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Classic Games (Games)

Pac-Man's Ghost Behavior Algorithms 194

Posted by Soulskill from the i-hate-the-pink-one dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This article has a very interesting description of the algorithms behind the ghosts in Pac-Man. I had no idea about most of this information, but that's probably because it's difficult to study the ghosts when I die every 30 seconds. Quoting: 'The ghosts are always in one of three possible modes: Chase, Scatter, or Frightened. The "normal" mode with the ghosts pursuing Pac-Man is Chase, and this is the one that they spend most of their time in. While in Chase mode, all of the ghosts use Pac-Man's position as a factor in selecting their target tile, though it is more significant to some ghosts than others. In Scatter mode, each ghost has a fixed target tile, each of which is located just outside a different corner of the maze. This causes the four ghosts to disperse to the corners whenever they are in this mode. Frightened mode is unique because the ghosts do not have a specific target tile while in this mode. Instead, they pseudorandomly decide which turns to make at every intersection.'"

Comment Re:Bullshit considered harmful (Score 2, Interesting) 222

by ld a,b (#34289236) Attached to: ARM Readies Cores For 64-Bit Computing

To be fair, that doesn't counter his argument, amd64 has more registers than i386 and they do make a big difference. Repeat the tests with 32-bit pointers and 64 bit registers and then get back to us.

As of today, the method he mentions would probably provide a bit better performance, assuming the processor optimizations didn't break when their expectations weren't met.

However, I think it is very short-sighted to miss the fact that about the only thing increasing these days is memory and that apps tend to grab all the address space they can get. By 2050 I can see machines with 1TB ram, but I can't see apps keeping themselves under 0xFFFFFFFF.

Furthermore, thanks to ASLR, which is a feature available now on most OSes, address space fragmentation is a problem today even for programs well under the 4Gb mark. The future is 64:64. 32 bit architectures are already dead, they just haven't realized it yet.

Comment Re:Wasn't there a study... (Score 1) 151

by ld a,b (#34070660) Attached to: Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage

If Neanderthals and Humans could interbreed I'd say we both were subspecies of our common ancestor. I can't see how can they be a subspecies of us when we didn't exist yet. So either rename homo rhodesiensis to homo sapiens, or hss and hn to homo rhodesiensis sapiens and homo rhodesiensis neanderthalensis respectively.

Comment Re:Normal (Score 1) 417

by ld a,b (#33471340) Attached to: Software (and Appropriate Input Device) For a Toddler?

In any case, make it a cheap computer. I don't think the ipad would work for a toddler.

I used the "adult" version of the ZX Spectrum 48k when I was ~18 months old. I even learned enough SINCLAIR BASIC to LOAD "" :). However, the only program I ran was an invaders-like BASIC game and the keyboard membrane didn't survive my space spider smashing for long.

Comment Re:I'm actually developing something like dyslexia (Score 3, Interesting) 508

by ld a,b (#33399526) Attached to: Wired Youths In China & Japan Forget Character Forms

I don't really know how sustainable Chinese characters are in Mainland China, especially after Comrade Mao simplified their etymologies out, believing the Western bullshit that they were too hard. In any case, they have been in use for a few thousand years if that means anything.

In Japanese at least, literacy is steadily increasing. Twenty years ago, with 8-bit computers, kanji were appearing to be on their way out. However, as soon as IME and modern OSes appeared people started using more kanji even if they never could have written them by hand. And that means more kanji regular people can read. Recently, the number of kanji considered to be needed for basic literacy was increased to account for that.

Handwriting is suffering(The only real usage cases in modern Japanese society are resumes[=], paperwork[vv], and kanji quizes/exams[^]), but kanji themselves are here to stay.

Submission + - Octopus Steals Pirates' Files, Creator Arrested (asahi.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Ikatako is a virus that spreads through Japanese P2P network winny aided by the pirates' lack of wit. Once downloaded and run, the virus sends their data to a central server and replaces it with cephalopod and cnidarian imagery. Japanese hacker and virus creator, Masato Nakatsuji, thought he wouldn't be arrested this time. However, Japanese police considered the files in Japanese Pirates' hard drives were more important than his manga depictions of octopods and other tentacled fauna. They charged him with property destruction of digital files, whatever that is supposed to mean.
Idle

Submission + - 100-year-old Scotch pulled from frozen crate - Yah (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by
jamie
jamie writes: "A crate of Scotch whisky that was trapped in Antarctic ice for a century was finally opened Friday — but the heritage dram won't be tasted by whisky lovers because it's being preserved for its historical significance."

