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Media Entertainment Games

LGP Announces New Competition 207

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the winner-is-extremely-bored dept.
Time Doctor writes "Linux Game Publishing announced its new game competition today, wherein an image relating to the game is revealed one pixel a second and competitors can attempt to be the first to guess it. Winner gets the first copy of the game, and the unofficial award of having way too much time on their hands to sit around waiting for pixels to change."
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LGP Announces New Competition More

LGP Announces New Competition

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  • Got it (Score:2, Funny)

    by whirlibulf ( 911135 )
    "Magic Eye: The CD Compendium"

  • Never could do these... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Snommis ( 861843 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @07:10PM (#13479802) Homepage
    Why can't I see the sailboat?

  • I waited 5 minutes already... (Score:3, Funny)

    by xiando ( 770382 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @07:12PM (#13479809) Homepage Journal
    I already waited 5 minutes for the site to load from the link I followed on slashdot. If that is the time you need to spend waiting between each pixel to update then I think *everyone* who tries to take part in that competition should get the "too much time on their hands" award just for trying... heh, come to think of it, I should get one just for posting this at slashdot!

  • No wild guesses! (Score:3, Funny)

    by grant murray ( 698896 ) <email@grantmurray.com> on Sunday September 04, 2005 @07:13PM (#13479811)
    They allow guessing but not wild guessing. How silly!
    • Silly indeed. They are simply hedging their bet by stipulating a commonly overlooked mistake when allowing "contestants" to guess at any given problem. According to Dr. Alfred Zuekec and Raul Paldonis at the Institute of higher Awareness in Peru there is an 22% likelyhood of a contestant guessing right when attempting an answer with a "wild" guess as opposed to a true, well thought out, "random" guess.
      The data they have put together clearly shows an advantage when wild guessing as shown in this formula; g=

  • We finally made it! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Daneurysm ( 732825 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @07:14PM (#13479816)
    With innovative ideas and advanced gameplay like this, it is only a matter of time until Linux dominates not just the desktop market, but the gaming market as well.

    • Re:We finally made it! (Score:4, Informative)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @09:26PM (#13480426) Homepage
      Hey, there are some dang good linux games out there. I just got done playing a couple hours of Scorched3D. I recently had a kick of the development version of UFO: Alien Invasion. My synaptic games list has perhaps 150 entries in it - all free, no effort to install, and while they're not all superb quality, a good number of them are. I mean, even Nethack is starting to look pretty ;) (Vulture's Eye)

      And this is just free linux games that I'm talking about here.
      • Do you like Vulture's Eye? Between it and noeGNUd, I'm still learning towards noeGNUd (though I'm interested to see what Yendor will bring).

        My wife and I only somewhat recently got into Nethack, she plays a monk, I play a ranger, and the farthest either of us have really gotten is around dlvl 10 or so.

        • Re:We finally made it! (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Rei ( 128717 )
          How long ago did you try VE? As a developer of VE, I can attest to the fact that it is advancing very, very rapidly - especially on my focus, graphics. ;) We've something like 4x'ed the total monster graphics from FE; I just recently finished mind flayers, liches, and foocubi, and today I'm going to hit nagas. There will be a new release later this month incorporating all of our recent changes, or you can download the current edition via darcs. You can follow progress over here [diguru.com], including graphics [diguru.com] devel
          • Very cool!

            Thanks for the info! I had no idea where to look for Vulture's Eye stuff, the only place I had to look at was Clive's website. I look forward to trying some of the 1.9.4 builds, and I'm very much encouraged to hear that things are progressing well on the development side. Thanks for correcting me!

  • Its gonna be mostly a guessing game (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dark Coder ( 66759 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @07:14PM (#13479818)
    For the first 30 seconds of a 30x30 image, it'll be a guessing game until the title is hit upon.

    Its gonna get a magnitude longer for any 300x300 image.

    This is based on the ability to distinguish a FAX image under heavy noise condition without error correction.

    Add color and it may get worst at first, then better later than grayscale image.

    I proposed a new rule: no guessing allowed to make things more interesting.

  • Games for Linux (Score:5, Funny)

    by nmb3000 ( 741169 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @07:17PM (#13479831) Journal
    See, there are sweet games for Linux. Geez, I don't know what everybody's always bitching about.

