Nukapedia News Digest - 15 Dec 2012

Welcome to the Nukapedia News Digest, brought to you by the Rivet City Market, make sure you bring your kids to come and visit Santa.

From the Administrative Enclave

• Poll Master General Dead Gunner is running for Full Moderator. Have your say by 22 Dec
• I've suggested some minor reforms to user rights requests, and some guidelines for issuing temp chat mod rights. Please join us for that.

From Wikia: Do you play COD: Black Ops 2?

Friend of the Wiki, and one time Apprentice Judge Lizzunchbox is looking for help./

George here from Wikia Games with what I think is a pretty interesting opportunity to get a glimpse of the future of gaming. Our own experience and common sense, backed up by research tells us that most of us play games with a Computer or tablet at arm's length. I'm preaching to the choir here pretty much, right?

Well, Wikia Labs decided to do something to enhance this second-screen experience, and the end result is a pretty exciting project we’ve code-named Project Co-Pilot.

Project Co-Pilot is, at its core, an acknowledgement of all the hard work you’re doing. The app listens via the microphone built in to your tablet, and is able to tell where you are in a game, and is then able to pull up the appropriate guide information, walkthrough text, trivia, historical context--or whatever--for your curious eyes.

Right now, we’re testing Project Co-Pilot on Call of Duty Black Ops II. As you read this, a few of the Call of Duty wiki’s finest admins are pounding away at the app to ensure that the first iteration of the app is as fine as it could possibly be.

This is where you come in. We’re looking for a bunch of people to pound away at the app for about two weeks during the holidays, and for this motley crew to tell us what they think about Project Co-Pilot.

Here are the requirements to participate

• Must have an iPad
• Must be able to play Call of Duty: Black Ops II
• Must be willing to install third party software (such as Testflight (www.testflight.com)) to test if necessary
• Must be willing to sign an NDA
• Must understand that the application may break at any time without notice
• Must be willing to take a short survey during the testing process

You can sign up here.

Hey Josh, over here, Josh, Hi!

“um, why didn't anyone ask me how 2012 was for white hetero male american gamers, the truly oppressed minority? (it was p. good, as usual).”— Josh Sawyer

From Josh Sawyer's Formspring...

When you write about how all classes in Project Eternity should be "useful", what does that mean? Does it mean they need to be equally powerful and "balanced"? If so, what does that even mean in a single player, party-based RPG?

Which order would you recommend doing the DLC's in? I am getting them for the first time on Steam this Christmas Sale, and I wanted your opinion on what order to play them.

Personally, I think they work best if you play Honest Hearts first, then Dead Money, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road. HH kinda sorta of fits into the overall arc, but DM/OWB/LR work better together. A lot of players also feel that HH makes the most sense as a lower-level adventure (I don't disagree).

Getting to the start of HH is much more challenging than getting to the start of OWB or LR, but I think that spaces out the DLCs from the core game nicely.

From Software has brought in new directors for the Dark Souls sequel which has a number of people, including myself, worried for it's quality. Since you've acted as director before, how big of an impact did feel you had on the final product (FO

NV)?

Without knowing the company culture at From Software, it's hard to know how much influence individual director(s) have. In general, I believe people attribute too much to project directors (or equivalent). The high-level design of the companions and areas in F:NV (outside of the Strip) was entirely mine, as was the entirety of the system design, but I did not do any of the hands-on design for any quest or location, I didn't design the central plot or conflict (that was John Gonzalez), and I only wrote a small number of dialogues (Arcade, Hanlon, Kimball's speech and a few others).

I dictated the overall tone and direction of the setting, story, and system mechanics, but there was a huge team of people responsible for doing the actual design work and implementation. At times, I demanded specific things, like the ability to kill any non-child NPC in the game and still complete the critical path. In most cases, I let the designers have a lot of freedom within a loose outline of what an area was supposed to be. Sometimes the designers convinced me to change the outline of those areas, so in the end, they had more influence over the high-level design than I did.

Wrap

Is this real life, or is this just a fantasy?

No relic this week, as I thought this from the Huffington Post was just too interesting to pass up.

Physicists say they may have evidence that the universe is a computer simulation.

How? They made a computer simulation of the universe. And it looks sort of like us.

A long-proposed thought experiment, put forward by both philosophers and popular culture, points out that any civilisation of sufficient size and intelligence would eventually create a simulation universe if such a thing were possible.

And since there would therefore be many more simulations (within simulations, within simulations) than real universes, it is therefore more likely than not that our world is artificial.

Now a team of researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany led by Silas Beane say they have evidence this may be true.

In a paper named 'Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation', they point out that current simulations of the universe - which do exist, but which are extremely weak and small - naturally put limits on physical laws.

Technology Review explains that "the problem with all simulations is that the laws of physics, which appear continuous, have to be superimposed onto a discrete three dimensional lattice which advances in steps of time."

What that basically means is that by just being a simulation, the computer would put limits on, for instance, the energy that particles can have within the program.

These limits would be experienced by those living within the sim - and as it turns out, something which looks just like these limits do in fact exist.

For instance, something known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin, or GZK cut off, is an apparent boundary of the energy that cosmic ray particles can have. This is caused by interaction with cosmic background radiation. But Beane and co's paper argues that the pattern of this rule mirrors what you might expect from a computer simulation.

Naturally, at this point the science becomes pretty tricky to wade through - and we would advise you read the paper itself to try and get the full detail of the idea.

Your next Nukapedia News Digest

We're at the point where companies start winding down things until the new year. If there's enough news to print on the 22nd and/or 29th, I'll publish. If not, The News will be back on Jan 1 with the "Year in Review" us news-types tend to do around that time.. In the meantime;

• Sulik is looking for your questions. We'll be answering those on Christmas day.
• If you have anything you'd like us to cover in the year in review, leave your suggestions here.
• Plans are coming together for Apprentice 2013. We're looking at a Feburary 2013 kickoff, with a slightly slower pace (1 challenge per month). Please let me know if you'd like a reminder when we're ready to go.

Have a good break if I don't see you before the new year. Agent c (talk) 19:59, December 15, 2012 (UTC)