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The game takes place exclusively in Germany and you can drive around the entire country, delivering goods to and from 16 German cities, though my own city, Wolfsburg, is not included. It doesn’t affect gameplay, but it’s another reminder that this is a really low effort release where every corner that could be cut, has been. Every vehicle is driven by the invisible man. For one, there’s not a single human in sight. I can recognise certain landmarks and familiar roads that I’ve driven on in real life, but there’s very little simulation of real-life here. Of the 16 major cities included in the game, none of them look particularly good. To be fair, some effort has gone into making the interiors of trucks look good, but everything else is really quite poor and not up to the standards that players would expect these days. Instead, we’re left with a very shimmery game that doesn’t look great at all. A little bit of anti-aliasing would have gone a long way to making the game hit the absolute bare minimum, but I don’t think the budget extended that far. Not that Germans have ever had a problem turning a blind eye to bad things… That’s the idea behind the game, and if growing a fictional logistics company is your idea of good fun, you’ll enjoy this game, but you’ll have to look past plenty of bad things. You have to manage the expenses, too, and if you thought filling up at the Tankstelle in real life was expensive, try filling up a truck with 1200 litres of fuel… Very expensive. You save that money up, buy yourself a better truck, maybe even an employee to drive it, and your money comes in quicker. The concept of the game is that you start your own haulage company – every little German boy’s dream – and you start with one truck, one driver (yourself) and you have to work contracts to get money. Trust me, I’m not German, but I’ve lived amongst them for years now, so I know a thing or two about Germans. That’s not to say it won’t find an audience – I’m positive that in Germany it will find a following, as the game takes place in Germany and it’s made by a German company, and Germans love nothing more than other German things, but they don’t like other Germans. The basics are there and the core of the game works, but it has absolutely nothing else going for it. There is Truck Driver, but I tried it on release and tried to slit my wrists afterwards, so that’s a no-go. At this moment in time, there aren’t many competitors. I’ve put hundreds of hours into Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator on PC, so I know my way around a big rig.Īerosoft’s On the Road – Truck Simulator aims to plug the gap that has been left wide open on consoles. These weird simulators tend to be peaceful, easy to play, and generally inoffensive.īear in mind, this isn’t my first time simulating the trucking business. ![]() Take Bus Simulator for example I played it last year and I’m a little embarrassed to say that I got sucked into it big time. They’re usually weird, janky, but a little bit wonderful. Upward trends in variables (for example, economic inequality) alternate with downward trends. ![]() Despite this complexity, our historical research on Rome, England, France, Russia and now the US shows that these complex interactions add up to a general rhythm. Cycles in the real world are chaotic, because complex systems such as human societies have many parts that are constantly moving and influencing each other. Incidentally, when students of dynamical systems (or, more colourfully, ‘chaoticians’ such as Jeff Goldblum’s character in the film Jurassic Park) talk about ‘cycles’, we do not mean rigid, mechanical, clock-like movements. And the cycles of inequality were an integral part of the overall motion. Over periods of two to three centuries, we found repeated back-and-forth swings in demographic, economic, social, and political structures. All of these societies (and others for which information was patchier) went through recurring ‘secular’ cycles, which is to say, very long ones. In our book Secular Cycles (2009), Sergey Nefedov and I applied the Phillips approach to England, France and Russia throughout both the medieval and early modern periods, and also to ancient Rome. But this is where looking at other historical societies becomes interesting. Does observing just one and a half cycles really show that there is a regular pattern in the dynamics of inequality? No, by itself it doesn’t. And if it’s cyclical, we can predict what happens next.Īn obvious objection presents itself at this point. In other words, when looked at over a long period, the development of wealth inequality in the US appears to be cyclical. Bring the 19th century into the picture, however, and one sees not isolated movements so much as a rhythm. The past 30 years are known as the ‘great divergence’. Commentators have called the period from 1920s to 1970s the ‘great compression’. From 1980 to the present, the wealth gap has been on another steep, if erratic, rise. Yet the wealth of a typical family increased by a multiple of 40. Over that time, the top fortunes hardly grew (from one to two billion dollars a decline in real terms). Then came the reversal: from the 1920s to 1980, it shrank back to levels not seen since the mid-19th century. In doing so, he found a striking pattern.įrom 1800 to the 1920s, inequality increased more than a hundredfold. The ratio of the two figures provided a rough measure of wealth inequality, and that’s what he tracked, touching down every decade or so from the turn of the 19th century all the way to the present. He looked at the net wealth of the nation’s median household and compared it with the size of the largest fortune in the US. In his book Wealth and Democracy (2002), Kevin Phillips came up with a useful way of thinking about the changing patterns of wealth inequality in the US. ![]() ![]() What is slightly less obvious is how a very long historical perspective can help us to see the whole mechanism. Yet obviously enough, all these factors must interact in complex ways. Some commentators point to economic factors, some to politics, and others again to culture. ![]() As the Congressional Budget Office concluded in 2011: ‘the precise reasons for the rapid growth in income at the top are not well understood’. Just one rich family, the six heirs of the brothers Sam and James Walton, founders of Walmart, are worth more than the bottom 40 per cent of the American population combined ($115 billion in 2012).