The Starfighter Low-Level Tech Tree
sockpuppet.org
sockpuppet.org
Helu,
This is Thomas. Here is a thing somebody wrote about Stockfighter, our project, which we're sending you because you asked us for updates from starfighters.io.
We hope you enjoy reading it. (If you want to read it in a browser, try here. Works best in a fixed-width font.)
Assuming there are no other Carpathian trickster-gods we've somehow managed to anger, you should be able to play both tech trees of Stockfighter by the end of the week. Patrick wants me to say the day, but I'm pretty sure speaking the names of actual days of the week in sentences about this project is one of the things that angers the Carpathian trickster-gods, so let's just say "a day that rhymes with Shplyday".
furtive glances over shoulder
If it does come out this week, my holidays are not going to be very productive - or perhaps very productive, depending on your perspective!
I think this is the first real look at the low level tech tree and what kind of things it will contain. I'm excited by both of the tech trees so far, I think it will be interesting working through both of them.
I really enjoyed the style of this information release, quite a lot of information but the writing almost seemed tongue-in-cheek the whole time and was fun to read.
But what do you mean by "low level tech tree"? None of those words are in the article.
Edit: Apparently this is all part of a fictional game.
The title of the submission is taken directly from the email subject.
http://starfighters.io/ has a great intro to what this is, made by community members 'patio11 and 'tptacek.
Can anyone explain what is going on?
Doesn't mean the game is not great, doesn't mean he's not skilled. Maybe I'm just sour about all his talk on 0x1c before giving up.
Although... I still can't tell if this is the Starfighter tech tree or the Stockfighter tech tree. I think the confusion is intentional, and I do like that. I think. :)
edit: nobody thought notch was joking about 0x10c, and this is clearly in that vein. but an AVR is a real CPU, and suddenly... mind blown?
I'm not sure you read this thread. Starfighter the company definitely uses technology.
edit: was your post using in-game voice? i'm totally about staying in character :)
Blizzard (the company) is to starfighter (the company).
OK, I'm curious now.
I've seen a lot of comments from two of you (you and tptacek) here on HN, and never noticed anything in those that would have led me to guess either of you had a sufficient interest in gaming to want to start a gaming company.
Did I just not notice your comments indicating a gaming interest, or were you wise enough to stay out of gaming threads knowing they usually turn to pointless time wasting crap, or what?
Monetization is through taking people that have both completed and/or done really well in this game and are interested in new employment, and after a few in-person meetings with the Ptaceks and Patrick, you might get a private lunch with a CTO looking to hire (in their words, IIRC). They would get finders fees for that.
Would I self-identify as a gamer? Well, "Ran a WoW raid guild", "I main AD Jungle Evelynn but haven't gotten many games in since having a kid", "My Steam account lists 720 hours of playtime on 60 games."
I don't particularly hide this on HN and also don't particularly go out of my way to talk about it. Games, books, and running software companies are my three big hobbies; one of these seems to be most relevant here. You can probably find 5~10 comments from me if you search for WoW, Warcraft, LoL, or Starcraft, but mostly they're talking about business, like you would expect.
If it helps Thomas sleep better at night, I'd definitely encourage you describe your products as "experiences" instead, because seriously. Games ain't trivial.
Anyone who describes their thing as an "experience" automatically gets -1000 points. IME, when the description of a thing says that it's an "experience", it's a strong indicator that the marketing copywriter ran out of fluff words to use and reached for the most trendy and inoffensive one they could find.
It's okay if there's a lot of surrounding substantive description that makes it clear that the folks behind the thing are legit, and that "experience" was just added to meet a buzzword quota. If -however- much or all of your description centers around how much of an "experience" it is, I'm likely to skip over whatever it is that you're hawking. :(
We spend much of our childhood doing accelerated learning through play (games). There's no reason that can't continue into adulthood, except for it culturally being slightly unacceptable. That's really counter-productive.
Also: we're very much structured like a conventional CTF; it's just a CTF we're not taking down after a few days.
"Challenges" or "programming challenges" sounds good to me.
The textfile was a fun read, best of luck!
The parallels should hopefully be obvious: have fun playing the game. But if you stand out, it's because you've demonstrated some set of marketable skills that other organizations are looking for. If you've set the 'contact me about potential jobs' bit in your Starfighters profile, they'll spend some effort trying to land you a gig with their client companies.
Better exchanges enable their FIX gateways long before they accept orders. They can signal their willingness to accept orders by sending everyone a message which says "we are open." Consider also that some exchanges trade products with disparate opening times. All the same applies at the close but in reverse. Better exchanges will tell you each of your orders is closed before they disconnect. Worse ones suggest you infer the same.
- Could it be that there is a whitespace missing after the " ◐ " or is the gap in the border intentional?
- X/Z are used in the 'program structure' example without introducing them beforehand (or mentioning 'we will look at these later').
- A real RE report would certainly have mentioned all visible part numbers and the type of I/O controller. Although it is certainly not relevant to the game, it somehow bothers me that the author decided to omit this information. (hmm, maybe this was described in Section 3?)
