Ray of light

At the beginning there was light. Billions of years have passed, minds have been refined and instruments adjusted, from element to particle to wave and photon. Taking a particle that follows a straight line, some interesting consequences arise, it might be that I don’t understand optics as much as needed to explain why distance has influence on size of objects, but since we know of quanta and Einstein an interesting proposition arises.

Placing the Sun on the left, Earth in the middle and Jupiter on the right, with the lines highlighting rays of light as they reach the planets. Before we thought light was a wave, it must have travelled in a straight line. The problem arises when we consider that the Sun is millions of times larger than Earth and since light falls on the entire surface of the Earth facing towards the Sun. The entire sky should be covered with the tiny surface area size of Earth on the Sun; same as looking at the Sun point blank, no matter where you are on Earth there would be no escaping, horizon to horizon. The same rules apply to any source of light on the dark side of the Earth, a light shining directly towards an observer should be the same size be it a meter or two away, it’s not.

Optics could account for this, our eyes bend light, the brain interprets the inputs and therefore in distance objects appear smaller, this is fine to some limit. Look at the Sun, it spans from horizon to horizon, most of the light coming from a small area of Sun that Earth is facing. I doubt that out eyes could compress an image of such magnitude, especially when Earth is staring at a inconvenient one millionth piece of the Sun.

Wave and quantum theories of light offer a solution, however I’m not a nuclear scientist and wiki doesn’t seem to offer a clean interpretation of these two theories relating to optics. Following is to the best of my understanding.

 

On the left is a source of light, as represented in wave theory, the ripples are a single light wave that is moving trough time (isolated), on the right is quantum representation of the same light source (two waves of them). To explain why the Sun doesn’t cover our entire sky, if the waves are stretching as they expand in all directions simultaneously, that expansion is the distance size relationship. Further away from the source, more stretched the wave is and a smaller amount of energy reaches our eyes. Our eyes detect the energy and wavelength of the ripples that reach them. Wavelength can be reconstructed without too much distortion from other light sources.

In quantum perspective, light becomes a particle of energy that behaves as a wave (photon), does it split to cover the distance, does it compress or stretch?

Caesar IV

Caesar IV is due out in September/October this year; it is the fourth instalment of a city building series from Tilted Mill. In it’s predecessor age it was only shadowed by Sim City albeit the two are distinct games they still fall in the city building genre. In Caesar III merchants and curriers were essential in delivering goods to your city population and other businesses. It seems that this concept of walkers delivering the goods to households has been altered so that the actual home dwellers are the ones seeking goods from the shops, something like the system in 1503AD: The New World. This living population seems to have multiple needs based on the level of the household, similar to the one found in The Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile, the spin off of Pharaoh, which was one of the sister games of Caesar III, only it was set in Egypt.

The new generation of city building family of games seems to be reaching a peak after a long absence of such titles. Tycoon City: New York is looking at the city as a business opportunity, it’s predecessor being Monopoly Tycoon, a cut throat market simulator disguised as a interactive monopoly game. City Life is focusing on the cultural, social and economical, but unfortunately not ethnic divisions in a city and how to build a city in which these social classes can coexist and remain happy. And CivCity: Rome looks like an original duplicate copy of Caesar IV.

It seems that we’ll be able to place roads and buildings at any angle desired, something like Immortal Cities, but it doesn’t look like they will be as curved as the ones in Black and White. Graphics look clean and detailed with HDR lighting, specula maps and reflections, they are promising over a hundred buildings, 25 goods and 75 unique characters with names like Pilysis Anthagoris. Black and white got criticised for making us start over from scratch every time we finished the level, this is the same in Caesar IV, and there is a technology tree, which I suppose will also start from the beginning with each mission. How can this be prevented I don’t know, I think that the designers purposely made each mission in the campaign start on unique terrain and different available resources. However once you get the perfect formula, how many times can you essentially build the same city without being bored or without feeling loss once you have to start over? CivCity could have capitalised on this and guided us trough history, building cities throughout the timeline, but they are not.

Caesar III was wonderful in the sense that it did not force combat upon you, the option was there however and to recruit legions or cavalry a whole interdependent economical and cultural structure needed to be sustained as only the elite of the city were wealthy enough to acquire the weapons and horses needed to join the army. There is also a more strategic side of the game; a map of the area affording trade and alliances between cities, hopefully this will be a little more detailed.

Caesar IV should be an excellent game, if it were only to bring Caesar III up to date with current technology standards and offer the same game play in terms of economical and cultural systems it’s predecessor excelled at.

Introduction

I remember a twilight zone episode from about 15 years ago, set in a future with flying cars and fancy uniforms, the impression given is of a totally controlled society made possible by technology that is integrated into everyones lives. The story follows a kid that is a genius and for his 16th birthday, as every other kid is required, he needs to write a knowledge test, the problem is that the society has allowances on intelligence, only a certain amount of variation from the standard is acceptable, the kid is drugged with a truth potion and examined. He passes so well and is so smart that he has to be eliminated to preserve social coherence.