Lifeboat Foundation

Steam’s concurrent user count passed 18.8 million earlier today, peaking at 18,801,944 according to tracker SteamDB. The previous record was 18.5 million just about two years ago on January 6, 2018. As noted by SteamDB, this concurrent user record did not coincide with a record number of players in game, with only 5.8 million today against 7 million two years ago, about 1.2 million fewer. The previous record was boosted by the huge number of players in Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. It’s not known what caused the current peak, though the time of the peak coincides with peak playtimes for all of Steam’s top games.

.@Steam has broken its record for most concurrently online users that was held for two years. Previous record was 18,537,490 users. It’s still increasing!But there’s about 1 million less players actually in-game (≈5.8mil vs ≈7mil two years ago). https://steamdb.info/app/753/graphs/ February 2, 2020

Essentially you could at this point make a working protoss carrier o.o

Carriers are a late-game Protoss air unit that are the largest and most costly unit available for Protoss. Carriers are produced from the Stargate and requires a pre-existing Fleet Beacon. Carriers have the highest armor, health, and shields of the Protoss race. Their main advantages are their long range and mobility in combat; this potentially incredibly long range is especially notable as unique among Protoss units. On the other hand, their raw attack power is rather low for their price. Perhaps their greatest use is in extreme late-game where their supply efficiency for their staying power is usable, much like Battlecruisers; however, they are hard-countered by the latter since they make volleys of low-damage attacks and due to the Yamato Gun.

Carriers themselves do not, in fact, possess any attack, but like Reavers build and transport unique units –Interceptors in this case- to much the same effect. A Carrier does not come equipped with any Interceptors when first warped in, so it must construct them individually, adding quite a deal of cost and build time to the finished unit. Unlike the Reaver’s Scarabs, however, the units it builds do not immediately sacrifice themselves to attack but attack as would another unit stacking up on a target that it “fires” at until recalled at which point they may still be used again. While targetable, expensive and fairly weak individually Interceptors move quickly around targets, potentially out of range, and can recharge shields instantly upon being recalled meaning they can overwhelm targeted forces (although potentially very, very slowly). Interceptors are all destroyed if the Carrier itself is destroyed.

DETROIT – General Motors is resurrecting the Hummer, best known as a gas-guzzling, military-style SUV, as an all-electric “super truck” with massive horsepower, acceleration and torque.

The Detroit automaker confirmed the plans Thursday and released three online teaser videos for the “GMC Hummer EV” pickup ahead of a 30-second Super Bowl ad for the vehicle featuring NBA star LeBron James. The spot is scheduled to air during the second quarter of Sunday’s game.

Continue reading “GM resurrecting Hummer as an all-electric ‘super truck’ with 1,000 horsepower” »

Japan is constructing an 18-meter-tall, 25-ton Gundam robot powered by a combination of electric and hydraulic actuators.

Japan has had a robust robot culture for decades, thanks (at least in part) to the success of the Gundam series, which are bipedal humanoid robots controlled by a human who rides inside of them. I would tell you how many different TV series and video games and manga there are about Gundam, but I’m certain I can’t count that high—there’s like seriously a lot of Gundam stuff out there. One of the most visible bits of Gundam stuff is a real life full-scale Gundam statue in Tokyo, but who really wants a statue, right? C’mon, Japan! Bring us the real thing!

Continue reading “Japan Is Building a Giant Gundam Robot That Can Walk” »

What defines the last decade’s hard science-fiction is a tendency to use process-oriented survival dramas to gain a personal understanding of the role of scientific inquiry and the big picture questions it poses.

From The Martian to Interstellar to Gravity, the 2010s was a comeback era.

Sorry, might be a re-post, new source (r;ns)

Fighting cancer can sometimes feel like a game of Whack-A-Mole – even after a primary tumor is removed the disease can crop up again in other organs. Now, researchers at the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research have developed a drug that can prevent cancer from spreading.

Previous research has shown that before tumors start to spread, they secrete substances that prepare new places for them to settle down. One way in which the disease does this is by making blood vessels in the area “leaky,” allowing the cancer to penetrate them easier. And it’s this process that the new drug, created by researchers at the Harry Perkins Institute, prevents.

Continue reading “New drug may keep cancer metastasis under control” »

Circa 2017

Chess isn’t an easy game, by human standards. But for an artificial intelligence powered by a formidable, almost alien mindset, the trivial diversion can be mastered in a few spare hours.

In a new paper, Google researchers detail how their latest AI evolution, AlphaZero, developed “superhuman performance” in chess, taking just four hours to learn the rules before obliterating the world champion chess program, Stockfish.

Continue reading “In Just 4 Hours, Google’s AI Mastered All The Chess Knowledge in History” »

As others have pointed out, voxel-based games have been around for a long time; a recent example is the whimsical “3D Dot Game Hero” for PS3, in which they use the low-res nature of the voxel world as a fun design element.

Voxel-based approaches have huge advantages (“infinite” detail, background details that are deformable at the pixel level, simpler simulation of particle-based phenomena like flowing water, etc.) but they’ll only win once computing power reaches an important crossover point. That point is where rendering an organic world a voxel at a time looks better than rendering zillions of polygons to approximate an organic world. Furthermore, much of the effort that’s gone into visually simulating real-world phenomena (read the last 30 years of Siggraph conference proceedings) will mostly have to be reapplied to voxel rendering. Simply put: lighting, caustics, organic elements like human faces and hair, etc. will have to be “figured out all over again” for the new era of voxel engines. It will therefore likely take a while for voxel approaches to produce results that look as good, even once the crossover point of level of detail is reached.

I don’t mean to take anything away from the hard and impressive coding work this team has done, but if they had more academic background, they’d know that much of what they’ve “pioneered” has been studied in tremendous detail for two decades. Hanan Samet’s treatise on the subject tells you absolutely everything you need to know, and more: (http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Multidimensional-Structure…sr=8-1) and even goes into detail about the application of these spatial data structures to other areas like machine learning. Ultimately, Samet’s book is all about the “curse of dimensionality” and how (and how much) data structures can help address it.

Circa 2017

Chris Roberts built worlds for games such as Wing Commander at Electronic Arts’ Origin at the dawn of 3D games a couple of decades ago.

Continue reading “Chris Roberts on using infinite computing power to create a universe of endless possibilities” »