itsamoose

So far the Fox News coverage of Ferguson seems to already support this view.

Cine, have you experienced this kind of treatment by police before? If so would you mind sharing those experiences with us? If you aren't comfortable doing so that is perfectly understandable. To be honest, you're right. I grew up in the bleach white MA suburbs where this kind of treatment wasn't even something I considered possible, but having moved down to Florida about a year ago I've been exposed to it personally in some brief moments but have never been the target of it.

Like you say bureaucracy isn't necessarily a good or bad thing, just the means by which change is implemented. I know its easy to lose faith in the system due to the obstructionism of recent years, as well as the increased influence of the wealthy, but ultimately we already have the tools to solve those problems, just not the will or public motivation. Just because the end result can be alienating and in places amoral doesn't mean it was necessarily designed to be that way. There is no practical reason for the electoral college, for example, to exist any more, and I would hope the first step in addressing the concerns you raised is for the U.S. to realize we no longer live in the 1700s. At some point politicians are going to have to admit the fact that the founding fathers did the best they could with what they had at the time. A good starting point, but more needs to be done. Sorry for derailing a bit on this.

Mainly because bureaucracy, as terrible as it can be some times, has in the past been a means of social change. You used to be able to own people in America, only white men were allowed to vote, etc, and bureaucracy changed that. We tend to focus on legal or bureaucratic changes because those are the mechanics by which the government functions. I'll admit in recent years this system has been failing, however that is the result of a coordinated effort by a minority in congress. I can't find it at the moment, but there was an article recently that described how a relatively small group can more or less prevent the whole thing from functioning. I'll keep looking and add a link here if I can come across it. Edit: This isn't the article I was referencing, but shows that the problem is essentially either that a bill gets filibustered, or bogged down in committee as various interests attempt to add amendments to the bill that can be unrelated to it. In recent months, this has been trying to add more sanctions to Iran in an attempt to torpedo the nuclear negotiations.

Unfortunately Free Speech Zones have become a pretty common thing in the U.S. in recent years, some set up temporarily and others permanent. It is an absolute violation of the first amendment in my opinion, but no one in government seems to want to make waves about it. Typically these are used to make protests happen where they are less likely to be heard, or give the police a legitimate excuse to disperse an otherwise lawful gathering. There is no set rule as to how to set up a free speech zone so really the establishment of these zones can sometimes serve as carte blanche for the authorities to do what they please.

That's a good point, and most likely correct that most police shootings happen with handguns, as was the case in Ferguson. The scenario I imagine in my head is that an officer brings a .38 in case he/she needs it, but if that same officer is going through the trouble of suiting up in riot gear, fueling up an MRAP, etc, the decision to use that equipment has already been made. I think you're right in saying that less military surplus going to local communities won't solve problem, but from the outside it seems as though access to military equipment is more likely to cause whatever problems are brewing under the surface to boil over.

To piggyback on that point, I saw this referenced in a newscast earlier today. In the same program an ex-cop came on and said that over the course of his career training became less about de-escalation and prevention, and more about the justification of force after it had been used.

This in my opinion is the heart of the problem. The DOD gave weapons to local police departments without first ensuring they had the discipline and training to use them effectively, or the knowledge of when to use them. I imagine this is still happening today, since we only learn about it once it gets out of hand. I would hope the first step in remedying this problem is reviewing the process by which local departments get these kinds of resources (or if they should get them), and even taking them away from departments that have overreached.

Is anyone aware of other sites/youtube videos/whatever that do this kind of thing? Specifically I'm looking for sites that aim a critical eye on the specifics of mechanics, the competence of narrative, implications of a game's technical implementation (P2P vs client server, damage models, etc), and not things we see on most game related sites such as product reviews and other opinion pieces. As much as I do enjoy these consumer focused sites, I feel as though there is a severe lack of academic or other critical analysis of a game's systems or ethics, aside from an occasional piece on gamasutra or in a classroom somewhere. I enjoy finding these kinds of conversations on this site, but most other places tend to devolve into people yelling opinions at one another, or other chest thumping nonsense. In case I'm being overly obtuse, here are a couple examples: Matthew Matosis, Errant Signal, and Instig8tive Journalism, three youtubers with a similar analytic style Groping the Elephant a blog dedicated to level design in games Tiny Subversions a blog written by Darius Kazemi, generally more focused on the technical implementation of game mechanics and those implications. Also a really nice guy. Cane and Rinse podcast retrospectives on 1+ year old games in a kind of book club format

Thanks so much for the recommendation, I've already read more of this than I care to admit.

