#that and I also was throwing bombs like they were frisbees instead of aiming them at the enemies feet and detonating them on the ground at

[agothorn]

Vincent Shepard: *waking up from some beacon nightmare that alludes to important plot, but other than that is in perfect health* That was a terrible mission, but at least we made it back

Ashley: *laying down in the next med bed, looks like absolute hell for dying twice on said mission*

Kaiden: *laying down on another med bed, also looks like absolute hell for surviving the mission on a sliver of health*

Ashley and Kaiden: *both groaning in pain and in unison*

[vatsal1804]

How Science is Revolutionizing the World of Dog Training

It was about a month into raising a new border collie puppy, Alsea, when I came to an embarrassing realization: my dog had yet to meet a person who doesn’t look like me.

I’d read several books on raising a dog, and they all agree on at least one thing: proper socialization of a puppy, especially during the critical period from eight to 20 weeks, means introducing her to as many people as I possibly could. Not just people, but diverse people: people with beards and sunglasses; people wearing fedoras and sombreros; people jogging; people in Halloween costumes. And, critically, people of different ethnicities. Fail to do this, and your dog may inexplicably bark at people wearing straw hats or big sunglasses.

This emphasis on socialization is an important element of a new approach to raising the modern dog. It eschews the old, dominating, Cesar Millan–style methods that were based on flawed studies of presumed hierarchies in wolf packs. Those methods made sense when I raised my last dog, Chica, in the early aughts. I read classic dominance-oriented books by the renowned upstate New York trainers The Monks of New Skete, among others, to teach her I was the leader of her pack, even when that meant stern corrections, like shaking her by the scruff of the neck. Chica was a well-behaved dog, but she was easily discouraged when I tried teaching her something new.

I don’t mean to suggest I had no better option; there was then a growing movement to teach dog owners all about early socialization and the value of rewards-based training, and plenty of trainers who employed only positive reinforcement. But in those days, the approach was the subject of debate and derision: treat-trained mongers might do what you want if they know a biscuit is hidden in your palm, but they’d ignore you otherwise. I proudly taught my dog tough love.

This time, with the assistance of a new class of trainers and scientists, I’ve changed my methods entirely, and I have been shocked to discover booming product lines of puzzles, entertaining toys, workshops and “canine enrichment” resources available to the modern dog “parent,” which has helped boost the U.S. pet industry to $86 billion in annual sales. Choke collars, shock collars, even the word no are all-but-verboten. It’s a new day in dog training.

The science upon which these new techniques are based is not exactly new: it’s rooted in learning theory and operant conditioning, which involves positive (the addition of) or negative (the withdrawal of) reinforcement. It also includes the flipside: positive or negative punishment. A brief primer: Petting a dog on the head for fetching the newspaper is positive reinforcement, because you’re taking an action (positive) to encourage (reinforce) a behavior. Scolding a dog to stop an unwanted behavior is positive punishment, because it’s an action to discourage a behavior. A choke collar whose tension is released when the dog stops pulling on it is negative reinforcement, because the dog’s desirable behavior (backing off) results in the removal of an undesirable consequence. Taking away a dog’s frisbee because he’s barking at it is negative punishment, because you’ve withdrawn a stimulus to decrease an unwanted behavior.

Much has changed about the way that science is applied today. As canine training has shifted from the old obedience-driven model directed at show dogs to a more relationship-based approach aimed at companion dogs, trainers have discovered that the use of negative reinforcement and positive punishment actually slow a dog’s progress, because they damage its confidence and, more importantly, its relationship with a handler. Dogs that receive too much correction—especially the harsh physical correction and mean-spirited “Bad dog!” scoldings—begin to retreat from trying new things.

These new methods are backed by a growing body of science—and a rejection of the old thinking, of wolves (and their descendants, dogs) as dominance-oriented creatures. The origin of so-called “alpha theory” comes from a scientist named Rudolph Schenkel, who conducted a study of wolves in 1947 in which animals from different packs were forced into a small enclosure with no prior interaction. They fought, naturally, which Schenkel wrongly interpreted as a battle for dominance. The reality, Schenkel was later forced to admit, was that the wolves were stressed, not striving for alpha status.