Īfter thousands of scholarly and popular articles on the topic, one might think we would have a pretty good idea why the richest people in the US are pulling away from the rest. The top one per cent of fortunes holds two-fifths of the total wealth. Today, the top one per cent of incomes in the United States accounts for one fifth of US earnings. ![]() the notes and other info (vibrato, tremolo, portamento, etc) you lay down in a DAW are MIDI data that could absolutely be exported as a MIDI file, but it's just being used to trigger the synths, samplers, etc you're using there. it can be played back any number of ways, as mentioned above. ![]() a MIDI file is just the note data, parameter changes, etc. Very short version: MIDI is a standard for sending and receiving information to/from instruments, software, etc. most people use the standard microsoft wavetable synth and also compose for how it sounds, while others use software players that stand in for it (fluidsynth, tmiditiy++) and other still use hardware romplers (roland sound canvas, korg 05r/w, etc), and everybody will get a slightly different outcome. the downside is variance in how they play back. Most doom mappers still use midi because midi is fairly quick to compose for (we don't have to worry about finalizing/mastering/too much tinkering in general), is small in file size (it's just note/parameter data), and is supported by every source port. it also just sounds better for the filesize), along with a number of tracker music formats (MOD, XM, IT, S3M, etc), so you'd be fine. Most modern source ports support streamed audio at this point in a number of formats (WAV/MP3/OGG - OGG is a big recommend as it doesn't add junk data to the start/end of the file and can loop properly using metadata that points to the samples at which the loop starts/ends. Maybe that would cause problems on some ports if I were to publish the wad. I just render the track to an MP3 and load it with Slade3 and call it by name in MAPINFO. I'm even half convinced that the top composers don't fully understand it. I probably sound insane, but this is the way I have come to understand it I don't fully understand it and that probably shows in my explanation. Most MIDI programs like Sekaiju will do this automatically, but with certain modern DAWs nothing is stored until you add everything individually, and certain ones like Pro Tools won't even tell you what anything represents, so you would want to look up what numbers represent what instrument, and which numbers correspond with what parameter. and if using a modern DAW, rather than setting the pan and volume (etc) on the track, you need to "embed" the data into the MIDI clip itself, so that when you export it as MIDI, all the info gets stored in the file to play on anyone's system. And there are very strict polyphony limitations depending on what you're playing it back on.Ĭomposing for games like Doom or any game with MIDI playback need all the instructions beforehand in the form of a number that represents an action, usually between 0 and 127: the instrument, volume, pan, modulation, etc. You would use MIDI with a VSTI plugin the same way a Doom MIDI composer would, the only difference is that a MIDI composer for Doom will make sure that a few extra parameters are in place so that the game will essentially act as the DAW, and their computer's playback synth/soundfont program acts as the VSTI, playing the sound in real time, every time. The term "MIDI" has become confusing, especially because it's so widely used in modern music production, and all usages of the term are correct, though different in practice. ![]() When I finish something I call it a track. I use Reaper along with several VSTI's besides my guitar, bass and Yamaha keyboard. Somehow I need to get on the sa me page with you doo m mu sic pe ople. ![]() I don't know whether to be annoyed at coffee for letting me down like this, or at my own brain for tricking me. But they also thought they would do better, and we demonstrated that this expectation was at least partly responsible for their improved performance. Adriana Madzharov, a lead researcher on the study and a professor at The School of Business at Stevens Institute of Technology, said in a press release, It's not just that the coffee-like scent helped people perform better on analytical tasks, which was already interesting. Given those findings, the study's authors concluded that it's pretty likely that a placebo effect skewed the results in the first phase of their study. According to the survey's results, many people believe the mere scent of coffee can improve the way they work. But before you brew yourself another batch and waft it all in sans sip, there’s a catch.Īfter discovering these differences in performance, the researchers conducted a survey of 200 totally different students, their goal being to find out if people simply assume that certain scents, such as coffee, will influence their performance and productivity - and in fact, that's exactly what was going on. The researchers found that the students who were taking their exams in a room that smelled like coffee performed significantly better than students completing the same exam, but in a room that didn't smell like coffee. ![]() The researchers tested their theory on a group of people who arguably need coffee the most: students taking an exam. The study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, set out to discover what happens when you smell coffee rather than drink it, and whether the scent alone can affect your productivity. Setting a timer for your coffeemaker to spring you out of bed in the morning could be enough to wake up your body, according to a new study, but the findings are, well, complicated. But can the smell of coffee actually wake you up? Sadly, maybe not. In the words of my queen Lorelai Gilmore, "I stop drinking the coffee, I stop doing the standing, walking, and words putting into sentence doing." Even the smell of coffee alone feels like it pushes your brain into productive mode. The promise of an entire day of energy and good vibes seem to rest in that little cup. There's nothing like the gurgle of a fresh pot of coffee first thing in the morning. |
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