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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."
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.
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)
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..
Uh, Doom 3 came out on Linux simultaneously with Windows, I believe. It was certainly with a few weeks, since I got it (on Linux) pretty soon after launch.
They didn't get around to adding surround sound support (a big deal for Doom, the sound is the best bit) for a few months though.
It's entirely possible that Quake 4 will also come out joint-first on Linux.
With seven more hours of data, more detail is starting to show...
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.
How long ago did you try VE? As a developer of VE, I can attest to the fact that it is advancing very, very rapidly - especially on my focus, graphics. ;) We've something like 4x'ed the total monster graphics from FE; I just recently finished mind flayers, liches, and foocubi, and today I'm going to hit nagas. There will be a new release later this month incorporating all of our recent changes, or you can download the current edition via darcs. You can follow progress over here, including graphics development announcements and monster graphics statuses
sed "s/SJW.*$/... never mind. I was about to say something stupid, and also, I'm a troglodyte./Ig"