Forum Regulars -PhilRoi's Invitational (come celebrate my return from a warzone)

[PhilRoi]

when I get off this deployment with the military.  I am going to have a grand time slacking for a month or so.   I hereby challenge the forum regulars here to a game  when I get back into the states and settled.

Admiral, Revenentus, darke, haagenti, Pandemic, ZarahNeander, Zulgaines, x4000   this means you! (off the top of my head.  sorry if i missed you!)
and if i didn't name you,  call dibs anyhow.  reality is when i get back i'll post again to co-ordinate the particulars!

sound off if your interested!  first 7 to call "in" get dibs on a seat!

time frame will be mid-end of September.

I will bring souvenirs back with me from lovely Afghanistan.   We will take a vote when we are done and the winners get them!  And no voting for yourself!  

voting categories will include:
Hider - Best job of avoiding a fight.....  (silent player, avoids the ai, lowest losses)
Herder - Asks for help doing things the most often...  "hey can someone help me attack this system..."
Hysterical - Best freak out moment when hit by surprise AI attack.
Hero - MVP.... nuff said!

Of course alot can happen between now and then...   I know it will take me close to 2 months to demob and get home.  and i will be away from the forums in that time.

Philroi out!

p.s. x4000  get to coding!  if you have an expansion pack ready to go by then....  we can play test and launch it!   hehehehe  

[Revenantus]

In! Looking forward to it.

Stay safe, Philroi.

[x4000]

I'm in, too!  Your safe return from Afghanistan is definitely a reason for a pickup game.  It'll be a whole 'nother ball of wax of a game when you get back, Phil, but I don't think the first expansion will be too big of a focus quite by that time.  Too much to do on the base game first, and we've got another project in the works, too.  But by around that point I should be getting started on the expansion, I imagine.

Like Rev said, stay safe.  I know a couple of guys over there at the moment, and I'm always impressed with the people who go.

[Pandemic]

*dibs on fourth*

*is glad this forum is relatively small so he got a spot*

*is happy that a huge game will be going on*

*is interested in seeing X play*

*is liking this idea*

*is going to stop thinking out loud*


So, I'm in . I'll be seeing you soon, and glad you're finally back in the States Phil .


-Pandemic

[Echo35]

Count me in. I'll never turn down a game  Got a few Army buddies coming back soon (None from Afghanistan though). Who are you with anyway?

[Admiral]

An advance welcome back from me. Thank you for the invitation! I'd quite love to play, but my schedule (single father) is generally too fluid for more than a half-commitment. Things will get better when school starts in a month...

Cheers!

[PhilRoi]

*update*

I'm back in the states, but the army is sending me to a school and i may be asked to hang out at our de-mobilization station for a few extra weeks to catch any stragglers coming home from theater and welcome them home properly.

so i'll either be back around sept 20th if they let me go after the school or oct 7th if they need me to stay later.

managed to get a pass and get out where i had internet and could grab the updates.  looking forward to reading the change log!

I see a few new faces on the forums.   Welcome!   If your all around when i get home,  feel free to jump in on the invitational!   I'll post again the closer it gets and when i have net access!

PhilRoi

p.s. now i have to decide if i build my new computer before or after running this thing!   hello multi-cores....  Seems the wife broke my gaming rig while i was gone and i decided it was time to build a new one anyhow!

[x4000]

Welcome back!  Glad you made it back safely.  We'll be here, so just let us know when your schedule firms up!

[Echo35]

p.s. now i have to decide if i build my new computer before or after running this thing!   hello multi-cores....  Seems the wife broke my gaming rig while i was gone and i decided it was time to build a new one anyhow!

And hilariously enough, AI War is one of the few games in my library that uses my multi-cores properly.

[x4000]

p.s. now i have to decide if i build my new computer before or after running this thing!   hello multi-cores....  Seems the wife broke my gaming rig while i was gone and i decided it was time to build a new one anyhow!

And hilariously enough, AI War is one of the few games in my library that uses my multi-cores properly.

One of the many advantages of the .NET Framework.  It still took a lot of work to get working entirely properly (and several books on threading for me to read over the last few yers), but the framework makes it easier in general.

