Alright, I know no one has yet delved into the real physical aspects of what you're talking about to this point, so I'd like to go ahead and give it a shot.
You're likely aware that the machinations of our entire universe are, as far as we are able to tell, based on very certain physical principles. The "laws" of nature we have found using experimentation, for which we assumed reproducibility and consistency, etc: If experiments that produce significant results disagree with a supposed theory of nature, and those experiments are verified not to be flawed in their execution, then the theory is held suspect, and a new theory must be proposed that fits both the previously acquired data as well as data from the new experiments which discredit the old theory. Of course we expect this theory to be able to predict related phenomena, etc:
The usual background. If a person does not believe that the way that science attempts to model the world is an actual reflection of how the world works, then this person believes in magic and the following question has no real meaning to him.
Assuming that this question means something to the dowser proponents:
What is the physical principle by which a dowsing rod works? I don't mean to say that you should know offhand how it works, or that anyone has ever even tested it. The great thing about science is that it has wonderful predictive qualities for phenomena that can be explained using previously constructed (and strongly supported) theories. And we have some pretty ironclad theories, either exact or at least approximate given certain conditions (using regular kinematics when relativistic effects are small despite the fact that they are always present).
Using what we know so far... how does it "detect"? One claims that the dowsing rod points down towards the object you intend to locate. This implies that there is a force that is causing a rotation of the rod in your hands. What provides this force? We know that gravitational forces will cause matter to be attracted to one another. If you had a body with an appreciable mass and connected this dowsing rod to a wall (the wall cannot move), then the body will pull on all atoms in the rod, with the net effect that the center of mass of the rod is being pulled on, assuming it is a rigid body. Depending on the type of support used to anchor the rod to the wall, a torque will be present if the center of mass of the rod is not on the axis of rotation, which it wouldn't be. We know that much.
When the dowsing rod in a real world situation bends down towards the object you wish to find, what causes it? You might say, perhaps, that the object you wish to find is more dense than the surrounding dirt that is present in much of the ground, so there is more mass present the same distance from you, so when you approach the rock the force of the rock on your rod is greater and then some stuff happens. But the difference is incredibly minute. Even if the rock were 10 times as dense as the dirt:
F = Gm1m2/r^2, where m1 and m2 are the masses of the two objects you wish to find the gravitational force for, r is the distance between them, and G is a constant. This works for point particles.
Another concept of physics is the notion that if you have a homogeneously dense object, then the force felt by any other object is equal to having all the mass in the sphere concentrated at the center of volume. This lets us deal with gravitation for objects that are not point particles without using very much math.
So lets say you have a sphere of dirt with a mass of 10kg. In the same volume, a rock that is 10 times as dense would have a mass of 100kg. Let's say your dowsing rod weighs 2kg.
F = 6.673x10^-11 * 2kg*10kg / r^2 = 1.3346 x 10^-9 / r^2 for the dirt.
F = 6.673x10^-11 * 2kg *100kg / r^2 = 1.3346x10^-8 / r^2 for the rock.
Now, we can pick any r we want. If the rod is one meter from the sphere of rock/dirt, then we get forces of 1.3346 x 10^-9 and 1.3346x10^-8.
Richard Feynman was absolutely BRILLIANT at teaching physics. I have the complete Lectures on Physics from when he was at Caltech, and everything he ever did made perfect sense. His method, in fact, was almost completely unorthodox. Almost the first significant thing he taught was reversible and irreversible machines, just to drive the point of conservation of energy home entirely, long before he began to discuss the basics of motion (kinematics/dynamics), which is standard fare for almost all entry level physics courses. I've never seen that kind of originality anywhere else, and above all it was just an astoundingly effective method of teaching.
He walked his students through quite a bit of interesting mathematics and derived almost everything he ever wanted them to know. Almost nothing was taken without proof, and he would at least remark about the nature of the proof if he did ever say that they would take something on faith. He really made science seem like science, and not a word search like you said.
I would've been honored to have been in his class. Unfortunately, he died long before my time.
A very similar thing occurs very early in the medical pavilion,
SUSPENSE SPOILER
in the side room where you need to wade through a giant pool of water to get into a back room where you see a huge shadow apparently operating on something, and the lights go right out (such that you are COMPLETELY in the dark if you look in that direction). When they come back, he's not there anymore, and he's not even behind you. You can ransack the place (it had a gene tonic I think), and he STILL was nowhere to be seen, even when you were in the water (and hence totally vulnerable). I had to walk all the way up to the operating slab after the watery area, and then POOF, this doctor splicer was standing right next to me.
It took me a few seconds after downing the bastard to realize he apparently popped out of a freezer.
