Live data from Hacker News

The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

dota2.com

161–170 of 203 posts

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#161

I wonder if they have looked into air curtains. Commercial installations are at a point where you have this silent, completely invisible sheet of fast-moving air that provides some degree of noise isolation as well - maybe four walls of these + a floating ceiling is enough when coupled with the noise-cancelling headphones.

I think leave the audience participation in, let the chaos rain supreme!

There was once a big StarCraft 2 tournament where one of the contestants walked out mid-event because he couldn't pull off any cheeky tricks due to the audience giving him away.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then how is argon better than nitrogen and oxygen?

Argon transmits sound much worse than air. I believe it's due to the fact that denser gases require more energy to compress and decompress, thus dampening sound vibrations. Even more fancy windows use Krypton, since it has superior thermal and acoustic properties over Argon, but is about 60 times more expensive. Xenon would also be a candidate, but it's about 10 times more expensive even than krypton, and also has th…

In general, denser materials are better (and faster) at transmitting physical waves sound and worse (and slower) at transmitting electric waves like heat.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#163
post #12
post #4

It was definitely an interesting article but the first sentence of the article proper really grabbed me. The weird thing to me about the world is you can have an event that literally millions of people watch around the world, and if you had asked me “what’s the International” five minutes ago I wouldn’t have had any idea, and I’m a very online person! I play video games, even, and at one point played DOTA2! The inter…

TI is a bit notorious because it's prize pool is massive compared to other esports. Winning TI puts someone's prize earnings past lifetime earnings of most other top player's career prize earnings in other games https://liquipedia.net/dota2/The_International#Tournaments https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Portal:Statistics/Player_earnin... https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Winnings https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Portal:St…

This is only prize earnings, important to keep in mind that Dota heavily weights prizes from tournaments. Highest total prize earnings on that chart is $7M, Faker pulls in $5M/year in salary alone.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#164

I was served the Dutch translation, and I must say I am impressed with the state of the art of this machine translation. While this still feels mechanically translated English, and accents are missing, it was very readable. I am used to having to translate each individual word to English and swap some verbs to end up with something readable -- with the regular paragraph of total gibberish in between. This reads like…

Valve uses human translators, not ML. So unless you're talking about your browser's auto-translation feature, you are, in fact, reading human-produced text.

This one is in the uncanny zone. If it comes from AI, I salute the AI. If human, I'd advise Valve to find better Humans.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#165
post #140

this photo from the article amazes me: https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//3703047/a37c... that's a packed stadium, up to the nose bleeds

Similar photo from League of Legends' world finals from 2022 (Chase Center): https://res.cloudinary.com/dxb0ptf6a/image/upload/c_fill,dpr...

If you haven't been paying attention to the eSports scene it can definitely be really surprising, but the crowd size and the production value of these things is insane to think about, especially if you aren't expecting it for just a video game.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My memory of this long ago is fuzzy, but I believe the word itself is originally from LA gang subculture and was spread more broadly via gangsta rap in the late '80s/early '90s or so (cf. the trend of people spelling certain words with "ck" changed to "cc", which was a feature of Crips tagging). The earliest documented use I could find referred to someone selling fake drugs, but I seem to recall that as it spread it…

Yeah it's just slang for some kind of nefarious action. It's in a lot of rap songs, west coast origin seems possible for sure but been around a long time. East coast version is juug.

In the early 90s in NorCal, we used gank to mean "steal" or "snatch", and you can still find this definition online. I don't think it ever meant murder until it got used in PvP games.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#167
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think leave the audience participation in, let the chaos rain supreme!

Players have said in the past that it makes it impossible to do Roshan sneakily, since the crowd gives it away.

In some early tournaments, the casters would have to avoid looking at Roshan fights, because the other team would inevitably hear (or feel!) the bass-heavy sound effects from Roshan's attacks and movement.

Later versions of the client added an option to mute those sound effects, for precisely this reason.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#168
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Players have said in the past that it makes it impossible to do Roshan sneakily, since the crowd gives it away.

It especially screwed over pre-siren Roshans (which don't seem to be much of a thing anymore). But yeah, there's still a lot the sounds can give away, like a Roshan play, a sneaky smoke, enemy tormentor attempts, etc.

Even without knowing much of anything about DotA 2 in particular: for any game with asymmetric information, the crowd reacting to what your opponent is doing is always going to be a major tell. At least in LoL, managing that information asymmetry is an important strategic element, can't imagine it being any less of an issue in DotA 2.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might think that, but the “not self respecting” mobile and console gamers out there outnumber you 3:1. Some of the most popular games have been PUBG, Fortnite, Rainbow Six, Roblox… I don’t play on mobile myself but you can’t deny this new reality.

Don't just sneak "console gamers" in there, that's disingenuous when the GP didn't say anything about them. Anyways, statistics aside he's right. Mobile games aren't the same thing as console/PC games. They are, almost without exception, thinly veiled monetization machines designed to be almost fun but not actually fun, just so you will pay money. They are literally designed to be less fun as a business strategy. The…

You also seem to be thinking of Candy Crush style games, whereas I was pointing out that in recent years some of the most popular mobile games are FPS, RTS, also things like Honkai: Star Rail and Genshin Impact and other action games. On the other end, desktop games have also become monetization machines in the same fashion - Fortnite, Apex, CS:GO, OW, Minecraft, Roblox are massive money-making machines. Any judgement about mobile games being 'less fun' or 'less serious' is entirely subjective.

This thread started because someone though Steam stands as the universal entrypoint to gaming in general, which is absolutely far from the truth.

Post reply on HN