Bah. Video? Come on, why not a web page with static images without music?

Anyways, http://www.jamesfridman.com and http://twitter.com/fjamie013 for them.

Only works with a static camera. Move through the hall and the effect is ruined.

Hey cat, you think static is bad, wait until you experience an explosion near your genitals!

http://d.yimg.com/static.video.yahoo.com/yep/YV_YEP.swf?ver=2.2.46 seems to be *dead.

http://d.yimg.com/static.video.yahoo.com/yep/YV_YEP.swf?ver=2.2.30 seems to be *dead.

I got interested in that question based on the Elder Scrolls series. Morrowind had a basically static world, Oblivion was basically entirely scaled to the player, and Skyrim is scaled to the player but within a min/max range.

To me, Morrowind was great because it could put appropriately powerful rewards in difficult (or just plain obscure) areas. Oblivion in particular was bad at making leveling feel like a treadmill because every time you leveled up as the player, pretty much every enemy would be that much more powerful also. Skyrim was better about that since an area would generally set its difficulty scale based on the first time you visited it, so you could leave and come back later if it was too tough, but it still felt a little off.

Another associated problem is how loot gets influenced by those leveled lists. In Skyrim, loot in containers and in the inventory of leveled enemies generally scales, but loot sitting out in the open in the game world generally doesn't. Which is really annoying, because all generic loot pretty much everywhere ends up being crappy low-level iron. God forbid there's some steel, elven, or dwarven gear in places where it would totally make sense to be (say, dwarven gear in dwarven ruins) that you might venture into before that gear becomes "level appropriate".


In a related issue, one beef that I have with general RPG mechanics is how they all feel the need to make you drastically more powerful at level 5 compared to level 1, and again at level 10 compared to level 5, and so on. By the time you're near the level cap, you're probably 100-1000 times as powerful as you were at level 1, which gives a good sense of accomplishment but just doesn't seem realistic, and leads to this problem with fixed difficulty or level scaling. Western RPGs (boiling back to pen and paper DnD rules) certainly aren't great about this, but JRPGs are completely ridiculous about it, which is pretty much why Final Fantasy 3(6) was the last one that I enjoyed. In my adulthood, I just can't handle them -- even going back and trying to play FF3 that I *loved* way back when.

I'd like to see more games where you get more skills, polish, and versatility as you progress, but overall you aren't more than 3-5 times as powerful at max level as you were at the beginning. Mount and Blade is one of the few games I can think of that comes close to that.

*cinema http://static.movieclips.com/embedplayer.swf?shortid=e5z7 is *dead (not found).

Yeah, the important thing here is the actor is not interacting with any of the scene. Sure, he sits on a couch, but if you were to look closely, you'd probably see the couch wasn't deforming normally.

Basically, this is just a static scene with a few simple shadows, and computers are very good at that these days.

Walking through a forest and brushing leaves out of the way? That's another story.

No. I think that's 1 out of every 24974 people are killed by a firearm assault each year....according to her.
Assuming that stays static, that's a 1/2497 chance you'll be killed by guns every 10 years, or an overall 1/250 chance if you live to 100. Not so great anymore.

Edit:where are you getting 1/350000? Not your chart.

No Netflix for me, and no luck on a quick search of torrents, but I'll keep my eye out for that show/series.

Many metrics to compare. Ecologically, that system sounds great for static locations with enough of an elevation gradient and reservoir areas to make it work. On the other hand it seems like the ecological damage done by constructing batteries, factories, and disposing of them is likely quite small compared to many other alternatives, particularly fossil fuels (which also have long-term scarcity concerns on top of plenty of other issues).

A major advantage of battery tech over hydro storage would be mobility. If the thing consuming energy doesn't sit in one place, hydro storage won't work. Another somewhat less significant advantage is the ability to install anywhere -- a battery farm recharged by mains and/or a solar/wind farm could be installed in places where hydro storage couldn't. And for one more item in favor of batteries, I'd wager that the land area footprint required for batteries is much smaller per kWH stored, although that might be wrong for extremely large reservoirs (ie. a hydroelectric dam, pretty much). But by the time you're getting to that large scale, the location requirements and ecological disruption are also much more extreme.

Anyway, I don't mean to pooh-pooh the idea of hydro storage -- it really does seem like a very good and ingenious idea where it would be applicable. But there's certainly room for improved battery tech, too. I don't think that we're going to get fully or even significantly weaned off of fossil fuels quite as fast as the video would have us hope for, either. Fossil fuels were the primary tool in our toolbox for a LONG time. And as the saying goes, since all we've had is that "hammer", we've started to think of everything as a nail.

I mostly agree, but I did think the static interior shots were photo realistic, but I don't have a 4k screen.
If you smoothed out the jerky camera motion, the last scene had climbed out of the uncanny valley, imo....except the flame.

This is a really good example of showing what video game graphics are really good at (static scenes with hard materials) and what they're not so good at but getting better (natural organic materials, humans with complex animations).

That said, as impressive as it is, we are still a long way off "photo realism".

*related=https://videosift.com/video/Photo-realism-in-video-games