Friday Links and Notes
A big grab-bag here before the I start playing and writing up today's Dwarf Fortress session.It's crazy in Austin right now. Half the world is down here for the Ohio St. game tomorrow. And if you can't get enough pre-game analysis, go here:
Ohio St.-Texas preview.
That is an incredibly detailed analysis, complete with formations and video clips illustrating every single freaking things both teams do.
Matthew Sakey's always-interesting Culture Clash column has a new installment and you can read it here.
Sirius sent me a fantastic link this week to an article in Discover on "extreme origami." Computer modeling has exponentially expanded the ability of origami artists to make complex creations, and the details are fascinating. Here's an excerpt:
At its core, origami consists of just two folds, mountain and valley. A mountain fold is what you get if you crease a piece of paper so that it stands up like a pup tent. A valley fold is the same thing turned upside down. Valley folding each corner of a square so that they meet in the center creates something that looks a bit like a cheese blintz and is therefore known as a blintz fold. Beyond these two basic folds, the grammar of origami proliferates rapidly. It's possible to blintz a petal fold, or double blintz it. Likewise, combining a series of squash and petal folds yields a frog base—one of the four traditional bases (called kite, fish, bird, and frog) from which many traditional origami animals are fashioned.
"All the parts of a base are linked together and can't be altered without affecting the rest of the paper, so that's the part you have to calculate just right," Lang says. A base with four flaps is relatively easy to make. Each flap is formed from one of the corners of the square. Making a base with 17 flaps of the right size and in the right places—what you'd need to create Lang's flying rhinoceros beetle—is exponentially more difficult. "Figuring out how to make good legs was all people did for years," Tom Hull says. "Doing a six-legged beetle was a big, big deal."
Totally fascinating, and here's the link.
Several people have e-mailed me to mention that Dominions 3 is gold (and has been for a few days). The Dominions series has a tremendously loyal following as a detailed, intense game, and I expect this new version will be excellent as well. Here's a link to game information and as well as the ordering page over at the Shrapnel Games website.
The NHL2K7 demo for the 360 version is available on the Xbox Live Marketplace. The new skating animations are fantastic, but it's hard to tell much else without having all the game options available for camera angles and sliders.
The NHL demo from EA is also available, but all you get is a shootout, and I'm highly suspicious of EA (for good reason). The shootout looks great, but why aren't they showing us actual gameplay in a five-on-five situation? Two guesses: one, they're having framerate issues, and two, the gameplay doesn't stand up any level of scrutiny. And I hope I'm wrong, but we've all been victimized by the classic bait-and-switch many here.
By the way, shooting using the right analog stick in NHL is a very nice piece of design.
<< Home