For Four Years In A Row...

Noelene du Toit (Educator-in-Charge of Northcliff High School's Esports Club) awarding learners awards for excellence in esports.

Success is often dependant on pure guts and staying power. Often those with oodles of pure talent are not as successful as those who with greater drive, ambition, and determination are willing to put in the work year-in-and-year-out to make a success.

Of course, the results of schools may fluctuate from year-to-year as learners come and go, but if the administration of the club is sound, the club should hold its own.

Thus the achievement of Northcliff High School is quite remarkable.

Mind Sports South Africa's (MSSA) Online School Championships is the first championship of the year, and represents the ability of the schools to gear up for thhe gruelling competitive year ahead. The points earned by the various schools in this first official championships, sets the ttone for the rest of the year as schools fight for the honour of being named, and known as, the best esports school of the year.

The remarkable achievement of Northcliff dominating MSSA's Online School Championships for four years in a row is previously unheard of. The result is testament to the hard work, dedication, and excellence of those few, but happy few, educators who put the best interests of their learners first.

The top ten schools for the past four years: 

2020		2019		2018		2017
Pos	Name of school	Pos	Name of school	Pos	Name of school	Pos	Name of school
1	Northcliff High School	1	Northcliff High School	1	Northcliff High School	1	Northcliff High School
2	Oakhill School	2	Paul Roos Gimnasium	2	Paul Roos Gimnasium	2	HTS Witbank
3	Hoërskool Randburg	3	Empangeni High School	3	Parklands College	3	Hoërskool Wonderboom
4	Monument Park High School	4	Hyde Park High	4	Westville Boys	4	Parklands College
5	Sasolburg High School	5	Fairmont High School	4	Empangeni High School	5	SAHETI
6	Curro Grantleigh	6	Curro Grantleigh	6	Grey High School	6	Cedar House School
6	High School Zwartkops	7	Helpmekaar Kollege	7	Northwood Boys	7	Protea Heights Academy
8	Redhill High School	8	Curro Aurora	8	Bishops College	8	Hoërskool Lichtenburg
9	Hoërskool Klerksdorp	9	Curro Mount Richmore	9	Helpmekaar	9	Oakhill
10	Empangeni High	10	Monument Park High School	10	SAHETI	10	Maritzburg College

Also read:

• Results of MSSA's 10th Annual Online Championships for High Schools

• Ensuring gender equity in esports.
• MSSA celebrates its women who have earned Protea Colours.
• Why schools and universities should invest in esports.
• Entry fees for Provincial and National Championships
• How school clubs affiliate for the 2020 season.
• 2020 Calendar of Events
• The various events held by Mind Sports South Africa.
• Why schools and universities should invest in esports
• New National Team Selection Criteria
• Selecting the national Protea teams for Mind Sports South Africa.
• The road to Eilat
• MSSA to nominate candidates for IESF's International Referee Workshop.

Apache Flink: Exploratory Data Analytics With SQL - CoderProg

Apache Flink: Exploratory Data Analytics with SQL

PUBG New Map Venezia 2.0 Confirmed To Release

PUBG has announced a big update about a new map called 'Venezia'. After the Vikendi snow map update, there were 4 maps v.i.z Erangel, Sanhok, Miramar and Vikendi but PUBG Corp is developing a new map Venezia inspired from Venice, Italy. Along with the map, 3 vehicles and 4 new weapons will also be available in this update.

Developer : 

                    Venezia is designed and developed by James Coreman, an employee of PUBG Corp,  the same man who designed the Sanhok map. Venezia will come in a size of 4×4 km. It is said that it will include the area between Georgopol, Pochinki, and Primorsk.

Inspiration : 

                       As already mentioned Venezia has been inspired by a city in Italy called Venice. Venice is a city in Italy having more than 100 small islands. This city is well-known for its large number of canals, bridges and small islands.
     
                       Venezia is fully inspired by this city. Thus Venezia will mostly contain water all over the island. This shows that this map will be very challenging and tough to play.

Vehicles : 

•          In this map, 3 more vehicles will be available. They are-
• 
  
•  1. Aquarail
•  2. Bicycle
•  3. Vespa

Weapons : 

• Venezia will contain the following 4 new weapons-
• 
  
• 1. Beretta ARX 160: It is an assault rifle that will require 5.56 mm ammo.
• 
  
• 2. Benelli M4: It has been a high time since a new shotgun has been added. Venezia will feature this shotgun.
• 
  
• 3. HK-911: As the map, Venezia is mostly covered with water so PUBG introduced this underwater pistol. Yeah you heard it right it is a pistol that can fire underwater also which requires 7.62 mm ammo
• 
  
• 4. C4 Explosive charge: It is not a gun but an explosive basically. One can attach it anywhere on the wall or objects or one can throw it also. It can be obtained by creates only.

Release date : 

             Though the date of release hasn't been officially declared, it is reported to come in 0.13 global version. And the expected date to release is 20-25 April 2019.