Comment Re:Success? (Score 1) 174

by ld a,b (#32530114) Attached to: New LLVM Debugger Subproject Already Faster Than GDB

Unlike GCC as a compiler, GDB really sucks as a debugger. It is a source player, nice for high level "debugging", but as soon as you try to follow code that cannot be statically extracted from the ELF and DWARF data you are left with a blinking light and a feature-set comparable to the APPLE I MONITOR.

I doubt LLDB will fix the latter, but it'll probably wipe GDB's ass as a source player because Clang already gets a lot more and better errors and warnings than GCC.

Still, supported platforms: Mac OS X x86 and amd64. So it isn't really here yet. No need to worry.
Operating Systems

OpenBSD 4.7 Released 143

Posted by timothy from the inexorable-and-dedicated dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The release of OpenBSD 4.7 was announced today. Included in this release are support for more wireless cards, the loongson platform, pf improvements, many midlayer filesystem improvements including a new dynamic buffer cache, dynamic VFS name cache rewrite and NFS client stability fixes, routing daemon improvements including the new MPLS label distribution protocol daemon (ldpd) and over 5,800 packages. Please help support the project by ordering your copy today!"

Comment Re:Cores vs performance (Score 4, Insightful) 361

by ld a,b (#32120894) Attached to: AMD Undercuts Intel With Six-Core Phenom IIs

Your real-world usage is what exactly? Playing badly designed games?

I want to play badly designed games *while* I am compiling, listening to some music and possibly leaving my browser on with some badly written JavaScript running. I also want my CPU not to melt.

You would need at least a 5GHz CPU to match a current dual-core CPU in this area. The ongoing trend is to have more and more things running and getting updated in real time. An it has been for a long time.

Files getting indexed, illegal files getting downloaded, stupid GUIs getting rendered, music getting played, Interpreted languages getting JIT-compiled ...

Gamers are still stuck in the microcomputer era. The real world isn't. And there isn't really a choice in the first place, the choice is more cores and a better experience or getting stuck at XGHz and having to pipe liquid Hydrogen into your home.

I think we will see more CPUs with more cores and likely more storage units to avoid resource starvation. More speed is just not possible.
Games

Do Gamers Want Simpler Games? 462

Posted by Soulskill from the i'd-say-no-but-i-used-to-love-frogger dept.
A recent GamePro article sums up a lesson that developers and publishers have been slowly learning over the last few years: gamers don't want as much from games as they say they do. Quoting: "Conventional gaming wisdom thus far has been 'bigger, better, MORE!' It's something affirmed by the vocal minority on forums, and by the vast majority of critics that praise games for ambition and scale. The problem is, in reality its almost completely wrong. ... How do we know this? Because an increasing number of games incorporate telemetry systems that track our every action. They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly. Every studio I've spoken to that does this, to a fault, says that many of the games they've released are far too big and far too hard for most players' behavior. As a general rule, less than five percent of a game's audience plays a title through to completion. I've had several studios tell me that their general observation is that 'more than 90 percent' of a game's audience will play it for 'just four or five hours.'"

Comment Re:Icarus? (Score 1) 138

by ld a,b (#32024508) Attached to: Japan To Launch Solar Sail Spacecraft "Ikaros"

Well, what is the efficiency of one of those sails once space garbage has poked a few holes on it?

Without knowing much, I would think that thrust is directly proportional to surface. So minus the hole, it wouldn't be that bad in principle.

However, an impact into a hair-thin layer of tin-foil spells massive damage even for tiny objects. And the larger the sail, the larger the chances it meets some macroscopic particle.

I hope this works. This would be our best chance if not for travel per se, at least to accelerate probes into unknown space up to reasonable speed.

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