Since you created this petition I want to ask you personally Warp:
Did you try out a Virtual Reality headset with all the useless argumented reality features yourself?
I'm not accusing you of anything, I'm just wondering if you can support your opinion with your own experiences.
I have used the Oculus Rift development kit version 1, but other than that, no, I haven't tried the retail versions of any of these new VR headsets.
I am basing my opinion on demonstration videos and critical reviews, as well as articles like this one. Reading that article is very illuminating because it reveals something I see as a problem with emphasizing the Augmented Reality portions of the headsets too much: It is giving people the false impression that AR is the only way to use the headset (as seems to be the case with the author of that article.) In other words, that you must rearrange your room and give space for all the tracking sensors and for yourself to move in a specified area, for the device to work. Many critics are in fact comparing it to the infamous Kinect, with all of its problems (requires a lot of space, is inconvenient and sometimes impractical because of it, and sometimes has even resulted in accidents with people hurting themselves, or property damage.)
While I recognize that probably the most expensive part of a VR headset is its display, I still think that these companies have spent way too much development time on the augmented reality features, which can be seen in the higher price of the device. And the major problem with this is that the augmented reality features are pretty much useless from a gamer's point of view (because nobody will be playing games for hours by standing up and walking around inside a room.)
My petition is for them to develop a more bare-bones version, a version optimized for practical games, existing games (such as Half-Life 2, the Portal series, the Doom series, and so on), which would hopefully be cheaper for the end consumer. We really don't need the ancillary augmented reality stuff. Stereo vision and head tracking is enough.
I created this petition for the big companies to make cheaper and more practical versions of their Virtual Reality headsets, with all the useless "augmented reality" stuff removed, ie. leaving them only with the stereo display and head tracking. The "augmented reality" capabilities are way too niche, limit game design too much, is impractical (because it requires a large room space, and rearranging the room), and can even cause accidents and property damage when people stumble onto furniture and trip over. And all this only makes the virtual reality headsets more expensive.
If you agree with the petition, feel free to sign and share.
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/cheaper-virtual-reality-headsets-without-augmented
Might be unnecessary to repeat it, but anyway, learning from the AGDQ, if there's a chance that the viewers might not be aware of what exactly is running the game, and what is controlling it, a brief explanation could be useful and nice. Also, saying which console is being used (and that it really is a real console, and not eg. an emulator, or a modded console, or a modded game).
It would be nice if the console (and tasbot being directly connected to it) would be shown on camera, but I don't know if that's feasible due to their physical setup.
But what do I get in return? Just constant nags that, oh, you did the run on Easy. How DARE you do the run on Easy. This run is shit because you did it on Easy. What's that, you have REASONS for doing the run on Easy? Screw you, I obviously know the game MUCH BETTER then you, even though I don't know anything about this game. Over and over and over and over and OVER AND OVER AND OVER again.
If people want to see a run done on the highest difficulty, you are not going to exactly convince them otherwise with that kind of attitude. Hostility is not the answer.
There's a difference between what we find "entertaining", and what the wider public (mostly consisting of gamers) finds "entertaining".
I can definitely agree with this, but I'd like to think that a casual viewer would be more impressed by the speed of a boss being taken down.
I'd say that in many cases (perhaps even the majority?) that may be true only if the viewer is not aware of the game's difficulty settings, and which setting the run used. I am convinced that in many cases if they then learned that the run was actually run on the easiest difficulty, it would be a letdown, a disappointment. The impressiveness of the run would be diminished by the fact that there was not as much challenge to it. Sure, the boss might have been beaten faster, but not because of superhuman skill, but because the boss was crippled by a difficulty setting favoring the player. In essence, the player got a handicap. A handicap that a superhuman player should not need.
It's not impressive to beat the computer at its weakest. It's impressive to beat it at its best.
I still remember when I made a joke post about being progressive and embracing the new full-HD fad, by making all our videos 1080p.
