Bay 12 Games Forum

Finally... => Forum Games and Roleplaying => Topic started by: Tack on November 11, 2009, 04:16:23 am

Title: Fun Facts
Post by: Tack on November 11, 2009, 04:16:23 am

Fun Fact 1: Tack Can't eat biscuits without milk, coffee or tea to dip them in.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Emperor_Jonathan on November 11, 2009, 04:52:52 am

Fun Fact 2: MacDonalds only uses real onions on a select few of their burgers.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Gunner-Chan on November 11, 2009, 04:53:54 am

Fun fact 3: Sofia is still totally obsessed with Taokaka.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: TheNewerMartianEmperor on November 11, 2009, 04:57:37 am

Fact 4: New Mars is actually inhabited by humans. Martians don't actually exist.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Jackrabbit on November 11, 2009, 05:31:05 am

Fun fact 5: Jackrabbit is, in actual fact, a tall gangly teenager with about as much in common with his beloved Max as roadkill with a burger not from McDonalds.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 11, 2009, 11:38:27 am

Fun Fact 6: It is actually not possible to punch someone so hard their skeleton tries to escape.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Akigagak on November 11, 2009, 11:42:42 am

Fun Fact 7: I had 12 toes, and 11 fingers.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Dakk on November 11, 2009, 11:46:01 am

Fun Fact: I stole my forum name from a Magic: The Gathering card.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Cthulhu on November 11, 2009, 11:57:18 am

Fun Fact:  Burger King didn't have to deal with Supersize Me, so their drinks are gargantuan.  A Burger King small is like a McDonalds Medium, a medium is large, and a large could keep a thousand Ethiopians going for a week.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Strife26 on November 11, 2009, 12:01:09 pm

Fun fact: The entire universe is slowly winding down, and will eventually suffer an entropic death. There isn't anything you can do about it.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 11, 2009, 12:06:24 pm

Fun Fact 11: Everyone knows that you don't want to know what's in sausages. But you also don't want to know what's in chicken nuggets and so forth.

It's mechanically separated meat! That means when they've taken all the meat off the bone, they put the bone into a machine that vibrates and scours it until every last scrap of edible material is off of it. Then this pink meat slurry is mixed with lots of vegetable starch, salt, other veggies to bulk it up, and pressed into fun shapes!

Fish sticks include the possibly rotted, possibly diseased fish that cannot be sold in stores. Huge fishing ships bring the catch to a floating fish factory, where the fish are processed. Workers are told not to throw things out - throw them in the slurry machine. What is horrible enough for the outflow is snapped up by sea lions that congregate nearby, which are then eaten by sharks and whales. Sea birds are constantly dive bombing the area trying to snap up scraps. And by the time any fish has gotten to market it's several weeks to months old.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Rashilul on November 11, 2009, 04:23:32 pm

Fun Fact 12: Rashilul means 'Death Lord'

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Tack on November 11, 2009, 04:25:58 pm

Fun Fact: I was once dared to eat three whole oranges (incl. skin) within five mins.
I ran out of time on the last one.  :-[

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 11, 2009, 07:28:19 pm

Fun Fact 14: I do a lot of stuff with my off hand but I'm not ambidextrous. I just like to do it. Now it actually feels weird to brush my teeth with my primary hand.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Itnetlolor on November 11, 2009, 07:35:42 pm

Fun Fact 15: Itnetlolor's beard grows at it's own pace. In this case, apparently really fast.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: sonerohi on November 11, 2009, 07:36:35 pm

Fun Fact 16: In the discussion of Renaissance gentlemen, our History teacher said that being a good swordsmen was a requirement. Myself and another kid both professed ourselves as one, so our teacher let us bring fencing gear to school and compete infront of the class.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 11, 2009, 07:39:31 pm

Fun Fact 17: Reniassance Gentlemen washed their genitals, on average, more frequently than some people today.

^{(I am guessing about this Fun Fact I am so sorry to let you all down like this)}

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Itnetlolor on November 11, 2009, 07:59:40 pm

Fun Fact 18: Plump Helmets melt in your mouth, not in your hand.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Strife26 on November 11, 2009, 08:01:32 pm

Fun Fact: Someday, somewhere, the zefie modification is more popular than vanilla DF.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 11, 2009, 08:03:40 pm

Fun Fact 20: Mars has an incredibly interesting landscape. There's a Google Maps for Mars and you can zoom around. There are very few Starbucks.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: qwertyuiopas on November 11, 2009, 09:39:47 pm

Fun fact 21: I will be lucky if somebody notices that 21 has been used, and DF 1.0 being released today is more likely than anybody reading this fully.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 12, 2009, 02:21:11 am

Fun Fact 22: You can use facts to prove anything. 90% of people know that. Facts schmacts!

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Angellus on November 12, 2009, 01:25:18 pm

Quote from: Sofia on November 11, 2009, 04:53:54 am

Fun fact 3: Sofia is still totally obsessed with Taokaka.