A study from Portugal published last fall in the pre-print digital database BioRxiv (meaning it is not yet peer-reviewed) evaluated dozens of dogs selected from schools that either employed the use of shock collars, leash corrections and other aversive techniques or didn’t—sticking entirely or almost entirely to the use of positive reinforcement (treats) to get the behavior they wanted. Dogs from the positive schools universally performed better at tasks the researchers put in front of them, and the dogs from aversive schools displayed considerably more stress, both in observable ways—licking, yawning, pacing, whining—and in cortisol levels measured in saliva swabs.

These new findings are especially relevant this year. Dog adoption in the COVID-19 era has ballooned, arguably because isolated Americans are newly in search of companionship and because working from home makes at least the idea of raising a puppy feasible. Before the pandemic, it was young city dwellers driving the boom in demand for and supply of dog trainers who employ positive methods, and an explosion in the proliferation of professional trainers across the globe. Often because they’ve delayed or decided against having children, millennials and Generation Z are spending lavish amounts of money on pets: toys, food, puzzles, fancy harnesses, rain jackets, life jackets and training. And those professional trainers, from the Guide Dogs for the Blind organization to renowned handler Denise Fenzi, have formed a legion of experimenters. They universally report that the less negativity they use in training, the more quickly their dogs learn.

Over the past 15 years, handlers with Guide Dogs for the Blind, which trains dogs to be aides for sight-impaired people, have extinguished nearly all negative training techniques and with dramatic results. A new dog can now be ready to guide its owner in half the time it once took, and they can remain with an owner for an extra year or two, because they’re so much less stressed out by the job, says Susan Armstrong, the organization’s vice president of client, training and veterinary operations. Even bomb-sniffing and military dogs are seeing more positive reinforcement, which is why you might have noticed that working dogs in even the most serious environments (like airports) seem to be enjoying their jobs more than in the past. “I don’t think you’re imagining that,” Armstrong says. “These dogs love working. They love getting rewards for good behavior. It’s serious, but it can be fun.”

Susan Friedman, a psychology professor at Utah State University, entered the dog-training world after a 20-year career in special education, a field in which she has a doctorate. In the late 1990s, she adopted a parrot, and was shocked to discover that most of the available advice she could find about raising a well-mannered bird involved only harsh corrections: If it bites, abruptly drop the bird on the floor. If it makes too much noise, shroud the cage in complete darkness. If it tries to escape, clip the bird’s flight feathers. Friedman applied her own research and experience to her parrot training, and discovered it all comes down to behavior. “No species on the planet behaves for no reason,” she says. “What’s the function of a parrot biting your hand? Why might a child throw down at the toy aisle? What’s the purpose of the behavior, and how does it open the environment to rewards and also to aversive stimuli?”

Friedman’s early articles about positive-reinforcement animal training met a skeptical audience back in the early aughts. Now, thanks to what she calls a “groundswell from animal trainers” newly concerned about the ethics of animal raising, Friedman is summoned to consult at zoos and aquariums around the world. She emphasizes understanding how a better analysis of an animal’s needs might help trainers punish them less. Last year, she produced a poster called the “hierarchy roadmap” designed to help owners identify underlying causes and conditions of behavior, and address the most likely influencers—illness, for example—before moving on to other assumptions. That’s not to suggest old-school dog trainers might ignore an illness, but they might be too quick to move to punishment before considering causes of unwanted behavior that could be addressed with less-invasive techniques.

The field is changing rapidly, Friedman says. Even in the last year, trainers have discovered new ways to replace an aversive technique with a win: if a dog scratches (instead of politely sitting) at the door to be let out, many trainers would have in recent years advised owners to ignore the scratching so as not to reward the behavior. They would hope for “extinction,” for the dog to eventually stop doing the bad thing that results in no reward. But that’s an inherently negative approach. What if it could be replaced with something positive? Now, most trainers would now recommend redirecting the scratching dog to a better behavior, a come or a sit, rewarded with a treat. The bad behavior not only goes extinct, but the dog learns a better behavior at the same time.

