Interesting, Non Political News

Leaked Wipeout source code leads to near-total rewrite and remaster

"Either let it be, or shut this thing down and get a real remaster going."

arstechnica.com

There have been a lot of Wipeout games released since the 1995 original, including Wipeout HD and the Omega Collection, but only the original has the distinction of having its Windows port source code leaked by (since defunct) archive Forest of Illusion.

Dominic Szablewski grabbed that code before it disappeared and set about creating a version that’s not just a port. He rewrote the game’s rendering, physics, sound, and generally “everything everywhere.” He documented the project, put his code on GitHub, and has some version of a justification. “So let's just pretend that the leak was intentional, a rewrite of the source falls under fair use and the whole thing is abandonware anyway,” Szablewski writes.

Most of the code seemed to come from Wipeout ATI 3D Rage Edition, a “lackluster port for Windows” that was bundled with ATI GPUs, Szablewski wrote. It is a mess. There are fragments of code versions from DOS, PlayStation, Windows 95, and Windows 98, with lots of things shakily patched in, including some kludgey 25-to-30 frames-per-second physics calculations in moving from European PAL to North American NTSC. The result was bad geometry, sluggish performance, and even goofed text rendering.

Not that he doesn’t have sympathy. “The code may not be pretty, but the result justifies it all,” he wrote. The PSX launch title braved unseen hardware and 3D models and physics and holds up today. But this pack-in version “is some caffeine-induced nightmare code written under immense time pressure. The 5000 lines of if else that handles the menu state is a striking witness to this insanity.”

As he digs into the specifics of his work, Szablewski takes the reader on a tour of PSX dev kits and how they handled Z-levels, how to translate yesterday’s triangles to today’s OpenGL, breaking the 30 FPS cap on a game that explicitly forbade that, and more. He takes the code from 40,699 lines to 7,731 and notably loved an excuse to work in C. “I had an absolute blast cleaning up this mess!”

Szablewski’s Wipeout rewrite can be compiled for Windows, Linux, Mac, and WASM (Web Assembly). You can even play it in your browser on his server (please be gentle). I spent some time in it this morning, and let me tell you: I am not ready for anti-gravity racing in the year 2052. It was a struggle to even get to fourth place, but those struggles were due entirely to skill, not system. The web version feels buttery smooth, even when you’re continually clunking into walls. I had misremembered this game as having a lot more to it, but it’s all feel: the trance/prog music, the physics, the controls, and the sense that you’re always just slightly out of control.

What about Sony and their legions of lawyers? Szablewski writes that Sony has “demonstrated a lack of interest in the original” Wipeout, so he doesn’t expect to hear much. “If anyone at Sony is reading this, please consider that you have (in my opinion) two equally good options: either let it be, or shut this thing down and get a real remaster going. I’d love to help!”

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How NYC’s fine-dining elite got pranked by Gen Zer’s fake steakhouse — complete with milk servers, ‘celebs,’ and wedding proposal

For those who experienced the one-night-only Mehran’s Steakhouse, the relatively subtle charade was an only-in-New-York stunt to be remembered.

nypost.com

This Manhattan restaurant is a tough reservation to book — because it doesn’t exist.

The foodie gentry who gathered for their dinner at Mehran’s Steakhouse this weekend believed they’d at last gotten off the years-long waitlist for a highly exclusive, 100-year-old chop house, which finally had an available table at its Lower East Side location.

In reality, what some 140 diners experienced this Saturday evening was an elaborate prank pulled off by a 21-year-old AI startup founder — and some 65 of his friends.

The practical joke of a white tablecloth institution was born during the pandemic, in 2021, when Mehran Jalali’s 16 housemates decided to commemorate the biweekly steak dinners he’d cook them by marking their Upper East Side home as a chop house on Google Maps.

The mostly teenage roomies all left glowing reviews for the newfound institution, leading to intrigued strangers showing up at their door seeking steak.

Mehran then made a website for their solidly booked, “revolutionary steak experience” and, by the end of 2022, had accrued a 2,600-person waitlist.

Seeking to make the hoax a reality, he and a crew of co-conspirators recruited friends to compose the volunteer staff, found a venue, got a one-day liquor license, food handling permits, plane tickets to New York (he now lives in San Francisco) and a 212 number to invite select waitlisters to his ephemeral eatery.

For those who attended, the relatively subtle charade was an only-in-New-York stunt to be remembered.

Set in an unmarked public bathhouse-turned-event space on East 11th Street, Mehran’s Steakhouse was not immediately obvious as being a one-night-only joke, although over the course of the night most guests appeared to notice that something was off.

