Messages

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Gallery / Re: Furdle's Modern House

« on: November 16, 2013, 11:12:47 PM »

The roof curves up too high. Reduce the end height to 2/5ths its original.

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Off Topic / Re: Are You Fit?

« on: February 28, 2013, 01:47:49 AM »

Sooo many people say that they are x feet and x inches and they weigh xxx pounds, but will take in no consideration that what makes people fit isn't solely their bmi but also how much exercise they get daily/ weekly. You can be overweight yet very fit.

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Off Topic / Re: Are You Fit?

« on: February 27, 2013, 02:49:15 AM »

Swimming by far is my favorite sport. I've been doing club swimming for 8 years now and I have gotten very fit from doing so. I'm always hungry, and I can eat tonnes of food a day without getting fat, but I generally avoid them. I don't like soda and hard candies, but ill still eat them. Fatty food are fine though.

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Off Topic / Re: How do you think humans were first created?

« on: February 27, 2013, 01:05:45 AM »

Which is why we were both: Persistence Hunting

Also the title is a trick question, humans were not created, we simply happened.

I almost used that wiki article as backup. :)

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Off Topic / Re: How do you think humans were first created?

« on: February 26, 2013, 11:21:18 PM »

Modern predators rarely use endurance running for hunting. And our eyes evolved for foraging, not hunting. This hypothesis apparently faces a lot of scrutiny.

I don't really know that much about this stuff but I know that our eyes developed in the front of our head in order to create a field of depth perception, that unfortunately, isn't all that necessary when foraging. Eyes in the front of your head is a trait related to specifically to hunting predators, with maybe a few exceptions that I cant remember.
      Moreover, since we are intelligent creatures, the likely hood that we evolved from a sole foraging species doesn't make all that much sense. What develops and promotes intelligence is hunting and laying traps for other animals, not foraging in the grass for berries. That came trait however, developed alongside with our endurance for running, and it later became dominant after we figured out it was way easier to find berries than to chase after deer or what not. Foraging animals don't become intelligent, hunters do.

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Off Topic / Re: How do you think humans were first created?

« on: February 25, 2013, 03:21:17 AM »

I would argue right now but I'm to tired. So here is a wiki article I found after a 5s search.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis

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Off Topic / Re: How do you think humans were first created?

« on: February 25, 2013, 03:02:44 AM »

Humans do have one physical advantage that allows us to capture and kill other animals. We have stamina up the wazoo when compared to other animals, its also why we don't have much fur. The fur prevents us from sweating properly and so we lost it in when we evolved. People would run miles after prey in order to catch it. We may be slow in comparison, but after a while the animal would get to tired and we'd catch up to it.

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Off Topic / Re: How do you think humans were first created?

« on: February 24, 2013, 04:51:23 AM »

That's not really accurate, either. Unless it inhibits procreation, a trait will probably stick with us. If it doesn't, that's pretty much random chance.

The random chances overtime will wash out traits. Having something that impedes reproduction only serves to increase the rate that a specific trait is removed from a species.

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Off Topic / Re: How do you think humans were first created?

« on: February 24, 2013, 04:46:27 AM »

Humans are being born without appendixes. Our tail bone is getting smaller with each generation.

They aren't getting smaller because evolution tells them to, its just because they aren't being used, and thus not a vital part for human success. Traits like a tailbone just get sorta washed out after a while, that's why they're go away.

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Off Topic / Re: How do you think humans were first created?

« on: February 24, 2013, 04:34:43 AM »

Humans are fairly strong animals. But our better quality by far is how dexterous and intelligent we are. The reason we rule the planet today is our ingenuity in tough situations. IE: We wear a bear's pelt for heat when we are cold. We take baths when we are hot. We use a rock instead of using our bare hands when attacking something. We group together and can communicate ideas, combining all of our past experiences to solve difficult tasks. Other animals very rarely show any of these traits.

Squirrels frustrate me. I'm bigger, stronger, smarter, and have greater endurance, yet they still manage to evade me. That's why I stopped trying to catch them after 11, I don't want to embarrass mankind anymore. :P

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Games / Re: Sim City 4

« on: December 20, 2012, 01:48:05 PM »

The city size for the regions in simcity 5 kinda sucks though. It seems like it's more like a town, rather than a city.

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Games / Re: Sim City 4

« on: December 11, 2012, 11:46:45 PM »

do parking garages play any use? like i thought people use em for multi style transits. or is that just overkill messy.

Parking structures only hardly work. You have to like force your sims to use them or they won't even bother with them.

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Development / Re: 2012/09/12 - Steam Greenlight

« on: November 23, 2012, 04:22:16 PM »

I haven't been here in a while though, but when I saw this on steam under the Steam Greenlight, I thought i'd come back and wish the best for Blockland to get on. I originally thought that Blockland being on steam would be bad, but now that I think about it, i know will benefit the game overall, despite the few drawbacks. :)

also: http://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=50477.msg806727#msg806724

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Games / Re: Dwarf Fortress Megathread!

« on: August 21, 2011, 08:28:34 PM »

A GPU is a massively parallel processing unit. It crunches a lot of numbers, very fast.
The speed difference is brought about because a GPU has an enormously large number of transistors, many many more then a CPU. This introduces the large clock speed difference, but again the GPU can still process numbers faster then the CPU.
A CPU is built for general purpose operations. It can do a lot more things then a GPU instruction wise, but the fewer things a GPU can do it does them a hell of a lot faster.

I would also like to say that this probably wouldn't be much more difficult to do then multithreading. If a game isn't designed with multithreading in mind from the ground up, it's a rather large undertaking to make it multithreaded.

GPU's are able to process information fast due to their innate structure of being able to process HUGE matrices( due to the large amount of transistors). This may seem like the way to go but you one would have to create a program specifically created to use large matrices in order to receive the potential from the GPU's capabilities. GPU programming would only truly work well with pathfinding and maybe liquids (if the way they were handled was altered).

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Games / Re: Dwarf Fortress Megathread!

« on: August 21, 2011, 07:42:33 PM »

The GPU is much much faster at doing thousands of calculations extremely quickly compared to the the CPU, even when it's not for rendering things.
Dwarf Fortress does a huge amount of small calculations for everything from path finding to water flow simulation to dwarven psychology etc etc, if all that load was shifted from the CPU to the GPU, because the GPU is effectively totally free in the game, then I would expect the game would get a huge boost in fps.

As an example for clarification, take something like a graphics shader, which is a simple program that does a bit of math to modulate colours for every pixel on the screen, every frame. It can run on a graphics card thousands upon thousands of times per second, achieving hundreds of frames per second on the screen. If you write a similar shader to run on the CPU, you would be lucky to get maybe 0.5 frames per second.
Take the same idea and apply it to the simulation in the game. On newer graphics cards this is totally possible, and not exceedingly difficult to do.

Sorry to rain on your parade, but I honestly don't think that a GPU is faster than a CPU. A fast GPU renders data around 700mhz, where a cpu can go up too and can easily succeed 3000mhz. Although, GPU's do have their own RAM built into the chip which increase the speed and aren't affected by interruptions. Although turning a GPU into a mathematical processing system and having it run faster than a CPU which's sole purpose is to process that sort of stuff seems incredibly unlikely. Also, coding that into dwarf fortress is incredibly time consuming, buggy and hard. It would be far better if multi threading was introduced.