Component Planet

Friday, 27 September 2019

Ealing stab death: Three held on suspicion of murder

Osvaldo Carvalho, 22, died following a fight near Ealing Common, west London, police say.

from BBC News - London https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-49854784

How an Article on Game Difficulty Explained My Own Modding, 18 Years Later

A game’s difficulty level can make or break the title. Games that are perceived as too difficult become boring, depressing grinds, while games that are too easy become boring and tedious, with little challenge. One of the most profound differences between World of Warcraft Classic and Retail is the difference in difficulty. Of course, every player has their own ideas about how hard a game should be, but there’s no arguing that the difficulty of a title is important.

But according to game developer Jennifer Scheurle, game developers think about game difficulty very differently than players do, which may be part of why conversations on this topic sometimes seem to break down. Her piece resonated with me, partly because it reminded me of the reasons why I became a game modder, once upon a time. According to Scheurle, difficulty is all about trust.

“At the core of the difference between how game designers and players speak about difficulty,” she writes, “is the fact that we discuss it in terms of skill progression. All difficulty design is essentially that: crafting how players will learn, apply skills, and progress through challenges.”

Graphic by Jennifer Scheurle for Polygon

She then walks through examples of how this plays out in games, using the Dark Souls series as an example. DS games ask you to accept that you will die (frequently) as part of learning how encounters function. You aren’t simply being killed by mechanics you can’t master, beat, or counter, you’re learning how the game functions and how to counter incoming attacks. The game, in turn, obeys its own internal rules. Players often become angry at a game if they feel it isn’t holding up its end of the bargain in some particular, whether that refers to drop rates, spawn rates, boss difficulty, or the damage you take versus the damage you deal. She also discusses the importance of how a game teaches players to play it, and the various in-game ways that developers communicate game difficulty and associated rules. It’s a very different view of the topic than simply boiling it down into whether a game is “hard” or “easy,” and it leads to a much more nuanced view of how and why different titles may put difficulty in different places.

The article resonated with me in part because it describes part of why I became a Diablo II modder and taught me something about my own motivation. I don’t want to seem as if I’m hijacking Scheurle’s excellent discussion of game difficulty because it’s worth a read in its own right, but I’m going to switch gears a bit and talk about my own experience. To put it simply: I was pissed.

Diablo II’s Trust Fail

This was the early days of Diablo II, before the Lord of Destruction expansion had even come out. Patch 1.03 dropped not long before I started modding, to put a date on things. On Normal difficulty, Diablo II worked pretty well, but as you progressed into Nightmare and Hell difficulty modes, deficiencies became apparent.

Back then, Diablo II used a linear leveling curve in which the amount of XP you needed to gain for each additional level increased by a flat amount — the amount you needed for your previous level, plus a flat modifier. This was exacerbated by a leveling penalty, introduced in Nightmare, in which you lost XP gained towards your next level if your character died. You couldn’t drop a level due to this XP loss, but you could theoretically be 99 percent of the way to Lvl 50 and fall back to 0 percent at Lvl 49. The net result of this was that the amount of time required for each additional level increased sharply, and this became increasingly noticeable as you moved into the later game.

Now for the coup de grace: The game was poorly balanced outside of Normal difficulty. I became a game modder specifically because my Barbarian character with maximum Fire Resist was being one-shotted by mini-bosses with Fire Aura even when he used abilities that temporarily increased his HP. These mini-bosses and bosses could one-shot a character virtually as soon as you saw them. Death meant losing a portion of gold and dropping equipped items. Attempting to retrieve those items (using whatever alternate gear you had access to) was virtually guaranteed to get you killed at least once more because you’d have to drag monsters away from your corpse in order to try and retrieve what you originally had. Mini-bosses could also spawn with these modifiers in critical areas, where it was exceptionally difficult to move them away from a critical spawn point. There was no way to see the exact location of the fire aura on the ground; you knew you’d touched it when you died.

It was cheap. That’s what I called it. I didn’t consider it any kind of legitimate difficulty spike. It just felt like a way for Blizzard to make the game harder by killing players in a manner they couldn’t even fight. I became a modder because I was angry about the way that these imbalances had changed the game. I felt betrayed.

Looking back (and using Scheurle’s article for reference), I’ve realized that I was angry because Diablo II had broken trust with me. Some of these flaws existed in Normal as well, but they weren’t as apparent due to the influence of how other scaling factors impacted the title. Some of the changes between Normal and later difficulties that impacted how poorly the game scaled included the much-slower pace of leveling and the fact that there were no unique items in-game for the Nightmare and Hell difficulty modes. This made it pointless to spend gold on gambling (since gambling, at the time, only produced normal weapons). The slow speed of leveling meant that one of a player’s primary means of gaining power was substantially curtailed. There were also notable power imbalances created by the use of percentages for some metrics (like life steal). In original vanilla D2, life steal was absurdly overpowered — and absolutely essential to surviving the late game. Certain classes were locked into endgame strategies as a result of bad math and poorly balanced game mechanics. It grated on me.

