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.

My 2 cents....
It might be, but that's not their position.

Religiously, as I read it, it's not much different from wearing a cotton poly blend or working on Sunday, also immoral according to the bible, but realistically the bible is just used as an excuse for them to attack things they don't like.
No American has been murdered or even ostracized by evangelicals for wearing blended fabrics or mowing on Sunday even though it's incontrovertible that the bible says they should be, but many have been murdered for being gay, and millions ostracized. Proof enough to me that it's not about what the bible says, that's just an excuse to attack what they hate or fear.

Compared to greed, the love of money, homosexuality seems barely mentioned, yet there's no outrage about the elevation of greed in our culture, it's celebrated.
Same for idolatry, forbidden by direct commandment from God not some interpreter, so if you've ever worshipped at a church with statues of any kind, including the cross or stained glass, God hates you far more than gays and demands we stone you to death.

Jews don't try to legally outlaw pork for everyone, not even other Jews. Christians have made homosexuality illegal for everyone, repeatedly.

*lmfahs

Reminds me of the very realistic hacking portrayed in the classic film Hackers.

Hardly a brilliant analysis - more like a brilliant piece of advocacy that, like most of its kind, is long on optimistic projections and very short on real numbers and a real analysis of those numbers. For instance: what is the megawatt hour cost of a solar power generation station that can replicate the power responsiveness and availability factor of a fossil power generation station (over a similar life cycle). He quotes the kwh cost for solar and wind power systems but each and every one of them is "backed up" by a much larger conventional power generation system that, ultimately, is burdened with the costs of maintaining grid stability, grid voltage, and grid frequency. There are huge engineering problems and substantial costs associated with maintaining a power supply that we now require to operate a modern economy. Just ONCE, I would like to see the green power advocates address those challenges and costs in a realistic way instead of glossing over them with their fantasy projections.
And I will say, as an aside, that I have spent my entire working career working in the renewable energy sector and fully agree that we need to transition to a renewable energy economy - but unrealistic projections are going to doom our economy if they are taken as being possible in the near term.

Imo, the peace process isn't dead, but it's deathly ill because Israel keeps expanding.

Want and can accept are two different things.

We give them most of that military might, and back it with ours. Without that interference, they might be more fair and equitable, with it they clearly won't, they'll continue to bully their weaker, poorer, displaced neighbors.

Popular opinion in Israel seems to be the Palestinians should be eradicated, so fair, equitable, compassionate treatment is incredibly unlikely and not realistic without being forced into it.

Trump's a buffoon randomly dancing around from one tire fire to set off another. This is no defence of him or any 'thought', motive or goal behind anything he does.

I'm just pointing out that the world's reaction of horror and outrage to moving the US embassy to Jerusalem is naive and hypocritical. It is naive in that clearly the peace process has been dead since WW2.

I'm going to list points that seem to clearly indicate the peace process didn't exist and tell me anything you disagree with cause I suspect we are working from different 'facts'.

Israel clearly doesn't want a two state solution.
Hamas clearly doesn't want a two state solution.
Fatah clearly doesn't want a two state solution.
The Muslim world clearly doesn't want to share Jerusalem with an Israeli state.
The Israeli state clearly doesn't want to share Jerusalem with a Palestinian state.

With the above, and Israeli's militarily dominant position over the Palestinians the only 'peace' process is going to be whatever Israel decides it wants that to be. Morality, wishes, blundering American 'presidents' and anything else we want to pull out doesn't really matter in the face of that. Israel has the might and the ability and so they will do what they want. My hope is to influence the Israeli state towards equitable, fair and compassionate treatment of Palestinians. If Israel decides to create a one state solution, but abides by that fine. Two states with borders unilaterally laid out by Israel, fine. So long as popular opinion in Israel can be won in favour of fair, equitable and compassionate treatment of Palestinians then that's the most I hope or wish for. I think it's a realistic goal that can be realized.

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The white Toyota 4runner or whatever it was almost made it! The simulation of the suspension impacts and structural deformations seems quite realistic.

