Slashdot Mirror
LGP Announces New Competition
Time Doctor writes "Linux Game Publishing announced its new game competition today, wherein an image relating to the game is revealed one pixel a second and competitors can attempt to be the first to guess it. Winner gets the first copy of the game, and the unofficial award of having way too much time on their hands to sit around waiting for pixels to change."
"Magic Eye: The CD Compendium"
You'd think they would have multiple winners because you know some jackass will be staring at it for days until he gets it. I, for one, have better things to do
Why can't I see the sailboat?
Face it, do something enough times, and it can cause problems.
I already waited 5 minutes for the site to load from the link I followed on slashdot. If that is the time you need to spend waiting between each pixel to update then I think *everyone* who tries to take part in that competition should get the "too much time on their hands" award just for trying... heh, come to think of it, I should get one just for posting this at slashdot!
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
They allow guessing but not wild guessing. How silly!
With innovative ideas and advanced gameplay like this, it is only a matter of time until Linux dominates not just the desktop market, but the gaming market as well.
For the first 30 seconds of a 30x30 image, it'll be a guessing game until the title is hit upon.
Its gonna get a magnitude longer for any 300x300 image.
This is based on the ability to distinguish a FAX image under heavy noise condition without error correction.
Add color and it may get worst at first, then better later than grayscale image.
I proposed a new rule: no guessing allowed to make things more interesting.
See, there are sweet games for Linux. Geez, I don't know what everybody's always bitching about.
Wah wah, I can't play Halo! So what? Shut up and go play "Guess the Game".
What's going to be good is that the image is going to be a screenshot of this very webpage. That's right folks, the answer to Guess the Game is: Guess the Picture! The newest sensation in an already exciting catalog of Linux games!
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
they are putting a dynamically generated 1085x814 image that changes once a second on to a site where we here at slashdot are going to check it out repeatedly? That doesn't appear to be a very bright idea.
Microsoft has announce a new technology where you can play the same game, but promise advanced features such as longer delays and larger images.
boring news is better then no news... erm wait no it isnt
The world's smartest bug zapper www.zapstats.com/kickstarter
So this is a pic of a NEW linux game? Exactly how many of them are there?
"Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." - Arthur C. Clarke.
Just trace the outline of the alien type people. You can sort of see their sillouette. They all have big heads and no arms yet. But I assume that's because of the telekinesis and the fishbowls on the head. Oh! And there are 4 of them so far, but there could be more as time progresses.
From the Non-Random-Guessing Department.
-FlynnMP3
Man this game has horrible latency.
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
Unless of course they are announcing Halo for Linux. That'd be funny. About 30 seconds later, it'd probably be ported to the PS2.
... this was really a picture of the crucial, plot revealing scene from a horrific crime; just like in that film No Way Out (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093640/ - includes scenes of nudity, navy personnel in white uniforms, and communists). ... such as Steve Balmer murdering (or f***ing) Eric Schmidt with a chair (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/03/0 515250&tid=109&tid=217&tid=133&tid=123), Google murdering unindexed information (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/03/00242 30&tid=217&tid=133, or SCO giving the OSS community a shafting thanks to mySQL (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/04/17302 25&tid=187&tid=126), or maybe it's just a picture of New Orleans ...
A few candidate crimes come to mind
The image "http://i.tuxgames.com/lgpcomp/comp.jpg" cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
I'm guessing this means the game is going to be a mmorpg, possibly a linux port of WoW.
Blizzard would like to thank you for your patience, but you can not play the game you pay a monthly fee for at this time, due to our servers being unable to cope with current load. Please try making another charactor on a different server and wasting even more time playing WoW. Thank you, your custom is important to us.
Couldn't they provide something else than a compressed jpeg full of jpeg artifact (zoom the large picture, you will see a the image is composed of 8x8 block of seemingly random pixels)
How is one supposed to know what the hell is in there if the jpeg compression moves the changed pixels around?
If I keep looking at it. I think I see smerfs? But then I decided to run it in Adobe and play around a bit. It looks like bubbles on a blue background.
If we were at the start we could have saved the first image, then image-diff it every half an hour (or less, depending how much time you have. OK, less it is.) That way you might see what it is. Now, I can roughly make out the outline of a head and shoulders type shape (I think). There looks to be about 3 of these shapes.
