Alex Le’s Blog

Gamasutra reports on an AP Poll stating that some 40% of American adults play games. From the article: “The poll also yielded plenty of other results worth ruminating on - 45 percent of gamers play over the Internet, and those who do are notably more ‘hardcore’ than those who do not. Forty-two percent of online gamers spent four hours or more per week playing games, but only 26% of offline gamers did similarly. The AP/AOL survey also revealed that, of those who play online games, almost one in five said they had formed real-life friendships or relationships with those they play with online, showing the use of gaming as a social activity, even when playing remotely against others

– slashdot

This is a really good news for my baby Wars of Earth. If I can successfully create the game to enhance the level of player interaction, then there’s nothing else to say. Based on the above result of the Gamasutra’s poll, the social aspect of the game is very important and it’s one of the main keys to attract more players to come join and stay with the game.

Sugar: Corn vs. Cane

“The Wall Street Journal is urging Washington to discard the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol. This tariff is effectively a subsidy for corn-based ethanol produced in the USA. Yet, producing ethanol from corn is highly inefficient and consumes 1 unit of energy for each 1.3 units of energy that burning ethanol provides. By contrast, ethanol derived from sugarcane (which is the sole source of ethanol in Brazil) yields 8.3 units of energy. Sugercane is about 7 times more efficient than corn. Some studies even show that corn yields only 0.8 unit of energy, resulting in a net loss of energy.”

Another news tid bit from Slashdot. I was wondering why people know that corn can be processed to make ethanol as alternative fuel source, but still it’s not widely available in the States. The Mid-west region has a huge corn production rate but why California cannot advocate more on corn-based ethanol? And why Brazil can sustain on ethanol for the past few decades?

According to the above article, corn is not very efficient in making ethanol. Sugar cane, on the other hand, has great conversion rate. This is true because cane sugar is carbohydrate with lots of alcohol (-OH) groups (still remember those organic chemistry stuff?) Hence the conversion of these -OH groups to make ethanol (CH3-CH2-OH) is not hard at all and efficient enough to produce larger amount of ethanol. Moreover, isn’t beers and wine all got to start with sugar of some sorts? See! You don’t ever drink corn-based alcohol, do you?
So why isn’t more sugar being produced in the States? I have no answer for that but I think sugar in the states are used to make alcohol for college kids’ consumption (Girls Gone Wild is one of the major customers). I’m just kidding, but the States is still importing sugar from other countries. It’s cheaper to import than to grow and produce cane sugar. More importantly, gas price is still NOT high enough to push the initiatives of finding alternative fuel sources. I suspect that if gas price rises and stay at $3.50/ gallon and above for unleaded, then it is now a big incentive for people to look for cheaper fuel, hence sugar cane comes to the rescue.

Maybe the States will life the embargo and start trading with Cuba again for dirt cheap sugar cane in exchange for excess tortilla made from corn. We’ll see.

I was reading Slashdot and stumbled into an article about XBox 360 and the execution behind it. It was quite amazing how Microsoft could pull it through. The article is available at Reed-Electronics.com website. Given the scale and the level of complexity of the project, only big names like Microsoft or IBM can have enough man power and capital to concert all activities. I always doubt the efficiency of big corporations, but after reading the article, my point of view has changed. This is actually a triumph of corporation-level execution.

BM assigned 421 engineers from six or seven sites to the project, which was a proving ground for its design services business. The effort paid off, with an early test chip that came out in August 2004. With that chip, Microsoft was able to begin debugging the operating system. ATI taped out its first design in September 2004, and IBM taped out its full chip in October 2004. Both chips ran game code early on, which was good, considering that it’s very hard to get chips working at all when they first come out of the factory.

421 engineers? IBM was pretty serious with Microsoft’s game plan and indeed the Xbox 360 scored big time when it was released. Thumbs up for Microsoft.

Oh, according to the article, Bill wanted to run Windows on XBox 360. Well, this can be done but why? I have 2 PCs and I consider that enough. If you want to add more multimedia features on the 360 then have the design the OS extensible to add more multimedia components. The hardware is good enough to handle multimedia for the next 3 to 5 years. Why do we need a bulky Windows XP in there? It’s not even instant-on, which is a major no-no for multimedia platforms. Moreover, I don’t want SPYWARE on my game console. Imagine while you’re playing Halo 3 (I hope) and those flashy “Free IPod” thing pops up. I’d love to “Kill Bill” right away.

Devilsbrigade writes “The blog MusicThing is running an interesting interview with Andy Moorer. Mr. Moorer is the man who created the sound called Deep Note, now heard in every THX-enabled movie theatre. The interview is originally from last year, but the tech-heavy discussion is still a timeless analysis of a great sound.” From the article: “The score consists of a C program of about 20,000 lines of code. The output of this program is not the sound itself, but is the sequence of parameters that drives the oscillators on the ASP. That 20,000 lines of code produce about 250,000 lines of statements of the form “set frequency of oscillator X to Y Hertz. The oscillators were not simple - they had 1-pole smoothers on both amplitude and frequency. At the beginning, they form a cluster from 200 to 400 Hz. I randomly assigned and poked the frequencies so they drifted up and down in that range.”

http://slashdot.org/articles/06/04/21/1446244.shtml

Wow, never thought of that kind of complication of a sound. Tribals made music from skulls (fast skining of the victim, quick butcher-work, and voila, a drumming-skull) for years, so are we complicating things up? Indeed.