First I swear I'm not stalking you. I was going to write off your comments as trollish or whatever. A video unrelated later, a picture of britney spears (hey she's hot) , and I find this comment discussing Britts talent.

": newtboy: While I do get your point, I think perhaps you miss the point that a real live singing/playing concert is different from a 'pop star concert' (although I do think they should be billed as 'pop star performances', not 'concerts').
If I go to the opera, I am expecting to hear people sing live while performing a play.
If I go to a 'concert', I expect to see a singer or band singing or playing live, but not doing much else (old Van Halen and GWAR being the exceptions).
If I go to a pop star performance, I usually expect to see flashing lights, smoke, sparks, special effects, stunts, and crazy dancing while you hear a track of the performer.
It's not possible to do the stage performance AND sing competently at the same time. If I expect to see dancing, I should not expect the dancer to also sing live, that's not realistic to me."

But this 13 year old, with the pressure she is under singing as sweet as she does, while being humourous at the same time using talent from a forgotten time of family entertaining. What do you expect from this show? I've literally never watched an episode, saw this and was amazed, and here you are all high and mighty on her. wtf?

I could probably work in a different field if the employer was willing to make certain exemptions for my issues. Realistically, I would have a very hard time dealing with stress and some of my meds would make working difficult (or even getting to work in some cases). Working in a high stress field like I was would be nigh impossible.

Thankfully, I have been in the right place at the right time (for the most part, in my career. I've worked for quite a few big-name tech companies at their height and I was always one of those people who took judicious advantage of employee stock options, so while not rich in any way, I am comfortably well off enough to basically 'retire' early. My wife works a job she loves, we own our home, and we decided against having kids a long time ago, so we are doing fine.

Only what they mentioned in the news.
20 ish guns.
2 ar15s, 1 with a bump stock.
1 ak pattern rifle (47 claimed, but the news is clueless. Could be a 74, could be an odd variant), possibly with a bump stock.
Then a bunch of other guns, not described.

Yes, full auto varies. I erred on the higher rate side.
A more realistic rate would be 12hz auto, 6hz bump, and 3hz semi.

Only other non-NFA non-bump rapid fire mechanism that I know of is a binary trigger (fires on pull, and on release). Effectively doubles your semi fire rate.

In any case, he only needed 1 gun and spare magazines.
I assume he brought everything not because it was necessary, but because he was planning to die and he had the stuff, so why not use it one last time (not like he'll get another chance).

To be fair, so far, mass shooters have stuck around for the long haul. Escape hasn't been an issue. But sure, in the future it could be.

True, you don't have to be 100% squeaky clean, but the vegas guy so far does look like he was.

As an aside, our felony code is incredibly expansive. People get disqualified from gun ownership over things that most normal people wouldn't even think would be illegal.

There's a stat that some lawyer published : a person typically commits 3 [obscure] felonies per day just going about normal daily activities. You can basically put anyone in jail if you choose to monitor them.

IMO, felonies should be divided into major and minor, with anything non violent being minor, and not disqualifying of gun ownership or right to vote.

Eg. I don't care if someone is running a pot farm. It isn't bothering anyone, it shouldn't even be a crime. But if it's gonna be a felony, at least it should be some lesser felony than it is now.

-scheherazade

what you saw was a mesh with a skin shader rendering in real-time so that's how fast it renders. didn't look terribly hi-res, the real advancement here is the quality of the skin shader(for realtime) and the fidelity of the facial rig, having proper face target shapes all blending together to get complex movements with skin compression/stretching/wrinkling at this level have historically been out of reach for anything but pre-rendered cgi.

They can probably drop libraries of mocap data on this with face markers that match those manipulation points you see in the video, and animators can use them to animate, or clean up/change the motion capture data.

and the skin textures/pore detail/face model are not a technological achievement as much as the work of a skilled artist, and the deformations are the result of someone who really knows their anatomy.

since there is no animation in this video, no performance, it's hard to judge how realistic it feels. the real trick is always seeing it animated.