END
Honestly, situations like that are even better than somewhat analogous scenarios in System Shock 2. I actually consider SS2 to be somewhat less suspenseful than Bioshock, for a few simple reasons. One of them is the "frightening spawn" of hybrids. There was one part where you need to walk through a bunch of large doorways to reach some area, and in that area I had very low life and just about no ammo, and hybrids more or less just began using shotguns, so I had to tip toe and conserve EVERYTHING. Considering how slow I was going, it was no surprise that I got jumped often. Problem is, the hybrids basically spawn DIRECTLY behind you, with no real regard to their tactical or even visual position when they do it. They're just there. Worse, if you just stand in place, you can be sure you'll get one. Eventually. It definitely takes the edge off when the appearance of a hybrid isn't preceded by tension... it's just surprise. And it ceases to even be a startling event when you become incredibly proficient at spinning right around and clubbing the bastard in the head with the wrench almost on reflex.
I know Bioshock also has random spawns, but so far in the game (and I'll admit I haven't been at it for very long), the random spawns aren't always near you, and they aren't constant. It's much more frightening if an enemy can at any random point come through any random door than it is when an enemy will always constantly come right up from behind as if they were magically teleported. The tension is knowing that, given the nature of enemy appearances, you COULD in theory spot them and get out of harm's way. Also, their more natural appearances make you forget you're playing a game. In SS2, the hybrids would pop up right behind you while you were standing between two closed, giant doors that took a few seconds to open.
The vast majority of jRPGs seem to be like that, but are you including in your set only the aforementioned jRPGs, turn based RPGs, or all sorts?
There is an RPG model that is very much more fun than "kill the goblin, kill the goblin, kill the goblin, puzzle, boss, kill the goblin, kill the goblin, kill the RED goblin, puzzle, boss." Games like Baldur's Gate, Fallout... I'm even tempted to include Deus Ex and System Shock, even though they're not strictly RPGs by the colloquial meaning of the term. The general philosophy seems to be that no fight should be so boring as to be trivial. Now, this isn't totally true, such as in Baldur's Gate II when you can mow down hordes of goblins or kobolds just by clicking attack near them and letting your mages and priests hit them with rocks or sticks, but usually there's some substance to a battle where just hitting them will either get you killed or drain your resources so much that further battles would force you to quit (attrition I suppose).
Baldur's Gate II especially. Sometimes you could get killed in 15 seconds, sometimes you could haul ass and pwn everyone in the same amount of time, but it depends on preparation, build, and how you approach the conflict. There's a difficulty, really, with pure turn-based split screen battles, in really making those epi-stat parameters stand out: where you are in a room, how far away you are, how many people are around you, area effect, etc: Having those parameters really lets a designer play with his world and provide a very entertaining fight experience.
Those games also all share the "big man on campus" philosophy, as I like to think of it, where there are characters which, should you choose to engage them, would always either kill you outright or at least provide a MAJOR challenge. Sometimes it's a naturalistic thing, where you don't feel like your characters are all Gods just because they're the only ones who seem to be able to pick up a weapon in the entire gameverse. Other times, though, it provides an offset to the usual stomping that your party tends to do: if you're bored with that, you have bigger fish to fry. And when there's a spatial element to the gameplay, designers can also include encounters that are flat out impossible, so you know when and how to run away. It really fleshes out the game, gives more fulfilling goals for your characters to achieve, and is sometimes really tactic and strategy-heavy. In general, the "Run" button in jRPGs is only for last minute ditches when you know you couldn't handle it, even though you should've been able to. It's really boring to "run" from a really strong enemy like that anyway.
People into Fallout are also likely to be into System Shock, etc: so I figured I'd point out that in the upcoming game Bioshock there is probably going to be a large "big man on campus" effect with the Big Daddys roaming around.
I abhor the usual jRPG system to the point where I will really never play one. I'm never impressed with the story, the environment gives me a sense of deja vu even if it is apparently "new", and the battle system blows. Now, I haven't touched a jRPG in many years. For all I know all the FFs after 8 have a spatial dimension to combat, or other nuances to combat, that invalidate my anti-jRPG claims. But the FFs stopped impressing me after FFV/Tactics (Tactics is sort of an aside).
I'm kind of surprised that you would say that about RPGs in a Fallout thread. In my experience Fallout was all about keeping on your toes; you never know what you would get.
Oh, and it's the 21st century. Let me kill a @$%^ing civilian. jRPGs also seem to love pigeonholing the characters, so that allowing you to do interesting things would invalidate the storyline's treatment of your party. Though I also think it's just lazy. It's also why towns in jRPGs are little dots on the map with a few shops and a few other houses (almost all of which will be employed in the main quest or a side quest). There's nothing to do there. For games billed as being atmospheric and imagi
Slashdot Mirror
Alright, I know no one has yet delved into the real physical aspects of what you're talking about to this point, so I'd like to go ahead and give it a shot.