Sig Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
The random image was made by generating noise over the background layer, so open it in GIMP and Ctrl+Z to und- oh wait...
Nuke Dukem 4D :)
That should tidy things up a bit.
The day has come and we can now rejoice. It's Duke Nukem Forever!
JPEG image can't be revealed one pixel at a time. JPEG image consists of 16x16 MCU (Minimal Coding Units) encoded with DCT and high harmonics discarded (actually, there's more to this). Changing one pixel before encoding changes the whole 16x16 square.
It would be a total of 19200 pixels. To display the full image, one pixel per second, it would take (19200 / 3600) = 5 hrs 20 mins.
One hour of waiting would get you about 20% of the image...
assumming it's a 160x120 image. Of course, the real image is 197x197 = 38809 pixels, which means twice the wait.
(Sometimes, it's much more practical to do the math first to see if trying's worth it)
Unfortunately, due to the Slashdot effect, no one can see the picture as it changes. Ergo, no one can win.
Good way to stress-test their web-servers, though.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
It is true that there are close to zero good native Linux games. But there is a way to get a huge number of games running.. What you need is:
znes - Play all the good old Nintendo games
epsxe - Play all the Playstation 1 games
xmame - Play all the classic arcade games
dosemu - Most of the back-in-the-day Dos games work
OK, it is not the same thing as native games, but these four (combined with your local friendly p2p network or USEnet) allows you to play A LOT of games on Linux... And btw, epsxe is extra cool if you use those USB to playstation converters which are supported perfectly (I use them for xmame too)
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Brought to a crawl already.
Either its a sarcastic stabb at linux, or an attempt at a joke, but either way I'll throw in my two pence.
:)
There are plenty of games avalable for Linux, including great titles such as Uplink (http://www.uplink.co.uk/), Darwinia (http://www.darwinia.co.uk/), and a many others.
You just need to look about more often
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
I went to the page, and then went there a few minutes later and saved both images and did a difference in photoshop and none of the pixels have changed. I say this is a joke.
Yeah, great idea, a one-pixel-at a time revealing image in a lossy format. Why do people never learn that screenshots are meant to be in a lossless format?
You won't be able to see patterns very well at all unless they post the original picture so you can do a diff. Does anyone have a copy of the original picture? [Or do you know where a link to it is?]
I think this is a pretty stupid way of doing it. They should have just done it from a blank image. This just gives people who know the original image an advantage.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
From their products page, LGP doesn't deal with that much developer. Unless the new game is from a new dev house, the only developer that have upcoming games are
-GRIN with Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfigter.
That one would be surprising, as Tom Clancy's stuff is usually published by Ubisoft, and Ubi can take care of Linux by themselves
-Metropolis Software, but their upcoming games don't seem to be slated for a North American release, and it would be susprising that a Linux launch would be announced before a PC launch.
-Stategy First. And they have quite a few games coming... So it might be a Strategy First title, Disciple 2 : Gallean's Return would be a good choice as LGP carries Disciple 2.
-Pyrogon. Their only game not on the Linux platform is Super Letter Linker. They have a OS X port out, so a Linux port wouldn't be far fetched.
My bet is on Super Letter Linker. I mean if you get Disciple 2 or Ghost Recon lined up, you announce the damn game, the news cannot be bigger than that, no need for a contest...
So if you actually compare successive images and see what changed, you'll find that what they're REALLY doing is, every second they alter one pixel, and accidentally mildly discolor the rest of the MCU cell that pixel is in :P
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
If the game they are announcing is called "Watch the pixels disappear for 30 hours."
Sigs are for Terrorists.
I can't imagine this contest will last long at all if there's every half as many people as the webserver leads me to believe... took me 10 minutes to load the image!
I'm sure this will be solved before most of us can make out even a slightest smudge in the image.. not to mention people who have an original from 5~ hours ago, who can just use photoshop to cancel out the noise.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Why the fuck would you composite the image server-side, then send the entired thing back to the client upon each page refresh? What a waste of bandwidth!