    Wah wah, I can't play Halo! So what? Shut up and go play "Guess the Game".

    What's going to be good is that the image is going to be a screenshot of this very webpage. That's right folks, the answer to Guess the Game is: Guess the Picture! The newest sensation in an already exciting catalog of Linux games!
    • Maybe it's not your cup of tea, but I think that Darwinia is pretty cool.

      Majesty is also decent, but then I'm a big fan of RTSes that "run themselves" heavily at the micro-level -- I hated Blizzards micromanagement-heavy RTSes.

  • so wait a sec (Score:3, Insightful)

    by after fallout ( 732762 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @07:18PM (#13479835)
    they are putting a dynamically generated 1085x814 image that changes once a second on to a site where we here at slashdot are going to check it out repeatedly? That doesn't appear to be a very bright idea.
    • No, it isn't, from a server response time point of view. But it's the fact that the Slashdot crowd has even bothered to slashdot something this silly that impresses me.
  • Just trace the outline of the alien type people. You can sort of see their sillouette. They all have big heads and no arms yet. But I assume that's because of the telekinesis and the fishbowls on the head. Oh! And there are 4 of them so far, but there could be more as time progresses.

    From the Non-Random-Guessing Department.

    -FlynnMP3

  • Lag (Score:4, Funny)

    by dawhippersnapper ( 861941 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @07:38PM (#13479918) Homepage
    Man this game has horrible latency.
    • LAAAAGGG!!!

      OMG LEWTERZ STOLE MY PIXLES!!!

      HAAACK!!! BOOTTT!! I GOT SCREENIES!!!

      omg haxkzrz sai i cant us caps lololwtf?!?!
      ur haxs cant sav u i report you to dm and g
      et u bannes hxr

  • a compressed .jpg? Brillant! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by XXIstCenturyBoy ( 617054 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @07:47PM (#13479949)
    Couldn't they provide something else than a compressed jpeg full of jpeg artifact (zoom the large picture, you will see a the image is composed of 8x8 block of seemingly random pixels)

    How is one supposed to know what the hell is in there if the jpeg compression moves the changed pixels around?
    • Theoretically, the correct pixels should be more different from those in the original, random image than the incorrect pixels. I've made a program that uses this assumption, and the image seems to be very gradually filling in. Can't be sure yet.
      • I've been doing the same over the last couple of hours, however with the wide difference in color... I am a bit skeptical because of the wide range of colors I am seeing with seemingly no pattern of the 10k so pixels that I think I've identified.
        • I'm getting a sort've question mark thing. That and a plus sign. I've recently made another program to expand out those single pixels to fill the empty space. Looking at the resulting image (sometimes with blur) shows some patterns.
        • Also, judging by their other box covers you might wish to rotate the image 90 degrees... I would guess clockwise, but who's to know? Every other box art on their site is in something like 3:4 aspect ratio whereas this image is in 4:3 aspect ratio, so I'm thinking they rotated it for added effect.

          And after 20 minutes of fiddling with and starting at the image, I have a headache. :)
           
  • If I keep looking at it. I think I see smerfs? But then I decided to run it in Adobe and play around a bit. It looks like bubbles on a blue background.

  • OMG its... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ClaraBow ( 212734 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @07:58PM (#13480004)
    Nuke Dukem 4D :)
  • The day has come and we can now rejoice. It's Duke Nukem Forever!

  • Faster! Faster! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Phrogz ( 43803 ) <!@phrogz.net> on Sunday September 04, 2005 @08:01PM (#13480020) Homepage
    "...an image relating to the game is revealed one pixel a second... and the unofficial award of having way too much time on their hands to sit around waiting for pixels to change."
    Are we so ADD these days that once per second is way too slow to wait for something?

  • JPEG?! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dmitriy ( 40004 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @08:03PM (#13480025) Journal
    JPEG image can't be revealed one pixel at a time. JPEG image consists of 16x16 MCU (Minimal Coding Units) encoded with DCT and high harmonics discarded (actually, there's more to this). Changing one pixel before encoding changes the whole 16x16 square.

    • Yeah (Score:2)

      by mcc ( 14761 )
      So if you actually compare successive images and see what changed, you'll find that what they're REALLY doing is, every second they alter one pixel, and accidentally mildly discolor the rest of the MCU cell that pixel is in :P

  • Slashdot Effect (Score:4, Funny)

    by SleepyHappyDoc ( 813919 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @08:06PM (#13480039)
    Unfortunately, due to the Slashdot effect, no one can see the picture as it changes. Ergo, no one can win.

