
If someone does leave those cues out there for you, use them. You can resolve them quickly (maybe you call a warning or shoot the enemy who was lining up a shot on the previous player, then go on to do other things), or make them the focus of your move (your entire move is about how you race against time and get there before the shot, maybe, or about the fight between you and the bandit when you get there).
Then, leave your own openings too!
One quick further note on this: This is another reason you want to have detail and story to your moves. It is much easier for people to play off of moves if there are details they can latch on to, and if you show your impact. So when writing moves, Add some detail, and especially remember that if you play a card you need to show what impact the card has on the scene. Don't just explain how your trait is good or bad - show the effect it has, and make us feel it.
For instance, if you're "Clumsy," maybe you trip up and bandits get past you...and run straight for a group of villagers, brandishing their weapons and putting them in danger. If you have "Mighty Muscles," you move a heavy stone in front of the gate...and the bandits struggle with it before being forced to go another way, giving you time to send some guards that way too. Things like that. Don't write the entire battle in one move, of course, but be sure we feel the impact of each move.
Finally, Storium works best if there's at least a little shared writing rights to the player characters—and definitely to the NPCs. Here are my rules - these are what I find work well, but different games may have different rules on this, so be sure to check on this with your narrator.
Player Characters: Players should allow other players to use their character for basic statements, basic questions, or assistance with actions as required for moves without requiring them to ask beforehand. They can always politely request a change if they want, and the writer should be amenable to doing so. If you want to write more heavily for another player character, I advise then asking for permission first, unless you've already established a good collaborative relationship. And, of course, if you're writing for someone else's character, keep their portrayal consistent as you can.
Non-Player Characters: Non-Player characters, especially those established by the Narrator, are generally totally free for players to write in whatever way they choose, within the bounds set by a challenge. I may sometimes provide guidelines for NPCs, but by and large, they're your tools to play with. In rare cases an NPC heavily important to the storyline may be treated more like a player character, but I'll always say so if that's the case.
Those are what work well for me, but again, this is a good thing to check on with your narrator. Some games have a tighter atmosphere where characters need to be more solidly held by their creators, and others have a very loose atmosphere where even more is allowed. Some players, as well, will permit more with their specific character even if the rest of the game is tight.
If in doubt, there's no harm asking.
Want to know more about playing off of each other and leaving things open? Here are some further articles I've written on this and related topics:
Friday, March 13, 2020
Invitation to a Seminar on "Fundamental Geometry..." on Sunday 22nd March 2020 at Seminar Halls 12&3 at, IIC, New Delhi
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