Gregory Cannon like’s Tetris. He recently wrote an AI that plays NES Tetris extremely well. It’s not perfect as it uses a search & heuristic approach, but boy can it play some Tetris.
Source code here: https://github.com/GregoryCannon/StackRabbit
He also wrote a Tetris trainer that lets you draw a particular Tetris board layout and then get an AI recommendation about the best play.
13-year-old boy named Willis Gibson/Blue Scuti just got the first NES Tetris kill screen (game crash) on level 157. A monumental accomplishment that was considered pretty much impossible. It was originally thought the kill screen was level 29 because the game speed up to the point where nobody thought actual play was possible. Well, it turns out by using hyper-tapping (invented by Thor Aackerlund), you can get past level 29 all the way to level 41. Rolling was invented by Cheez and got people up to level 148.
Along comes StackRabbit. StackRabbit is a automated Tetris playing bot that was created by Gregory Cannon. With the machine playing the game, they discovered there really was a kill screen on level 237. As people (HydrantDude) dug into the crash, they discovered the crash could happen on different levels because several different factors triggered the crash. HydrantDude discovered the earliest it could happen was level 155 – that was within reach of human players for the first time ever.
That’s what Willis/Blue Scuti just did on level 157. This was considered the very first human reached true kill screen.
But, as the video points out, there is always a new set of achievements. Because the kill screen depends on game conditions, it is still possible to go to even higher levels.
It’s been interesting to watch the record chasing in the NES version of Tetris. From new control techniques to reaching levels that people never thought possible.
Dan Foisy13K built a volumetric display that uses a phased array of ultrasonic transducers to levitate a 1mm foam ball and move it at speeds greater than 1m/s. He even used an FPGA to do the acoustic calculations fast enough.
You can find all the design files here: https://github.com/danfoisy/vdatp
Things are never what they seem – especially in food commercials. This video shows you all the tricks used to make ordinary looking food look like a runway model.
Blender Guru walks us through how a modern CGI workflow would work for a scene everyone knows – the elevator scene in the Shining.
He breaks down all the tools and rendering tricks he uses as well as points out 3 key elements that most VFX artists get wrong and makes CGI workflows look bad: grain, focus, and levels.
He shows why CGI has gained so much traction. The cost for the practical effect version of the elevator scene would likely now run around $50,000-$100,000. The CGI version? $14,000-$20,000.
He needed about 6 days to re-build the CGI version of the scene and 4 days of rendering. He does a fantastic job showing off how modern workflows work.
Tools he used:
曦曦鱼SAKANA shows off some of amazing skills one needs to have if you’re a motion capture artist working for a video game. She seems to have mastered both male and female (and zombie!) walks along with lots of interesting and really unique kinds of swagger and variations.
Primal Space (which has some fantastic videos with 3D model recreations) shows us the innovative Brennan gyroscopic monorail designed in the early 1900s.
Louis Brennan wondered if he could help the spread of rail by making it half as expensive – needing only one rail instead of two rails. But how do you balance tons of train on one rail?
In the end, he designed a monorail that defied conventional limitations by balancing on a single rail, leaning into corners without external input, and remaining stable (no hunting oscillation) even when stationary by the use of 2 extremely clever interconnected gyroscopes.
What seems to have largely done in the idea is that each car in the train would need its own gyroscope motor and assembly. It makes me wonder if there would be a way to reduce that space requirement using an interconnected air system in modern train brake systems to power the gyroscopes. But it also would have the unfortunate problem of falling over if the gyroscopes stopped/malfunctioned/ran out of fuel or weren’t parked with supports. It also didn’t remove the problem of needing to design and acquire right-of-way to lay the tracks in the first place.
Still – it’s quite amazing to see this thing in action. All done before computers and mechanically.
Vuntra City is a procedural VR city generator in Unreal Engine 5 developed by a single person over the last few years. I know, I know. Procedurally generated content has got some serious shortcomings. Too many games with procedural content are just thinly veiled programmer art designed to fill spaces rather than be part of the experience.
The author actually does a great job recognizing those traditional limitations and attempts to fix them. Probably the best observations they make is not from the technical side, but the aesthetics side.
It turns out they have made an excellent solution with just some good observations and shockingly simple engineering solutions. As an engineer, I see far, far too many projects over-complicate things that could be done much more simply. Simplicity is how you know you’re on the right track. Complexity leads to tears.
After 2 years of experimenting, they have a really interesting solution. Check out the VuntraCity youtube channel to see vidoes of how they experimented with different techniques and solutions. I particularly liked how they used a normal old treemap layout to break up boring city grid structures. Combining it with a caching and pooled allocation system is nothing new; but was a good little optimization.
Links:
“I’d have more fun hiding in a dumpster surrounded by actual zombies.”
If I had to pick a trend for the 2010’s, it’s that we seem to have a growing trend of delusional and outright manipulative entrepreneurial sociopaths that promise everything to get rich and use startup culture to carry it out.
In this case, it was the game “The Day Before”. It was the most hyped game in Steam history. The social media blitz by the strange founders Eduard and Aisen Gotovtsev was something out of a fairy tale. They were the hottest thing on gaming sites and took in millions of dollars from fans that ate up their claims and demo clips – even though experts were dubious from day one. As people started looking deeper, the story got stranger and stranger but the money and fans poured in. I wrote about how the whole thing seems like a scam. Sadly, it’s all come true.
KiraTV did epically good coverage of this strange pair and Fntastic studio that raised red flags from day one. But nobody seemed to care or heed the warnings. The two projected what I can only describe as a cult-like charisma. People forked over millions of dollars to a pretty much unknown and unproven pair with no track record. Their studio was equally strange – in which they seem to be grooming and manipulating young developers to work for them, apparently, for free.
As development went on and people expected updates on progress, the messaging from the developers became more and more strange. Industry vets asked questions and were given inconsistent and confusing answers; yet a very solid core of fans rabidly defended them despite all the experts calling for serious caution.
In the end, after 5 years of development, the game was released to terrible reviews, not delivering even a portion of the promised features at dramatically worse quality than all the demos showed. As people absorbed how bad the game was, Fntastic quick announced it was closing its doors because the game flopped. It was only on sale for 4 days before they announced the studio closure.
A few hours after the studio announced its closure, sales of The Day Before on Steam were halted. “The Day Before has failed financially, and we lack the funds to continue,” the studio said in a statement posted to Twitter. “All income received is being used to pay off debts to our partners.
Their response to countless gamers that were promised the moon and stars and paid for $40 early access? “Shit happens”
I smell a lawsuit. I HOPE there is a lawsuit. These creators clearly were mis-representing the game they were making, took people’s money, and then launched the game in some twisted attempt to show they didn’t just take the money and run.
What’s sad is that almost anyone could see this coming. The signs were all there. Yet, much like Bitcoin, it’s amazing how many people absolutely refused to believe the founders were psychological manipulators, ignored the continual warnings of industry experts, and that they were promising something that just could not be delivered the way they were making it (on the backs of naïve young developers they didn’t even appear to pay).
If you’re curious what one of the most hyped games in Steam history ended up looking like at launch, here’s the first 22 minutes:
Despite the highly publicized and ongoing wreck and knowing the game was pulled from the Steam store, people were paying $200-$400 for a Steam key for the game even AFTER it was pulled. Perhaps they want to own the gaming equivalent of the Fyre Festival?
Articles:
Tom’s hardware visits Cooler Master headquarters in Taipei and gets an interesting view of upcoming developments in home pc building
What are some of the trends Cooler Master sees?