SubscribeLinks for Wednesday
April 16, 2008 4:15 pm
- “For past four weeks, TiVo has been using its second-by-second audience measurement to determine which [American Idol] performers had the highest and lowest viewership. It turns out, this information […] is highly predictive of which contestant will be voted off. Viewers tend to rewind and watch their favorite performances multiple times, while fast-forwarding through the ones they don’t like. These viewing preferences correlate with voting patterns …” (via Marginal Revolution)
- Pirates of the Burning Sea’s data service API. Are any players doing cool stuff with it yet?
- Gamasutra interviews Dave Sirlin on the rebalancing of Street Fighter. He’s gotten tons of press on that gig, and I haven’t seen much that’s terribly applicable — until now.
My biggest secret is that, even though I have a math degree from MIT, it’s not about math at all. If I was going to make a fighting game from scratch, starting with nothing, there’d be a tiny bit of math to make sure that, if you make them block a move, you can’t block it again to prevent infinite loops, so there’s already a little bit of maths done for me in Super Street Fighter, but when it comes to things like, should this guy’s priority be a little bit better or not?
It’s just this holistic approach. We know the results from all these tournaments from all these years, and it’s just having an intuition of what a tweak is going to do.
But NO, YOU NEED ! Even glorified worldbuilders need math degrees.
- Raiding Represented in Mathmatical Graphs. (Hahaha.)
Matthew Weigel wrote:
Raiding Graphs: not funny, mostly.
Pirates of the Burning Sea: according to the PDF, you have to acquire API keys from http://www.burningsea.com/page/developer - which seems like it might be holding things up. Incidentally, although no one asked my opinion, I’m not a big fan of the API key approach to providing the data… I’d be curious to hear more about their reasoning on that.
Posted on 16-Apr-08 at 5:26 pm | Permalink
Darius K. wrote:
To be fair, Sirlin isn’t saying that you don’t need an education to balance SF2. He’s just saying he doesn’t specifically use his math knowledge.
On the other hand, his writing was a little bit unclear and could easily be misinterpreted as him saying otherwise.
Posted on 17-Apr-08 at 12:21 pm | Permalink
Kevin wrote:
They are indeed:
http://potbs.armeagle.nl/map-Rackham.php
Posted on 17-Apr-08 at 3:55 pm | Permalink
Kevin wrote:
Also, wtf?
“Bachelor Degree in Mathematics, Computer Science or Engineering required”
Seriously, that’s what they want from your senior designer? An engineer? oooo-kay.
Posted on 17-Apr-08 at 3:59 pm | Permalink
Joe Ludwig wrote:
The API keys do two things for us:
1) We can track how much each application is accessing the data, what data they’re accessing, and from where they’re accessing it.
2) If any application goes crazy and accidently overloads our web servers we can shut it down.
As we move forward into exporting more data about characters we will probably also add some “release my data to this application” stuff where the API key will uniquely identify the application.
Of course for all that to work, app developers have to actually GET keys and the link Matthew posted is actually broken. I’m looking into that now.
Posted on 19-Apr-08 at 12:22 am | Permalink
Psychochild wrote:
Kevin wrote:
Seriously, that’s what they want from your senior designer? An engineer? oooo-kay.
One of the reasons people have given on why they like working with me as a designer is because of my engineering background. “You actually design things that can be implemented,” as one well-known producer told me. Game designs still have to work on computers, which are what people with engineering-related degrees often understand in depth.
That said, by the time you get to the Senior level for developers, the degree often matters a lot less than previous work experience and references. And, if Bioware is like most companies, the requirements are more a list of “it would be nice to have…” considerations. Assuming that HR isn’t throwing out contacts from people that don’t happen to have one of those degrees, that requirement isn’t quite as onerous as one might think. (Given the EA acquisition, however, one never knows….)
Posted on 22-Apr-08 at 5:28 pm | Permalink
Psychochild wrote:
Personal to Kevin: Quit complaining about engineers doing design jobs and go update your blog!
Posted on 22-Apr-08 at 5:35 pm | Permalink