In case you didn't know, we host chat rooms as well. In fact, we host over 600 of them! (see chatcave.me) The service has fared much better than initially anticipated. Believe it or not, though it isn't exactly profitable, it does pay for itself with fairly minimal ads, unlike its competitors.

I barely check on the support forums over there anymore and the spam has grown to unspeakable levels. Like, horrible. 110K posts and it's overloading the server. So much spam that I am currently SSHing into the server, going straight into the database, and via a command prompt, deleting these posts 1000 posts at a time. And even that is overloading the server. 

Would it be bothersome if we added a board over here on MS for chatcave support and posted everything chatcave related here instead?  It wouldn't be much of a liability being that those forums aren't really all that active, but it would sure solve the spam problem, and would free up the server for the actual chat rooms.

I recently bought a 2004 Subaru Forester for about $450. It's a trash car, literally have not even been able to get it to pass inspection. (Failed again today. It's gonna be a project, for sure... ) 

But I bought it for a specific reason: to drive on the beach.

The other day I drove it down to the beach access (they have special off roading zones designated for this purpose), and well, unfortunately, I was greeted by an attendant who did not hesitate to inform me that since my vehicle was all wheel drive instead of 4WD, that I would not be permitted to drive on the beach. 

I've done a fair amount of research on these things and have honestly found that they do not seem to fare poorly at all on the beach, so I'm confused. In fact, I've taken this thing in mud and over rocks, and over plenty of other surfaces and terrains, never once got stuck. This thing may not be a true 4WD, but with a little care and skill, this AWD kicks a** anyhow. 

So what is the difference anyway? 

Well, in theory, they are more technical than they really are anything else. Both systems are fully capable of sending power to all four wheels on the car. AWD, however, is always active, whereas 4WD has to be manually activated by the user. 4WD is generally more easily controlled by the user (e.g. determining when to use it and how to use it), but sometimes is not intended for actual street use and is designed more for offroading, and the differentials on the car sometimes have trouble spinning the wheels at different speeds when taking sharp turns. AWD, on the other hand, may not be as robust and does not have as many user controls available, but is more suitable for everyday use on the roads, and generally has much less trouble making sharp turns when active, etc. 

From my research, a lot of the controversy regarding the differences seems to be in the variability in all wheel drive systems. Particularly, it turns out that many AWD systems actually are only 2WD UNTIL traction is lost in one of the main drive wheels. Then it kicks into 4WD briefly until traction is regained. This doesn't usually fare too terribly well in offroad situations because, well, by then it's usually a bit late and you may have already gotten stuck. It's an upgrade over 2WD, but very much inferior to an actual 4WD. 

Subaru's aren't designed like this at all. Rather, in the Subaru AWD system, the engine's power is directed to all four wheels 100% of the time, just like an actual 4WD, so in theory it should perform significantly better than other AWDs on the beach. 

Based on this, I'm going to take it to another beach sometime later this week or next week, and we will see how it goes!  

as you guys know I've written a few technical tutorials, I'm always looking for new stuff to try out and tinker with, anyone have any suggestions for tutorials that you think would be super handy and useful to have written up?

I'm going to post houses I build in the sims here since I do that a lot more than I build cities lol.

7 Lighthouse way

2 BR 2 1.5 BA

The 2018 draft is less than a week away! The season is right around the corner! 

Draft discussion begins now, and season discussion will follow. 

Who's your favorites for the top draft picks?

The 2018 Spring Games are underway, freshman are getting involved and learning new systems. Teams have fully moved on from the past season are focused on this upcoming season. We still have 4 months before opening day, but it will fly by, so to keep any potential discussion going, I'm creating the 2018 thread early. 

There is still much to discuss!

Watch any spring games? What are your thoughts? What's your hopes for this year?

We've been working on recursive sequences in python in classes lately, and I was a little surprised at how much math actually makes a difference in your ability to optimize code. I wrote a little demonstration for one of my assignments. 

The fibonacci sequence makes no sense to me, but essentially, it goes like this. 

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ... 

Each digit is the sum of the two previous digits. Pretty simple. We could definitely extrapolate this as far as we wanted to and get an infinitely large number of digits, but I won't go there. Apparently this is some sort of important sequence in computer science and I don't know why, but you should be able to see the pattern easily enough. 

