I am personally a fan of another of his games not mentioned here, Yomi. It definitely puts focus in a 1-on-1, competitive aspect where you're not playing time trial and every action you make involves picking the counter to the action your opponent is going to make.
It's a lot of standing on the shoulders of giants. People take a new framework or library that abstracts things at such a high level like making a chart just by doing chart ((0.1, 0.2, 0.3), (1, 2, 3)). This work has been done by someone else awhile ago, and they can fit them together like LEGO to create something cool in a relatively short period of time
I would guess they pull from the wiki commons and then use typical JPG or PNG algorithm libraries to stretch or compress the image. There's probably some AI to retrieve images that don't need to be stretched much so that it looks natural.
I'm saying that players have come to expect that issuing "move" will make AI take the shortest path without destruction, and we know that if there is a faster way, we have to tell the AI to attack through the wall if we want to break it. I guess the TL;DR didn't cover that though.
I'm interested in knowing how many of you on here are going to read this in one sitting. Not that it would be sufficient to analyze it for bugs, but because you're that interested.
Why is this game so godlike? I think people might have missed it because they are too used to thinking about what could happen on a real board, where arms would get tangled and whatnot. The strategies in place, like leaving your king wide open to get taken, but dodging at the last second to bait a power piece in are awesome!
I think it's pretty standard that if you issue a move command, units will not attack and will go around. Players have come to expect this since Starcraft I. The whole idea of tower defence that was made popular stands a testament to the fact that we can place walls and change terrain and units WILL change their path on the fly. If you have played a tower defence in Warcraft III, you know that units can be lured into taking the A* optimal path, and you can block it off just before they get there, forcing them to recalculate a new path (which may be a long way away from where they currently are). Then, you can destroy the new tower you just placed and block off the path they had just changed to, forcing them down the old path again. You can repeat this as long as you have resources to build your cheapest tower (this was an exploit that made certain user-created maps really easy). Tower Defence designers now know about this and most of the well-made maps prevent you from building during level.
TL;DR: Path recalculation has been around since Starcraft I.
EDIT: And probably before that
I think you're looking for "straw man" as I didn't attack you personally but you think that I'm attacking a point you didn't make. I brought up one counter-example, but I have seen many more out there.
I'll go back to the top again.
>Justin Bieber was a nobody until he put his videos on Youtube. Kendrick Lamar was discovered this way too. It's easier to gain recognition now than ever. If the world enjoys what you produce you don't have to worry as much about a distribution channel like you did 10+ years ago.
Yes, they get more recognition, but for what? They can convert this Youtube recognition into a small portion of money through Youtube ad monetization (a brand and a distribution channel, though I guess not a label). These examples ended up with a major distribution channel (a major record label) that will bring in enough revenue to survive on or to become a star (something Youtube ad monetization can only do for a very small few). Youtube was just the equivalent of that buddy you have in the industry that can pass on your sample tape with a kind word to get them to look at you. That one buddy probably means more to people in the labels than 100k views.
To continue with your direct response, music labels were promoting artists before iTunes. "[E]mployees of the companies that create the software to distribute the music and videos" most likely include employees of the label itself or contracted companies to write the software. Promoters have been around since the town crier, and their value has kept the job existing (and now unfortunately they take the lion's share of the revenue).
I make no comment on the middle man's ability to adapt to modern distribution channels. I don't think it's relevant to them picking up artists.
Concert venues and software contractors do create jobs, but they very rarely spawn into the giant companies we see represented by the RIAA. If they did, why would this power imbalance exist?
The actual study seems to be behind a paywall. The article claims that "participants were told they won about half the trials", which I assume would be by blasting them with noise ("fingernails on a chalk board, dentist drills, and sirens"). Why would they need to explain which noise was used if they never used it (the player had no opponent)?
They also said that the participant won half the trials. How could the experimenters fool the subjects about the game if they didn't get any harsh sounds back?
And then we have artists like DJ Kariu (http://www.youtube.com/user/Kariu) who have been producing content for years, have ~30k views on their big songs, produce consistently, and are still surviving with a separate shift job because they didn't get picked up. Even if you're noticed, it's still these labels that are creating a majority of the jobs.
I wonder how much research the marketing team did on setting up their brand with that name, considering their consumers are parents and young children.
Gas mileage and average life of transmission, etc. are benchmarks that do matter to the average consumer. The max horsepower isn't used at all by people purchasing cars for travel on the main roads, but max processor power is probably used at least from time to time on people purchasing computers, maybe because of running badly-written software or just trying to open a million tabs in Chrome.
Build quality/durability is quite a tough pickle to nail statstics on. Used Apple sales may still carry a higher price tag because people paid more for them in the first place, or because of the brand name. % of devices still running to their consumer's satisfaction is a statistic I haven't seen before, and might be skewed by the type of respondents. Some of the tests done here that I put stock into are actually some of the most interesting: like dropping Nintendo cartridges from 3 story buildings, or leaving a laptop in your freezer or out on the hot pavement for an hour to see what happens when you try to use them again. There are a lot of stories here about what kind of abuse their laptops take, but I would go on over to Youtube and actually look at some people who went out of their way to record this. Word of mouth and anecdotes really do dominate this area, so I can't say much about this outside of personal experience, which really comes down to "Wait at least a year, do at least an hour's research, and hope you're lucky". Even within a brand, some products are very durable while others are flimsy.
ASUS falls off that list when it comes to vendor support, but Sony, Dell and Lenovo all offer support, though I have never come across useful vendor support, so I'll have to keep quiet about that. Generally I try to buy equipment that is durable enough not to fail within that warranty period, and after that I'll move on.