Looks gorgeous! Thanks. You’ve got me exploring what there is to explore. :)

Wow that looks so involved! Will definitely look into this.

Any recommendations on games using this engine? I’ve been playing Java Edition again lately but am always open something new.

I find as I get older and my vision is not what it once was, I need bigger screens with good contrast but don’t care so much about resolution. I think it was on the show Corner Gas where they were talking about how big a screen you should get and concluded the size in inches should match your age. That made me laugh but I have to confess now there may be some truth in that…

They’re going to keep making more powerful hardware either way, since parallel processing capability supports graphics and AI just fine.

It’s not quite as simple as that. AI needs less precision than regular graphics, so chips developed with AI in mind do not necessarily translate into higher performance for other things.

In science/engineering, people want more—not less—precision. So we look for GPUs with capable 64-bit processing, while AI is driving the industry in the other direction, from 32 down to 16.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if they made a version that just stays in one age indefinitely and lets you explore it in an open world sort of way?

Like take Minecraft. I played that for years without even knowing there is an end game, and it came as something of a shock when someone told me. You can finish Minecraft?!?

But then I was like meh, leave me alone. I’m trying to build Noah’s Ark with a functioning village on top and a crystal waterfall down to the animal sanctuary below. And I still haven’t completed the Mars colony. Wonder how the pandas are doing over there?

Aw man that’s a good list!

In terms of consoles, I got the most enjoyment out of Super Nintendo. I think that’s in part because my kids were still young at the time and we played a lot of coop mode games on it before they got older and their tastes started diverging from mine.

It was the golden age of platformers I guess, and the focus was still solidly on game mechanics over production. I especially liked Bomberman. The gameplay was just perfect the way the challenge scaled naturally even as you got upgrades or added a 2nd player. Literally a blast!

Huh… I always thought Stalin was the most Mario-looking dictator.

Overclockers have already had it running at 9.1GHz with liquid helium cooling, and it potentially offers an enormous amount of processing power if you water cool your PC.

Well, maybe then you can run Cities: Skylines II…

Ooh this looks right up my alley…thanks for posting!

100g * 9.832m²/s

That should be 100g * 9.832m/s², or better yet 0.1kg * 9.832m/s² to get a number in newtons (N).

From a high school physics perspective, holding a 100g object steady for any length of time does no work, since work is force applied over a distance, measured in joules (J). What you do have is gravitational potential energy. Potential energy is the ability to do work, also measured in joules. Once you release the object, then you actually start getting numbers for work and power.

Power, measured in watts (W), is work done per unit time. So 10W/hr would be (10J/s)/hr. I guess that would be the rate of change of power consumption, if that were useful to you?

In theory, energy and work should be measured in joules. Simple as that. But this unit of kwh (kilowatt∙hour) has come into vogue, presumably because that’s what power utilities show on the meter outside your house? 1 kW∙hr = 1 kJ/s∙hr ∙ (1000J / kJ) * (3600s / hr) = 3.6MJ. So now we’re back from power to energy consumption.

I signed up and so far my feed seems to be dominated by a lot of bird pics. I guess that’s fitting for a site called bluesky?

My fave has gotta be kwh/yr/ft². I came across that while researching the lighting requirements for hydroponics.

Oh interesting, so there’s a glimmer of hope at any rate. Thanks for the feedback! Maybe if there’s a big steam sale…

Even the old game had a noticeable dip in performance by the time you were building airports and stuff, though it never reached deal-breaker levels for me. I suspect you’re right that it’s the modelling?

That’s a shame. I played tons of the original game and must’ve got most of the DLC over the years, but while 2 looked awesome in demo clips, the system specs were outrageous. Above my pay grade lol!

I wonder where the performance bottleneck lies? Is it graphics or modelling the city? I know in the demos it looked almost photo-realistic, but tbh I don’t need that. The new gameplay elements like better control over traffic at intersections were the interesting part to me.

Noted. Thanks!

#2 is certainly food for thought. So the idea is that from a journalistic fact-checking point of view, it is more important to convey the information exactly as it was presented than to verify its accuracy?

This would explain why science/engineering-based articles are so commonly inaccurate or missing in critical details. The journalist can fall back on saying “I have a recording of an interview with the expert after we downed a few pints at the pub, and I’m just parroting back what he said. Don’t shoot the messenger!”

holds the potential to store up to 2 MW of energy

2nd paragraph and he’s already lost me. It would be nice if tech columnists had the equivalent of even a single semester of high school physics.

Thought I read at one point that the authors of The Expanse had originally intended it to be a gaming universe? Then they made it into a book series instead. Then it became a TV show. And now…

How is Surviving Mars? I got it on a steam sale but haven’t played it yet. Got deep into Cities Skylines by the same company so thought it was worth a download.