[Echo35]

One of the many advantages of the .NET Framework.  It still took a lot of work to get working entirely properly (and several books on threading for me to read over the last few yers), but the framework makes it easier in general.

Haven't messed around with .net yet, but I'm surprised more games don't use threading particularly well. With all those big name companies throwing so much money into gaming, you figure it would have been used more frequently by now, its not the hardest thing in the world to do. I'm sick of my quad core processor maxing out the first one or two cores and not the other two because games want faster speeds rather than actually using all the hardware. Oh, and 32-Bit pisses me off but that's a different story **cough** Empire Total War **cough**

[x4000]

its not the hardest thing in the world to do.

It's darn close, though.  Multi-threading is one of the current holy grails of computing.  And not every game model will work well with multiple threads (under the current way of handling threads, anyway), for a variety of reasons that would take too long for me to extrapolate on here.  Also, learning to think as a multithreaded programmer is hugely, hugely, hard.  Very few actually "get it" when it comes to multithreaded programming.  I "get" a couple of threading models by now, but there are a number of others that are still mysterious to me.  It's among the harder of computer science topics in many ways, and it requires completely different programming techniques (and it makes traditional debugging all but impossible).

That's why (I think) IBM has a big $1M USD prize for someone who can make a breakthrough in compiling singlethreaded code to run on multiple cores.  It seems like an impossible goal at present, but hopefully someone will figure it out.  I don't know that anyone is at all close on it, though.

Anyway, point being that I would not trivialize the multithreading too much.  It is simple when you are talking different processes on an OS or completely unrelated threads (like sound/music playback), but when you start talking about threads that have to talk back and forth the problem gets much more sticky and you are at serious risk of deadlocks.

[Admiral]

That's why (I think) IBM has a big $1M USD prize for someone who can make a breakthrough in compiling singlethreaded code to run on multiple cores. 

I'm not a hardcore computer scientist, but a lot of the undergraduate work I did on high-performance computing were on multiprocessors (e.g., DEC Alpha and the like) and other computers (vector processors like Cray or even single-bit supercomputers like CM5, or message passing architectures, VLIW computers and a variety of multiprocessors like hypercube, etc.).

Without thinking deeply, I feel that this is sort of like offering a prize for solving the halting problem.

The solution, of course, is programming languages that allow themselves to be semantically understood without threads. A lot of FP languages would be much better at compiler-level parallelization than the current crop of OO languages.

As to recompiling object code on the fly... Ha. (I'm more than happy to eat my word, though.)

[x4000]

That's why (I think) IBM has a big $1M USD prize for someone who can make a breakthrough in compiling singlethreaded code to run on multiple cores. 

I'm not a hardcore computer scientist, but a lot of the undergraduate work I did on high-performance computing were on multiprocessors (e.g., DEC Alpha and the like) and other computers (vector processors like Cray or even single-bit supercomputers like CM5, or message passing architectures, VLIW computers and a variety of multiprocessors like hypercube, etc.).

Without thinking deeply, I feel that this is sort of like offering a prize for solving the halting problem.

The solution, of course, is programming languages that allow themselves to be semantically understood without threads. A lot of FP languages would be much better at compiler-level parallelization than the current crop of OO languages.

As to recompiling object code on the fly... Ha. (I'm more than happy to eat my word, though.)

Well, it's hard to break programmers of their favorite languages.  That's why you see things like COBOL.NET (no joke).  I think the idea is to get it so that language choice is (mostly) a preference thing, and under the hood they can be compiled or executed in various different ways. 

Is that feasible?  I also really have a lot of doubts on that. 

Is that advisable even if it is feasible?  I think it could be useful in some cases.  Language portability is an important aspect of Java and .NET, one of my favorite aspects in fact.  However, by the same token certain languages are just plain better at certain activities.  My two favorite programming languages are C# and TSQL, and I wouldn't trade either for the other. They are both so different, and each one really stinks at the tasks that the other excels at.  So I suppose if there was some sort of multicore-type programming langauge that someone came out with, I wouldn't be offended to add that as another central part of my toolset.

[Echo35]

That's why you see things like COBOL.NET (no joke).

::Googles::