INRIKES UTRIKES POLITIK EKONOMI KULTUR KRÖNIKA
EKONOMI PUBLISHED 2041-10-08
##KROPPSLIGT MÖNSTER KLART ###INC Universities Announce Major Breakthrough in Reproduction of Atlantean ‘Physical Video’, Sets Stage for Mass-Commercialization
TEXT: JANNE SUNDLING
DUBLIN - Top Materials Sciences and Engineering Universities in the UKOBI and CNK have announced today the successful recreation of Atlantean “Physical Video” in a proof-of-concept prototype, following an in-depth nanostructure analysis of the tablet’s high-resolution, handheld 2.5D pinscreen display. Operating on a major Irish-Nordic Confederation grant, the University Partnership was capable of identifying the unique composition of the pinscreen material (which is capable of transforming the polarization state of light), effectively reverse-engineering a metamaterial nanoparticle with the same optical and RF-spectra properties. The teams of graduate students were then able to take their unique blend of metamaterial nanoparticles (which have since been patented as Mignolecules®), and were able to leverage a combination of plasma-enhanced chemical vapor and Royal Commonwealth Naval Army metallic beam deposition technologies used for additive manufacturing to construct sheets of metamaterial lattice around a fiber optic core. When inductively powered by a tiny commercial Li-air battery and a graphene-based photonic integrated circuit, the metamaterial outer layer can be programmed remotely to change the frequency, colours, and even the direction of light. Further experimentation with Mignolecules® on Univers
... keep reading on reddit ➡An open letter to all video game, movie, what-have-you vehicle/thing designers:
The reason your favorite vehicle or tool (car, plane, tank, ship, gun, medieval weapon, etc.) looks cool is because it was designed to function well, not to look cool.
Now, there are two obvious caveats to this:
- Cars
Cars are built for a market, and of course the auto manufacturers want as much demand as possible for their designs. Sometimes cars look cool even though they don't perform. But, even then, there are not too many features on any car you care to name that literally don't function at all (rear wings on Lamborghini Countach... oops). Compare this to renders or video game cars with, shall we say, extraneous... bits. You can actually see this in real life, where people will add all sorts of aero bits to their cars to imitate a race car, but without the thought, wind tunnel time, and engineering that leads to those race cars.
- The Rule of Cool
Media is made for a market, and of course the producers of said media want as much demand as possible for their product. This is applied as a broad excuse for designs to obviously have no hope to be a working product. And no, I'm not talking about flying cars or hoverboards. I'm talking about things like Super Star Destroyers, kilometers long, with more firepower than all of current Earth, having exposed bridges. Tanks with 4 sets of treads. Guns with all sorts of extra angles and what looks like 3 barrels. Swords with nonsensical hilts and serrated edges.
Now, don't read me wrong here. I think there are some super cool imagined designs of things. Cloud's sword, even though by real world standards is dumb af, is an icon. The starships in Halo (UNSC and Covenant) are instantly recognizable, but also pretty sensible. The spinners in Blade Runner feel like real cars.
What these things have in common is the features they use to look cool are real world features. The designers understood something more than the bare aesthetics of what they were designing.
Make something that works first, then happens to look cool, rather than the other way around.
When selective breeding occurs in domestic animals, drastic changes happen. The body is reformed over several generations of selective breeding in the absence of any natural pressures. Evolution causes changes due to environmental pressures; Birds of Paradise gain their incredible plumage from the pickiness of females, hyenas gain their massive muscular structures from a need to take down large prey.
In both these examples, form follows function. The King Bird of Paradise flashes his brilliant green throat, the hyena crushes bone with powerful jaws. In domestic animals, humans are the pressure. Huskies have broad chests to pull, dachshunds have long bodies to plunge down badger burrows, and terriers have short, agile bodies to chase rats.
In every single breed, this is acknowledged. Greyhounds have long legs and large eyes to hunt hares. The Pyrenees guards livestock with its massive figure and shaggy coat.
There is a singular breed group that is given a cultural exception: the bully breeds.
However, let’s look at the American Staffordshire Terrier and American Pit Bull Terrier, two closely related breeds bred for the singular purpose of dog fighting, to see how form follows function.
First, let us start with something every zoologist goes to first: the skull.
Here is the American Staffordshire (Here, AST): https://i.imgur.com/PyLMNzj.jpg
and the American Pit Bull Terrier (Here, APBT): https://i.imgur.com/pkcwAyE.jpg
Both skulls are incredibly similar, owing to the breeds’ close relationship (the Staffordshire gave rise to the APBT in the early 1900s).
Now let’s look at their functions.
Both breeds have massive saggital crests, a uniform indicator in nature of massive jaw muscles used for crushing. This ridge of bone running lengthwise along the brain case can be found in the following animals known for their bites:
Gorillas: https://boneclones.com/images/store-product/product-313-main-main-big-1415039569.jpg
Spotted Hyenas: https://boneclones.com/images/store-product/product-317-main-original-1612812969.jpg
Siberian Tiger: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/31I7UnpaTuL.jpg
This is where massive masseter muscles attach from the jaw, like huge rubber bands of muscle, allowing greater jaw strength. In herbivores like the gorilla, this is used for chewing roots as the pressure is redirected to the grinding molars. In hyenas, tigers and pit bulls, the pressure is redirected onto the shearing carnassial tooth. This tooth is used
... keep reading on reddit ➡
What would be a good design methodology for smth like a Souls-like combat system? More specifically: how would you go about designing such an animation-based game without starting from the art? As in actually prototyping the game (in a game engine) without an artist/animator.
Would you, for example, shape the hitboxes (colliders) around approximations of character shapes or weapon shapes, even though ideally we don’t want to limit mechanical creativity based on a vague and ultimately borrowed idea of an aesthetic? Would you design those hit boxes from a purely abstract place of what is the most relevant mechanically, and then see what, if anything (?!), fits that? Definitely the answer is somewhere in between and I’m curious if anyone here has worked on such a thing. Thank you.
The common naming convention in the Clojure community is when converting input a to output b as a->b. However if a and b are more or less the same entity say a user-profile that comes from an API request and then you convert that into a form that is needed for the DB layer and then again converting it back to a form that is needed in API responses. How do you name such functions?
request-user-profile->db-user-profile seems repetitive where you repeat the basic entity name multiple times. Some small libraries use the convention of from-entity-type or to-entity-type in their coercion namespaces which is ok for small libs but for complex codebases where data can come from various places and go back, multiple utilities are needed to convert from one form to another.
What conventions do you follow?