IBM PCjr. Upgrades Part 2

When I first received my IBM PCjr. back in 2013, I was able to discuss most of the readily-available upgrades for the system that existed at that time.  https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2014/03/ibm-pcjr-upgrades.html  Now, almost six years later, we have some new upgrades available.  Let's see what modern conveniences can do for a 35-year old computer system


Read more »

You say "obsessed" as if it is a bad thing.

Something A Little different....The First Of The Romans

One on-going project I have at the moment (and one which is going to go on for quite a long time!), is painting up a lot of Warlord Early Imperial Romans. Not for me, I might add, but fun nonetheless. Here are the first 2 cohorts- eventually I'll have a couple of Legions worth + all the Auxilia to do. So, quite a bit.
I'm not doing this alone, thank God, but as part of a team of painters in order to accomplish this massive task.

I've always wanted to do an Early Imperial army, but have never actually got round to it, one of those situations common to just about every wargamer, we all have "those projects" I guess, so having the opportunity to paint one for someone else will hopefully get it out of my system.

Early Imperials have always been the "classic" Romans for me, Square Scutem, Lorica Segmentata, I suspect my like of them goes back to a bunch of Timpo figures I had when I was a youngster.
The Warlord figures have been around for while, go together fairly easily, choices of sword-arm or pilum, a few different head choices. The ones in the pictures are a mixture of the basic set and the set sold as "veterans" - these give you a few extra choices - different heads and helmets, and battered shields. All the veterans have the additional magnia sword- arm armour a few legionaires adopted for the Dacian wars. Fortunately these are indeed for the Dacian campaigns so they will fit right in.

                       There are a few extra metal command figures mixed in- manufacturer unknown.

Anyway, I'm enjoying doing these, which is probably just as well, seeing as there are a few to paint! It makes for a good diversion from the WWII projects which I'm also doing for myself.

        So thats a few Romans, Next up, I'll be showing some rather lovely Dacian tribesmen to oppose them

Oceanhorn 2 In Development!

I can't believe it has been five years since we announced the development of the first Oceanhorn game on this blog. Now the time has come for another major announcement.

We are proud and excited to reveal the next installment of the Oceanhorn franchise, Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm. Here's how it looks!

Oceanhorn 2 has been in development for little over a year

The boy has grown up? That's right! But he is a different boy altogether! Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm is set in another time period on the Oceanhorn timeline. The game has a new Hero, a boy who has been trained to become a Knight of Arcadia.

Oceanhorn 2 will be built upon the same elements that were the heart and soul of the first Oceanhorn game: exploring a colorful world, a deep backstory with secrets and twists, amazing music, and most importantly – classic Action RPG gameplay with items, puzzles, battles, and badass bosses!

The Caster is a magical weapon that only Knights carry

The game is played from a third person camera angle that will take players right into the heat of action and allows them to explore even the smallest details of Arcadia. Our battle system consists of sword fighting, utilizing powerful spells and finding creative ways to use various items that Hero discovers on his travels.

One of the key items in the game is the Caster, a gun that shoots magical projectiles! It will have many uses on the player's adventure, from puzzle solving to luring enemies and casting directed spells.

The game will feature a traversable world map

Oceanhorn 2 will also feature a traversable and vast world map that consists of fields, forests, mountains, and water. It works as a hub between levels, dungeons and towns, much like in many of the classic JRPGs.

"For us, Oceanhorn 2 is the fulfillment of a JRPG dream."

Oceanhorn 2 is an opportunity to create something new from the strong background that we established with our previous game. In Oceanhorn 2, we want to emphasize the elements that people loved and create something new and brave on that foundation.

The world of Oceanhorn has grown and so has our team. The core team working on Oceanhorn 2 is now a team of five!

Heikki Repo, Creator and Lead Artist
Jukka Viljamaa, Lead Programmer
Antti Viljamaa, Lead Programmer
Kalle Hämäläinen, Graphics Programmer
Miko Kiuru, Game Artist

Also, Kalle Ylitalo will return to compose soundtrack for Oceanhorn 2 and the famed sound designer and foley artist Tapio Liukkonen will be in charge of the audio experience.

For us, Oceanhorn 2 is the fulfillment of a JRPG dream. It is a dream of running down green fields with the warmth of the sun on your face. It is a dream of learning the secrets of ancient ruins despite the danger. It is also a dream of finding yourself looking at beautiful mountains on the horizon and imagining what's beyond them. It will be an amazing journey ahead of us and we hope that you will join us on that journey!

In the upcoming months, we will have many things to show to you and many secrets to unveil regarding Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm. This is a dream project for us, but even more importantly, we are making this game for you to enjoy and experience. So, please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas on Twitter and Facebook!

And make sure to check out Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas on PS4 and Xbox One this fall!

