No recent game has enraged me more than Clash of Heroes. This is unfortunate because the core of it is actually very good; it’s just mired in one of the single worst metagames I can remember.
The Scientific Gamer
Science, gaming, and all things in between.
Barry’s Guide To Barycentres.
Barycentre, barycentre. It’s the kind of word that sounds like it should be easy to pun, but really isn’t.
Sunday Soundtracks.
Warning: may contain incredibly high concentrations of sugar.
To The Developers Of Xenonauts.
Edit: Some rummaging in the game files revealed that not only is there a correctly-shaped lightmap in the geoscape folder, but you can actually use it to replace the current, awful lightmap through some simple file renaming. So the only remaining question now is, why isn’t it being used as default?
First, great job on the game! The cold war setting in particular is a great idea; it looks like you should be able to produce something special if — as looks very likely — you guys make your Kickstarter target and then some. However, when you are considering your stretch goals (or what I would otherwise call “deciding what to do with our huge piles of money” if I were feeling uncharitable) I would like you to take a look at the above picture, and then have a long, hard think about what exactly this is going to do to the day/night border as it progresses across the surface of the Earth as rendered via the Mercator projection. Hopefully this will lead you to make some changes to the geoscape so that it doesn’t break basic physics, or at least put some blurb into the lore about the aliens either altering the axis of rotation of the Earth to zero degrees or else physically shifting the Sun to match, because aliens are dicks like that.
Each New Frontier.
A month or two back there was a news article (or several) about how spending long-duration flights in space caused astronauts’ eyesight to deteriorate. Since “long-duration” in this case means flights of over a month in low earth orbit the doctors who published the study were rightly concerned about the effect a longer trip in space might have on the astronauts making it; any exploration of the solar system outside of the Moon’s orbit is going to involve flights lasting many months, meaning that this symptom of time spent in low-G environments – which wore off after the astronauts had spent a week or two back on Earth – might suddenly become a hugely relevant problem. However, while I completely get that this is a bad thing that must be avoided or mitigated if at all possible, when you stack it up against the other hazards involved in true long-duration space flights it starts to look positively benign. If only cataracts were the worst an extended journey in interplanetary space could do to us. Unfortunately it’s not quite that simple.
Testicular Torsion Physics.
Longbranch Pennywhistle asks
What do you know of Newtonian Torsion physics? Is there a reason this information isn’t more widely known or even distributed?
Here is some info I found, not all inclusive by any means but does this hold any credence?