Fun fact 23: I only like Taokaka when there is a face visable.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Taokaka (http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/867/79106taokaka12296lo.jpg)

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 12, 2009, 02:06:07 pm

Fun Fact 24: Any fiction or game involving space on a scale of even a tenth of the galaxy is meaningless because it's so huge. There are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Which means if in your guidebook you detailed each star system with just one page of text, and you can fit 269 pages in an inch of book thickness (http://wbilljohnson.com/journal/math/pagethickness.htm) with one solar system on each side of a page, the book would be almost 3,000 miles tall. Earth's diameter is almost 8,000 miles.

If you were to read that book at one page per minute, continuously without sleep 24 hours a day 7 days a week, you would finish over 190,000 years later.

And this is one page of text per solar system. Go ahead and try defining our solar system, including Earth and all its biology and civilization and history, in just one page.

I say this scale is meaningless because our stories involving galaxies always focus on just a few people and planets, and even then only on extremely limited parts of those planets.

You could easily tell the story of Star Wars without anyone in the cast visiting more than a half-dozen solar systems. You have just a few scattered planets visited, a moon or two, a couple bars, etc. In a stretch you could set it in just one solar system.

In terms of a game, just try designing, even in a crude overview using randomized tables like in Traveller, just one quadrant of a galaxy. It's pointless.

And unless you hit all those places, you might as well not even talk about the galaxy at all. It's just a buzzword that makes the fans titter.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Armok on November 12, 2009, 02:19:18 pm

(There is actually one meaningful way to have a galaxy: have each star be just a dot with a few bytes of data, and generate it procedurally if and only if the player visits it. Think Noctis.)

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Rashilul on November 12, 2009, 02:34:26 pm

Fun fact 25: Rashilul has mild OCD and messed up brain halves leading to bad coordination.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Itnetlolor on November 12, 2009, 03:38:46 pm

Fun Fact 26: Somewhere, somehow, there's a duck watching you.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 12, 2009, 03:48:55 pm

Quote from: Armok

(There is actually one meaningful way to have a galaxy: have each star be just a dot with a few bytes of data, and generate it procedurally if and only if the player visits it. Think Noctis.)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Digitally, it's more feasible. But if a star isn't generated until you visit it, then there is no connectivity between systems, and you can't really say your game / fiction is really about a whole galaxy. It's just about a series of disconnected star systems. And until you've done the generation then you don't even have that: you just have a funky little bitmap. That's like me showing you a picture of the Milky Way and saying that's a fleshed-out fictional setting.

But even then, with exactly two bytes per star system, your galaxy takes up over 186 gb of storage space. If you average four planets / features per system, one moon/feature per planet, and give each of those two bytes of description, you've inflated it to 1.67 tb of data. But you need little spacer bytes that say "move on to describing the next body" so between each needs to be a byte at zero.

Our solar system would look like this:

Single Medium Yellow Star
Tiny Rock Planet, No Moon
Small Gas Planet, No Moon
Small Rock Planet (Atmosphere), One Small Rock Moon
Loose Asteroid Belt
Small Rock Planet, Two Tiny Rock Moon
Huge Gas Planet, 62 Tiny Rock Moon
Large Gas Planet (Rings), 33 Tiny Rock Moon (1 Atmosphere)
Large Gas Planet, 27 Tiny Rock Moon
Large Gas Planet, 13 Tiny Rock Moon

If every system had that level of detail, you're looking at about 27.8 tb of data.

And I'd say to have a meaningful interaction with Earth you'd need to know more about it than that it is a small rocky planet with an atmosphere. If you accounted for space to tell what the main atmospheric composition was, the presence of liquid water, biology, civilization, not even getting into any names or specifics, you're still looking at a galaxy of well over 300 tb of data.

But even that doesn't actually give you a setting. You need to name civilizations, determine what civs they know about and how they feel about them, what their tech levels are, how peaceful they are, what atmospheres they breathe, etc. At that point you might as well call it 5-10 pb of data for your galaxy.

Don't even try for ship floorplans, names of countries or famous individuals, social movements, general maps of planets, and so forth.

Space is just too big to try talking about a galaxy.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 12, 2009, 03:51:00 pm

Fun Fact 27: Itnetlolor is that duck.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Aldaris on November 12, 2009, 04:03:39 pm

Fun fact 28: This is getting silly, stop it.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 12, 2009, 04:15:58 pm

Fun Fact 29: Banned for wishing for a high-rated avatar! ;)

Not Very Fun Serious Fact 29: A natural gas drilling company caused a mud volcano (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/06/sidoarjos_manmade_mud_volcano.html) that has destroyed a swath of Indonesian countryside and several villages. It continues to pump out mud at an astonishing rate and cannot be plugged.

