SEEKING WORK - Remote (American residing in Berlin)
JS/Python/C++ guy. Well versed in d3.js. Have spent past two years doing vertical feature development, focusing on front end, in JS and Python/AppEngine. Spent three years before that doing backend/algorithm C++ work.
Open for flexible work designing/implementing visualizations and frontends.
The free ride area also had major consequences for outbound buses during peak hours. If a bus started in downtown and went elsewhere, riders had to pay as they left the bus. Seattle still doesn't allow you to pay at any door on a bus, only at the front with the driver. A crowded bus meant people could not easily get to the front; either the bus sat while people squeezed down the length of the bus, or they simply got off at the rear and didn't pay.
An alternative solution, of course, is to incentivize use of RFID bus passes (already in heavy use), install RFID readers at all doors, and speed up boarding all-around.
This is one of the main reasons I'm writing these tutorials - small multiples (nested selections) in D3 are explained very poorly in the official docs, and are a constant stumbling block for coworkers not very familiar with the library.
Sadly, getting around to properly explaining them will take another lesson or two.
Results after the first one fail to load in the latest Firefox. It looks like a Firefox bug btw, the style and script tags are not being added to the created iframes (except the first, which is always ok) unless I mess with the timing, either by using a 100ms delay in setTimeout() or a breakpoint with Firebug.
PS: it's a fantastic tutorial, thanks for writing it!
Author here. I've updated my post to include some words on the current Android games market and how none of it maps to the Ouya. Simply, a game written for a 4.5" diagonal phone screen will not scale down to the 2-3" diagonal touchpad on the controller and then back up to the 52" diagonal of a TV. You have lost too much fidelity in the process; the game will feel wrong if it even works at all.
As for Android being the future of gaming - I don't believe it. Why might a motley collection of devices with disparate specs upend a highly focused and adaptable juggernaut, besides it making a great story? This won't kill the current gaming juggernauts anymore than streaming content killed television ones.
I think you misunderstand vibrunazo's point about some games being "Ouya ready". You can already plug an Android into a TV and connect it to a controller, so some games already offer proper, non-touch gamepad support, designed to work on a big screen.
Plus, touchscreen games don't all require you to tap specific points on the screen (as in your Reversi example). Look at Temple Run: you duck and jump by swiping down or up, from anywhere on the screen, rather than tapping on-screen Duck and Jump buttons.
I personally find it much more comfortable and relaxing to be able to hold a controller in my lap while looking up at a TV. With games on my phone or tablet, I either have to strain my arms holding it up high enough to be in front of my face, or I have to strain my neck to look far enough down that I can hold the device in my lap to play; there just isn't a comfortable way to play a mobile game for more than 5 or 10 minutes.
Another thing, related but not frequently discussed, is the change in how important gear is vs. other factors. For instance, in Diablo II a high level item would give +20 vitality. Your character got 5 stat points per level which you could, if you wanted, put all into vitality. This high level item was roughly equivalent to only 4 character levels (of which you got 99).
In Diablo III, a high-level item is giving you 200+ vitality. I don't know about other characters, but I believe my Monk is getting 2 vitality per level (and there are 60 levels). A _single_ item can give me more of a stat than I gain from leveling all the way from 1 to 60. As such, leveling up doesn't do much other than allow equip items with better stats.
Because items in Diablo II gave, comparatively, closer benefits to gaining another level than those in Diablo III, I felt like I was making progress with either a level up or a nice item drop. If my character was getting decimated in Act IV of Nightmare, I could go back and gain a few levels and maybe get some new items in the process. In Diablo III, not only do your levels not increase your survivability or killing power in any way (besides new skill runes), by the time you feel like you aren't strong enough to defeat an encounter you'll most likely have few or even no more levels left to gain. The only tangible measure of progress is "phatter lewt" at this point.
First, a single item of, for instance, 200 vitality, is not giving you a +200 to your vitality at lvl 60. Instead, it's giving you the difference between 200, and what ever the bonus would be on average eq that you can get easily in the game by being level 60 and killing a few things.
Second, levels do increase your survivability, in several ways:
1. You get vitality, every level, at +10 life per point plus any percentage bonuses you have
2. You get your key stat, every level, which increases your damage directly and indirectly
3. You become able to wear higher-level equipment when you gain a level, and of course, that equipment improves based on its own level.
4. You learn new skills, not just new skill runes, and both are quite significant. The higher-level skills are more powerful in many cases.
Diablo II's levels provided more than just stat boosts: there were skill points, and likely changes in level-based mechanics underlying damage taken by player characters.
D2's uniques and runewords were more common and reliably useful than D3's legendaries. Finding good uniques (e.g. Stone of Jordan[0]) led to big jumps in character power unmirrored by a level or two.
I don't agree that items were less important in D2 than in D3, but suspect they're presently much harder to obtain in D3 without turning to using the auction house. This is probably intentional.
This is actually a good thing. Diablo II spoiled you with unique items so no magical and almost no rare items could ever be useful. In Diablo III, a very simple item can be very useful because of stat bonuses.
This is not entirely correct. While several Uniques could be considered Best In Slot, a good magical (especially true pre 1.10 path with Cruel weapons) and more commonly a good rare would be the best choice for a given build. Rare (or Crafted) Gloves, Amulets, Belts, Boots and Tiaras could spawn with extremely good properties, often surpassing Unique items.
