Lots to talk about this week on This is Only a Test, as we finally see the announcement of Nvidia’s Pascal video cards, both the new Call of Duty and Battlefield games, and some rumors leading up to next week’s Google I/O conference. Plus, we celebrate the transit of Mercury in A Moment of Science!
One Day Builds
Adam embarks on one of his most ambitious builds yet: fulfil…
Show And Tell
Adam recently completed a build of the royal St. Edwards cro…
Making
Viewers often ask to see Adam working in real-time, so this …
One Day Builds
Adam and Norm assemble a beautifully machined replica prop k…
One Day Builds
One of the ways Adam has been getting through lockdown has b…
Making
Adam unboxes and performs a quick test of this novel new hel…
Making
When Adam visited Weta Workshop early last year, he stopped …
One Day Builds
Adam tackles a shop shelf build that he's been putting off f…
Show And Tell
Time for a model kit build! This steampunk-inspired mechanic…
One Day Builds
Adam reveals his surprise Christmas present for his wife--a …
Good Morning, Tested! I just wanted to be first.
Ideas for segment names:
Tech-Cetera, For The Tech Of It, Tech-Tonic: The Geography of Tech This Week
Culture-Cache
Great episode! My idea for the technology segment: “Technologically Speaking”
I think Jeremy is 100% right about educational value of these types of games. I would wager someone who plays this type of game will have a better understanding of the basic facts of history and geography than…. well, a “yuge” amount of people today who apparently have no interest in the facts of history nor geography. For example certain people in the modern era seem to not know or care about things like “why are chemical weapons banned by international law and custom” and by extension why are weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction also banned. The answer is in WWI. It’s not a theoretical question, the human race ran the experiment and the results are recorded. It is only up to us to teach these lessons instead of having to re-learn them with new generations. If kids can learn this from video games, then I am all for it, because a lot of them certainly aren’t learning it in school.
Suggestions for segment titles: Tech Check, Check into Tech, Quick Pop into some Culture
Hey Jeremy…my GameFrame is working perfectly. Bring yours back to the Tested set!
Hi, is there a link to the real life voxel table research? Can’t remember the name right now.
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/materiable/
(imagine the “She Blinded me with Science” chorus music)
Kishore is Talking Science, he’s only talking facts
Kishore is Talking Science, mind-blowing acts
I think Jeremy is throwing the baby out with the bath water when he says Cardboard is bad for VR. Is there any statistic showing it turns people off of VR? I think every single person I’ve known who’s used Cardboard has had the reaction “Wow, that’s cool” and it’s designed to prevent you from using it for extended periods of time by not allowing head straps. How soon do you think the millions of people who’ve tried out cardboard would have forked out > $1.5k for a real VR set that you guys all have (not even considering the billions outside the West)? To dismiss whatever the next incremental update that Cardboard’s going to announce as harmful is not fair considering not everyone can afford the systems that would get your stamp of approval. Plus, if mobile is the future, it’s a step, however small, in that direction.
To keep in line with Tested, you should call your Pop Culture segment Pop Quiz
Comic book movie cross promotion has never translated into increased sales of monthly comics. That’s more or less a closed market at this point – nobody new really coming in, and a slow attrition. Maybe movie fans pick up certain TPBs if they’re really interested, but even that seems like a longshot.
The impact of movies on comics is, IMHO as a 35+ year comic reader, mostly negative. What typically happens is that everything uniquely comics (deep history, colorful visuals, over-the-top action and adventure) is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator of a movie (simple, self-contained story; bland black leather costumes; banal, sub-movie budget action). It’s unsatisfying for everybody, because it’s just a bad comic book version of the movie version of a comic book.
I really liked Civil War and thought it was incredibly well-written. The character motivations, the fight scene choreography, the way they managed to work so many characters (including multiple origins) into the movie still feel like everything got the time it needed – it was pretty masterful. Overall, though, it didn’t take flight quite like some of the other Marvel movies (Winter Soldier, Iron Man 1, etc.) did for me. I thought it was very well made, but lacking some kind of spark. (However, I did dream of sitting Mark Millar, writer of the insultingly awful Civil War comic, in front of this movie Clockwork Orange-style to learn how to write a conflict between heroes without making both of them into idiot villains.
As for the podcast itself, I’m just not a fan of having “segments” (especially not with cutesy segment names and overlong, underproduced theme songs). The quick musical hit to signal a change of topic is much less tiresome than hearing that stupid “what have you guys been testing” song for the 10th time. I’m here for the content, not the transitions.
Jeremy! Game developer in Unity for 5 years here. Your first game in Unity is certainly not the easiest one. I don’t know where you are and if this will be at any help, but you might have missed some features in Unity that should deal with the problem you have, even thought it does not solve it perfectly.