EDIT: Not actually completely a Fun thing.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Armok on November 12, 2009, 06:02:11 pm

Quote from: LeoLeonardoIII on November 12, 2009, 03:48:55 pm

Quote from: Armok

(There is actually one meaningful way to have a galaxy: have each star be just a dot with a few bytes of data, and generate it procedurally if and only if the player visits it. Think Noctis.)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Digitally, it's more feasible. But if a star isn't generated until you visit it, then there is no connectivity between systems, and you can't really say your game / fiction is really about a whole galaxy. It's just about a series of disconnected star systems. And until you've done the generation then you don't even have that: you just have a funky little bitmap. That's like me showing you a picture of the Milky Way and saying that's a fleshed-out fictional setting.

But even then, with exactly two bytes per star system, your galaxy takes up over 186 gb of storage space. If you average four planets / features per system, one moon/feature per planet, and give each of those two bytes of description, you've inflated it to 1.67 tb of data. But you need little spacer bytes that say "move on to describing the next body" so between each needs to be a byte at zero.

Our solar system would look like this:

Single Medium Yellow Star
Tiny Rock Planet, No Moon
Small Gas Planet, No Moon
Small Rock Planet (Atmosphere), One Small Rock Moon
Loose Asteroid Belt
Small Rock Planet, Two Tiny Rock Moon
Huge Gas Planet, 62 Tiny Rock Moon
Large Gas Planet (Rings), 33 Tiny Rock Moon (1 Atmosphere)
Large Gas Planet, 27 Tiny Rock Moon
Large Gas Planet, 13 Tiny Rock Moon

If every system had that level of detail, you're looking at about 27.8 tb of data.

And I'd say to have a meaningful interaction with Earth you'd need to know more about it than that it is a small rocky planet with an atmosphere. If you accounted for space to tell what the main atmospheric composition was, the presence of liquid water, biology, civilization, not even getting into any names or specifics, you're still looking at a galaxy of well over 300 tb of data.

But even that doesn't actually give you a setting. You need to name civilizations, determine what civs they know about and how they feel about them, what their tech levels are, how peaceful they are, what atmospheres they breathe, etc. At that point you might as well call it 5-10 pb of data for your galaxy.

Don't even try for ship floorplans, names of countries or famous individuals, social movements, general maps of planets, and so forth.

Space is just too big to try talking about a galaxy.

(there are actualy ways around those problems to, but they are rather technical. One example is that you could describe 1 group of 1000 stars, then you just have several copies of that, with randomly generated diferences only when the player actualy examines them so it dosn't seem like it's the same. Thats just one example, and that could be combined with loads of other techicues. or if the drawbacs from that spesific techniue are to limiting for the curent aplication, using some of the other would still be enought.)

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: qwertyuiopas on November 12, 2009, 06:18:53 pm

Quote from: Armok on November 12, 2009, 06:02:11 pm

Quote from: LeoLeonardoIII on November 12, 2009, 03:48:55 pm

(there are actualy ways around those problems to, but they are rather technical. One example is that you could describe 1 group of 1000 stars, then you just have several copies of that, with randomly generated diferences only when the player actualy examines them so it dosn't seem like it's the same. Thats just one example, and that could be combined with loads of other techicues. or if the drawbacs from that spesific techniue are to limiting for the curent aplication, using some of the other would still be enought.)

(((((Noctis turns a single number into an entire galaxy. What you would then do is continue the data seeding to produce civilizations and other components, with the civilizations being affected by nearby systems. You have to generate them each time you use them, but that way you have a deeply described civilization, with the only issue being that they can only "interact" with nearby civilizations, and more importantly, cannot change those interactions or evolve in any way.

It works by using the 3d coodrdinates to produce an input to a function that uses the input to decide if a planet exists through pseudorandom methods only relying on the input to determine the output, and weighted to be more likely in the denser regions of the centre of the "galaxy".

Take this one step further, and fully save just the last thousand or two systems the player has meaningfully interacted with in full detail, then another hundred thousand vaguely. (The hundred thousand basically saying how well known the player is or something simple). The player will take a long time to fill up this cache, so they will never notice a civilization "revert" (10 minutes to properly interact with a system * 1000 systems = too much time).

Add to this the probability of a given civilization existing somewhere, and you get maybe one in ten systems with inhabitants, and you can give the player the feeling of an entire galaxy to explore while only saving the details for a few thousand.)))))

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Rashilul on November 12, 2009, 06:23:56 pm

Fun fact 30: ^ They do this in every thread. ^

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 12, 2009, 07:15:14 pm

Ah but that's not really a galactic story.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Let's say you have a Star Wars story and it describes ten planets throughout. The characters do not set foot on an eleventh planet. It is meaningless to say that the story is set in a galaxy. It's a galactic story in the same way Lord of the Rings was. It doesn't matter how much empty space was traveled through.

The characters of LOTR interacted with various types of terrain, dungeons, civilizations, battles, etc. and it can legitimately be said that the story is on a national scale. It cannot be described as a continental or world-spanning story.

WoW is set on several continents but those continents are actually the size of large islands in terms of real-world measurement. Morrowind was a few square miles or so. You can't call Morrowind or WoW a game about a world. They're games on an archipelago scale.