    Good way to stress-test their web-servers, though.
  • Yeah, great idea, a one-pixel-at a time revealing image in a lossy format. Why do people never learn that screenshots are meant to be in a lossless format?
  • You won't be able to see patterns very well at all unless they post the original picture so you can do a diff. Does anyone have a copy of the original picture? [Or do you know where a link to it is?]

    I think this is a pretty stupid way of doing it. They should have just done it from a blank image. This just gives people who know the original image an advantage.

  • I can't imagine this contest will last long at all if there's every half as many people as the webserver leads me to believe... took me 10 minutes to load the image!

    I'm sure this will be solved before most of us can make out even a slightest smudge in the image.. not to mention people who have an original from 5~ hours ago, who can just use photoshop to cancel out the noise.

  • bastards! (Score:2, Funny)

    by ftsf ( 886792 )
    they stole the source to my unreleased version of #define WIDTH 1280 #define HEIGHT 960 int main(int argc, char** argv) { unsigned short x, y; srand(time(NULL)); for(y = 0; y HEIGHT; y++) { for(x = 0; x WIDTH; x++) { putpixel(x, y, makecol(rand(255), rand(255), rand(255))); } } }
  • The picture looks like the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
  • It looks like they've got a 1280x960 image which will be completely revealed in about 14 days. I was going to download the image and do a comparison against previous images in order to remove the noise, but then I realized that they were giving you the image in jpg format -- the images are going to be compressed differently when a pixel changes, and thus you won't even necessarily be able to tell when there is a new pixel.
  • A real geek whould get the first image and then xor it with the one sometime later.
    So picking out all the random dots and leaving all the information dots, makes guessing a lot easier.

    Greets

  • noise profiling (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04, 2005 @09:40PM (#13480480)
    There are a few 'interesting' properties of the image that they've posted; firstly the noise doesn't appear to be randomly distributed - there are many more samples in the center of the intensity scale than in the fully dark/fully light regions. The green channel also appears to have a much broader distribution curve than the red or blue channels.

    To get an idea of what might be in the image I can think of a few methods that might provide some insight; performing a low pass filter (eg. gaussian filter) and enhancing what remains with the levels control in photoshop (this should help remove the random high frequency element, but of course you also end up losing all detail in whatever image is left), or if anyone feels up to it, performing an autocorrelation of the image with itself may help (essentially using the profile of the noise in the image to figure out what parts are significant).

    Of course, with only ~1.5% of the image revealed so far it's not very likely that there'll be much to see yet - it's likely that all the meaningful data has been buried in the jpeg noise..

    • symmetrical (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 2008 ( 900939 )
      The image looks like it might be largely symmetrical. It'd be worth combining the two halves, though I'm not sure what procedure would give the best results.

      Maybe average the colours in 16x16 blocks (does that eliminate the jpeg noise?) then average the two halves. Or just check for pixels that are the same shade on each side, this throws out most of the data but even more of the noise.
    • I think your colour/distribution observations may be true for any and all jpegs. This is because they convert from rgb to some other form that I forget the name of, and can't find with google in the limited time I have to reply ;-)

  • Trick on seeing it... (Score:3, Funny)

    by DroopyStonx ( 683090 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @09:51PM (#13480514)
    ..isn't actually all that different from those fuckin.. 3d staring pictures (the name eludes me).

    Relax your eyes.. kinda look through it. You will see the partial outlines of certain objects.

    I dunno wtf they are. Strawberries carrying luggage through an airport terminal or something...

  • And they said that the new nvidia drivers weren't fast.
  • They're revealing the game pixel by pixel. Since 'asteroids' was drawn with vector graphics, not raster, it's not asteroids.
  • while true do wget http://i.tuxgames.com/lgpcomp/comp.jpg [tuxgames.com] sleep 1 done They did say that they would update it *every* *second*. Slashdot users: start your terminals!

  • The marketing team came up with the promotion without telling the developers. Now the developers are frantically writing the game as the pixels are revealed. Will the evil tactics of the marketeers plaster the developers with the "vaporware" label? Will the l33t coding skills of the developers make them rich beyond their wildest dreams, allowing them to spin off into their own company and leave the marketeers behind?

