The Claw

I should have made clear that putting your sword away doesn't completely eliminate the chance that you'll lose grip on one hand when the colossus shakes around like a crazy man, but it does make it harder for him to shake you loose and gets you re-attached quicker if you do lose grip. It makes those situations where you're just constantly getting detached over and over less common.

Been reading this thread and thought I'd chime in with a couple of tips for the frustrated. It's been a while since I played the game so these points are vague, but here goes. As people have found you can jump onto the horse by holding the grip button. You can stand up on the horse, and hang from its side. You can also use the bow from the standing position, which is bad-ass. Don't obsess over steering the horse around, it's generally much better to just let him take care of it, he will avoid obstacles and colossi automatically for the most part so you keep moving and fall off less. This is really useful when you're scoping out a colossus for the first time because you can focus on locking on and firing arrows or shining your sword beam on him. Pull back on the left stick and hit X from a stand-still to make your horse dash. This looks cool and gets you the fuck out of a bad situation. Once he's saved your sorry butt, put your weapon away and pet him with circle. Mashing triangle makes you recover consciousness faster if you get knocked out. You can charge and direct your jumps while gripping. Jump-charging is generally a much faster way to get around a colossus than just climbing, and uses less stamina. Put your sword away when climbing around a colossus. If you have your sword in your hand you find yourself dangling by the other hand, unable to move. Be super patient and don't go on a collectathon unless you have completed the game on normal.

Probabilities in XCOM, interesting short article on sinepost about this topic.

That sounds pretty interesting, any chance I could take a look? Edit: Oops, I found it on your site. Will read it in bed. Awesome.

The discussion is about the applications of random numbers, not the quality of the source. We can assume they're good enough for computer and video games.

Not over time but at any instance in time. It will always give an 80% chance. Measuring it over many rolls would only prove that each individual roll has an 80% probability. Really? In my experience most accounting software simply uses high precision decimals for calculations and then does half-even rounding on the results to minimize cumulative error when dealing with actual credits and debits. Some more credible examples than movies would be cool if you have any, I used to work on this stuff. I'm sorry I didn't respond to you before, since this is exactly what I was getting at and it would be nice to move back to this question. I'd say that art is progressive and the only reason most artists create art is to benefit society, and if that isn't true then art is certainly measured in terms of its cultural impact, which implies some societal benefit. I don't think creators have any obligation educate; they do it by default or they wouldn't be creators. Not sure how important getting the probabilities right fits into that, but I guess getting them wrong sacrifices some of the integrity of the work in order to widen its reach. Video Games are a business! Good job it's called "shuffle" and not "random", then, eh?

Try this: I guess to achieve the behaviour that people generally expect you could just do something like success = (numRolls % 5) == 0 but this would not be at all random and would be immediately exploited by players.

I used Firaxis as an example, I'm sure other studios do this too and I didn't mean to single them out as bad guys or anything. I get what you're saying but there are decisions in life that don't boil down to gut instinct and experience can be informative. Also the distortion applied seems to depends on your outlook: people who play the lottery overestimate the chance of something good happening and also believe they can predict it.

This discussion reminds me of an old Thumbs cast where they mentioned Firaxis tweaked the probabilities in Civ to make random events "fit" better with how players generally evaluate probabilities, e.g. people get pissed off when something that is 80% probable does not occur, or they have a run of misses, so they cook it so that doesn't happen as much. Given that the public understanding of statistics and probabilities is already deep in the toilet I see this kind of manipulation of randomness as irresponsible - it reinforces incorrect ideas about what these figures mean and how randomness behaves which I guess could adversely affect the choices people make in daily life. Any thoughts on this?

Those animatronic muppet cats don't come cheap

The promise of randomness (or procedural generation) is that every game is unique to some degree. You don't have to play the game multiple times to appreciate its random elements, you just have to talk to someone else who played it. What makes XCOM and FTL great is that your experience in these games is personal to you, and if you have friends who play the same game it makes for great discussion. If you have a story-driven game where everything is authored there's very little scope for discussion since everyone who played it went through exactly the same story doing exactly the same things. Unless the story itself raises some interesting talking points (a rarity in games) the conversation is going to be pretty bland.

Yeah, I'm hearing it might be an issue specific to AMD cards. Again.

I've noticed a bug where I popped out of the artist's appartment and immediately got the "kill a dude with a wall of light" achievement, looks like a guard just committed suicide, I never hacked the wall of light and now I'm concerned that I'll get blamed for any random death in the world... Also on PC is anyone else having this awful chug when loading saves and looking around for the first time? It happens at the main menu too when it does the pan from the beach to the street. After this it's fine, but it've had a few close quickloads where the game can lock up for a second while I'm doing a 180 to leg it. I guess it's pulling in assets, I just wish I could edit the ini file to tell it to preload all that stuff...

Hi, I've been lurking for years and listened to every episode of Idle Thumbs, evangelised it to friends etc. I've made a few posts on the boards already but never got around to a formal introduction. My name is Steve, living in Birmingham UK. I'm a coder but I'm also interested in the many facets of design and music. I suppose it'd be a good idea to share some stuff I like with you: 99% Invisible is a great little podcast about design (from architecture to Trappist beers) by Roman Mars. I enjoy it so much I backed its kickstarter, as I did for Idle Thumbs. Radiolab is probably the best produced radio show in the world, you must've heard of it. It's a jewel. Gary Hustwit's documentaries (Helvetica, Objectified, Urbanized) are all wonderful. Alfred Hitchcock's work. Specifically Vertigo and Rear Window but I'm still working through his films. The demoscene. The scene's most popular site is also the most offputting, so instead of a link there have some of demos I enjoy for their technical and aesthetic qualities. You should download and run them realtime if you can.Cornelius. His impish brand of alternative and electronic music . I recommend Point or Fantasma as good albums to start with, but 69/96 remains my favourite despite all its flaws.BBC 6 Music's Freak Zone. If you're able to listen to this in your part of the world and are of inquisitive taste when it comes to contemporary music, this may be up your alley. I tend to read a lot of factual stuff, but I'm big on classic sci fi like Bradbury, Huxley and Wyndham. I enjoyed Sense of an Ending a huge amount, but Cloud Atlas not at all. It seems I am the sole dissenting voice there. Oh and then there's video games. I'm playing Dishonored at the moment with a view to finishing that and trying out some XCOM. When I just want to play a fucking video game I play Trackmania or Burnout, which I love for being honest-to-god video games without all that overbearing pomp and ceremony that's so prolific these days, and crucially can be enjoyed in 45-minute chunks.

He's stated that he needs to raise $2m to prove that people are interested and get the more traditional investors on board. I think this was in the GDC Online talk linked above. Seems understandable to me. The $16m thing does sound like a lot, but I guess it's in-line with the size and scope of this project - most indie games are small 2D affairs, seems like he's going for a grand 3D space opera with a ton of very high quality meshes, textures and animation to build which will cost big bucks.