GTA4 was set in a very small but very built-up town. But it was really a game with a scale of the streets of a tiny town. You couldn't go inside except a couple specific places.

For something to be on a galactic scale, you have to feature meaningful interactions with many things in that galaxy. Procedural generation is fine, but you can't generate just as much as the player might encounter. At that point you're absolutely not playing a galaxy-scale game. You're playing a 1,000-solar-system-scale game.

I'm not saying that's not enough. It's far more than plenty! I'm saying that calling it a story on a galactic scale is disingenuous because it draws people in who are excited by that level of scope when it is not present.

EDIT: Also, if you have 1 in 1,000 system natively inhabited, you have to save cultural details for a minimum of one hundred million civs. That assumes every inhabited planet has no more than one native civ. You can't let the civ history cache drop and then expect the game to re-generate the civ procedurally again because the history is dependent on factors beyond static values like XYZ location and input seed.

EDIT2: Fun Fact 31: One of the two men who were the first ones to explore the Marianas Trench (the deepest portion of the sea) was named Piccard. His father was Swiss though, not French.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Now I can see how you could generate a history, too, and civs, etc using a seed. You would divide the galaxy into sections and subsections, and you load only what's in your subsection. The game re-generates the entire eight subsections around you every time you change subsections.

The problem with this is first that you can have no impact on the game. You can save changes you make to the player profile but that would quickly balloon out of control: imagine the havoc a single RPG character wreaks when he plows through a town stealing and buying and selling. And if you don't save those changes to the player profile he can mine the same asteroid for space-fish over and over, or kill the Prime Gulash of Krenucky multiple times.

Secondly if the game regenerates only the subsections immediately adjacent, they are not affected by subsections farther out. Imagine that the Borg are two subsections away. The game history shows everyone happy and healthy. You pass close enough to load the subsection with the Borg origin / homeworld. Suddenly the history of the Borg takes effect and the whole region is full of them. Farmer Ben is now six feet tall and wears black rubber implants. Scoot a light-year back in the other direction and the game reloads, and the Borg no longer exist for the purposes of the galaxy.

You can extend the load distance or reduce inter-civ impacts. Extending load distance increases system resource requirements by the square of the additional distance. There are practical limits you reach quite quickly. And if you make everyone completely isolated from each other so they can't affect each other, you are no longer playing a galactic game. You are playing a Gulliver's Travels style game involving multiple star systems. Gulliver did not travel around the world. He traveled between a few tiny islands.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Tack on November 13, 2009, 04:46:53 am

Fun fact for the very far above.
This isn't for philosopy - it's for random tidbits of information which amuse people. Get to it and stop derailing.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 13, 2009, 11:30:18 am

Hey I leave fun facts and started spoilering my diatribe!

Fun Fact 33: The name of my city is unique - there are no other cities in the world named Tacoma. There is a light pickup of dubious quality.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Myroc on November 13, 2009, 01:56:31 pm

Fun Fact 34: Myroc is not pronounced "My rock".

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 13, 2009, 02:58:10 pm

Please elaborate with the correct pronunciation in a future Fun Fact. I am curious.

Fun Fact 35: There's a million of us, just like me. (-The Real Suga Baby)

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Frelock on November 13, 2009, 04:07:06 pm

Fun Fact 36: Glass is actually a liquid at room temperature; it just has such a high viscosity that it takes centuries for it to be noticeable.  This is why extremely old church windows are thicker at the bottom than they are at the top.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Armok on November 13, 2009, 04:20:48 pm

Quote from: Frelock on November 13, 2009, 04:07:06 pm

Fun Fact 36: Glass is actually a liquid at room temperature; it just has such a high viscosity that it takes centuries for it to be noticeable.  This is why extremely old church windows are thicker at the bottom than they are at the top.

This is a myth. The actual answere of what state glass is in is slightly more complicated than most materials, but closer to solid than liquid, and the thickness of church glass is due to the glassmaking techniues of the time.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Virex on November 13, 2009, 04:30:56 pm

Fun fact 37: pitch on the other hand exhibits liquid properties at a human time scale at room temperature, but it's viscocity is so absurdly high that it can be shatered by striking it with a hammer. It takes the pitch in the famous Pitch Drop experiment of Queensland University (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment) about 100 months to form and let go of a drop.

(note for the chemistry nerds here: In cases like this, "Liquid properties" would probably better then saying it's a liquid, since one could atribute the forming of drops in resins and bitumens to creep. Actualy in cases like this, liquid and solid lose a bit of their meaning.)

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Luke_Prowler on November 13, 2009, 04:43:03 pm

Fun fact 38: Marijuana is actually less addicting than cigarettes and beer. If it was legalized in the US, hemp (the plant that Marijuana it made from) would put cotton out of business.   

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Frelock on November 13, 2009, 05:25:30 pm

Fun Fact 39: Astronauts were not allowed to use the moon buggies if one astronaut was walking; a lunar hit-and-run would not have been good press.

