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Saturday, Apr 20, 2013 - 20:56 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Some Work And Some Play

changelog v1.17b
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* Link archival popup now works with Internet Explorer (tested on IE9), originally unseen due to position:fixed not recognized in Quirks mode.

Almost put aeroplane on Friday (among other stereotypes)


Exchange of the Week

Naughty Law Professor: ...With power comes responsibility, of course, yes.

Deputy Public Prosecutor: That phrase, "With great power comes responsibility", that's from Spider-Man?

NLP: Sorry?

DPP: It's from Spider-Man, the film?

NLP: I didn't know that. I'm educated.


That said, as a neutral observer, it's eye-opening to see how a former district judge pulls out all the stops in his own defence; even if he's probably not winning, he's putting up a good fight.

The incumbents are meanwhile keeping it up, with the latest initiative being trialing free MRT rides for early birds - which, it goes without saying, will have nothing whatsoever to do with any future fare hikes (actually, this I can believe). However, still deafening silence on CPF Life payouts not being guaranteed (when since did they base policies on whether they could be overturned by succeeding administrations?)

They are even claiming to be shifting to the left, but this I'll believe when I see actions tally with words.

Elsewhere, the SDP has begun to try and cast off its jiak kantang image with a Chinese version of its website. One small problem is that it's not immediately obvious how to get there (small "language" link at top right), but I suppose it's a start for their efforts at widening outreach.


Programmer At Work


Typical Development Schedule
(This is all assuming Windows does boot)


A few delayed events finally came through, in academia and otherwise - patience is a virtue, but waiting is often the hardest part (none of that at least for the Kindle - first eBook bought!). Ah, for methods and data that give immediate feedback! And let's just agree that the background drudgery of setting up projects ain't much fun. So, here are some randomly selected C++ tips from a lab senior who's more into this (some possibly well-known, but still):
  • Pass const references wherever possible, other than for basic data types
  • Use (sorta-)standard constants whenever possible
  • Be careful with stuff like inserting an additional space between closing angle brackets in template declarations - while Visual Studio might be cool with it, other compilers might choke (same went for web browsers and HTML)
  • Manage external libraries using property sheets and PATH variables (might cause a bit of a headache if not communicated to other developers, though)
  • (not C++) Don't upload (large) binary files to version control systems such as SVN

At least I've come some way since I was manipulating individual pixels (okay, shapes) in QBasic, and wondering how the heck did anybody write an operating system in that. By the way, I came across Discourse, which touts itself as the next generation of forum software. Looks fresh, if not exactly revolutionary, to me, since most of the individual features are already in place here and there on existing sites, but the sum could yet be greater than the parts.

Other diversions: tried my hand at LiteCoin CPU mining on the home system, only to quickly discover that it wasn't worth it (0.0014 LTC for a few hours' work, about half a cent - and in fact, mining might even be dangerous for the careless)

Oh, and it seems like the Mujin-Ten unmanned store has moved on to the student lounge, and is further expanding. Vending machines without power consumption, the next hit?


Game For More

Well, DotA 2 hasn't quite caught on with the Friday-sometimes bunch ("too many pretty colours", sadly), forcing myself to pass the 100-win mark all by my lonesome self. Since I random whenever possible (i.e. when not in single draft), I haven't played any hero more than a handful of times, and it was interesting to note that I currently only have unbeaten 4-0 records with two: one melee, one ranged. Have a guess, from the 99 implemented thus far?




One more note: while ranged heroes are by-and-large more successful ('cause they can hit melee heroes while not being hit back, duh), it turns out that there's another rule of thumb as to whether your team will win: Count the number of legs on the heroes on your side! Remember, kids - four legs good, two legs better, no legs best!

Among the key attractions of DotA is, it goes without saying, farming, which involves converting enemy units (referred to as "creeps", for some unknown reason) into gold by the expedience of killing them - a process known as last-hitting, as only the hero who gets the last hit in, gets the gold (on this note, the price of real gold dipped after that note a fortnight ago - some belief reinforcement, perhaps selective)


The very soul of DotA, crystallized


On the bright side, creeps aren't very smart - they will basically attack, and continue attacking, the first accessible enemy unit or structure they come into contact with, till either it or they are dead. They do engage units that attack them as priority over structures that don't, and go after those that attack allied heroes foremost (cue Asimov's Three Laws; exception - casting spells doesn't trigger this aggression, as creeps are presumably too dense to tell that it's a hostile act)

Some quick notes then: normal melee creeps start out with 550 health, do 19 to 23 normal damage, and have two armour (550HP/19-23/2). Ranged creeps are (300HP/21-26/0), but with piercing damage, the rare siege creep has (500HP/35-46/0) with siege damage and fortified armour, while the outermost towers are (1300HP/100-120/18) again with siege damage and fortified armour.