What I Did In 2019

It's time for my annual self review. You can see previous ones from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018. I didn't have a lot of goals for this year:

1. Write to my blog instead of only to Twitter or other closed platforms.
2. Improve my explanations and write new ones.

The first I can measure by looking at whether I blogged about my projects. I did: 24 blog posts this year. I'm pretty happy with that. The second is harder to evaluate, but I would say I didn't spend nearly as much time on explanations as I had hoped to. I wrote these new explanations, but they were small:

• Axes and Angles
• Grid Edges
• Circle Filling
• Making-of: little details

And I worked on these two, but didn't get them to a point I was happy with:

• Coordinate transforms - abandoned
• A* Heuristics - incomplete

I spent some time improving existing explanations:

• A* Implementation - clarified terminology: "location", "node", "state" can all be graph nodes
• Distance to Any - improved layout
• Making-of: drag handles - updated to work with touch screens
• Differential heuristics - continued to work on it but still nowhere near complete
• Terrain from Noise - island and wraparound map sections
• Hexagon Guide - improved the map storage section, and improved the load time
• 2d Fourier Noise - refactored code, improved the terrain rendering

Instead of explanations, this year I was more inspired to work on art, learning, and other fun projects:

• Goldberg Coxeter
• Orbit Spirograph
• Growth Forms
• Reaction Diffusion
• Delaunator Animation
• Voronoi Percolation
• Sphere HEALPix
• Cube morphed into a sphere
• Square tiling of a sphere
• Dungeon on a sphere
• Weighted cell rendering
• Isometric outline experiments
• Cellular influence maps
• Dyson Hatching
• Triangle texture patterns

I also have 15 other projects that weren't for the general public (for clients, or responses to emails, etc.). I generated new logos for my social media presence using a new logo generator I wrote. And I updated my home page with links to lots of projects I hadn't previously linked. I track these projects on Trello.

What else? I'm hanging out on AIMA chat (students who want to contribute to the AIMA textbook open source project), Roguelike Discord, ProcJam Discord, a few Slacks, Twitter, and a few subreddits. I decided to go to non-GDC conferences this year, and went to BangBangCon, FDG, and Roguelike Celebration. I'm pretty happy with how all of this went this year.

For several years I've hoped that the coordinate systems page would become the next big successful project after the Hexagon page and the A* page. I've attempted to write it several times but just haven't been happy with it. I'm now starting to think that maybe it's not going to be the next big success for me. I've also been trying to come up with a good explanation of differential heuristics but can't seem to make much progress. Maybe I won't have any more big successes with tutorials, and should stop looking for that.

What are my goals for 2020? Unfortunately, I don't have any strong goals. After working on big projects in 2018, I ended up working on small projects in 2019. I would like to work on something bigger, but I think my focus will be on learning new things rather than explaining things I already know. I'd like to work on projects that last a month or two rather than a week or two, to really dig into them and learn a topic deeper than I can do in a week. Other than that, I feel kind of aimless right now. I'm ok with that. I'm in a wander-and-explore phase of my life.

Brave Browser voted the best privacy-focused product of 2020

Out of all the privacy-focused products and apps available on the market, Brave has been voted the best. Other winners of Product Hunt's Golden Kitty awards showed that there was a huge interest in privacy-enhancing products and apps such as chats, maps, and other collaboration tools.

An extremely productive year for Brave

Last year has been a pivotal one for the crypto industry, but few companies managed to see the kind of success Brave did. Almost every day of the year has been packed witch action, as the company managed to officially launch its browser, get its Basic Attention Token out, and onboard hundreds of thousands of verified publishers on its rewards platform.

Luckily, the effort Brave has been putting into its product hasn't gone unnoticed.

The company's revolutionary browser has been voted the best privacy-focused product of 2019, for which it received a Golden Kitty award. The awards, hosted by Product Hunt, were given to the most popular products across 23 different product categories.

Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt said:

"Our annual Golden Kitty awards celebrate all the great products that makers have launched throughout the year"

Brave's win is important for the company—with this year seeing the most user votes ever, it's a clear indicator of the browser's rapidly rising popularity.

Privacy and blockchain are the strongest forces in tech right now

If reaching 10 million monthly active users in December was Brave's crown achievement, then the Product Hunt award was the cherry on top.

The recognition Brave got from Product Hunt users shows that a market for privacy-focused apps is thriving. All of the apps and products that got a Golden Kitty award from Product Hunt users focused heavily on data protection. Everything from automatic investment apps and remote collaboration tools to smart home products emphasized their privacy.

AI and machine learning rose as another note-worthy trend, but blockchain seemed to be the most dominating force in app development. Blockchain-based messaging apps and maps were hugely popular with Product Hunt users, who seem to value innovation and security.

For those users, Brave is a perfect platform. The company's research and development team has recently debuted its privacy-preserving distributed VPN, which could potentially bring even more security to the user than its already existing Tor extension.

Brave's effort to revolutionize the advertising industry has also been recognized by some of the biggest names in publishing—major publications such as The Washington Post, The Guardian, NDTV, NPR, and Qz have all joined the platform. Some of the highest-ranking websites in the world, including Wikipedia, WikiHow, Vimeo, Internet Archive, and DuckDuckGo, are also among Brave's 390,000 verified publishers.

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