The debate is not entirely quashed. Mark Hines, a trainer with the pet products company Kong who works with dogs across the country, says that while positive reinforcement certainly helps dogs acquire knowledge at the fastest rate, there’s still a feeling among trainers of military and police dogs that some correction is required to get an animal ready for service. “Leash corrections and pinch collars are science-based, as well,” Hines says. “Positive punishment is a part of science.”

The key, Hines says, is to avoid harsh and unnecessary kinds of positive punishment, so as not to damage the relationship between handler and dog. Dogs too often rebuked will steadily narrow the range of things they try, because they figure naturally that might reduce the chance they get yelled at.

The Cesar Millans of the world are not disappearing. But the all- or mostly positive camp is growing faster. Hundreds of trainers attend “Clicker Expos,” an annual event put on in various cities by one of the most prominent positivity-based dog-training institutions in the world, the Karen Pryor Academy in Waltham, Mass. And Fenzi, another of the world’s most successful trainers, teaches her positive-reinforcement techniques online to no less than 10,000 students each term.

While there is some lingering argument about how much positivity vs. negativity to introduce into a training regimen, there’s next to zero debate about what may be the most important component of raising a new dog: socialization. Most trainers now teach dog owners about the period between eight and 20 weeks in which it is vital to introduce a dog to all kinds of sights and sounds they may encounter in later life. Most “bad” behavior is really the product of poor early socialization. For two months, I took Alsea to weekly “puppy socials” at Portland’s Doggy Business, where experienced handlers monitor puppies as they interact and play with one another in a romper room filled with ladders and hula hoops and children’s playhouses, strange surfaces that they might otherwise develop fear about encountering. Such classes didn’t exist until a few years ago.

A vizsla puppy at a dog training class at Doggy Business in Portland, Oregon, on Jun. 4. Holly Andres for TIME

I also took Alsea to dog-training classes, at a different company, Wonder Puppy. At the first session, trainer Kira Moyer reminded her human students that the most important thing we need to do for our dogs is advocate, which is also based in a renewed appreciation of science. Instead of correcting your dog for whining, for example, stop for a moment and think about why that’s happening? What do they want? Can you give that to them, or give them an opportunity to earn the thing they want, and learn good behavior at the same time?

Enrichment is another booming area of the dog-training world. I didn’t feed Alsea out of a regular dog bowl for the first six months she’s been with me, because it was so much more mentally stimulating for her to eat from a food puzzle, a device that makes it just a little bit challenging for an animal to acquire breakfast. These can be as simple as a round plastic plate with kibble dispersed between a set of ridges that have to be navigated, or as complex as the suite of puzzles developed by Swedish entrepreneur Nina Ottosson. At the highest level, a dog might have to move a block, flip the lid up, remove a barrier or spin a wheel to earn food. Another common source of what we consider “bad” behavior in dogs is really just an expression of boredom, of a dog that needs a job and has decided to give himself one: digging through the garbage, barking at the mail carrier. Food puzzles make dinnertime a job. When Ottosson first started, “they called me ‘the crazy dog lady.’ Nobody believed dogs would eat food out of a puzzle,” she says. “Today, nobody calls me that.”

When Alsea was 4 months old (she’s 12 months now), I traveled south of Portland to Oregon’s Willamette Valley to introduce her to Ian Caldicott, a farmer who teaches dogs and handlers how to herd sheep. First we watched one of his students working her own dog. As the border collie made mistakes, the tension in her owner’s voice escalated and her corrections grew increasingly harsh. “Just turn your back and listen,” Caldicott said to me. “You can hear the panic in her voice creeping in.”

Dogs are smart and can read that insecurity. It makes them question their faith in the handler and, in some cases, decide they know better. Raising a good sheepdog is about building trust between the dog and the handler, Caldicott says. That does require some correction—a “Hey!” when the dog goes left instead of right, at times—but what’s most important is confidence, both in the dog and the handler. In the old days, sheepdogs were taught left and right with physical coercion. Now, they’re given just enough guidance to figure out the right track by themselves. “We’re trying to get an animal that thinks for itself. A good herding dog thinks he knows better than you. Your job is to teach him you’re worth listening to,” Caldicott says. “The ones born thinking they’re the king of the universe, all you have to do is not take that away.”