(I got my last fun fact from a geochemist; funny how some scientists still believe everything they read.  However, since glass has no structure of any kind, I might call it a liquid too.  Definitions are fun.)

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Virex on November 13, 2009, 06:23:35 pm

Fun Fact 40: you can heat watter and other liquids to well above it's boiling point, in which case you get a superheated fluid. This happens if you gradually heat the liquid in a clean container containing no dust or other things the boiling can start on.
If you disturb a superheated fluid, for example by adding sugar to your superheated coffee, some of it will turn into gas rapidly. Remembering that vapours typically take in about 1000 time as much volume as their corresponding liquids variant and you can guess the consequences.

(To be more precise, the formation of a vapor needs present gasses to start. Dust particles and sand can contain minute pockets of gas where the evaporation can start, and so can rough surfaces. A clean, smooth container could well lack these pockets of gas, facilitating superheating. Also, repeatedly heating and cooling liquids removes gass from it, making superheating easier.)

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Dwarmin on November 13, 2009, 06:56:35 pm

Fun Fact 41: Lobstermen are quite resistant to ranged weapons like Gauss, Harpoons, and explosives-but take extra damage from sonic drills.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 13, 2009, 08:01:24 pm

Since you're a Lobster Man, I can't help but feel that this Fun Fact is to your detriment!

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Itnetlolor on November 13, 2009, 08:36:51 pm

Fun Fact 42: This fact is the Answer to Life...the Universe...and Everything

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Akigagak on November 13, 2009, 09:04:59 pm

Fun fact 43: Steven Fry is the only person alive who knows the meaning behind the last fact.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Itnetlolor on November 13, 2009, 09:34:41 pm

Fun Fact 44: Lobstermen, like Chryssalids, taste great with butter and garlic.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: eerr on November 14, 2009, 04:52:01 am

Fun Fact 45: Ants are a good source of protein. As well as Antment.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Itnetlolor on November 14, 2009, 11:23:27 am

Fun Fact 46: Over-exposure to classical music can make one act like a fine gent. Dost attempt this endeavor at thine own risk now.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Shoruke on November 14, 2009, 01:29:25 pm

Fun Fact 47: Shoruke once solved problem math questions that his teacher couldn't figure out.
On the next test, she corrected my paper and used it as the answer sheet.

This was back in grade 7 mind you, but it was still pretty FRIGGIN AWESOME.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 15, 2009, 01:58:54 am

Fun Fact 48: Leo was once berated in class by his 4th grade teacher for "showing off" vocabulary-wise.

He also once got a D on an art assignment, depicting our solar system, because he drew it from the outside looking along the solar plane.

Reasons the teacher gave for giving a D? "One of the planets is in the sun" and "You can't see all the planets".

No darling, that is called perspective. The planet is in front of the sun. And you should have complained about, if anything, the fact that the planets were far too large compared to the sun. Otherwise they would have been little dots near a three-inch sun in the middle.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Strife26 on November 15, 2009, 02:00:27 am

Fun fact 49: It is possible to lick your own elbow.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 15, 2009, 02:03:48 am

Fun Fact 50: I'm doing it right now.

Wait, the inside or the outside of your elbow?

I'm licking the inside. I think he meant outside.

*Urrgh!*

Ain't happening.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Archangel on November 15, 2009, 02:04:57 am

Fun Fact 51: I'm left handed.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Strife26 on November 15, 2009, 02:07:36 am

Fun Fact 52: I am not left handed.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Itnetlolor on November 15, 2009, 03:00:36 am

Fun Fact 53: The fact below is true.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Jackrabbit on November 15, 2009, 03:04:57 am

Fun Fact 54: My left arm just fell off and turned into a dog.

Also I'm an asshole.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: eerr on November 15, 2009, 03:15:40 am

Fun Fact 55: Google is destined to overtake microsoft.
Their reign of awesomeness will last as long as the guys who work on the original engine.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Archangel on November 15, 2009, 03:42:58 am

Fun Fact 56: Now, whenever someone says something involving ass, I picture it involving a donkey. For example, if someone says that he is kicking ass, I picture him kicking a donkey.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Tack on November 15, 2009, 06:32:38 am

Quote from: Jackrabbit on November 15, 2009, 03:04:57 am

Fun Fact 54: My left arm just fell off and turned into a dog.

Also I'm an asshole.

The former is not true - The latter, however...

fun fact 57: Tack cannot do backflips. Forward flips though, yes.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Akigagak on November 15, 2009, 07:41:01 am

Fun Fact 58: The weather hates me.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Rilder on November 15, 2009, 08:25:42 am

Fun Fact 59: My username is from Runescape...