Well, nobody's going to be tapping on a calculator in the middle of the game, so here's the (probably rather obvious) conclusions, on best last-hitting practices for the gentleman farmer:

  • More damage is good
  • More attack speed is also good (but far less important than damage, since its effectiveness is quantised)
  • Extra damage modifiers (e.g. critical hits) are not particularly good, since to guarantee the last hit, the bonus damage has to be assumed not to occur
  • If you're going to tank all the creeps anyway (e.g. Axe), then it doesn't matter, and more of everything above is very good
  • Try to arrange it such that creeps get damaged at different rates; ideally, there is always one creep that's taking most of the damage, but not at a pace that makes it tricky to time the last hit
  • If this is not the case and two or more creeps are getting damaged at approximately equal rates, help one along by whacking it a bit, to open up a spread
  • Again, an exception - if your hero relies on area-of-effect spells to farm (e.g. Death Prophet's Carrion... sorry, Crypt Swarm), then it could be worth it to attack the enemy creeps that are not being focused on by your allied creeps, so that their health levels are all below the damage of your spell when it is cast
  • The tower deserves special consideration - since it does so much damage (in the triple digits), it has about twice the last-hitting power of most heroes early on. This leads to many frustrating cases where a hero watches helplessly as those darned defence contractors rob him of his just rewards. More on this...

So, one disadvantage of fighting under the safety of a tower is that it is harder to confirm kills - consider a ranged creep with 300 HP. The first tower is guaranteed to destroy it in three hits (minimum damage: 300, maximum damage: 360), and the problem is that after two hits, the ranged creep will have anywhere from 60 to 100 HP left, most usually somewhere around 80. Unfortunately, no heroes (other than Treant Protector) are assured of anywhere near 80 minimum damage per hit at the start of the game, with quite a number of poor chaps not even exceeding 40 damage.

What then is the answer? Almost all the time, the right thing to do is to strike the ranged creep exactly once at any time before the tower hits it for a second time; if the hero's damage range is between 50 to 59 (pretty common), one further hit will then confirm the kill. Otherwise, it will at least give him a much higher chance than putting in his first attack after the second tower hit (essentially zero - possible exceptions are heroes with attack-speed boosting skills that let them get multiple hits in, e.g. Weaver's Germinate Attack)

Assuming that a hero's attack speed is not fast enough that he can get in two or more hits between a tower's attacks, the probability that he can get the last hit on a ranged creep under optimal strategy, assuming the player is not skilled enough to read the creep's health in between, is then:



to damage
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Conclusion: Other than Treant Protector and Chaos Knight, other heroes would do well to get an additional hit in, if the ranged creep starts off at full health. Note that Chaos Knight has a relatively poor chance of success even then, due to his extremely wide range of damage (30 - but that's his theme). Other heroes that don't do well off the bat include the likes of Morphling and Clinkz, due to their poor base damage, but most such heroes have some inbuilt skill to raise it quickly (Agility Gain and Searing Arrow in these cases)

In general, having a wide damage spread is bad, and it could be postulated that certain damage levels might be naturally less ideal for autoattack farming (analogous to destructive interference, then again no one should be autoattacking anyway)

Of course, in the actual game, all this is complicated by there being enemy heroes in the vicinity who can deny creeps (you can attack your own creeps once they are at half health or below - denied creeps obviously give no gold, and also less experience), as well as allied heroes who are competing for the last hit too, and are often more frustrating than the enemies; the worst case happens when both try to second-guess each other, winding up in neither getting the bounty (most typically when one hero gambles on attacking slightly earlier in an effort to get the kill, and winds up leaving the creep with a sliver of health, that is then removed by an enemy creep attack before the other hero reacts)

In a professional setting, the partners are generally clear on who is entitled to get the kills (usually carries, who improve relatively more with items purchased with gold), but even in public games it should be possible to build an unspoken understanding not to cannibalize each others' kills (possibly by attacking a creep out of order once or more, to "claim" it)

Not that this works with any reliable frequency, but given the asshattery possible in public games, having a lane partner that competes for last hits should be near the bottom of one's worries. Far worse are:

  • The guy who insists on "solo mid" (i.e. taking the middle lane alone for more gold and experience, leaving the other four players on his team to share the other two lanes). Four out of five times, he won't be much good at it. More warning signs:

    • Insists on taking mid right at the beginning, even before anybody has selected a hero
    • Further insists on it with an unsuitable (often melee) hero, especially when the other side has several good harassers ("I farm mid with Faceless Void get Divine Rapier in 15 min! So what they have Viper, Drow Ranger, Lich?")
    • Insists on it crudely ("SOLO MID OR QUIT KTHXBAI111!1", all the while frantically pinging the minimap irritatingly)

  • The guy who is quick to insult on any perceived mistake, sometimes when it wouldn't make a difference, or is unlikely to succeed ("CENTAUR U NOOB! Y U NO USE UR STAMPEDE ULTIMATE AND LET ME CHARGE HEADLONG ALONE INTO THREE STRATEGICLY RETREATING HEROES WITH FULL HEALTH AND KILL THEM ALL?!") This is still marginally tolerable when they are actually some good...
  • The guy who takes it personally when allies do not assist him, particularly in hopeless situations such as being ambushed when farming half the map away
  • The guy who takes it personally when anybody else tries to last-hit in "his" lane
  • The guy who simply walks over and kills the neutral creeps that an allied hero has engaged (often the very same guy as the above)
  • The guy who insists on taking Roshan in doubtful situations (i.e. his team isn't winning and he isn't Ursa or stacked with damage and the other team is mostly missing and known to ward the river)
  • The guy who simply refuses to push, even when the team makeups dictate that his team has to win early or die trying (ok, this is sometimes me, in the past)
  • The guy who's frankly just not very good... but if he's new, it's still okay, as long as he sticks around some other heroes and/or stays around the base
  • The guy who insists that somebody else fork out for the courier and wards, especially when he's not the only (semi-)carry, or even a support hero himself
  • Two or more guys with matching "clan" names (like C0oLsTuD.kIlLa, C0oLsTuD.GaNgStA and C0oLsTuD.sUpErPr0) Alright, when they're good, they tend to be pretty good, but somehow they more often than not turn out to be average at best - and multiple not-very-good players are still... not very good

The Customer Is Always... Ignored

But as far as asshattery goes, one entity has staked a firm claim on the undisputed title:


Justified.
(Source: abload.de)


Let's see - Electronic Arts is shutting down SimCity Social, one of the few online games I am still actively playing, in two months. This follows on the back of many other server closures by the embattled game publisher, now twice voted worst company in the world, no mean feat in an era of arms merchants and collapsing banks.

I was originally ambivalent on the complaints about SimCity 5 being online-only, but am now beginning to regret paying full release price for the title, old favourite as it may be - who's to say EA won't decide, a year or two down the road, to say oops, sorry, and pull it too? I liked you, man, but this is too much, especially at such short notice for a game that many paid real money (not even transferable!) to purchase items within. Couldn't they just have cut development of new features to the bone, but kept the servers going, especially as less users means less resources consumed anyway?

To top it all off, they then had the gall to make "a special offer to introduce you to a PopCap game" (translated: time to milk the customers again), which deservedly brought about universally negative comments... while their Chief Operating Officer waves aside these extremely legitimate concerns with "the tallest trees catch the most wind", before drifting into blaming the anti-gay lobby for their unpopularity (wut?)

I don't know about others, but I don't see myself purchasing any Electronics Arts title for the foreseeable future. Returning to Retro QBasic, baby!

And speaking of retro, Wreck-It Ralph is a heck of a movie (with Vanellope nearly as adorable as a hamster!). I never expect too much from game-based movies nowadays, after the so-bad-it's-kinda-good Mortal Kombat and original Street Fighter progressed to the simply-irredeemably-unentertainingly-bad Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, but this has rescued the genre for me. Which might go to show that video game characters are best when they stay animated, with a few exceptions.


Until the official DotA movie comes out, we got these



I Remember Now

All that made me realise that it's easy to dismiss just how much can be stuffed into the memory, if a person wants - I suspect that I can name most, if not all, the skills of all 99-plus DotA heroes (or at least describe what they do) offhand (not that it's anything to be particularly chuffed up about), yet not put names to faces. Sorry!

Then again, readers here are assumed to have associated no fewer than 26 odd-looking symbols to their names with instant effortless recall capability, so... how about doing it all over again (with more sophisticated tests available too)?





Note: It seems that the Korean alphabet works this way too. Not that I have much use for it, though, with drama consumption next to zero. Wonder how long it would take to rewire the brain so that each alphabet is spoken differently, e.g. "a" as "d" - but that might turn out a wee bit dangerous.



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