Learn More Here: https://bit.ly/3jEFySe

[coolgreatwebsite]

Why DotEmu Has Me Worried About Windjammers On The PS4

Early in 1994, an unassuming little game named Windjammers made its way to arcades. Developed by Data East for the Neo Geo Multi Video System, Windjammers is essentially high-octane video air hockey. Players pick one of six characters with different skills and shots, one of six courts of different sizes and layouts, and proceed to volley a frisbee back and forth with the hopes of jamming it past their opponent and into the goal. It’s a game that’s dead simple to pick up and play, but that simplicity masks an amount of depth to its mechanics and variety in a player’s options that makes Windjammers something special. When two skilled competitors go at it throwing rapid fire shots, counter-shots, trick shots, super shots and counter-super shots, the game is an edge-of-your-seat adrenaline pumping blur. Unfortunately, most people just didn’t seem to catch on to that hidden layer, and Windjammers was generally met with a middling reaction.

As time went on and arcade game emulation became easier, Windjammers gained a bit of a cult classic status. For a good long while it was a side-tournament staple in the fighting game community, and a French community had rallied around it and were doing their thing, but it wasn’t until website about video games Giant Bomb started playing it in 2013 that North American awareness of the game really started picking up. As much as I would like to be a cool on-line guy and say that I was way into it before that, I was only tangentially aware of the game prior to Giant Bomb’s coverage (I was more of a Street Hoop guy when it came to weird Data East Neo Geo sports games, for whatever reason). Nevertheless, it’s a game I feel like I’ve been a fan of for a long time, if that makes any sense. It’s an immediately and deeply lovable game.

The only port Windjammers has ever had as of this writing was a Japan-exclusive release on the Wii Virtual Console in 2010. This release eventually got delisted in late 2013, shortly after Giant Bomb’s coverage started strangely enough. Ever since then, there’s been a steady rumbling of people asking for the game to come to modern systems with online play, mainly aimed at PlayStation’s Third Party Production team. After all, they’re the guys who got us a Final Fantasy 7 remake and Shenmue 3, right? If anyone can get this weird obscure frisbee game out of whatever licensing hell it fell into following the death of Data East and years of turmoil SNK has gone through, they could! Well, at PlayStation Experience 2016′s showcase event it finally happened. The lights dimmed, a familiar tune started playing, and there it was on the big screen: Windjammers was coming to the PlayStation 4. The wish had been granted.

And then the monkey’s paw curled.

Pictured above is the banner for the Windjammers booth at PlayStation Experience 2016, and pictured in the zoom-in of that banner is the one thing powerful enough to instantly turn a retro video game fan’s excitement into dread: the logo of French video game company DotEmu. Founded in 2007, DotEmu is a company that specializes in bringing old video games to not-so-old platforms. Over their nearly 10 years of existence they’ve built up a network of connections with Japanese developers and rightsholders and have been responsible for bringing a sizable amount of classic games to various platforms (an exact list is hard to compile, as even their website’s game list is clearly incomplete). The rub here is that, despite the years of experience and web of trusted business partners, DotEmu consistently puts out products that can be described as poor at best.

Generally not poor in flashy, attention grabbing ways mind you. They’re competent enough that a passerby could go “sure, that’s Metal Slug!”, but for the people who love and care about these classic games the vast majority of DotEmu’s output may as well have shipped with crash bugs. It’s not just old game obsessives that suffer either as, even though it may be difficult to point out specific shortcomings without side-by-side comparisons, the way DotEmu’s ports are busted have an undeniable effect on the way these games play at even the most casual levels. These problems aren’t flukes, they’re consistent and documentable, but they often go ignored in media coverage of the company and general discussion of their releases. 

I don’t think this is due to any sort of nefarious intent or anything, but rather a lack of education about the subject. Most of the complaints are loosely organized tweets, or squirreled away in niche message boards, and the informative reviews that hit Steam are easy to lose among the less-than-informative ones. The reason I set out to write this article was to attempt to find and document the issues plaguing DotEmu’s ports (with a focus on their Neo Geo offerings as they pertain more to Windjammers) and, most importantly, put everything somewhere easily viewable and shareable. With that mission in mind, I jumped into the Steam version of one of my favorite arcade games: Metal Slug 3.