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Rooster on November 15, 2009, 08:38:07 am

Fun Fact 60: Pokemon may be a franchise built on money making, but competitive battling is actually fun

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Itnetlolor on November 15, 2009, 01:09:15 pm

Fun Fact 61: Fried alligator actually tastes like chicken.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Myroc on November 15, 2009, 02:27:51 pm

Fun Fact 62: EVERYTHING tastes like chicken.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Strife26 on November 15, 2009, 03:28:58 pm

Fun Fact 63: There is an exception for every generalization with the exception of there being an exception existing for every generalization.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 16, 2009, 01:23:11 am

Fun Generalization That Disproves Strife's Point 1: Things are.

Actual Fun Fact 64: The Final Countdown lyrics are now going through your head.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Luke_Prowler on November 16, 2009, 02:20:15 am

Quote from: LeoLeonardoIII on November 16, 2009, 01:23:11 am

Actual Fun Fact 64: The Final Countdown lyrics are now going through your head.

...damn you

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Duke 2.0 on November 16, 2009, 03:24:26 am

Quote from: LeoLeonardoIII on November 11, 2009, 11:38:27 am

Fun Fact 6: It is actually not possible to punch someone so hard their skeleton tries to escape.

Protip 65: The above has been invalidated.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Neruz on November 16, 2009, 05:42:50 am

Fun Fact 65: You just wasted 20 minutes reading this thread.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Tack on November 16, 2009, 06:44:31 am

Quote from: LeoLeonardoIII on November 16, 2009, 01:23:11 am

Fun Generalization That Disproves Strife's Point 1: Things are.

Wrong. Things can be not.

Fun Fact 66: Dolphins and humans are the only animals that have sex for pleasure, and kill for fun.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Jackrabbit on November 16, 2009, 06:46:29 am

Fun Fact 67: Dolphins are dicks.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Nivim on November 16, 2009, 06:52:54 am

Spoiler: "Ridiculously long discussion on galaxy sizes." (click to show/hide)

Quote from: LeoLeonardoIII on November 12, 2009, 02:06:07 pm

Fun Fact 24: Any fiction or game involving space on a scale of even a tenth of the galaxy is meaningless because it's so huge. There are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Which means if in your guidebook you detailed each star system with just one page of text, and you can fit 269 pages in an inch of book thickness (http://wbilljohnson.com/journal/math/pagethickness.htm) with one solar system on each side of a page, the book would be almost 3,000 miles tall. Earth's diameter is almost 8,000 miles.

If you were to read that book at one page per minute, continuously without sleep 24 hours a day 7 days a week, you would finish over 190,000 years later.

And this is one page of text per solar system. Go ahead and try defining our solar system, including Earth and all its biology and civilization and history, in just one page.

I say this scale is meaningless because our stories involving galaxies always focus on just a few people and planets, and even then only on extremely limited parts of those planets.

You could easily tell the story of Star Wars without anyone in the cast visiting more than a half-dozen solar systems. You have just a few scattered planets visited, a moon or two, a couple bars, etc. In a stretch you could set it in just one solar system.

In terms of a game, just try designing, even in a crude overview using randomized tables like in Traveller, just one quadrant of a galaxy. It's pointless.

And unless you hit all those places, you might as well not even talk about the galaxy at all. It's just a buzzword that makes the fans titter.

Quote from: LeoLeonardoIII on November 12, 2009, 03:48:55 pm

Quote from: Armok

(There is actually one meaningful way to have a galaxy: have each star be just a dot with a few bytes of data, and generate it procedurally if and only if the player visits it. Think Noctis.)

Digitally, it's more feasible. But if a star isn't generated until you visit it, then there is no connectivity between systems, and you can't really say your game / fiction is really about a whole galaxy. It's just about a series of disconnected star systems. And until you've done the generation then you don't even have that: you just have a funky little bitmap. That's like me showing you a picture of the Milky Way and saying that's a fleshed-out fictional setting.

But even then, with exactly two bytes per star system, your galaxy takes up over 186 gb of storage space. If you average four planets / features per system, one moon/feature per planet, and give each of those two bytes of description, you've inflated it to 1.67 tb of data. But you need little spacer bytes that say "move on to describing the next body" so between each needs to be a byte at zero.

Our solar system would look like this:

Single Medium Yellow Star
Tiny Rock Planet, No Moon
Small Gas Planet, No Moon
Small Rock Planet (Atmosphere), One Small Rock Moon
Loose Asteroid Belt
Small Rock Planet, Two Tiny Rock Moon
Huge Gas Planet, 62 Tiny Rock Moon
Large Gas Planet (Rings), 33 Tiny Rock Moon (1 Atmosphere)
Large Gas Planet, 27 Tiny Rock Moon
Large Gas Planet, 13 Tiny Rock Moon

If every system had that level of detail, you're looking at about 27.8 tb of data.

And I'd say to have a meaningful interaction with Earth you'd need to know more about it than that it is a small rocky planet with an atmosphere. If you accounted for space to tell what the main atmospheric composition was, the presence of liquid water, biology, civilization, not even getting into any names or specifics, you're still looking at a galaxy of well over 300 tb of data.

