Man, I do find that quite sad... the app store still has some major issues with regards to discoverability. It's funny because you'd think as the app store became more and more saturated, that they'd create more ways to deal with that, but many of the changes have actually made it worse lol :/

I guess it is quite subjective, but what makes the second one look better to you? For me the first one, whilst chalked with noise/grain, has a much better rendition of the skin-tone, along with detail in the highlights, and the depth of the reflection in her eyes. I guess it's hard to describe really, but that's kind of why I would side towards the first image.

One instance where it's very obvious to me was 300 vs its sequel 300: Rise of an Empire. I tried to find 2 similar images: 300 http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/dvdreviews46/300_the_complete... 300 sequel http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTQwMTk3MTU3OV5BMl5Ban...

So basically I think digital is getting there but it still has a little ways to go in matching the perceived quality.

Otherwise you make a paid game and hope an Apple-featuring makes you enough.

I think I basically tried almost every A* trick available (rectangular symmetry reduction, HPA*, points of visibility, jump point search, etc) but ultimately I couldn't make it run fast enough on iOS for our max level size which was about 100x100. It also couldn't be multi-threaded because it needed to work with online code (synchronous tick engine)...

What ended up happening was I found a full C implementation of Jump Point Search, and it was incredibly fast! I had already moved several parts of my code to C in order to speed it up, but I guess using a higher level language like Objective-C is just way too slow to have instantaneous path-finding on a 100x100 grid. I think this was the code I found https://github.com/Bio2hazard/cJumpPointSearch

I am not sure that this works for all situations though; maybe I've been lucky too... I tend to work for smaller startups.

"In Angband, any monster that drops stuff can drop pretty much anything. Monsters have a level, and if they drop loot, it just randomly picks any item near the monsters level."

-> (RPG related) I felt like this was an issue with Diablo 3 compared to Diablo 2. You basically just had to mash around in D3 grinding the top-level monsters and hoping... whereas in Diablo 2 you could make conscious choices over where to farm if your goal was to find a certain item (albeit the drop chances were extremely low, so most people just did Meph runs or Baal runs and traded their way up). Here though the author is doing drops way more realistic than either of those games heh, so that's quite an awesome feat.

Itemization seems really tricky; analyzing Diablo 2 vs Diablo 3 can actually provide some interesting insight into how item systems affect gameplay etc... maybe those devs even tried doing it realistically at some point but found it didn't pan out gameplay-wise?

Hey I still do that! :(

I wonder if my (or anyone's) film photos on Flickr are completely useless metadata-wise. Because they are all scanned so they just say "NORITSU KOKI EZ Controller". There seems to be a large portion of people (on Flickr) shooting film still but I wonder if it's only a small percentage overall.

You'd think tablets/mobile would have an amazing plethora of RTS's, but it kind of seems like the simulation/Facebook games took over (Clash of Clans etc).

On a related note, I also just noticed that the "Arecibo Radio Observatory" was in Goldeneye!

"The samples will be missing lots of implicit information such as how to install the necessary libraries and how to deal with missing dependencies and version conflicts. Transcribing and modifying the examples may lead to bugs that suck up time. It's not terrible, mostly thanks to sites like stackoverflow, but it's still a lot of unnecessary distractions from the task at hand."

So many times, the actual programming isn't tough, it's just getting all of the stuff around it setup that is hard.