Back then it was a joke. I didn't actually expect it to become a reality.
I would like to repeat a point I made earlier.
There's a difference between what we find "entertaining", and what the wider public (mostly consisting of gamers) finds "entertaining".
Because most of us have seen hundreds of TASes, sometimes even dozens of TASes of the exact same game, we have a rather skewed perspective on what is "entertaining". To many of us "needless" repetition in a TAS is "boring" because we have seen so many TASes, and we get tired of seeing the same thing again and again. But that's not how the casual member of the wider public sees it. They are most often seeing the TAS of that particular game for the first time, and they may have seen only a handful of TASes overall.
Enemies/bosses having more HP, thus requiring a few hits more, is not by necessity more "boring" to such a casual viewer (especially someone who has played the game.) It may feel like it to us, but as said, we have a skewed view.
Remember that those were just my personal opinions, and I'll even apologize for them today. I wasn't particularly in the right state of mind when I wrote them. It's a bit too late for me to edit them now with all the quoting and discussion, but just keep in mind that none of them are actually going to go into practice.
I did indeed interpret it as being a serious (perhaps even semi-official) proposal for the new guidelines. I'm sorry I jumped to conclusions.
I don't think that an easy-difficulty run should obsolete an existing hard-difficulty one (with possible, but rare, exceptions, if there are good reasons for it). However, there may be merit in having both as separate branches, if both have something to offer. (After all, this is pretty common eg. in Quake speedrunning.)
If a game has only an easy-difficulty TAS, and later somebody makes a hardest-difficulty one, then creating a new branch for the latter should be at least seriously considered.
* An easier difficulty run has to remove boring repetition to obsolete a harder difficulty run, unless it's a Vault run, in which case it just has to be faster
* A harder difficulty run has to be noticeably more entertaining to obsolete an easier difficulty run, unless it's still not entertaining enough to make Moons, in which case it would be rejected for being slower
This looks to me like the complete reversal of the principle that has been in place so far. In other words, this new guideline actually prefers easy difficulty over hard difficulty in almost every case (and is, in fact, quite contradictory to the statement that "usually, this is the hardest difficulty").
I said this in an earlier post, and I say it again: If the only reason for choosing the easiest difficulty is that it makes the run faster, that's not good enough of a reason. Again, we want to see the god-like perfect player mop the floor with the computer at its best, not at its weakest. There is no challenge in beating the game at the easiest difficulty level.
Beating a game on its easiest difficulty is just cheap. More egregiously, obsoleting an existing hard-difficulty run with an easy-difficulty one feels even cheaper. There is no challenge. It's just cheap. This complete reversal of the principle that we should always beat the computer at its best, at the hardest difficulty, seems like an affront to everything that's cool about TASing.
Moreover, there is concrete evidence (given in this thread) that the general gamer public expects games to be beaten on their hardest difficulty, and are disappointed when they are not.
I don't like this at all.
I don't consider those MLP games at all. Reskinning a game, or simply putting MLP graphics on a game that has zero to do with MLP:FiM doesn't make it an MLP game. It makes it a completely unrelated game with an MLP:FiM skin.
Which reminds me of the classic joke:
An architect, a physicist and a mathematician are given a 4-meters long rope and the task to enclose the maximum possible area of ground with it. The one who encloses the largest area wins.
The architect, being used to rectangular shapes, makes a square with the rope. The area of the square is 1 m2.
The physicist is smarter, so he makes a circle with the rope, as well as he can. The enclosed area is 4/pi, ie. about 1.27 m2.
The mathematician then takes the rope and lazily makes a nondescript shape with it. He doesn't even use the full length of the rope, making it cut itself somewhere. He the declares: "I win."
The others are puzzled. "What do you mean you win? Clearly your area is much smaller than mine" says the physicist.
The mathematician then steps inside the shape he made and says: "I define myself to be outside."