Rigidbody in Unity has a setting called ‘Collision Detection’ (read about it here http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-Rigidbody.html) and if both dynamic object (racket and ball) are set to at least ‘Continuous’ and one to ‘Continuous Dynamic’, they should detect each other better. But! Since your racket is not really a dynamic object like a ball, (it’s followings your hand), the collision between it and the ball will be “force-less”. So you probably need to detect the collision via the ‘OnCollisionEnter’ callback and do your own ball impulse code. On your racket you should sample it’s speed in a script every 10ms or so and feed that as the force magnitude and direction for the ball impulse. Don’t forget to put a rigidbody on you racket, set as kinematic.
If I would do it I would probably do a high resolution lerp (available for Vectors and Quaternions) between the racket’s previous position and current one, and the same on the ball. Put a plane (mathematically) on the rotation and position lerp of the racket and then trace a line on the ball rotation and position lerp. Then I would find the intersection of the ball line and racket plane with a time stamp, and then calculate my own directions and angles involved in the collision. And that’s because it’s hard the make a really good general purpose collision detection that works for most use cases, so I would not trust Unity with this and make my own specifically designed for my purpose (which would probably suck in most other application).
I have no idea if this is any help, just thought I’d share what immediately came to mind when I heard your problem 🙂 But send me a PM if it’s interest your!
thanks!
Google Cardboard: I can’t help but think of Voice over IP adoption which was set back for years, especially among businesses, because of people’s first, low quality crappy experience with stuff like early Vonage. So many people wouldn’t even consider it because they had heard it and it was not acceptable for business.
Timestamps here: http://pastebin.com/prPkBj6Y
Can’t post them directly here because the comment editor doesn’t like them.
Long-time listener, maybe first-time commenter. 🙂
I loved the discussion about conversational AIs (Alexa, Siri, etc.) But when you guys mentioned wanting to chain commands together (“Cancel timer and play jazz”, etc.), I knew I had to comment. The word “and” is one of those really interesting words that seems straightforward to the human brain, but makes natural-language artificial intelligence developers drink themselves to sleep.
Let me leave chaining together different commands completely out of the picture for the moment. Let’s just look at supporting the word “and” within a command itself.
Suppose that Amazon decided to add “and” support to the “order” command in Alexa. So if you say “Alexa, order butter and eggs”, it’ll add two items, “butter” and “eggs”, to your Amazon Fresh shopping list. For extra points, it can look up what brands of butter and eggs you’ve bought in the past, or whoever’s paying for promotional placement for butter or eggs this week, and suggest those brands. Easy enough, right?
Now, I come along and say “Alexa, order salt and pepper shaker.” I am going to be disappointed if what I get are a pepper shaker and a large box of salt. In this case, Alexa needs to figure out — by brute-force searching the catalog, or by predetermined product-specific rules, or by annoyingly asking the user — that what the customer really wants is not two products, but a single product — a set of salt and pepper shakers — that happens to have the word “and” in its name. This is even more of a problem for books, music, etc., where the word “and” gets thrown around an awful lot in titles and authors.
Now someone comes along and says “Alexa, order vanilla and strawberry yogurt.” Here’s a case where, even as a human, I can’t say that I’m completely sure what this person wants. It could be a single product named “vanilla and strawberry yogurt”. It could be some vanilla extract and some strawberry yogurt. As a human, my most likely guess it that it’s some vanilla yogurt and also some strawberry yogurt. But understanding that requires an AI to learn or be taught that “yogurt” is a type of product that comes in multiple varieties; that someone ordering one variety is likely to be ordering other varieties as well; so when someone orders a variety of yogurt as one of several items, the AI should look at the other items being ordered to see whether they actually make sense as varieties of yogurt as well, and if so, either try to guess based on past shopping history whether “vanilla” or “vanilla yogurt” is more plausible, or annoyingly ask the user.
Now throw in the ability to give multiple commands separated by “and”, and you add the fun of “Is this ‘and’ meant to separate two commands, or is it meant to separate two things in a single command, or is this just a product that happens to have an ‘and’ in its name? If it really is two commands, and I misinterpret a word in the first command, is that going to cause me to misinterpret the context for the second command, so that I get both of them wrong? If I have to ask for clarification, do I have to phrase my request differently so the user knows which command I’m asking clarification for?”
Alexa, order gin and vodka.
With regards to WWI education in the US, I feel that because the US’s involvement in WWI was limited for much of the war, it’s not taught all that much in a lot of schools. However, a lot of things that happened during the war are still having repercussions even to this day.
As a history show, I would strongly recommend anyone curious to check out “The Great War” channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGreatWar
Also, for those interested in Firearms history (both WWI and WWII), check out Forgotten Weapons (https://www.youtube.com/user/ForgottenWeapons) and C&Rsenal (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClq1dvO44aNovUUy0SiSDOQ)
The National WW I museum in Kansas City is fascinating. I don’t remember much about WW I from my AP history classes in high school, but I really enjoyed spending part of 2 days going through the museum.