Loads and stores are relative to the X, Y, and Z registers, which are aliases for the 16 bit register pairs starting at r26, r28, and r30 respectively (r30 is an alias for Z)
Probably intentional. A big part of the skill of reverse-engineering that they're introducing here is the feeling of "I don't understand what this line does, so I'll just accept it and move on, and see if I understand it later". Using X/Z before describing it is definitely in keeping with that feeling.
The whole document reads as "we're intentionally throwing you in the deep end by giving you not quite enough to understand completely, but giving you enough that you can understand with some work". It's a similar approach to Microcorruption, and to the crypto challenges. I like it.
If you intend for performance in Stockfighter to be used as a proxy for talent by recruiters, how do you intend to prevent cheating? Seems like it should be very easy for people to work in groups, or look up walkthroughs online.
People have asked us about a variety of ways to cheat on the games. Some of them don't strike us as even a little bit problematic, e.g. using an OSS library to access our API. (Some folks are already working on these and we're thrilled about that development.)
Some of the ways people could cheat on Stockfighter are, from the perspective of someone wanting to hire engineers, pretty awesome. If you get arbitrary code execution which busts out of an emulator written by the Ptaceks I urgently want to make your acquaintance.
Some of the other, more boring ways that one could cheat do not particularly strike me as bothersome to our business model. We're not selling certs; we're brokering introductions of candidates to businesses that want to hire them. Scamming a row out of our database doesn't meaningfully negatively affect the world, Starfighter, or our clients. I've got lots of rows.
Though I was a bit confused by a statement you made. You said you'd need to beat the Turing test to automatically pass the last level of Stockfighter. But if that's true, how are you generating and validating the levels - that seems an equivalent challenge. (Unless you've made tons by hand.)
Honestly its a big world and there are jobs for people merely smart enough to successfully reimplement based on an online guide with no supervision. Maybe 99.999% of humanity can't do that.
Or rephrased in an absolute theoretical sense its a problem, but in a relative competitive sense its not an issue.
I love the FIX meta humor. Order Cancel Replace Request: tag 35=G.
Having recently done a large chunk of Microcorruption, I think I get what they are going for here. Super excited.
But also a little nervous as to the timing. Like others have said, if this releases before xmas, my level of interaction with the real world may have a real impact on the most wonderful time of the year, family togetherness, etc, etc.
I'd love it if one of the founders could tell me if there's any PVP element to the low-level tech tree? What I'm really asking is if I put off playing this until some time in January, have I put myself at a disadvantage?
Nope.
Actually, that's a sort of separate question than the GP. Are there penalties for going through it slowly and/or playing in bursts interspersed with downtime? Depending on the metrics you are looking at, that might be very hard to correctly account for.
No! That's part of the beauty of it -- the game is on 24 hours a day (well, after we get past the roaring pyroclasm I expect on the servers immediately post-launch), 365 days a year, and hundreds of simulated bots are waiting with bated breath on a hard drive somewhere on AWS for when 'kbenson (or anyone else) has 45 free minutes in the schedule.
All three of us are working parents who are familiar with the juggling that goes on. Believe me, we didn't make something you'd have to be an unemployed 22 year old to get through. (In addition to that being a poor decision from a product perspective that would be a really poor decision from a "identify as many of the best engineers in the world that we possibly can" perspective because our working hypothesis is that y'all are presumably pretty busy.)
If there isn't a strong tether to "real data" than this question is moot, but if that's a key part of this experiment, then I and many others will start drooling at y'alls feet pretty soon here.
To be honest, even if I didn't know them, based on their online reputations I'd expect them to be the best contingent recruiters in the country within weeks. That I completely & totally agree with their underlying philosophy on hiring makes me even more bullish.
Of course, all of that is contingent on them delivering on the game experience and delivery software products is...hard.
I wouldn't be surprised if lots of companies in that domain would be very interested in the candidates coming out of Stockfighter, however there are so many subsystems involved in the problem environments disclosed so far that many valuable skill sets have the potential to be exercised. Part of the (general) success of both Stockfighter and Starfighter will be how well they manage to actually exercise those different skill sets.
I'm cautiously optimistic so far :)
There have been a number of comments from people who find the idea of the markets 'unfun', or just not relevant to the roles and tasks they want to be doing. My impression from what has been released so far is that there is actually a plethora of tasks/technologies/etc involved, and as such 'useful' skills will be used regardless of if you're in the finance industry.
Background:
I'm an applied math guy that works in cv, image processing, and anywhere that stats & optimization can be used. Work has recently led to learning more distributed stuff, albeit simply wiring up zeroMQ with c++ or python and getting the concurrent dances right.
Is it safe to say that Microcorruption is sort of a pre-req to this? Should I muck around in there first for a bit or sign right up for starfighter? Thanks.
But I like Microcorruption too (I'm biased) and would definitely not try to talk anyone out of playing with it as well.
In standard json, the last element in a list or object is special, in that it can't have the trailing comma. Thus you have to special case every deletion and insertion of elements, to check if it needs a comma or not.
Without this requirement, you can remove and add elements without worry, which makes it easier for hand editing, and easier to avoid bugs in code.
E.g.
var foo = [
"aa"
, "bb"
, "cc"
];
E.g.
var foo = {
attr1: "foo"
, attr2: "bar"
, method1: function() {
}
, method2: function() {
}
};
I like what I'm seeing so far, AVR sounds like a fun new challenge.
I do like the sense of humour here.