Moving Too Fast

In shmups going slowly allows one to actually see the graphics rather than have them just flicker by. Big shots also obstruct the view and give the games artificial width. That width is not depth. My blogging style is based on the Noble Quran, it is a stream of consciousness that can't be easily broken into parts. 

Power-Up Slop

 This is another post about good game design, mostly in the shmup genre. I have noticed that in many mobile shmups many of them suffer from power-up slop which is that the power-ups that players naturally gravitate towards may actually be unwanted weapon changes or upgrades. All of the shmups in the mobile space are vertical, probably because horizontal usually implies a slower sense of speed that is less addictive. I have mentioned before that web games supported by banner ads are the best distribution system for games and this has been the way for decades. R-Type avoids power up slop except for the speed power up. Gradius avoids it with the buffet line. In addition graphics have been going in the wrong direction for decades. There is too much detail for sprites that just flicker by. Nothing memorable comes from that. The abstract approach or minimalist design or just plain slower gameplay complements the genre better.

Good Video Game Design

 From Thomas Aquinas to now we must consider the one, the good, and the beautiful even in modern video game design. Good game design follows the ratio fun = meaningful decisions / time but if we subtract from that the elements of bad game design we end up with implementations of classic board games, because RNG is also bad. Some genres mentioned before like platformers and fighting games tend to avoid the problem, as do some MOBAs and first person shooters. I will be writing and designing RPG battle systems that avoid RNG and grinding. So then fun = meaningful decisions / time - bullshit so f =  (d/t) - b

Turn based systems will be judged by the permutation (actually a multiset (actually that might need some clarifying)) of the moves done like the marks in SGF (for Go) or Chess notation. An action game is thus only the string of inputs. 

So then what happens in the genres? Has there been little innovation? Are new genres forming? Did genres not get recognized correctly before? What even is Qix and Quadrun? 

Bad Video Game Design

 Grinding for items and levels is bad. Traveling on world maps is bad, it is a form of grinding. In the free to play space rewarding daily logins is a form of grinding. In-game currencies that are earned from grinding with only the effect to add features that make games easier is bad. Each level is its own world. Any time there is connection to another that is a form of grinding. Imagine the pipes in platformers that lead the player character to the "underground" section. The underground section is a whole other level, not inside the level that it was connected to via the pipe. Narrativity and pornographic rewards are bad design as they just insist on more grinding. Good game design is to be measured combinatorily. Each battle in a turn based RPG is a separate level or game. The item loadout is a combination that makes the battle easy or not and thus is equivalent to the free to play in-game currency bad design. Good game design is measured combinatorily as either a combination or permutation of elements (like turn based battles) or a string of inputs (fighting games). Good game design should not require any special hardware including graphics cards or controllers. Only keyboard, mouse and touchscreens should be needed. Since the early 2000s with web games via Java Applets, Flash, and now modern JS frameworks, video game distribution was solved perfectly. F2P mobile games continued this.

Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages (video script)

 Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages

Programming for Abundant and Scarce Energy Applications

Year 2023, month of July, in this video I will be discussing an academic paper from 2017 about the energy efficiency of various programming languages. The paper is called Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages by Rui Pereira, Marco Couto, Francisco Ribeiro, Rui Rua, Jácome Cunha, João Paulo Fernandes, and João Saraiva. We often forget the science part of computer science and I am glad they more or less formally stated and tested what we all know intuitively. First off, all of these measurements depend on the compiler, and the algorithms being implemented. Generally compiled languages are more efficient, followed by virtual machine languages like the JVM, and interpreted languages are more energy intensive. Measuring for energy, the physics concept of a joule, C, Rust, C++, and Ada top he list, followed by Java which takes about twice as much energy as an equivalent program in C. Interpreted languages like Ruby, Python, and Perl are all at the bottom of the list consuming 70 to 80 times more energy. The results are similar for time consumed and memory consumed, although Pascal, a language even older than C rises to the top and Go makes an appearance as well for memory efficiency. The paper also remarks that programming language paradigms can also be ranked by efficiency in all of these measurements and as you would expect imperative programming languages are more efficient, followed by Object-Oriented, and dead last is the elegant looking functional programming paradigm. From this research we can conclude that there will always be a role for very simple pointer-based languages like C and Pascal when energy consumption is a consideration for the application. Perhaps it runs on cheap batteries for example. The creator of Pascal is still alive by the way, Niklaus Wirth. He’s nearly 90. In an energy abundant future we can used interpreted languages. Will the future in general be energy abundant or energy scarce? Well, we’ll see. Let’s be prepared for both possibilities . 