But even that doesn't actually give you a setting. You need to name civilizations, determine what civs they know about and how they feel about them, what their tech levels are, how peaceful they are, what atmospheres they breathe, etc. At that point you might as well call it 5-10 pb of data for your galaxy.

Don't even try for ship floorplans, names of countries or famous individuals, social movements, general maps of planets, and so forth.

Space is just too big to try talking about a galaxy.

Quote from: qwertyuiopas on November 12, 2009, 06:18:53 pm

Quote from: Armok on November 12, 2009, 06:02:11 pm

(there are actualy ways around those problems to, but they are rather technical. One example is that you could describe 1 group of 1000 stars, then you just have several copies of that, with randomly generated diferences only when the player actualy examines them so it dosn't seem like it's the same. Thats just one example, and that could be combined with loads of other techicues. or if the drawbacs from that spesific techniue are to limiting for the curent aplication, using some of the other would still be enought.)

(((((Noctis turns a single number into an entire galaxy. What you would then do is continue the data seeding to produce civilizations and other components, with the civilizations being affected by nearby systems. You have to generate them each time you use them, but that way you have a deeply described civilization, with the only issue being that they can only "interact" with nearby civilizations, and more importantly, cannot change those interactions or evolve in any way.

It works by using the 3d coodrdinates to produce an input to a function that uses the input to decide if a planet exists through pseudorandom methods only relying on the input to determine the output, and weighted to be more likely in the denser regions of the centre of the "galaxy".

Take this one step further, and fully save just the last thousand or two systems the player has meaningfully interacted with in full detail, then another hundred thousand vaguely. (The hundred thousand basically saying how well known the player is or something simple). The player will take a long time to fill up this cache, so they will never notice a civilization "revert" (10 minutes to properly interact with a system * 1000 systems = too much time).

Add to this the probability of a given civilization existing somewhere, and you get maybe one in ten systems with inhabitants, and you can give the player the feeling of an entire galaxy to explore while only saving the details for a few thousand.)))))

Quote from: LeoLeonardoIII on November 12, 2009, 07:15:14 pm

Ah but that's not really a galactic story.


Let's say you have a Star Wars story and it describes ten planets throughout. The characters do not set foot on an eleventh planet. It is meaningless to say that the story is set in a galaxy. It's a galactic story in the same way Lord of the Rings was. It doesn't matter how much empty space was traveled through.

The characters of LOTR interacted with various types of terrain, dungeons, civilizations, battles, etc. and it can legitimately be said that the story is on a national scale. It cannot be described as a continental or world-spanning story.

WoW is set on several continents but those continents are actually the size of large islands in terms of real-world measurement. Morrowind was a few square miles or so. You can't call Morrowind or WoW a game about a world. They're games on an archipelago scale.

GTA4 was set in a very small but very built-up town. But it was really a game with a scale of the streets of a tiny town. You couldn't go inside except a couple specific places.

For something to be on a galactic scale, you have to feature meaningful interactions with many things in that galaxy. Procedural generation is fine, but you can't generate just as much as the player might encounter. At that point you're absolutely not playing a galaxy-scale game. You're playing a 1,000-solar-system-scale game.

I'm not saying that's not enough. It's far more than plenty! I'm saying that calling it a story on a galactic scale is disingenuous because it draws people in who are excited by that level of scope when it is not present.

EDIT: Also, if you have 1 in 1,000 system natively inhabited, you have to save cultural details for a minimum of one hundred million civs. That assumes every inhabited planet has no more than one native civ. You can't let the civ history cache drop and then expect the game to re-generate the civ procedurally again because the history is dependent on factors beyond static values like XYZ location and input seed.


EDIT2: Fun Fact 31: One of the two men who were the first ones to explore the Marianas Trench (the deepest portion of the sea) was named Piccard. His father was Swiss though, not French.


Now I can see how you could generate a history, too, and civs, etc using a seed. You would divide the galaxy into sections and subsections, and you load only what's in your subsection. The game re-generates the entire eight subsections around you every time you change subsections.

The problem with this is first that you can have no impact on the game. You can save changes you make to the player profile but that would quickly balloon out of control: imagine the havoc a single RPG character wreaks when he plows through a town stealing and buying and selling. And if you don't save those changes to the player profile he can mine the same asteroid for space-fish over and over, or kill the Prime Gulash of Krenucky multiple times.

Secondly if the game regenerates only the subsections immediately adjacent, they are not affected by subsections farther out. Imagine that the Borg are two subsections away. The game history shows everyone happy and healthy. You pass close enough to load the subsection with the Borg origin / homeworld. Suddenly the history of the Borg takes effect and the whole region is full of them. Farmer Ben is now six feet tall and wears black rubber implants. Scoot a light-year back in the other direction and the game reloads, and the Borg no longer exist for the purposes of the galaxy.

You can extend the load distance or reduce inter-civ impacts. Extending load distance increases system resource requirements by the square of the additional distance. There are practical limits you reach quite quickly. And if you make everyone completely isolated from each other so they can't affect each other, you are no longer playing a galactic game. You are playing a Gulliver's Travels style game involving multiple star systems. Gulliver did not travel around the world. He traveled between a few tiny islands.