Say we wanted to know what, say, the 20th digit in the sequence was? It turns out that the method for finding this is a little bit more complicated than you'd think. It's rather tedious to go and actually add up all of the numbers. And particularly if you're going to use a recursive sequence, as fast as we think computers are these days, trying to go past about the 40th term or so in the sequence will crash my macbook because literally going through and generating this sequence is that tedious for a computer. Maybe yours might get a tad bit higher but I'd be willing to bet you won't get past 50 in Python. 

Okay, but why in the world is this so freaking slow?

It's because it's recursive. If it wants to find the 5th number in the sequence, it first must find the 4th and the 3rd, and add those up. But because it doesn't know what the 4th and the 3rd are, in order to find the 4th, it must find the 3rd and the 2nd. And in order to find the 3rd, it must find the 2nd and the first. And it has to go through all of these steps before it can give a simple answer. Although this is easy for small numbers, as you can probably imagine, this starts to grow exponentially once you start finding, say, the 20th, or the 30th, or the 35th number in a sequence. The next thing you know, your computer can't even find the 40th term in a simple sequence without crashing, where you could probably do it by hand in a matter of a few minutes. 


There are two ways to speed this up. Instead of calling the same function over and over again and creating a gigantic tree of function calls to recalculate the same data over and over and over again, you can either save what each digit is as you go, and only calculate if you haven't saved that particular digit yet, or you can use something called an exact solution (a simple formula you make out of the recursive sequence using some sort of voodoo magic) to do the trick. By saving these numbers, it prevents the results from growing exponentially because it never has to recalculate values it's gone over before. You can easily calculate, say, the 4000th term with this method. 

I demonstrated all three methods with the following code. It calculates the 35th number in the sequence. Enough to take a few seconds on the recursive calculation, but not enough to crash my Macbook. Hopefully it won't crash yours.

Attached Files

  fib2.py.zip (Size: 1.29 KB / Downloads: 398)

I played these games quite a bit growing up. Simcity always ran alright on integrated graphics for its time. I never really had too much of an issue, although on bigger cities I definitely did notice that the frame rate got pretty bad. But the game more than made up for it. Simcity 4 was always the best to me.

But even on my 2012 Macbook Pro (2.5 ghz dual core i5, 3rd generation) makes playing Cities Skylines almost unbearably slow. We're talking in the ballpark of 2-3 FPS at best. I can deal with 10 FPS. But 2-3 is absolutely awful. 

But this is a fairly, ish I suppose, old computer nevertheless. Even 4th generation i5's were better on graphics, and I'm sure the current 7th and 8th generations have far outdone even the Haswells. AMD supposedly has good integrated graphics too. 

Anyone play these games today on integrated graphics? Have any advice on what works and what doesn't? I wouldn't mind playing skylines again if I had a computer that could handle it.  

Hello all, 

So a community that was near and dear, and beloved by several of us here, has now (apparently, as I'm told) been put to rest. Not all of us are members of this community, and neither are we at MS, an offshoot in any capacity. But many of the members that were the most invested in MS were invested here because they supported what we did, and a couple of us were active members over at Simmania. Other communities that people have come from that have made the MS community include the general MyBB community (including Icyboards), as well as a few other websites, and collectively, they have made us what we are. (I have faith. We'll make it further! )

But Simmania (http://simmania.net) was something special of its own. Founded in 2010, it has brought over eight years of tight-knit community that has stayed true to its values. I write this as a former admin of the community from years back, as it started off with a core group of about four or five people, most of which aren't around today, until around 2013ish, where members such as pupper_donut and brian come from. The community was a small Simcity fansite with a very active chat community that slowly spread out 

It was never a huge forum. It had about 35K posts about ~300 members, many of whom had posted, by the time it had disappeared. So this thread shall serve as a tribute to one of our biggest inspirations as a community. And because some of the same members that supported Simmania now are here supporting MS, and because MS shares much of the same tight-knit atmosphere that defined Simmania, Makestation now says profoundly, thank you. 

May a tribute to Simmania be held here in this thread. 
Farwells, beloved community.