Helious

 What a strange game and origin.

This is plain text in MacOS on M chips. I finally found it again.

Violence all the way down.

Fiction only demonstrates the stupidity and unthinking

Of its author.

The universe is the necessary violent coexistence of

Stupidity and intelligence, truth and falsehood, and beauty, and ugliness.

Philosophy is the process of straining the infosphere

In all its forms for Truth. 

Bullshit is necessary. Temples to bullshit are necessary.

People believing and acting out bullshit from cradle to 

Grave are necessary.

Information exists and may not be recorded, or solidified.

The residents of Sentinel Island are generating information

With each step they take, but without Fitbits attached to their wrists this information is lost to time, but it can

Be predicted.

The battery-sphere stores energy. Let them be filled and 

Used in a sinusoidal pattern. 

scraps

A blog post

Peak oil doesn't necessarily mean peak energy. A new energy economy may be possible by slowly  restructuring to a more recyclable and renewable circular process.

Energy is abundant right here in the local solar system. The sun has far more than is needed for the human superorganism. Cities can be designed better. Civilization began with some smart-ass learning how to plant food and those not needed to harvest or hunt them congregated into the first cities and then invented politics and religion to the chagrin of many.

Cities became informatic centers and collective brains. They still are with land multiplied by skyscrapers to hold white collar work like insurance, sales, programming, and some forms of education. 

Religions are also social networks and economic ecosystems. 

A modern arcade is a temple is a library is a node is a sexual act is a play is a panchvishay is a book is a monastery is machine is an energy conversion pattern is a reminder is a copier is a thread of the social organism operating system is identity is a store is a battery is a storage device.

Platforms are that which abstract away details. Like an iron/steel frame many things in software architecture 'hang off' the main infrastructure. Like the stable structures in The Game of Life algorithm there are hard points in programming that can be built and/or don't change.

Don't forget most of humanity is on the afroeurasian supercontinent. Many of the islands are just galapagos effect economies.

  

Like a single cell organism a religion can thrive being in one city in one building like Eckankar and Unity.

Many things are repeated and are everything good. Good beautiful and oneness Thomas Aquinas was right about.

Our relationship to ugliness and falsehood is profound. Bullshit is necessary. Consider the Mormon temples. They are temples yo bullshit. Out of actual bullshit comes beautiful flowers.

Simple information is generally easier to carry on into the future. Classic video games carry on not just on nostalgia but a simplicity that comes from full understanding of their nature because humans become addicted to that which is simple and preserve that which is simple as can be seen from animals produced for meat and beer and wine.

The emojis are the symbols of human mental life and the Platonic realm they live in.

Philosophy creates informatic sieves of Truth. A book of falsehoods would be useful actually.

Sean finkle showed humans a way 100 years ago, Alan turing only 70 years ago.

Religions as Genres of Art, and as languages, and objects of art.

 Soon this blog will be revamped to be the beginnings of what will eventually but not actually be a book about informatic art objects and how they rule our world as the polypandeistic gods that grab humans to force us to give them tribute. Religions are like this. Books, religious or not are like this, movies music video games, statues, paintings, and biological organisms like the Baobab tree are examples of these. Humans are not at the center of the human world. We are willing slaves to inanimate objects. For example the statues that were protected during the Ukrainian war are the true Gods of Ukraine. The soldiers fight to preserve it and it alone. France exists as the protective shell around the Louvre, and so forth. These demands to protect themselves are innate to the objects themselves. One of a kind objects and informatic objects are different and survive differently. 

2023 halfway

 My beard indicates I think in a Quranic way, even as an atheist. A bunch of mangled thoughts that come together to form a coherent paradigm. Trucking, trains, and ships move matter around the Earth. Concrete is dropped.

The flow and processing of solid matter. Plumbing is the flow and processing of liquids and gases. Energy and electrical work is the flow and transformation of energy, which makes the world economy a single

resource game like starcraft. Societies based on the status of plots and bodies of land like magic the gathering, and types of energy like pokemon. In these two games lies the major paradigm. The little

monuments to Al-Khidir are cute and Islam represents the necessary violent force required to preserve that which is valued. Computers are about the flow and processing of information. HVAC about the flow and processing

of human breathable air. Information then is essentially a fourth (or fifth if plasma counts) kind of "matter" which does not exactly have the finite properties of matter. All economies, peoples, and states are

slaves to art, all of them being the protective and reproductive systems (if the art is information) or the art itself (if one of a kind like a painting.)