KeytarHero

(1) That's beside the point. Even if a phone has a 4k display, they still don't need a camera of more than about 8MP to display it on screen.

(2) Yeah, I get this use case, and I understand why there are DSLRs that big. But how many cameraphone users are actually cropping their images so extremely that they need 41 megapixels? Phone makers don't put 41 MP sensors for the niche market of users who need cameras that good but don't have a DSLR; they do it because the majority of their customer base thinks "the more pixels the better".

You're right, it doesn't - a high-quality 44.1k DAC will out-perform a low-quality 192k DAC any day. But device manufacturers (especially when it comes to phones) are generally not using high-quality DACs. As I said, I wish phone manufacturers advertised which DACs they were using.

A hub is different. A hub is a device you buy specifically for its networking performance. On the other hand, 99% of the market doesn't buy their phone for its audio quality.

That's what audio mastering is for. A good mastering engineer tests their masters on iPhone headphones as well as studio monitors.

> I would not expect a willingness to exploit consumers' magical thinking to be a good signal for quality engineering.

Companies do this all the time, not just in audio, and they have for years. I don't know why most consumers would need a phone with a camera more than 8 MP, when most users will only ever display it on a 1080p (~2 MP) screen. I don't know why anyone needs a screen with more than 300 PPI. I don't know why anyone needs a TV with higher than 120 Hz refresh. But guess what, if Nokia puts a 41-megapixel sensor on their phone, I'm willing to bet they've also got a darn good lens. If Google wants to put an almost 500 PPI screen on their phone, I'm guessing they've chosen a screen that also has pretty good contrast & color.

Sample rate/depth is one thing device manufacturers can do to easily send the message "we care about audio quality" to the general consumer market, just like how a 41 MP phone camera tells you they are serious abut the quality of their camera.

Obviously you shouldn't judge a phone's camera or screen by the number of pixels alone. Unfortunately, it's much easier to directly compare screens and cameras than it is phone DACs. I wish there was a good benchmark system for audio hardware, but it's really hard to find accurate, unbiased, quantitative information.

24/192 playback isn't entirely silly. It's probably true that you can't hear a difference between a perfectly reconstructed 16/44.1k audio and perfectly reconstructed 24/192k audio. But the quality of your DAC certainly does matter, as well as the analog hardware that's after it. If a device has a 24/192k DAC, it means the manufacturer didn't just use the cheapest DAC they could find, and it's more likely to be high-quality (plus, it shows they care about audio quality, so they may have gone for a higher-quality analog hardware too).

In a perfect world, cell phone and music player manufacturers would advertise "this phone has a Wolfson DAC and uses OPA2134 opamps running at 9V in the output stage". But the mass consumer market doesn't care about those things, so for now all we have to go off is "this one supports 24/192 so it's probably got better hardware" (or the alternative, "this one says it has Beats Audio so it's probably got hyped bass and is terribly inaccurate").

I don't think this is relevant in this case; I don't see how vector fields matter in a turn-based strategy game where all movement is quantized.

Irregular movement costs would be there anyway, due to forests, hills, and other terrain. The fact that "this space is arbitrarily bigger" isn't really a good justification, especially when the game is doing this in an effort to be more realistic.

I also think this could lead to a whole bunch of balancing issues that might not immediately be obvious. Although some random-but-fair differences in balance such as this are okay, they should be based on the terrain, resources, and other features that mirror the real world, not "this tile is just bigger".

Really cool - I, too, have long been bothered by the cylindrical map in Civ and wondered what a spherical Civ would be like. (At least Civ V's switch to a hex grid solved the biggest pet peeve I had with the game's geometry, since with a square grid, moving diagonally was just as fast as moving orthogonally.)

However, the irregular tiles actually bother more than if it was a standard geodesic sphere which only had 12 pentagons. For one, the fact that tiles are different sizes looks kind of weird. More importantly, this tile layout could actually make an important strategic difference (much more than if there were only 12 pentagonal tiles). Assuming movement costs between adjacent cells are constant, a straight line may not be the fastest way between points anymore! Looking at the heavily distorted mesh example, I can see several places where a path through a few large cells has the same movement cost as the straightest path.

Also, a realistic simulation of global wind patterns isn't actually that hard. Since it's only long-term trends that matter (at least when it comes to shaping overall climate), it's not like you'd have to calculate detailed fluid mechanics models. A simple model of Hadley & Ferrel cells (which is key to having realistic deserts) would get you most of the way there. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_circulation

Aren't there C++ compilers that will compile to C code? Doesn't that effectively make C++ just as portable as C?

So why not use C++?

Since it's a superset of C, why not just use C++ to program C-style code, using only the C++ features you want? C++ is a multi-paradigm language; you don't have to write object-oriented code if you don't want.