Off the top of my head, I can think of about 4 easy solutions that would reduce the bandwidth by about 76,800 times, or allow 76,800 times more participants because the damned server wouldn't cack out immediately...
they stole the source to my unreleased version of #define WIDTH 1280 #define HEIGHT 960 int main(int argc, char** argv) { unsigned short x, y; srand(time(NULL)); for(y = 0; y HEIGHT; y++) { for(x = 0; x WIDTH; x++) { putpixel(x, y, makecol(rand(255), rand(255), rand(255))); } } }
...run a competition that spurs games to be written for Linux? Somehow Tux Racer with proper drivers misses people completely. I want the next Doom to come out first on Linux. Instead, we're looking at pixels trying to guess pictures.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
This is one of those games I'd call "innovatively bad."
I SEE IT! It's the "Slashdot effect"! And it IS a Linux game, because no one on /. uses anything other than linux anyways.
The picture looks like the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
UT 2004 comes with the Linux and Win versions on the same media. Other than that, uh, yeah, what he said.
It looks like they've got a 1280x960 image which will be completely revealed in about 14 days. I was going to download the image and do a comparison against previous images in order to remove the noise, but then I realized that they were giving you the image in jpg format -- the images are going to be compressed differently when a pixel changes, and thus you won't even necessarily be able to tell when there is a new pixel.
I downloaded it (using wget to be sure I'm not getting any caching) twice about five minutes apart. I then did cmp filea.jpg fileb.jpg and discovered that they were identical.
My conclusion is that they have already finished revealing the entire image, and that it is in fact a screenshot from some sort of snow-globe building game.
A real geek whould get the first image and then xor it with the one sometime later.
So picking out all the random dots and leaving all the information dots, makes guessing a lot easier.
Greets
There are no stupid questions, Just a lot of inquisitive idiots. (from a good friend)
There are a few 'interesting' properties of the image that they've posted; firstly the noise doesn't appear to be randomly distributed - there are many more samples in the center of the intensity scale than in the fully dark/fully light regions. The green channel also appears to have a much broader distribution curve than the red or blue channels.
To get an idea of what might be in the image I can think of a few methods that might provide some insight; performing a low pass filter (eg. gaussian filter) and enhancing what remains with the levels control in photoshop (this should help remove the random high frequency element, but of course you also end up losing all detail in whatever image is left), or if anyone feels up to it, performing an autocorrelation of the image with itself may help (essentially using the profile of the noise in the image to figure out what parts are significant).
Of course, with only ~1.5% of the image revealed so far it's not very likely that there'll be much to see yet - it's likely that all the meaningful data has been buried in the jpeg noise..
..isn't actually all that different from those fuckin.. 3d staring pictures (the name eludes me).
Relax your eyes.. kinda look through it. You will see the partial outlines of certain objects.
I dunno wtf they are. Strawberries carrying luggage through an airport terminal or something...
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc1/showpage.php?pag e=247
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You've only served to underline the belief (or possibly fact) that there really aren't many native Linux games.
Wait for it...
Microsoft announces huge leap in relative productivity as open source coders spend month staring at random image.
http://members.shaw.ca/icodenaked/lgp_contest_hack .dmg
This program filters out the noise, leaving only those pixels which belong to the hidden screen shot (on top of a grey background).
Ironic that I wrote it for Mac OS X, eh?
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
The image looks like it might be largely symmetrical. It'd be worth combining the two halves, though I'm not sure what procedure would give the best results.
Maybe average the colours in 16x16 blocks (does that eliminate the jpeg noise?) then average the two halves. Or just check for pixels that are the same shade on each side, this throws out most of the data but even more of the noise.
I quit!
what would help would be to save an early version and use it to filter the noise out of later versions by only displaying what has changed.
but it's a jpg...
http://happypenguin.org/
I have a feeling they'd beg to differ. There's other sites that may interest you, too, but that's the one where I get most of my Linux games.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I think the framerate on my Voodoo3 card was like 1 pixel per second trying to play HL2....
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
And they said that the new nvidia drivers weren't fast.
The free version of what was formerly Tux Racer is now Planet Penguin Racer.
See this Newsforge article for more information.
1) Wait for image to be finished
2) Invent time machine
3) ???
4) PROFIT!
Mod parent "Insightful". I used to pronounce "W" as "duhboolyew", but his way is much faster!
Now that the slashdot effect is in full swing they can just put the full picture up and everyone can download it pixel by pixel.
