- More Starlink Satellites in Orbit #
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Despite the tragedy of the imbeciles attempting to divide people down here, SpaceX successfully launched more of its Starlink low latency broadband internet satellites up into orbit around Earth just over an hour ago.
This is exciting for fast global internet via satellite and should help bring change to places with heavy government censorship, and, of critical importance, make torrenting movies and playing all-multiple-player online computer and console video games a much faster experience for people in remote areas.
More at Hacker News.
- Elite Dangerous: Odyssey #
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Space legs it is for the Elite: Dangerous update next year, and two of my favorite games now share the word Odyssey in their name.
Looking forward to leaving the ship and hope to eventually run and jet around planets with atmospheres and green vegetation. Also that Frontier makes the game cross-platform so I can play with more friends.
I only wish I could leave this planet, too, at the moment, but only after frying the evil men on it with a beam laser.
Monday, 1 June 2020
- The Guilty One #
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Martin Luther King, in his 1967 speech in Washington D.C., quoting Les Misérables:
A profound judgment of today’s riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, ‘If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.’
The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison. Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.
Via David Remnick’s latest piece in The New Yorker.
Sunday, 31 May 2020
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Combat Air Mail
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Letters: Little symbols that strung together make words. Joined in a sequence the words make sentences that can be woven into communication written or printed on paper, or typed in then transmitted in rays of light from computer displays.
Lost, delayed, miscommunicated in careless haste or evil intent, to tragedy these may lead, while written (or filmed) in honest witness of the evil in the world, they can make change for the better.
PRINCE
This letter doth make good the Friar’s words,
Their course of love, the tidings of her death;
And here he writes that he did buy a poison
Of a poor ‘pothecary, and therewithal
Came to this vault to die, and lie with Juliet.
Where be these enemies? Capulet, Montague,
See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.
And I for winking at your discords, too
Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished.
From Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 3, line 253.
By VVilliam The Spear Shaker.
Some time ago I showed you how to take off in the video game IL-2 Sturmovik, and had also promised to show you how to land. Since landing lessons by Requiem and others with far more skill already exist, I decided instead to make a small mission of the kind I would like to see more of in IL-2, and really, any video game that simulates flight.
Inspired by looking at the heavy weapon called The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Seventh Edition, edited by one Bevington on the shelf, the mission is called Combat Air Mail, and includes two of the three most rewarding activities in flying digital airplanes: Blasting an enemy machine, and successfully landing, in this case on an unprepared field to deliver important mail.
Download the mission from its page on GitHub and install by moving the Combat Air Mail folder in the archive into your IL-2 installation’s data/Missions folder, then access it by clicking on Missions in IL-2’s main menu.
Whether or not you play the mission, I’d like players and makers to consider the benefits of missions of this type that have variable objectives that don’t necessarily need to be historically accurate. They only need to be fun.
Most of the elements we need to make these are already present in the game, like built-in and custom mission editors, quick missions with random variables, small and large maps with beautiful landscapes, several detailed, customizable airplanes, and excellent flight physics and damage modelling.
A Combat Air Mail gameplay flow could work like this:
- A random point on a random map is selected and populated with objects to make it a mail delivery objective.
- The player flies there and faces random enemy aircraft or vehicles en-route or in the objective area.
- The player needs to survive and land to deliver the mail, and is awarded points for hits on enemies and successful landing criteria like how many pieces are missing from the airplane.
- Expanding this to cooperative missions, points are divided between players, and bonuses are applied when both survive and land successfully.
- Daily custom missions are published (like Noita’s daily runs) that players can try once, and since IL-2 has an excellent mission recording feature, it would be entertaining to see the final 5-to-10 seconds automatically recorded with the option of sharing the way you lost one of your wheels on landing.
Character
I am using Sturmovik as an example, but as I’ve mentioned recently I think developers can make any flight simulator’s gameplay more fun and approachable to more people by combining character development and progression systems with the quick mission section of the game.
An example of this is a random mission framework that takes inspiration from procedurally generated video games through which your avatar progresses, with things like choice of aircraft, home airfield, jobs, targets, cargo, damage and modifications of the airplane, flight suits, haircuts, and so on, selected or randomized, and a play statistics page visible to the player only, with a choice to make it public.
Nothing combs hair like the wind, and I want to fly with it (and maybe a scarf) fluttering out an open aeroplane window on my way to deliver letters through hails of bullets or ice.
Four Wishes, Because I’m Greedy
Finally, since this concerns IL-2 Sturmovik, here I present some wishes for the developers to consider in addition to the Combat Air Mail quick mission framework above:
A: More flight and wind-related environmental details like the sound of singing birds near trees when landed in summer maps. For example, I don’t think I have ever seen a kite being flown in a flight simulator, and with IL-2’s wonderful wind modelling it would be lovely to find colorful ones with threads leading to little digital people on the ground. Also, clotheslines with sheets, shirts and dresses, bushes, flowers and more types of trees.
B: Better mouse control options closer in functionality to War Thunder’s system so more people can play easily. Make it an option and think of the new players who would try the game (and then get a control stick), making it more profitable for the developers so they can spend more time improving it. Also consider John Carmack’s dual mouse input idea.
C: An easy-to-use random function in the editor instead of the various “random switch” timer insanity. This could be a MCU called Random whose only function is to randomly activate one of a series of target links. This would allow mission makers to more easily create variable chance scenarios without having to do lots of math and add a forest of timers to a mission.
D: The ability to get out of your airplane and walk around. You can already use a flare-gun and a pistol on some of the planes, like the P-51. Let me jump out and have a shoot-out or hand-shake with another pilot who has crash-landed nearby!
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- IL-2 Sturmovik Flight School Missions #
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Extensive set of progressive missions to teach you to fly the whirly airplanes of IL-2 Sturmovik.
Saturday, 30 May 2020
- Tweety The Coward #
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Jalni Cobbs, writing in The New Yorker:
A Presidential threat to have the United States military shoot civilians is the opposite of leadership, the antithesis of wisdom—a comment as ill-advised and as detrimental to the public well-being as recommending injecting disinfectant or self-prescribing hydroxychloroquine.
Rule of thumb for choosing leaders: Those who communicate with fear and threats of violence are the weak, terrible ones. Choose them at your peril.
Friday, 29 May 2020
- Pancake #
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Performed by Tori Amos in San Antonio in 2003, the bridge of this particular performance of Tori’s song is from Neil Young’s Ohio.
The studio version of Pancake can be found in the excellent Scarlet’s Walk — one of my favorite albums.
Wishing you a happy Friday, with apologies for the relative silence this past week. I am working on a post about my favorite flight simulator which has taken more time as it involved learning to use the mission editor. It should be up soon.
Thursday, 28 May 2020
- 35 Years of HUGGH! #
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Today I learned that Sylvester Stallone and James Cameron Wrote the screenplay for Rambo 2. Wesley Morris, writing in The New York Times:
Stallone’s physique, the stunt work, the limitless carnage — they turned the blockbuster into a pornographic political event and Stallone into a permanent delusion of American supremacy.
I can see how that may be the case and I think the current idiots in charge should be sent to Mars, but this doesn’t stop Rambo 2 from being in my top-10 favorite films of all time, with a wonderful score and Rambo’s response to the question of how he will live in the end of the film:
Day by day.
If you want to be Rambo I recommend putting down your guns and picking up a video game piece of art called Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
- Bookshop.org #
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Just bought books from Bookshop for the first time. Bookshop is an online book store that supports local, independent book shops, and you can select the shop you want the profit from your purchase to go to. A pleasant experience.
More articles in the archive and links in the linked list archive.