The Exigent Duality
Unbroken and Broken - 08:04 CST, 5/21/19 (Sniper)
This article has a neat chart, which attempts to formulate growth of college majors versus the political ideology of their corresponding faculty. Interestingly, my college major-- way back in the day-- of Computer Science skews slightly conservative, if I'm reading the vertical axis correctly.

The reason I find that mildly surprising is because I had the overwhelming sense my college professors were liberals. And even professionally, the leftist programmers will openly make anti-Trump jokes in meetings. Turns out this is just a case of the liberals being the most vocal, as usual-- and the conservatives keeping their mouths shut, also par for the course.

Sometimes I also wonder if I'm in the right career: look at the explosive growth in Computer Science majors since 2011! I was also alarmed by the "Learn to Code" joke-- notice that it wasn't "Learn to Sew", or "Learn to Jackhammer". I wonder if my field is on the brink of being totally commoditized?

In other political news, and not just to brag, I got another one spot-on; check out Mark Dice's coverage of the breakdown of Google's search results. My prediction is totally coming true: their results are basically worthless for anyone even remotely right-of-center politically, and it's all because of what I laid out in that post.

In other totally unrelated news, my brother sent me this-- it's the 3DO's "The Need for Speed", but corrected to make the car pace match what they would actually be in real life. I passed a couple of cars once in real life going 140 mph in my 350z, so I can attest to the rate at which slower moving traffic comes and is left behind, as shown in the video. Of course, the gearing and speedometer is all broken-- this is just a hack, after all.

But it brings up an interesting game design discussion: the 3DO's NFS is probably the best designed video game I've ever played, from the standpoint of making realism trade-offs in exchange for superior gameplay, but in a way that still feels convincing. A superficial example is that the driver is sitting too high in the game's cockpit view-- so they raised the camera a bit, and it does wonders in improving visibility, while still feeling realistic.

But the best example comes in the form of the game's pacing. "Digital Foundry" did a frametime analysis of the title some years ago, and it only runs at like 13 fps. I was shocked-- how could the game feel so butter smooth at such low framerates? Then it dawned on me: rather than "frameskip", the developers made the engine simply render every frame, then balanced the game so that the distances traveled made sense given the low framerate!

In other words, if you divide the number of kilometers traveled by the amount of ground the car moves each frame, multiplied by the framerate-- such as 13-- the math actually works out! To put it yet another way, they eliminated the framerate issues by just building the entire game's design around that limitation! As for the other cars, they are moving "too fast" relative to the player-- but this was also intentional, because just like the cockpit view situation, the game is way more fun and balanced, while still having satisfying passing maneuvers.

Back to the hack then: the hacker "unbroke" the game and made it "realistic". While it's a fun exercise and a way to explore the game's brilliancy, also notice how it's basically unplayable as a result. It's a cool testament to just how clever of a release 3DO's NFS is.