You're likely aware that the machinations of our entire universe are, as far as we are able to tell, based on very certain physical principles. The "laws" of nature we have found using experimentation, for which we assumed reproducibility and consistency, etc: If experiments that produce significant results disagree with a supposed theory of nature, and those experiments are verified not to be flawed in their execution, then the theory is held suspect, and a new theory must be proposed that fits both the previously acquired data as well as data from the new experiments which discredit the old theory. Of course we expect this theory to be able to predict related phenomena, etc:
The usual background. If a person does not believe that the way that science attempts to model the world is an actual reflection of how the world works, then this person believes in magic and the following question has no real meaning to him.
Assuming that this question means something to the dowser proponents:
What is the physical principle by which a dowsing rod works? I don't mean to say that you should know offhand how it works, or that anyone has ever even tested it. The great thing about science is that it has wonderful predictive qualities for phenomena that can be explained using previously constructed (and strongly supported) theories. And we have some pretty ironclad theories, either exact or at least approximate given certain conditions (using regular kinematics when relativistic effects are small despite the fact that they are always present).
Using what we know so far... how does it "detect"? One claims that the dowsing rod points down towards the object you intend to locate. This implies that there is a force that is causing a rotation of the rod in your hands. What provides this force? We know that gravitational forces will cause matter to be attracted to one another. If you had a body with an appreciable mass and connected this dowsing rod to a wall (the wall cannot move), then the body will pull on all atoms in the rod, with the net effect that the center of mass of the rod is being pulled on, assuming it is a rigid body. Depending on the type of support used to anchor the rod to the wall, a torque will be present if the center of mass of the rod is not on the axis of rotation, which it wouldn't be. We know that much.
When the dowsing rod in a real world situation bends down towards the object you wish to find, what causes it? You might say, perhaps, that the object you wish to find is more dense than the surrounding dirt that is present in much of the ground, so there is more mass present the same distance from you, so when you approach the rock the force of the rock on your rod is greater and then some stuff happens. But the difference is incredibly minute. Even if the rock were 10 times as dense as the dirt:
F = Gm1m2/r^2, where m1 and m2 are the masses of the two objects you wish to find the gravitational force for, r is the distance between them, and G is a constant. This works for point particles.
Another concept of physics is the notion that if you have a homogeneously dense object, then the force felt by any other object is equal to having all the mass in the sphere concentrated at the center of volume. This lets us deal with gravitation for objects that are not point particles without using very much math.
So lets say you have a sphere of dirt with a mass of 10kg. In the same volume, a rock that is 10 times as dense would have a mass of 100kg. Let's say your dowsing rod weighs 2kg.
F = 6.673x10^-11 * 2kg*10kg / r^2 = 1.3346 x 10^-9 / r^2 for the dirt.
F = 6.673x10^-11 * 2kg *100kg / r^2 = 1.3346x10^-8 / r^2 for the rock.
Now, we can pick any r we want. If the rod is one meter from the sphere of rock/dirt, then we get forces of 1.3346 x 10^-9 and 1.3346x10^-8.
Not
Richard Feynman was absolutely BRILLIANT at teaching physics. I have the complete Lectures on Physics from when he was at Caltech, and everything he ever did made perfect sense. His method, in fact, was almost completely unorthodox. Almost the first significant thing he taught was reversible and irreversible machines, just to drive the point of conservation of energy home entirely, long before he began to discuss the basics of motion (kinematics/dynamics), which is standard fare for almost all entry level physics courses. I've never seen that kind of originality anywhere else, and above all it was just an astoundingly effective method of teaching. He walked his students through quite a bit of interesting mathematics and derived almost everything he ever wanted them to know. Almost nothing was taken without proof, and he would at least remark about the nature of the proof if he did ever say that they would take something on faith. He really made science seem like science, and not a word search like you said. I would've been honored to have been in his class. Unfortunately, he died long before my time.
A very similar thing occurs very early in the medical pavilion,
SUSPENSE SPOILER
in the side room where you need to wade through a giant pool of water to get into a back room where you see a huge shadow apparently operating on something, and the lights go right out (such that you are COMPLETELY in the dark if you look in that direction). When they come back, he's not there anymore, and he's not even behind you. You can ransack the place (it had a gene tonic I think), and he STILL was nowhere to be seen, even when you were in the water (and hence totally vulnerable). I had to walk all the way up to the operating slab after the watery area, and then POOF, this doctor splicer was standing right next to me.
It took me a few seconds after downing the bastard to realize he apparently popped out of a freezer.