They're revealing the game pixel by pixel. Since 'asteroids' was drawn with vector graphics, not raster, it's not asteroids.
If they add a random noise to a picture, just avearge the samples and scale it down. Once tey get enough picture pixels revealed you will see the picture or some sort of it.
while true do wget http://i.tuxgames.com/lgpcomp/comp.jpg sleep 1 done They did say that they would update it *every* *second*. Slashdot users: start your terminals!
Ads? What ads?
The marketing team came up with the promotion without telling the developers. Now the developers are frantically writing the game as the pixels are revealed. Will the evil tactics of the marketeers plaster the developers with the "vaporware" label? Will the l33t coding skills of the developers make them rich beyond their wildest dreams, allowing them to spin off into their own company and leave the marketeers behind?
Oh wait, this is for Linux. They won't get rich...one guy will buy the game and everyone else will get the torrent of it.
How many times have you read here on slashdot, "I stay with Windows because of the games." I think Windows is safe for the moment. Look at the system requirements for "Mindrover" (for which a random plug was on the screen when I was checking out the contest image":
Linux Kernel 2.2.x or later
GNU C Libraries (glibc) 2.1.x
XFree86 Release 3.3.5
200 MHz x86 Processor (300 MHz or better is recommended)
3D graphics accelerator with OpenGL? drivers 32 MB RAM
OSS compatible sound card
70 MB free hard disk space
4x CD-ROM drive
"Ok, Mom, now what version of glibc do you have? 2.0.9? Damn you, I told you to update that! I suppose you're still running kernel 2.1.5 too. I can't even believe we're related. By the way, can I bring my laundry over?"
Anyone got the original, very first image they posted?
There's got to be a way to at least make the challenge easier. All the random pixels just confuse my visual cortex, so blacking them out, leaving only the pixels already revealed (about 45000 by the time I post this) would certainly make the job easier.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This has to be one of the funniest trolls I've seen... if only it were on-topic so I could mod it up... -- The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers
It would seem to me that the way to crack this puzzle would be to take a copy of the image at its earliest point (when it was essentially all noise), then a copy at its current point. A mask of where the images differ will indicate which pixels are part of the "real" image. Then simply isolate those "good" pixels on a transparent background in Photoshop, and interpolate between them. (It can be done, with a bit of cleverness.) Voila, instant solution.
Of course, the fact that the images show up with horrendous JPEG artifacts may foil this somewhat, but I hope someone finds the time to try it anyway.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Fortunately the random noise isn't re-seeded at each reload.
:)
Therefore:
1. Load page
2. Save As Pic1
3. Wait...
4. Reload page
5. Save As Pic2
6. Load Pic2 into the GIMP
7. Load Pic1 into the GIMP
8. copy Pic1 to clipboard
9. Paste onto Pic2, keep as a layer
10.Select "subtract" as the Layer Mode
et voila, there's your picture.
Repeat steps 3-10 to see your picture take shape.
Has anyone else figured out what it is yet?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Don't forget things like ScummVM ( http://www.scummvm.org/ ) and the other engines that allows you to run old games (There's some for the old Sierra games, and some for old text-based games too).
Was this competition devised by Rolf Harris?
I find dosbox is better than dosemu.
Also don't forget scummvm.
let's see. It says it's been running for 16 hrs 51 minutes 43 seconds.
All I see is static in the image. So, I'm gonna say.. since by the time the image is done displaying, Duke Nuke'Em Forever will be out... That must be it. Oh, and maybe Prey.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Maybe it's not your cup of tea, but I think that Darwinia is pretty cool.
Majesty is also decent, but then I'm a big fan of RTSes that "run themselves" heavily at the micro-level -- I hated Blizzards micromanagement-heavy RTSes.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I think your colour/distribution observations may be true for any and all jpegs. This is because they convert from rgb to some other form that I forget the name of, and can't find with google in the limited time I have to reply ;-)
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
With seven more hours of data, more detail is starting to show...
Linux is no drop-in replacement for Windows. You cannot get the style of gaming that you get on Windows on Linux. Period.
On the other hand, if you're a Linux user looking for entertainment, there really is no shortage. On your base Gnome system, you've "sol", which is a scalable vector graphics Solitaire with about eight bazillion Solitaire games more than Microsoft's SOL.EXE. If you can live without graphics, many years of improvements and coding have made ToME one hell of a roguelike (with, admittedly, one hell of a learning curve). Diablo was derived from these things, but lost all the sophistication of the game.