Stories like this always put me in a bad mood. Every time I read about or see women (in particular, but others as well) being treated like that on the internet I get completely enraged, which ultimately accomplishes nothing, and my heart breaks a little. Having seen so much of it in recent years, and for it to be largely ignored by companies like twitter and Facebook, I fear myself and others are simply becoming indifferent to it. Toxicity like that is the reason I stopped using twitter, even though none of it was aimed at me personally. Hopefully this leads to some meaningful policy changes, and good on her for responding to this kind of barbarism gracefully. If I were in her shoes, I certainly would not have.

On that note... http://www.newsweek.com/new-york-city-approves-poor-door-luxury-apartment-building-260218

Jon Stewart did a segment recently that shows the incredible disparity with which black and white people are treated by the police in the U.S. related to the case of Eric Gardner. http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/11cz5e/five-officers-and-a-gentleman---brandishing-blackness

No I understand what you meant, but I think I came off a little more combative than intended. My criticism was more that any commentary not explicitly provided by the game, or at least heavily inferred by it is not something the game can take credit for since that commentary only exists in the minds of players that are willing to make that connection. Perhaps the game was the vehicle for the player making that connection, but its not like GM can take credit for the work of ambulances just because they make the engines. More than anything I'm just frustrated with game developers thinking they can get away with glorification of things we all agree are bad by simply claiming their intent is to subvert the idea, which usually amounts to little more than a QTE, cutscene, or background element like you described. Ever since the UAV level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare this seems to be the trend. Yeah, probably.

Isn't that just a lazy way of justifying not having to provide a commentary? Sure if you do something out of the ordinary and don't comment on it, that might be considered commentary because I am naturally able to infer meaning in that case. However so far everything we have seen about Battlefield: Hardline is just so bog standard. The game modes are standard, the weapons/abilities/mechanics are standard, hell even the marketing material explicitly states that the story is modeled after popular crime dramas. If they were taking a serious deviation from the norm, that might be interesting, but really they haven't made the structural changes to the game's design for anything they are doing to be considered a commentary. All in all this game feels like the College Freshman's idea of philosophy, its exciting and new but not entirely understood.

The particle system suggestion was based on my assumption that what you seem to be doing is creating some kind of visual effect which can be done with a particle system and a bit of math. Using the same material can help with reducing draw calls, but Unity's batching can only do so much, especially with large numbers of objects. If you are running into draw call issues with just an empty scene, then its likely the implementation won't work in a level with with a bunch of other stuff going on (image effects, UI, background, etc). Essentially particle systems are really just a cheap way of creating visual effects. Instead of generating a large animation or 3D model, you can arrange textures in such a way as to create a similar looking effect. A particle system is just something that emits particles (a texture/sprite that always faces the camera), then applies some movement, rotation, etc logic to them. They are great for creating visual effects, and can sometimes be useful in other scenarios. Out of curiosity, what is this for?

Can you post the code you are using the create the objects? From what I can tell it seems like you are generating an object every frame, or at least every fixed Update. Part of this could be checking to see if the last object instantiated is a significant enough distance away before creating the next object just to reduce the amount of creation. If you do need that many objects, you could try generating them all in the first frame, then turning them on as necessary but you'll still run into an upper limit. Also if you need to be creating that many objects, you might want to look into particle systems instead provided you don't need any collision on them.

I haven't used the 2D physics as much, but here are some suggestions for when I've seen issues like this with the 3D system. 1.) All objects are on a layer whether or not they are placed there manually, so you might want to check to see if those two layers are set to collide in the layer collision matrix. Also double check that those colliders are enabled 2.) Are the objects triggers or standard colliders? Also, for any collision to take place at leas one object needs to have a rigidbody component attached. However, moving objects with trigger colliders must have a rigidbody attached for events to fire properly 3.) Are these objects children of something? this can sometimes affect collision event notication, as the trigger and collision events are sent to the parent if the child object doesn't have a rigidbody 4.) are the two objects at different z depths? I'm not sure if this matters with 2D collision, but it may. 5.) How many points/vertices do the two edge colliders have? Generally in my experience line/edge colliders can sometimes have a problem of penetrating through one another, completely missing the event. You tend to see the same problem in 3D with very small colliders As a test, the first thing you should do is make some test scripts that assign to the 2D collision enter/stay/exit events just to see if they are firing or not. If this isn't happening, try running some raycasts to see if the objects are lining up properly.