END
Honestly, situations like that are even better than somewhat analogous scenarios in System Shock 2. I actually consider SS2 to be somewhat less suspenseful than Bioshock, for a few simple reasons. One of them is the "frightening spawn" of hybrids. There was one part where you need to walk through a bunch of large doorways to reach some area, and in that area I had very low life and just about no ammo, and hybrids more or less just began using shotguns, so I had to tip toe and conserve EVERYTHING. Considering how slow I was going, it was no surprise that I got jumped often. Problem is, the hybrids basically spawn DIRECTLY behind you, with no real regard to their tactical or even visual position when they do it. They're just there. Worse, if you just stand in place, you can be sure you'll get one. Eventually. It definitely takes the edge off when the appearance of a hybrid isn't preceded by tension... it's just surprise. And it ceases to even be a startling event when you become incredibly proficient at spinning right around and clubbing the bastard in the head with the wrench almost on reflex.
I know Bioshock also has random spawns, but so far in the game (and I'll admit I haven't been at it for very long), the random spawns aren't always near you, and they aren't constant. It's much more frightening if an enemy can at any random point come through any random door than it is when an enemy will always constantly come right up from behind as if they were magically teleported. The tension is knowing that, given the nature of enemy appearances, you COULD in theory spot them and get out of harm's way. Also, their more natural appearances make you forget you're playing a game. In SS2, the hybrids would pop up right behind you while you were standing between two closed, giant doors that took a few seconds to open.
The last half hour of KOTOR 2 made me EXCEPTIONALLY unhappy.
I mean, seriously, what would it have taken to make KOTOR 2 one of the best games of that style I've ever played? 2 weeks? 4? 6?
It was like losing a hard-on moments before orgasm. And yes, being a gamer, I DO consider that a comparable situation.
The vast majority of jRPGs seem to be like that, but are you including in your set only the aforementioned jRPGs, turn based RPGs, or all sorts?
There is an RPG model that is very much more fun than "kill the goblin, kill the goblin, kill the goblin, puzzle, boss, kill the goblin, kill the goblin, kill the RED goblin, puzzle, boss." Games like Baldur's Gate, Fallout... I'm even tempted to include Deus Ex and System Shock, even though they're not strictly RPGs by the colloquial meaning of the term. The general philosophy seems to be that no fight should be so boring as to be trivial. Now, this isn't totally true, such as in Baldur's Gate II when you can mow down hordes of goblins or kobolds just by clicking attack near them and letting your mages and priests hit them with rocks or sticks, but usually there's some substance to a battle where just hitting them will either get you killed or drain your resources so much that further battles would force you to quit (attrition I suppose).
Baldur's Gate II especially. Sometimes you could get killed in 15 seconds, sometimes you could haul ass and pwn everyone in the same amount of time, but it depends on preparation, build, and how you approach the conflict. There's a difficulty, really, with pure turn-based split screen battles, in really making those epi-stat parameters stand out: where you are in a room, how far away you are, how many people are around you, area effect, etc: Having those parameters really lets a designer play with his world and provide a very entertaining fight experience.
Those games also all share the "big man on campus" philosophy, as I like to think of it, where there are characters which, should you choose to engage them, would always either kill you outright or at least provide a MAJOR challenge. Sometimes it's a naturalistic thing, where you don't feel like your characters are all Gods just because they're the only ones who seem to be able to pick up a weapon in the entire gameverse. Other times, though, it provides an offset to the usual stomping that your party tends to do: if you're bored with that, you have bigger fish to fry. And when there's a spatial element to the gameplay, designers can also include encounters that are flat out impossible, so you know when and how to run away. It really fleshes out the game, gives more fulfilling goals for your characters to achieve, and is sometimes really tactic and strategy-heavy. In general, the "Run" button in jRPGs is only for last minute ditches when you know you couldn't handle it, even though you should've been able to. It's really boring to "run" from a really strong enemy like that anyway.
People into Fallout are also likely to be into System Shock, etc: so I figured I'd point out that in the upcoming game Bioshock there is probably going to be a large "big man on campus" effect with the Big Daddys roaming around.
I abhor the usual jRPG system to the point where I will really never play one. I'm never impressed with the story, the environment gives me a sense of deja vu even if it is apparently "new", and the battle system blows. Now, I haven't touched a jRPG in many years. For all I know all the FFs after 8 have a spatial dimension to combat, or other nuances to combat, that invalidate my anti-jRPG claims. But the FFs stopped impressing me after FFV/Tactics (Tactics is sort of an aside).
I'm kind of surprised that you would say that about RPGs in a Fallout thread. In my experience Fallout was all about keeping on your toes; you never know what you would get.
Oh, and it's the 21st century. Let me kill a @$%^ing civilian. jRPGs also seem to love pigeonholing the characters, so that allowing you to do interesting things would invalidate the storyline's treatment of your party. Though I also think it's just lazy. It's also why towns in jRPGs are little dots on the map with a few shops and a few other houses (almost all of which will be employed in the main quest or a side quest). There's nothing to do there. For games billed as being atmospheric and imagi