The first clue for the more observant of the crowd lay off the lobby, hanging on a wall en route to the main dining area: A selection of framed photographs depicting chef Mehran posing with an array of celebrities he had ostensibly cooked for over the many, many years.

Pictured stars included Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, a group of 1920s mobsters, Obama and JFK.

“I would recommend suspending your understanding of linear time,” Mehran advised when asked about the images.

Further down the wall were a series of large format promotional posters from Mehran’s Steakhouse over the decades, including one advertising “bone marrow ice cream.”

Across the way, a looping black and white projection varyingly showed videos of raw meat cooling off, being salted and in a skillet next to a large half-head of garlic.

As violin covers of pop hits (and at one point the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” theme song) played, one of the ridiculously overstaffed venue’s army of barely-legal servers showed the well-dressed patrons to their seats, where a 15-inch laser-etched wood cut provided them with a comedic amount of text describing their upcoming, $114 prix-fixe meal.

“The bright blissful days, the frigid unforgiving nights, heat, snow, drought, storm, all earthly experiences felt in tandem. Is this not community?” read one high-brow gibberish line from the giant block of text describing the “Agrarian Synergies” course, one of five themed to “the Bovine Circle of Life.”

As part of this meal concept, two suited waiters at one point paraded around a gallon of whole milk as though it were a fine wine.

“The milk is intended to represent the bovine life cycle,” my 21-year-old server, Erika, informed me as a sommelier suppressed a smile and poured me a large glass of it, adding “We felt it would be remiss to not include the cow’s byproducts.”

Another, different waiter later informed me the milk came from a cow in Uganda named Philip.

“Mmm, yes, Philip, a common name for a female cow,” Mehran commented, hands perpetually clasped behind his back, playing a solemn chef as he ambled among tables in a black double-breasted jacket.

At around 8 p.m., a large crowd could briefly be heard screaming for Drake at the front of the building, and at 8:30, the music stopped (and never resumed) as a disheveled man gave an extremely scripted-sounding marriage proposal to a woman he had known “for five to six years.”

(“Did she say yes?” asked a blonde at the table next to us who seemed very much not in on the joke.)

Overall, as the five-or-so hours of Mehran’s Steakhouse’s brief existence progressed, the general ambiance remained typical of an NYC restaurant on a rainy Saturday.

Guests checked their phones, checked out their neighbors, ate their food and otherwise went through the normal motions of those enjoying a nice meal on the town — not realizing they were part of an intricate performance piece.

“Some improvements could be made,” agreed two Upper East Side gourmands I spoke with on my way out, citing their experience eating at Michelin-starred restaurants as their judgment credentials, and noting they were disappointed they’d been on the waitlist for years only to get reservations at this location, and not the one in their neighborhood.

Outside, in the drizzle, two guests were smoking and attempted to get two of the steakhouse’s in-house videographers to explain what was happening.

“I went into the kitchen and there were 50 people in there — I wanted to find someone who would confess,” said retired colonel David Menegon, disbelieving this writer worked for The New York Post, having already met purported reporters for the New York Times and This American Life that evening. “It’s bulls–t. I’m having a great time.”

Not everyone was amused: One couple threatened Mehran with legal action after finding out his “restaurant is fake.”

Others, though, considered the farce to be a delight, a rare moment of absurd and edible entertainment in a city which often takes itself and its food too seriously.

“It’s New York, you can eat anywhere,” said opera singer Scott Thomas. “But for it to be this fun is priceless.”

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Drinking diet sodas and aspartame-sweetened beverages daily during pregnancy linked to autism in male offspring - UT Health San Antonio

Contact: Steven Lee, (210) 450-3823, [email protected] SAN ANTONIO, Sept. 20, 2023 – A new published study led by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) has found an association between autism diagnosis in boys and daily consumption...

news.uthscsa.edu

In this case-control study, boys who had been diagnosed with autism were more than three times as likely as neurotypically developing boys to have been born to mothers who reported consuming one or more servings per day of diet soda, or comparable amounts of the leading artificial sweetener aspartame, during pregnancy or breastfeeding. No statistically significant association was found in female offspring.

“These associations do not prove causality, but taken in concert with reports from earlier studies of increased prematurity and cardiometabolic health impacts among infants and children exposed daily to diet beverages and/or aspartame during pregnancy, our findings raise new questions about potential neurological impacts that need to be addressed,” said Raymond F. Palmer, PhD, senior author of the paper, and professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at UT Health San Antonio.

Since its introduction, aspartame consumption has been reported to cause neurological problems in some users. It has also been associated with increased health problems among the offspring of animals fed aspartame during pregnancy, and among children whose mothers had consumed diet sodas, other diet beverages and/or aspartame daily during pregnancy.

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