And at the end of the day, everything is very well drawn.
That's one of the things that they nailed. The art of previous-generations MLP is just hideously ugly. It's the kind of style that's supposed to be cute, but comes out as really ugly, approaching the bottom of the uncanny valley.
With Friendship is Magic, however, they got it just right. The style is genuinely cute. I don't think the series would have got any kind of following if they had simply used a G3 style.
Now shoot the bullet straight up in a vacuum. Its kinetic energy is reduced to zero by gravity. No new forms of energy (turbulences, heat) were created, but the total energy in the system cannot have changed. So where did it go?
The solution is to examine "potential energy". It is defined in such a way that regular energy can be converted into potential energy (raising the bullet into a higher position) and back (let it drop) without violating conservation of energy.
Do I understand correctly that, while that's how it's modeled in classical physics, in the context of general relativity there's only inertial motion happening to the bullet all the way through, ie. no forces and therefore no acceleration anywhere, and therefore it's just likewise kinetic energy all the way through?
(But if that's so, then it raises the question that if at the height of its apparent parabola it lands on a surface, where did the kinetic energy disappear?)
Gravitational potential energy is easy to measure; it's just mass * height * force of gravity. So a 1kg ball 1m above the surface of the earth has 1kg * 1m * 9.8m/s^2 = 9.8J of potential energy. This is equal to the kinetic energy the ball will have right before it hits the ground.
You can calculate a number for it... but does it actually physically exist? Can you physically measure it with a device, if you eg don't know the altitude?
Also, isn't the potential energy always relative to something? An object has a potential energy X relative to the Earth, and a potential energy of Y relative to the Moon, and a potential energy of Z relative to the Sun. The calculation would always be in relation to one of them, or anything else, really. How much potential energy is there at a certain point in space?
It still just sounds to me like potential energy is an abstraction, not a physical entity that exists in physical space. Not unlike eg. speed. "Speed" is not something that somehow exists floating around there, but it's a notion we use to describe how an object behaves in relation to another object.
Thus, and kind of back to the original point: If "potential energy" really is just a notion, not a physical entity, then how can it be "converted to heat", given that heat is a form of energy that physically exists?
(On a meta-level: Why are things like "potential energy" taught as if they were conceptually simple, easy-to-grasp, self-evident things? They are far from easy to understand. They are so abstract, when you really think about them.)
Speaking of potential energy... I know this is basic high school physics, but could someone explain what it exactly means?
I always thought that it was just an abstract concept used to aid figuring out the math, rather than it being an actual physical thing that actually exists. If it really physically exists, and it's a form of energy, it feels like a rather... esoteric form of energy. Where exactly does it exist? Can you point out to some point in space and say "there are X joules of potential energy right here"? Can you measure it?
I was hoping this would be some kind of joke because to my knowledge there's no Street Fighter 2 for the NES, but this isn't April 1st, and Mothrayas' explanation that it's an unlicensed bootleg game kind of ruined it...
I understand that 8-bit gaming computers often had severe limitations on sprites/colors (heck, I owned a Spectrum128, so I ought to know), but I find it strange how the playable character seems to have a bitmask around it that lets the background be seen through, but almost none of the enemies do, and instead they are surrounded by solid-colored blocks. Why is that?
Is there a way in this game to affect the ball other than with the paddles (typically by bumping the table, as supported by some pinball computer games)?
If not, then this would be technically acceptable even under the rule "the earliest acceptable ending point is when no further input can make the game end faster" (or in this case, for the goal to be achieved faster.)
But this should have really waited a few months for April 1st...
I personally support the notion of a TAS being able to control the initial (and arbitrary) ram state.
In principle a TAS is a demonstration of what would it look like if a theoretically superhuman being would play a video game on an actual console/computer. This means that this hypothetical being ought be able to somehow affect the initial RAM state of the console as the game starts. Is this even physically possible?
And note that at least I understand this concept to mean that the "superhuman" just plays the game by pressing buttons. He's not able to directly reach into the console itself and start tampering with the electrons directly via some supernatural ability because if he could, then he could just as well modify the RAM after the game has started, as well as the CPU registers, and just skip to the end.
So, my take is this: If the hypothetical superhuman player is not allowed to directly touch the RAM after the game has started, then neither should he be allowed to do so before. You would have to demonstrate another way of achieving the desired initial RAM state without directly tampering with it.
(Even then it becomes more the philosophical question of what constitutes gameplay, but that's a different pet peeve of mine, so let's not go there right now.)
If we had a "concept demo" section, this could perhaps be published there.
(Although by my own words, the qualification standards ought to be pretty high to get there, so I don't know if this would qualify for that reason...)
Well, that's one of those topics where everybody's doing it but nobody's talking about it... (very similarly to how everybody and their grandmother plays old console games on emulators, but we don't talk about where to get them.)
I know I'm as guilty of this as anybody, but well...
Is copy-pasting miles of code into your post really the only possibility? I think there are free services out there for this exact purpose, so that you don't have to embed enormous amounts of code here.
Well, most of my knowledge on what a section of code does comes from copy pasting an example online, then messing around with it. Not the best way, but it works fine assuming its a hobby and not your job to make the game. :P
It reminds me a bit of the really bad advice that was very popular in the 70's and 80's, and sadly persists to some extent to this day, that "to learn to program you should take other people's code and study them".
I like to compare that to saying "to learn how to cook, you should go to restaurants and order meals."
You learn cooking best by reading a good book or taking classes, and the same is true for programming. (Although the difference is that programming is more complex and thus requires more books and classes.)
(Oh, and big welcome to an old friend too!)