Are you perhaps doing a print statement when a button is pressed, or are you seeing errors in the console? Any time you write to the console you can get a frame rate drop, even once or twice a frame this can be noticeable. Also, a 1 or 2 frame drop really isn't really cause for concern if that is all you are seeing. Finally if you are interested in keybinds that can be rebound at runtime, you might want to check out cInput, It uses a similar set of methods to Unity's Input class.

In regards to namespaces, you can use them and I believe as of the more recent versions of Unity they are supported, its just that in the past they would cause problems. Generally when working with Unity I try to make classes that are as independent as possible from one another. For example, to make a RPG style Character class like Jason Mentioned you could do the traditional inheritance based route (Actor > RPGCharacter > Player, etc) and really there is nothing wrong with that. The one concern it brings up is that you aren't leveraging the design philosophy of Unity, in that entities can be created by attaching arbitrary components to GameObjects. In the end, this approach will actually make your project more flexible and allow you to reuse those components easily. For example, in my current project we have separate components for applying damage, Health, inventory, locomotion, pathfinding, behaviour control, etc. Then when I want to make a complex entity I just slap on a bunch of components. It also allows you to do some pretty cool things like just attach a health component to an object in the world, and then write an item drop component that listens for the object's death event and spawns items, or create a deadly spike by just attaching a contact damage component to the model. Rather than drone on about all the intricacies, I'll just say that no way of writing code in Unity is wrong. In my projects I tend to try and create classes that can have their functionality changed based on a few flags (for example, any type of gun imaginable can be created using a single script as opposed to multiple child classes), but I still use inheritance here and there. Really the whole point of Unity is to make games however you feel comfortable, but if you're willing to buy into their design philosophy you can end up doing a lot more with a lot less. One thing to watch out for is, because of the open-ended nature of Unity, project management and organization can get out of control quickly. Personally I learned on XNA (C# was my first language) and some of the flexibility of C# can seem a bit weird. I still run into situations where I find some feature of C# that I never knew existed, but for the most part this is just shorthand or syntactic sugar (For example get/set properties vs methods). Again, there is no wrong answer, just whatever you are comfortable with.

I'm not sure if this is the best place for this, but the game I've been working on for the last couple of years just went into Beta and we're looking for anyone who is interested in giving it a run through, and possibly helping out with some bug reports (we're a 2 person team). If anyone is interested, shoot me a message with your e-mail and I'll add you to the mailing list. For more info on the game, you can read more here.

The separate inventory thing is really starting to get to me. I feel like every time I come across a chest I need to cycle through my characters to open it, and just general inventory management stuff can be a bit frustrating particularly when trying to organize things. I like the idea in concept but in practice it usually means I've got some busy work to do. In a couple cases I spent a half hour or so looking for some item that was tucked away in a party member's inventory. Also it seems like there isn't much benefit to crafting, although I'm still early on so it's hard to say for sure. Overall I'm enjoying the game, but given how long I've heard it is will probably never finish it.

That was a wonderful little game, the author's sense of humor really made it something special.

I'd say its more about asking good questions than anything else. Beyond that you probably shouldn't be taking a job if you aren't reasonably sure you can do.

Personally I don't see the problem with calling out features that a game should/you wish had, but I don't necessarily think this always qualifies as criticism. Sure if something doesn't work properly or has some glaring omission fine, but imposing a different value system on a game design is really more speculation than anything. For example imagine a game that asks you to parse a large amount of data (quests, skills, items, whatever), but doesn't give you a search function. The game still works, just not in the way you would like. Now any comments regarding the effect this has on your enjoyment of the game is criticism, but to say the game would be better with a search feature is a critique of the game's design as opposed to a critical analysis of the game itself. I think both have a place, but usually the two get lumped together.