At some point I realized that the Cantor's diagonal argument technically speaking is a demonstration that the set of all possible infinite strings of digits is uncountable. (If we assumed that we can enumerate all possible infinite strings of digits, the argument shows that the assumption leads to a contradiction.)
Technically speaking that in itself doesn't yet prove that the set of reals is uncountable. We would still need to prove that the set of reals has the same size as the set of all possible infinite strings of digits.
I'm not completely sure that's trivial, given that some different strings of digits represent the same real number.
I have become convinced that there will never be an actually good MLP:FiM game. They will all be just crappy simplistic flash games for kids. Forever.
Which is a shame, really. There would be a lot of potential.
Even though I have no idea what kind of game this is or what the run does, I would like to ask if this conforms to my favorite principle of "end the input where no further input can make the ending be reached faster".
Living permanently with someone else might not be the absolutely problem-free solution either. Time and again I hear from married friends who are very happy in their marriage and wouldn't change it for anything, yet still sometimes long for just a bit of alone time, which they usually never get anymore (especially after having kids.) Constantly living with someone, even an entire family, every day, 7 days a week, for years, also brings its stressful situations, where you just would want to be left alone for a bit, but you are pretty much forced to care and pay attention to the others, pretty much constantly. Finding a good balance might be impossible.
This might delve a bit into the human condition. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
In the subject of living alone, I don't think anybody can beat me. I have lived alone for longer than some of the visitors of this forum have lived period.
And yes, it sucks.
So I have quite a lot of experience on living alone (and how much it sucks), but unfortunately I have no experience nor advice to give on how to fix that.
The only advice that I can give, from experience, is that you should fix it sooner than later. The older you get, the harder it gets to fix it. (I have the hypothesis that the older you become, the more people will instinctively not approach you on their own because they assume that you already have a social circle of your own, probably even a family. People are instinctively attracted to younger people. And I don't mean "attracted" like that. I mean socially. As in wanting to make acquaintances and friends. Older people neither instinctively approach other people, nor are approached by other people.)
So fix it before it's too late. Unfortunately I don't know how, but try your best.
Because so many people sung praises for it, I once gave Adventure Time a chance, and watched the first two seasons.
I didn't get it. I found it mostly boring and pointless, and didn't find much enjoyment or idea in it. And hey, I'm a quite open-minded person when it comes to cartoons (I'm a rather avid fan of MLP:FiM after all). I know that people say that it becomes better in later seasons, and in fact I tried watching a few episodes from those later seasons, but I still found it mostly boring, uninteresting and pointless. I just couldn't see what other people are seemingly seeing.
On a completely different tangent... Not really a cartoon series, but I recently watched the Pixar film Inside Out. I don't know exactly why, but this is by far one of the best movies I have seen in a long, long time. Not just animated movies, but movies period. Maybe it's not for everybody, but somehow it resonated with me just perfectly. I love this movie. I actually went and bought it in BluRay, not only just to be able to watch it again, but as a kind of gesture of appreciation for a masterpiece. I don't often buy movies, but this one I just had to; it felt like the right thing to do. It may seems like just a silly Pixar's kids movie... but I don't know, it just resonates with me.
Now I'm a bit confused. Let's recap:
Premise: 21/n is irrational for any rational value of n > 1.
This means that for 21/n to be rational, n must be irrational.
We can even give a formula for what n must be. In other words, if we have:
21/n = r
where r is rational, then
n = log(2)/log(r), ie. n = logr(2).
From this, in conjunction with the premise, it follows that n cannot be rational. (Any rational value of n would give an irrational result, which r is not, as we established r to be rational.)
Thus it follows that if logr(2) is larger than 1, it must be irrational for any rational value of r.
Is there a flaw in this deduction?
In other words, if I want 21/n to be x, then the required value of n is the logarithm base-x of 2 (ie. logx(2).) Makes sense.
Which, in conjunction to the previous postulate, means that logx(2) is never rational for rational values of x?
