palish

He's not the author, but he's "the face of Dota" at this point.

(Well, he's "the person of Dota", at least. Mr. Ismail is far too reclusive to ever show his face.)

Unfortunately, it pains me to say this, but this is the truth: If you tried to commercially release your own DOTA, and if you'd copied skills/heroes/items from the original game, Valve, or rather Ismail, would sic lawyers on you immediately. I know this because they tried to do it to S2, the creators of HoN (a very similar game).

So it's unfortunately not true "There really is no rights holder to the game". Valve/Icefrog hold all the cards at this point.

Hmm? Bethesda didn't make Quake, if that's what you're saying...

timr isn't the submitter of this story. He's a commenter.

PG was specifically referring to submitters, submitting links.

Could you elaborate a little on why Jules' blog post was bad?

It seemed completely straight-up. "X happened, Y happened, Z happened". Whether or not we agree with their decision, it seems like a good (for us) thing to hear the full sequence of events.

Incase anyone was wondering, it seems like this was one reason _why chose to leave:

http://www.rubyinside.com/nokogiri-ruby-html-parser-and-xml-...

(_why wrote Hpricot. Imagine how that post must've felt from his perspective.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774170

Which porn company?

Sorry! Didn't mean to imply you did. It was sort of a tangent... a lot of people think that way, and so I sort of had a bone to pick with 'em. Cheers.

Wow, that's incredible! Thanks for sharing.

Sorry, I miscommunicated --- fluid simulation isn't expensive as long as it doesn't affect gameplay. Because then you can do it all on the GPU, and you don't have to transfer it back to the CPU (to perform checks like "is the water touching me?")

In this case, From Dust is simulating the fluids on the CPU, then building geometry / textures on the fly and uploading that to the GPU and rendering. It's quite an impressive tech demo, both from a technical and artistic standpoint.

Actually, Ford never said that.[1][2]

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2747106

[2] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2819549

I never readback the textures. The water surface is entirely generated and simulated on the GPU, and its heightfield is converted into a normal map and fed into the renderer every frame. There was literally zero performance overhead (we were CPU limited, not GPU limited).

The lake surface looked utterly convincing; it was as if you were watching a rainstorm pour down on it. I wish I had a video.

The bottleneck you ran into was readback. Transferring data from GPU->CPU was, is, and always will be, "expensive".

GPGPU is completely unrelated to this; it merely enables you to perform computations on the GPU faster, nothing more and nothing less.

Thank you. Probably my favorite tech demo of all time. It gives me goosebumps every time I watch it. Likely watched it at least 30 times by now.

Everything about it is beautiful, from the art to the music to the sound effects to the incredible feeling of "being drenched". Natalya Tatarchuk is truly a hero.

Watch it all the way through, with headphones, in fullscreen, or don't watch it at all!

The experience was so much more intense back in 2007; it was breathtaking.

(Nooooo I don't wanna get old! Make it stop!)

GPGPU is incredibly overkill for simulating a water surface.

Create two 256x256 RGB textures, call them foo and bar.

The R channel will store current height of wave. The G channel will store the previous height of wave (allowing you to derive velocity).

  ... each frame ...
  render_to(bar)
  sample_from(foo)
  /* insert fancy partial differential algorithm */
  foo,bar = bar,foo

In other words, you're "ping pong"-ing between two textures.

Now if you set an arbitrary texel to, say, 1.0 (maximum), that texel will propogate outwards as if it were a ripple.

Bonus: the result is a seamless tilable texture.

Look up "toyshop rain" for the exact details. But I used this method to augment an ingame lake surface's normal map (thunderstorm effect --- rippling raindrops propagating across the lake). This was in 2007, running on 2007 hardware. GPGPU need not apply.

Apologies, but this attitude is quite annoying: "As long as you're healthy and a hard worker, you too can be a genius! It just takes time!"

If anyone bothered to try to answer the question "do genetics matter much?" by examining real-world prodigies, they would be forced to conclude "Yes, genetics are equally important to upbringing/environment".

Read through this, then claim genetics don't matter:

"This was Richard Feynman nearing the crest of his powers. At twenty-three ... there was no physicist on earth who could match his exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science. It was not just a facility at mathematics (though it had become clear ... that the mathematical machinery emerging from the Wheeler–Feynman collaboration was beyond Wheeler's own ability). Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Albert Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau—but few others."

— James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

Fun fact: Feynman mastered Calculus by age 15. He didn't just learn it; he derived it himself.

Who cares, and why? (Honest question.)

He certainly doesn't; he's dead. And everyone knows who we're referring to, so there's no ambiguity. Everything seems to indicate "it doesn't matter", and yet apparently it does to some. So why?

A nice example of how people are inherently illogical...

I was of course talking specifically about WebGL for games...

But it seems like you'd run into many of the same hindrances. For example, how will you get around the 5MB local storage limit? It would be unwieldly to re-download the whole visualization dataset each time, no?

P.S. I have nothing but respect for the medical visualization community. A lot of game graphics techniques were derived directly from work done in medical research (for example, BSP rendering and voxel rendering).

Hardware compatibility is the least of WebGL's problems. Right now there's essentially zero chance of WebGL powering any modern graphics engine. It unfortunately seems doomed to a life of "hey-look-at-my-cool-effect". (Which is neat, don't get me wrong. But it will never reach Doom 3 quality, and that's a tragedy IMO.)

Example: WebGL doesn't even support compressed textures. The spec actually mandates "We will not support compressed textures, and this is by design". Facepalm...

Well... its demo is way cooler, for one. =)

Seriously, I'm having way too much fun swinging this ball around and smashing things. Package it up for $0.99 IMO.

Huzzah! http://imageshack.us/f/839/towerofpower.jpg/

RNG's... Did they include Mersenne Twister?

http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/emt.html

EDIT: Apologies... the only reason I asked was to contribute to the discussion, but now I realize it probably looked like I was being lazy.

Probably should've posted this at about 10AM PST rather than 10PM.

Here's a smidgen of info: http://tam.plannet21.com/FAQs.htm#electronics

Wow, that was extremely annoying to disable.

- I didn't remember my password offhand, so each of my 5 attempts required me to fill out a captcha.

- On the settings page, the "Account" link is... less than visible. The word "Account" appears ~4 times on the page. One of them was a link entitled "Manage Account Settings", which you'd think would be it, but no --- that led to a FAQ.

This was done without my knowledge or consent. Not that I can do anything but post an HN comment, though...

I thought Fukime was great!

Warning: This is incredibly epic, and worked fine for me. May cause heart attack due to awesomeness.

Like I said, this is not Anon. Think about it. Anon aren't stupid. And going up against Facebook is stupid.

Am I the only one who thinks this sounds completely out of character for LulzSec / Anonymous?

They aren't stupid. They surely know that waging war against Facebook would be silly.

I'd bet this is someone completely different, looking to pose as Anonymous. Try looking at the sources --- you won't be able to trace it back to an announcement by Anonymous. So who are these guys?

Obviously. But you will not be Starcraft, Dwarf Fortress, nor Minecraft. :)

Here's the Minecraft Fire video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnjSWPxJxNs

Post-Mortem (or maybe a different house, but still hilarious): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MuM61RKtcs

The more people hacking, the better IMO. It's something that should be praised.

She's 10, and she figured it out on her own. Let her have her 5 minutes.

That's so cool!