    Oh wait, this is for Linux. They won't get rich...one guy will buy the game and every
    • Oh wait, this is for Linux. They won't get rich...one guy will buy the game and everyone else will get the torrent of it.

      Do you have the slightest evidence to support the fact that Linux users pirate more software than Windows users?

      In general, I'd say the fact that someone is using Linux is a reasonable sign that they're interested in using a legal version of something rather than just pirating Windows.

  • How many times have you read here on slashdot, "I stay with Windows because of the games." I think Windows is safe for the moment. Look at the system requirements for "Mindrover" (for which a random plug was on the screen when I was checking out the contest image":

    Linux Kernel 2.2.x or later
    GNU C Libraries (glibc) 2.1.x
    XFree86 Release 3.3.5
    200 MHz x86 Processor (300 MHz or better is recommended)
    3D graphics accelerator with OpenGL? drivers 32 MB RAM
    OSS compatible sound card
    70 MB free hard
    • The newest game out for Linux is probably the port of NWN. There's been a big lull in games since Loki went under, with more infrequent releases.

      Linux is not a drop-in replacement for Windows. If you want a game-launching-shell, Windows is a much better choice. If you want a Windowsesque desktop, Linux is just okay, but aside from being Free, nothing that special. If you want to really use Linux as a Unix system -- lots of scripting, piping stuff together, multiple desktops, remote access, then it becom

  • Hacking it? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @03:53AM (#13481826) Homepage Journal
    Anyone got the original, very first image they posted?

    There's got to be a way to at least make the challenge easier. All the random pixels just confuse my visual cortex, so blacking them out, leaving only the pixels already revealed (about 45000 by the time I post this) would certainly make the job easier.
  • It would seem to me that the way to crack this puzzle would be to take a copy of the image at its earliest point (when it was essentially all noise), then a copy at its current point. A mask of where the images differ will indicate which pixels are part of the "real" image. Then simply isolate those "good" pixels on a transparent background in Photoshop, and interpolate between them. (It can be done, with a bit of cleverness.) Voila, instant solution.

    Of course, the fact that the images show up with horre
  • Fortunately the random noise isn't re-seeded at each reload.

    Therefore:

    1. Load page
    2. Save As Pic1
    3. Wait...
    4. Reload page
    5. Save As Pic2
    6. Load Pic2 into the GIMP
    7. Load Pic1 into the GIMP
    8. copy Pic1 to clipboard
    9. Paste onto Pic2, keep as a layer
    10.Select "subtract" as the Layer Mode
    et voila, there's your picture.

    Repeat steps 3-10 to see your picture take shape.

    Has anyone else figured out what it is yet? :)

  • hmmm.... (Score:2)

    by XO ( 250276 )
    let's see. It says it's been running for 16 hrs 51 minutes 43 seconds.

    All I see is static in the image. So, I'm gonna say.. since by the time the image is done displaying, Duke Nuke'Em Forever will be out... That must be it. Oh, and maybe Prey.
  • If you look at difference image from yesterday and today, it is apparant that the image is split into a 4x4 grid of smaller pieces. As far as I can see, these re-arrange into 4 chunks of 2x2 each. One is a figure silhouetted in a doorway, head cocked to the left. Another is a figure in an atheletic stance, possibly with a weapon on his shoulder. A third involves something white in roughly a shape like:

    xxxxxxxxxx
    xx....x..x
    xxx...x..x
    xxX...x..x
    xxxxxxxxxx

    The fourth is just greens and blues and pur

  • Got It! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by telstar ( 236404 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @12:09PM (#13483554)
    It's called "Email Address Farmer" and the goal is to collect as many email addresses from contest submitters as possible to be used for marketing in the future. Seems the game only lasts 15 days or so ... but after that, the real fun begins.
    • Well, Ive been reading through the comments, some interesting ideas and stuff, but I had to reply to this.
      NEVER will any of my companies do ANY email farming. We have mailing lists that you have to explicitly subscribe to, and every email allows you to unsubscribe. We dont 'add people in' you can only get onto our lists by requesting it. We dont sell our information.
      Its just not what we do. I for one hate the spam I get, why on earth would I encourage it?

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