The changes to Diablo II from Normal to later difficulties weren’t just the result of Blizzard trying to be jerks. It’s common for RPGs to have poorly balanced endgames because most people do not play them for long enough to actually experience the endgame. This was a topic of discussion around Skyrim when that game was new, and it explains much of what happened with Diablo II way back then.

I developed the Fusion 2 mod for Diablo II, followed by a much larger overhaul, Cold Fusion. I and a team of three other people — Justin Gash, John Stanford, and Matt Wesson — cumulatively poured in several thousand man-hours of development time into Cold Fusion. I led the effort, which was a core part of my best friend’s senior project in computer science and consumed no small chunk of my own senior year in college. I’m not sure the game files exist on the internet any longer, but you can see the original website archived by the Wayback Machine. Fair warning: I was not a web designer. Still, it gives some idea of the scope of the project, if you’re familiar with Diablo II.

While I don’t expect anyone reading this to have ever played the mod — I never released an LoD-compatible version of the project — it was a pretty major part of my life for the time I worked on it. We overhauled the entire title, tweaking drop rates, fixing bugs, and implementing a new leveling curve, a new difficulty curve, new monsters, and new unique items intended for both Nightmare and Hell difficulty levels. We developed new audio effects, visuals, and skills using pieces of code that developers had left in place in the engine and audio effects another friend created. We pulled certain unique items over from Diablo I (with Diablo I art) and reworked the skill trees to better balance the game. Our goal, in every scenario, was to build a more consistent Diablo II that didn’t just funnel characters into a single endgame build but allowed other skills to compete as well. I was quite proud of the fact that when Lord of Destruction came out, it adjusted Diablo II in some of the same ways we had, and even introduced new spells that were similar to some of the ones we built. I’m absolutely not claiming that Blizzard took inspiration from our work — it was just neat to see that we’d been thinking along the same lines as people at the company.

For example: We implemented a logarithmic curve for CF’s level scaling — one that was designed to allow a player to run the game once at each difficulty level and finish “Hell” near maximum level. Blizzard wanted a game that would require many, many, many runs through maximum difficulty to reward Lvl 99 and used a differently-shaped curve to do it — but they still moved away from the linear curve they used in the early phases of the title when they launched the expansion, Lord of Destruction.

Until now, I never really understood why I was so unhappy with the base game in the first place. Now I do. I felt as though the collective changes to Diablo II that happened after Normal weren’t just the result of making the game harder — they made the game different, in ways that felt like they’d broken the trust Blizzard had established in building the game.

It’s not often that you discover the explanation for why you spent a few thousand hours rebuilding someone else’s project in an article written 18 years after the fact. I suppose Cold Fusion has always felt a bit like a road-not-taken path for me. It had its fans, but it was one reasonably popular mod among many, not a DOTA or a Counter-Strike. Either way, I appreciate Scheurle’s discussion of difficulty and how developers think about the topic. It shed some light on an episode of my own life.

Now Read:

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/299138-how-an-article-on-game-difficulty-explained-my-own-modding-18-years-later

Snag this iPhone-Sized Pocket Projector for over 60 Percent Off

Your smartphone’s screen is pretty impressive. Whether you’re binging your favorite Netflix shows or simply scrolling through email, the clarity and resolution that most people enjoy right on their go-to smartphone screen is more than enough to get through the day.

But when it comes to enjoying a full cinematic experience on the go, your smartphone just doesn’t cut it. This Prima 1080p HD Pocket Projector allows you to project a screen up to 200” in virtually any environment, and it’s available for over 60 percent off at just $299.99.

At roughly the same size as an iPhone 7s Plus, this intrepid projector lets you transform your smartphone into a full-fledged multimedia behemoth on the go.

You’ll be able to project a crisp, sharp image on any surface thanks to a 200 lumen bulb that offers four times the brightness of other portable projectors, and a 64-bit quad-core processor allows you to quickly and easily access the Google Play Store and download apps.

This projector even syncs easily with all of your devices simultaneously, so you’ll be able to control the output from any source.

Treat yourself to a powerful pocket projector that won’t break the bank. This Prima 1080p HD Pocket Projector is available for just $299.99—over 60 percent off for a limited time.

Prices are subject to change.

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/deals/299052-snag-this-iphone-sized-pocket-projector-for-over-60-percent-off

Ayub Hassan murder: Boy jailed for Kensington county lines stabbing

The 16-year-old boy claimed in court that he acted in self-defence but was convicted of murder.

from BBC News - London https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-49850999

Apple Will Now Warn If Your Screen Is Not ‘Genuine’ After Repair

Apple has never been friendly to user repairs, but the company has opened a new front in its efforts to convince customers to only pay Apple to fix their own devices. Last month, we discussed how the company has changed its battery health messaging in an attempt to scare users into only using Apple-authorized repair services. Now the company has introduced similar messaging around displays. Screen and battery replacements are two of the most common smartphone repairs and Apple is targeting both. Thus far, the company has only announced this ‘feature’ for the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max.