You know, there is a procedural game that will use that fact to make sure the players never run out of room. The development is going well, even though Brebion isn't as close to the future players as Toady. Oh, and it's called Infinity (http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/index.php).
:tcaF nuF

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Neruz on November 16, 2009, 07:02:04 am

Quote from: Jackrabbit on November 16, 2009, 06:46:29 am

Fun Fact 67: Dolphins are dicks.

Fun Fact 68: So are people.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Myroc on November 16, 2009, 09:55:58 am

Fun Fact 70: Fun Fact 65 has been mentioned twice.

Fun Fact 71: I just denied everyone the possibility of making a perverted "Fun Fact 69" joke. Muhaha.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: EagleV on November 16, 2009, 12:12:19 pm

Fun fact 72: Lice are so fertile, they get born pregnant.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 16, 2009, 12:43:58 pm

Fun Fact 72B (Because the next one legitimately ought to be 73): If you ever hear something that touches off your logic-sensor, check Snopes (http://www.snopes.com) for corroboration. It's not peer-edited so in some circles it could be viewed as a more reliable source than Wikipedia. It's also pretty entertaining to read.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Myroc on November 16, 2009, 02:53:40 pm

Fun Fact 74: We went 65 twice, i just corrected the order. The next Fun Fact should be 75.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Rooster on November 16, 2009, 02:57:30 pm

Fun Fact 75: Number/Answer games are extremely popular on forums

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 16, 2009, 03:53:13 pm

Fun Fact 76: Americans have what we call football and there are about 300,000,000 of us. The rest of the world disagrees and there are 21 times as many of them.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Cthulhu on November 16, 2009, 03:57:29 pm

Fun Fact 78:  Fun Fact 66 is false.  Bonobos have sex for pleasure, as do pigs.  There are a lot of animals that have sex for pleasure.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Tack on November 16, 2009, 04:10:32 pm

Fun Fact 79: Neither Bonobos nor pigs kill for pleasure.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 16, 2009, 04:12:05 pm

It would also be more appropriate to give the fact as "of animals which have been reliably and thorhoughy researched, ..." because I doubt there have been many studies on whether pink salmon or musk oxen like sex or not.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Tack on November 16, 2009, 04:17:48 pm

These are fun facts. Not credibly researched and backed up facts. I expect them to be true, but I expect people to be able to read them in a sentence.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 16, 2009, 04:24:17 pm

Fun Fact 80: Your ability to tell the truth is not related to your butt-size preference.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Cthulhu on November 16, 2009, 04:26:03 pm

Quote from: Tack on November 16, 2009, 04:10:32 pm

Fun Fact 79: Neither Bonobos nor pigs kill for pleasure.

Fun Fact 81:  "2+2=5 and 3+3=6" is a false statement.  If one point in a statement is false, the statement is considered false.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Tack on November 16, 2009, 04:30:17 pm

Quote from: Cthulhu on November 16, 2009, 04:26:03 pm

Quote from: Tack on November 16, 2009, 04:10:32 pm

Fun Fact 79: Neither Bonobos nor pigs kill for pleasure.

Fun Fact 81:  "2+2=5 and 3+3=6" is a false statement.  If one point in a statement is false, the statement is considered false.

Quote from: Tack on November 16, 2009, 06:44:31 am

Fun Fact 66: Dolphins and humans are the only animals that have sex for pleasure, or and kill for fun.

Quote from: example

Jill, and Tracy are the only girls who wear dresses and hats

Congratulations on forcing me to make an extended argument on a fun fact.

Quote from: Ever So Helpful Wikipedia

"We also employ subjective terms such as 'willingly' and 'regularly' in claiming that bonobos and dolphins are the only other animals who "willingly (and regularly) engage in sex with each other"

Even though its thoughts are a bit divided on this.


Next time, PM people with the true information, so they can sort it out and possibly change it. I don't want to have arguments in a thread meant for "lol, did you know that I can't clap one-handed?"

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Strife26 on November 16, 2009, 09:58:38 pm

Fun Fact: Facts can only be disproven, not proven, rendering most of these facts incorrect as 'facts.'

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Frelock on November 16, 2009, 10:38:20 pm

Fun Fact 83: A counterexample is a way to disprove a fact that states a generalization (a counterexample to fun fact 82 would be "All bachelors are not married," a fact which is proven by definition).

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: Kerikath on November 17, 2009, 12:25:00 am

Fun Fact 84: I will not fear, for fear is the mindkiller. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. The fear will pass over me and through me, and shall turn my minds eye to see that only I remain.

Fun Fact 85: The original Dune kicks monumental ass.

Title: Re: Fun Facts
Post by: LeoLeonardoIII on November 17, 2009, 02:02:59 am

Fun Fact 86: It might be considered impolite to post more than one Fun Fact, but we will not hold it against you.