If you love strategy, check out Battle for Wesnoth, which is a polished strategy game in the hex-wargame genre, or FreeCiv.
If you've never played interactive fiction, it's another text-based genre that's a lot of fun, and deserves a shot. Get yourself a copy of TADS and a copy of Babel, or if you want an adult game, try Ideal Highschool.
If you want a vertical shooter, check out Chromium B.S.U..
The multiplayer FPS that most people seem to be playing on Linux is a tank game called BZFlag.
If you're looking for more, try hitting up HappyPenguin and sorting by rating, which will pretty consistently give you decent stuff.
You can make some pretty consistent general statements about open-source games. They are usually uglier/less flashy than their closed-source equivalents, because there are few artists working on open-source projects (maybe art just happens to be such a competitive field that nobody can spare the time and fund a hobby with their day job -- dunno). They tend to have a much greater degree of replayability than commercial releases, since the developer wants to play it too -- you could easily play most open-source games for ten years and still continue to enjoy them. Many (though certainly not all) open-source games have a strategic element to them, or something that requires the application of the brain a bit, and less pure twitch. Very few open source games have cutscenes or cinematics (though they do exist). Some open source games have been around for many years, and have a very high degree of complexity and sophistication -- closed source games don't have a development cycle of this length, and the ability to keep adapting to trends in playing. With a few exceptions (I really like Battle for Wesnoth's music, for instance), sound and audio is limited and low-quality compared to commercial games. Globulation 2, for instance, is an RTS with essentially *no* audio.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
xxxxxxxxxx
xx....x..x
xxx...x..x
xxX...x..x
xxxxxxxxxx
The fourth is just greens and blues and purples without any high contrast things standing out.
See here for the un-permuted diff image.
It's called "Email Address Farmer" and the goal is to collect as many email addresses from contest submitters as possible to be used for marketing in the future. Seems the game only lasts 15 days or so ... but after that, the real fun begins.
Diablo was derived from [Roguelikes], but lost all the sophistication of the game.
Replacing it with about a bazillion times more fun. Sorry, but life's too short for games written by crazy people who refuse to implement basic save/load functionality because it "spoils the game" if you don't have to start over because you were foolish enough to step on the wrong tile on dungeon level 666.
If you love strategy, check out . . . FreeCiv
Great game if you can get a group together to play multiplayer. Single-player gameplay sucks, though - the AI is crappier than the original Civilisation from about 15 years ago.
If you want a vertical shooter, check out Chromium B.S.U..
Looks boring. Aren't there any open source danmaku shooters?
Of course, the answer is to take images some time apart, and then subtract the two. Then you only see the revealed pixels, randomly distributed. With an hour or two's worth of pixels randomly spread, the picture should be easily discernable. They realy have to change their script to redo the random noise to make this obvious crack fail.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
But then you could look at what pixels don't change between two close together. That's even easier than grabbing them with a good amount of time. I suspect they have something more complicated at work here.
Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
I've said for years now, that the moment artists start to use free software to do their proprietary shit, that is when open source projects would start to blossom in the art department. I give it a bit less than 10 years.
Also, I started playing wesnoth a few months ago, and I gotta say I really enjoy it. It is developing at a fast pace, and it is quite a bit of fun, although multiplayer is kind of slow due to its turn basedness.
According to LGP: The competition has been solved correctly, and the winner has been notified. However, it was done with image manipulation, and as people are enjoying guessing so much, we will keep the competition open for a bit longer, for people without the technical skills to do image processing. Once the image becomes clear enough to make educated guesses without data processing, we will pick a second winner, at random, from all the correct guesses. This second winner will also receive a free copy of the game. Keep those guesses coming in!
:p
I for one think it's a ripoff. So now my last 48 hours have been wasted staring at this thing??! Writing out this little diagram of hourly pixel movements was for nothing???
If they're gonna give the prize away to the man who technically cheated, so be it. But to choose one random winner from all the correct guesses, just doesn't seem fair.
How about choose the first person who guessed it?
Kinda like what they advertised: Be the first to guess
*DrugCheese rants*