Medals, counting and chauvinism
The BBC has a predictable story this morning about whether Scotland will have its own team at the London Olympics. Which is a silly season story, a slow-news-day-story, a non story. First of all, it is quite possible that by 2012 Scotland will be irrevocably on the road to independence. We should have had a referendum before then, but even if the unionist parties block it we will have both Holyrood and Westminster elections before then, and it is entirely possible under present circumstances that the SNP will gain an absolute majority of Scottish seats in both.
In any of those cases, of course there will be a separate Scottish team at the London olympics. On the other hand, if Scotland fails to choose independence, of course there won't. It's as simple as that.
But there's a deeper, nastier chauvinism behind the story. The British media — the BBC inter alia, although they may not be the worst offenders — have been making a big deal about 'Team GB' coming fourth in the 'medal table' as if that somehow reflected credit on the second most obese nation in the world, the nation of lard arsed couch potatoes whose nearest approach to athleticism is the five-metre waddle from the double yellow line to the pizza counter.
It's not cricket!
Look, lets stop fooling ourselves. The London and Edinburgh velodromes have both been sold off to developers — the London one, supposedly, to help pay for the Olympics. We have Chris Hoy because when he was developing in the sport there was a velodrome in Scotland for him to learn the ropes. Now there isn't — so where is the next Chris Hoy coming from?
There's someone else from Scotland who should have been winning medals for us at this Olympics. Jason McIntyre should have been doing for us in the man's time trial what Emma Pooley did so brilliantly in the women's. But Jason couldn't be there — because some careless motorist killed him while he was out training this spring (and was fined a derisory five hundred pounds in punishment).
Cycling doesn't have too much spent on it. Cycling doesn't have nearly enough spent on it. Every medium sized town has an Olympic size swimming pool. Every city has a running track. And we have one — count them, one — indoor velodrome in the whole country. In no other of our elite sports do we turn promising young athletes out onto the roads to battle it out with speeding motorists too busy with their mobile phones to pay attention to where they're going.
The spread of knowledge in a large game world
These days we have television, and news. But in a late bronze age world there are no broadcast media. News spreads by word of mouth. If non-player characters are to respond effectively to events in the world, knowledge has to spread.
How to model this?
Worlds and Flats
Of Compartmented Worlds
Playing The Witcher has got me thinking again about an algorithm for rendering a world which I first thought of twenty-five years ago. Then, it was a hack for dealing with the fact that the computers of the day didn't have much memory or horsepower. Now, it's a hack for dealing with the fact that — when considered against the complexity of a world — the computers of today still don't have enough memory and horsepower. Mind you, today I'm contemplating photorealistic scenes, whereas then simple line and wash would have been good enough, but...
The algorithm for rendering I'll call 'flats'. But before we get to discussing flats, lets discuss worlds. The world of The Witcher (and other games based on the Aurora engine) is composed of areas. One area is loaded into memory at a time; when the player reaches an area boundary, the area is unloaded in toto, and the next area loaded, also in toto. The result is a noticeable interruption in game play. There's also, normally, a noticeable visual disjunction at the boundary; the new area uses a different 'tileset', which is to say, set of bits of scenery. When you look across a boundary, the scenery often appears different from what you find when you cross the boundary and arrive at the other side.
The Witcher: Story telling of a high order
This isn't, by any means, a final review of The Witcher. I've played it fairly intensely over three weeks, and am only into the fourth chapter. Which is great, because there is more to come.
But, what do I think of the show so far?