I'm building an interactive map based search interface for concerts and events in the bay area: http://fanflame.city/
This is something I've always wanted for myself so I decided to build it. Plenty of event aggregators out there, but not many that let you search and filter by any combination of locations, dates, and genres.
It currently supports automated data feeds from ticketmaster and the Civic Joy Fund; hoping to add Parks & Rec, Library events, and some other ticketing sites in the near future.
It has been a fun way to keep my coding skills sharp (Eng Director by day), I've learned a ton about react, mapbox, django, postgis, and GCP doing it. If you have an event source I should look into or a feature request let me know!
That's a cool idea but many games already struggle to find a fair balance point at all ranges of human skill, so expanding that range to include AI could just make things more difficult. Maybe there's a way to force the AI to replicate bad players, but I'm not sure what learning objective you would give it to achieve that.
I don't follow gaming balancing too closely, but I (naively) assume there's some reasonable analytical solution to find tuning. Like I would imagine if you're Blizzard and have logs of all the data, you could just regress race attack/defense/movement/etc. stats to find a potential equivalence point.
I suppose there's lots of interactions, but finding "well Zerg beats Protoss X% of the time", you could balance by messing slightly with resources or blanket buff.
I think achieving suboptimal play can be pretty straightforward — keep the parameters the same, but simply limit the amount learning. Some tweaks might be necessary here and there, but as long as you have basic gameplay down but not perfected, it should work pretty well.
Empire Earth had the ability to take geographic elevation data as input to the map maker. My buddy and I did a high school presentation on Paul Revere where we imported Boston and then made a series of triggered events to show the ride. The Redcoat was Britain's special unit in the game so it ended up looking pretty good!
Part of the reason this year has been a bit of a mess is because MDG has been focusing a lot of resources on the profit-generating component of their business: meteor hosting and support. They launched Galaxy (their hosting service) just a couple months ago so it's still too early to say how successful that will be, but it could easily be in their best interests to cannibalize some of their older features if it helps to grow their userbase. For example, not having to spend developer resources on Blaze might enable them to get SQL support out the door sooner. I'm cautiously optimistic for them but wouldn't be too surprised either if they were still struggling next year.
Not having to spend money on Blaze will make them more competitive as a hosting business. Frankly, when is the last time you saw a billion dollar unicorn hosting business? Or a hosting IPO?
I doubt we will see SQL support. We will likely see something with GraphQL instead.
Heroku is probably the closest case study, in that they started as (and mostly remained in the popular conscience) a Ruby on Rails host. I believe they sold for $200+ million. Not a "unicorn", but not a small exit, for such a short period of time. They were only around as an independent company for a few years.
As a developer who is only using them for a personal project so far, I don't care one way or the other if they are incapable of becoming a unicorn - I just want them to be profitable enough to continue developing the framework. They may be under too much pressure from their investors to go that route, but wasn't hosting MDG's monetization plan from the beginning? If so, savvy investors would already know the likelihood of unicornization was low/zero when they invested.
You're certainly much more in the loop about SQL/GraphQL. Would GraphQL allow non-mongo databases to push updates out to clients for reactive updates?
Thanks for running Crater.io - I've been reading it a lot recently!
I don't think it's fair to call Bungie a one-hit shop. Pathways into Darkness, Myth, and Marathon were all successful and well respected. Halo definitely moved them onto the big stage by pushing them off the mac platform. I agree with everything else you say though.
The nexus 4 has the light and no-unlock summary as well. The light even changes colors depending on the app which generated the notification (e.g. facebook messages have a blue light).
Agreed. I set up my nexus 4 with a $30/month plan that has 100 min of voice, unlimited texts, and 5GB of data at non-lte 4g speed (throttled after that). I can't understand why you would opt into a binding contract at a higher price with a lower data cap. I'm betting that their new no-contract, no-subsidy model will work out well for them especially as the upfront prices of android phones drop.
Can't speak for Forax, but I just don't talk on the phone much. Everyone texts, even family. At $0.10/minute after the first 100 minutes, I'd have to talk for 10 more hours before my old plan would be the same cost.
I have the same setup. I do all my long phone calls at my computer anyway --- with GVoice + GMail, you can intercept your phone calls from your computer. And my family prefer skype as they can see me. I only use actual talktime when traveling, which is rare. Almost all coordination is now over text.
This is something I've always wanted for myself so I decided to build it. Plenty of event aggregators out there, but not many that let you search and filter by any combination of locations, dates, and genres.
It currently supports automated data feeds from ticketmaster and the Civic Joy Fund; hoping to add Parks & Rec, Library events, and some other ticketing sites in the near future.
It has been a fun way to keep my coding skills sharp (Eng Director by day), I've learned a ton about react, mapbox, django, postgis, and GCP doing it. If you have an event source I should look into or a feature request let me know!
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