Image by iFixit

This warning supposedly persists for four days and then moves to the Settings menu. After 15 more days, it’ll be moved to Settings -> General -> About, which means you only have to put up with Apple annoying you about non-genuine screens for the better part of a month before the company will deign to allow you to use your device in the manner you chose without nagging you about it.

According to Apple’s support site, the use of a non-authorized service could result in phone damage, overheating, and injury. Your multi-touch functionality might not work properly. True Tone might not function correctly. The ambient light sensor might not work. The display might be incorrectly calibrated or the brightness might not be uniform.

Apple’s documentation further implies that your device will be permanently flagged as having undergone a non-authorized Apple repair. The text states: “You might see an additional notification that says, ‘Apple has updated the device information for this iPhone.” This means that Apple has updated the device information maintained for your iPhone for service needs, safety analysis, and to improve future products.”

iFixit reports that they tested this behavior by swapping out the displays on several iPhone 11 models. The warnings weren’t present in iOS 13 betas or the final version of iOS 13 that shipped with the iPhone 11, but it’s baked into the iPhone 13.1 iOS version that’s now being distributed. Of course, Apple hasn’t actually baked anything into the device that can detect whether an authorized screen has been used. iFixit still saw the same message when swapping iPhone 11 displays with other, 100 percent legitimate, Apple-manufactured iPhone displays. The problem is, without the software tools required to authorize the repair, the message is still shown. Even swapping the FaceID hardware along with the display doesn’t make the message go away.

Apple recently announced that it was going to begin opening up its process for authorizing more repair shops to become Apple-authorized resellers, but in the past, the repair programs Apple created for third-party shops did a remarkably poor job of actually providing useful service. Firms who signed up under these rules were almost always required to ship products back to Apple for repair rather than performing the work themselves. The company still maintains that it can forbid any firm from performing Apple repairs for any reason and that completing all of its required coursework and certifications does not mean that a business will be allowed to qualify as an Apple-authorized repair center.

Screen Quality Can Vary, But This Isn’t an Answer

Apple loves to talk about how these restrictions are in place to protect customers, but what they mostly protect is Apple’s bottom line. There’s no hardware-level check being performed to make sure that a display meets objective quality control concerns here and no way for a phone to independently know if it’s outfitted with Apple-approved hardware. If there were, swapping both the screen and FaceID hardware from one iPhone 11 into another iPhone 11 would work.

It’s absolutely true that a cheap third-party shop might use a low-quality screen to repair a smartphone, resulting in a poorer customer experience, but this solution does nothing to prevent that problem. This is the essence of what it means to inject FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) into a topic. Apple knows that a healthy chunk of its customer base is unhappy about the high cost of repairing devices and the associated price of AppleCare+. They know that declaring “We wall off our repairs to make money” isn’t going to play well. So they play the “This screen isn’t genuine” card, hoping that customers will assume that being non-genuine is the same as being bad. Apple never comes right out and says “Your third-party display definitely won’t work as well.” They use weasel words like “might not,” and “could.” They say: “Repairs that don’t properly replace screws or cowlings might leave behind loose parts that could damage the battery, cause overheating, or result in injury.”

To this, we would add: “And building large phones without appropriate internal framing will cause them to catastrophically fail a few years after purchase due to high bending stress.” Except, oh wait. Apple did that. And Apple knew what it had done before it launched the iPhone 6 but gaslit its own customer base about the reality of the problem. Someone please remind me again why I’m supposed to trust the company when it comes to messaging on issues like this. What kind of damage is caused internally when IC solder joints break due to stress fracturing caused by removing important parts of the phone? What’s the risk of damage, overheating, or injury then?

The implication of this statement is that a third-party shop is more likely to make this kind of mistake than an Apple-certified repair center. And that’s the whole point of FUD. At this point, it looks as though Apple’s move to widen the pool of companies that can repair its devices is mostly about convincing customers that they can only use Apple-approved sources while giving lip service to the idea of expanded repair access.

Now Read:

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/299094-apple-will-now-warn-if-your-screen-is-not-genuine-after-repair

Boris Johnson will explain Jennifer Arcuri links to London Assembly

Boris Johnson says his former colleagues at the London Assembly are "barking up the wrong tree".

from BBC News - London https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-49851003

Granit Xhaka: Arsenal manager Unai Emery names midfielder as new captain

Arsenal head coach Unai Emery names midfielder Granit Xhaka as the club's new permanent captain.

from BBC News - London https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/49850242