I would much rather ride a Seattle bus than a SF bus, but the likelihood of finding a bus that goes from A to B (without a transfer) is much higher in SF than in Seattle. This is partly a product of Seattle's shape, where the obvious thing for any bus to do is run north-south from a neighborhood to the downtown corridor. It is also a product of density, which Seattle doesn't really have in large quantities.
And re: expensive neighborhoods for transit. I think your numbers are quite a bit off - sure, if you want to live near the main Caltrain station, you are looking at that much. But you can easily find a large 1 bedroom for $1600 within 5 minutes of the light rail or BART for a total transit time to downtown of 10-15 minutes.
When is the last time you rented? My impression is that the rental market is picking up significantly and there are noticeable rent raises even month to month at this point (bubble, anyone?)
Being near BART is going to set you back at least $1700 at the very low end for a studio, $2000 for a 1BR. More for both depending on quality of the place, naturally. You might hack 10% off either of those prices if you pick up a particularly sweet deal.
FWIW, I signed my current place last month, so that's when my knowledge of the current rental market ends. I talked to numerous people including an apartment hunter, all of whom expressed incredulity at how much prices are shifting, even on the order of a couple of months.
I stand corrected, and should have checked Craigslist before posting. It is astounding how much rents have gone up recently. The neighborhoods I had in minde were Lower Haight (5 minutes-ish to the N, 10 minutes-ish to the rest of the lines, 15-20 minutes-ish to 16th & Mission BART) or the part of Market near the Castro Safeway (shave 5 - 10 minutes of all of those times). It seems like $1800 might be a better floor, and that is a studio-like thing. Of course, its a small market in those places so you may be able to find better (or worse or absolutely no) prices.
It isn't quite a barley wine, at least it doesn't taste like any barley wine I've had before. It has some hints of mead, but the grape is what makes it different. If you live in the SF Bay area, you can definitely find this at either City Beer Store or Healthy Spirits.
Descent came out over a year before Quake and was full 3D (except the annoying hostage sprites). It may have taken advantage of being set in a mine to have twisty passages that obstructed views, but it did have its fair share of wide open spaces (most reactor rooms, for instance). I think the reason Quake gets all the credit is due to its popularity, not for being the first.
Descent used affine texture projection, which makes texels slide around as your viewpoint changes, unless extremely small polygons are used (they weren't). It also had extremely simple lighting (intensities set at vertices, interpolated in a simple gradient in screen space like the texture projection). Neither of these things means you're wrong in calling it "full 3D", of course. I don't recall if the topology allowed room-internal objects other than the robots; I think it did.
There was also Driller in 1987 which had full 3D representations though you could rarely take advantage of it. It was based on the Freescape technology which I played with in 3D Construction Kit in 1991 and that was definitely full 3D in terms of movement (though not a game in itself).
My observations as a (somewhat) recent graduate from UW CSE:
Many of the students that wanted to go into startups after graduation instead of a job either had started on some product during school and wanted to see that through to completion, or were of the mind that they could just work for a few years at {Amazon, Google, Microsoft, ...} and then do the risky thing.
There is also a lack of exposure in the curriculum. They are in the middle of re-designing it, but before that only one class let you create a small team, come up with a product, and build it. It was seen as a painful course (it was) and it was also taken by most everyone (including people who couldn't care less, so it was hard to find a group of 4-5 motivated people). I don't recall any hackathons when I was there aside from ACM programming competitions.
As a startup person, I had to seek out the opportunities to build a product as part of a small team each quarter at UW CSE. That said, you can do it if you have the motivation.
All the literature about the program mentions that you can optionally take 1 capstone course (which are the big project courses that let you have free creative reign over what you produce). My solution was to just do 3 capstones instead.
I ended up taking the Google/Hadoop project course, distributed systems capstone, and Dan Weld's web services capstone. Each quarter I had 3-4 people on a team, and we were able to build something awesome.
To me it always seemed like a problem of advertising the opportunity within the department, and encouraging big risky projects vs. focused, assigned classwork.
Fun that I can recognize you based on your user name, but you probably can't do the same matching for me (its Mikey).
You were actually one of the people I was thinking of when I originally put in an aside about the really motivated people still doing it. I then removed that aside, but I probably should not have. The really motivated people are going to go into startups; they caught the itch at some point and need to scratch it to remain happy.
The subset of people that could go either way (startup or corporate) don't quite have the opportunity to see what a startup would be like at UW. The capstones are good, but for most they are an afterthought to be done in the final quarter or two, when they have most likely landed a job already. Software Engineering (CSE 403) is more about satisfying a requirement than about building something, and that is all most students end up with.
Their brand is that they manufacture the best gaming PCs in the world. But if one only pays attention to branding and not realities, you end up thinking Chevy's are indestructible rocks and that Sprite quenches thirst and gives you the power to play sports.
And in case you missed it, GP mentioned Scan as an alternative. I'll add Falcon Northwest.
JS/Python/C++ guy. Well versed in d3.js. Have spent past two years doing vertical feature development, focusing on front end, in JS and Python/AppEngine. Spent three years before that doing backend/algorithm C++ work.
Open for flexible work designing/implementing visualizations and frontends.
Site: http://hazzens.com