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"
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
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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.
boring news is better then no news... erm wait no it isnt
The world's smartest bug zapper www.zapstats.com/kickstarter
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
.....like welcoming our new Linux game-publishing overlords?
*ducks*
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
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?
Nuke Dukem 4D :)
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
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.
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))); } } }
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!!
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!
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.
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
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.