The Steam version of Metal Slug 3 was, unbeknownst to me at the time, my first brush with DotEmu. I ran through it once back in mid-2014 and here in 2017 all I could recall was that it was the worst port of the game I had ever played, so it was a natural pick to start off with. I played the Steam release simultaneously with the game running in MAME, trading off every other level, just to make sure I was getting all the facts straight. The most immediately apparent issue with the Steam release is that the audio is wrong on almost every level. Most of the sound effects are off in different ways, the worst of them reduced to nothing but shrill screeches, and the music is mangled in one of the oddest ways I’ve ever experienced. It has trouble keeping a steady beat, but it doesn’t quite skip and instead sort of tries to rush back to where it’s supposed to be. It almost makes it seem like the music is being performed by some sort of drunken orchestra, or as if someone were briefly holding back the turntable of a record player in the few cases where it seemed to affect the pitch. I’ve taken the liberty of making a video comparing the music of both versions, below.

The other two big issues are slightly more subtle, but much more impactful on the gameplay itself. First off, the Steam version drops frames like crazy, which means the game consistently stutters and jumps around erratically. Metal Slug 3 is pretty chaotic so it can be a little tough to pick out amidst the explosions, but the DotEmu port drops frames at all times, even during the game’s rare quiet moments. I found that the tiled background of Stage 3′s pre-sub cave area offered the most readily visible comparison (below). [UPDATE 1/12/17: This is actually an issue with frame-pacing rather than dropping according to John Linneman of Digital Foundry. Frame-pacing issues are where, rather than completely skipping over frames of the game, individual frames will stay on screen for longer or shorter than they’re supposed to. The end result is still a stuttering, choppy mess.]

This problem only exacerbates the next issue: the Steam version has input lag. Input lag means, well, there’s a lag on your inputs. You press a button and it takes a little bit longer for the corresponding action to happen on screen. Don’t know why, don’t know how, but there is a slight amount of input lag present in the DotEmu port that just isn’t there in the MAME version. Weirdly enough it wasn’t anything visual that tipped me off, but instead something auditory. The gap between pressing the fire button and hearing the gunshot sound effect is a bit wider in the Steam version, and it’s fairly noticeable when you’re going back and forth between versions.

These two issues are bad enough alone, but when combined it causes the game to feel muddy and unresponsive when in actuality it’s quite snappy. Easily dodgeable attacks suddenly become less so, simple actions such as jumping and shooting below you become more difficult to perform effectively, and the game is much more likely to register jumping and shooting as a simultaneous press of A+B, making you accidentally activate your kamikaze Slug Attack while in a vehicle. This isn’t any sort of scientific evidence, and I certainly wasn’t playing amazingly in either version of the game, but I did demonstrably worse in my playthrough of the Steam version and I attribute that to the generally awful feel of the controls.

The one nice thing I can say about DotEmu’s port is that the online play seems, from my extremely limited experience, totally fine. I played the first couple of levels with a friend and it was smooth throughout. The port’s underlying problems still existed, and I’m not sure how the netcode would hold up to something more timing intensive like a versus game, but online play did not accentuate any of the port’s issues from what I could tell.

A brief check-in with the Steam port of Metal Slug X revealed that it, unsurprisingly, has the exact same problems Metal Slug 3 has. This is where my firsthand experience with DotEmu’s products ends, because I’m not enough of a sucker to buy three bad versions of old games. Just two. Craving more info, I put out the call to my wonderful, smart, definitely non-sucker Twitter followers. What follows is everything I was able to gather from them.

Now, I love Metal Slug 3, but I’m far from an absolute expert on it. There are people who have played the game for longer than I have and are way better at it than I am. I doubt the same can be said for friend of the site LordBBH regarding Shock Troopers. One of his favorite games of all time, BBH has probably put more hours into playing Shock Troopers than anyone on the planet (and plenty of those hours are on video). He knows the game inside and out, and he found all of the same issues in Shock Troopers that I found in the Metal Slugs, but he also stumbled upon a couple of things I would have never even thought to check. Such as the difficulty settings, for instance. Every Neo Geo game has about 8 or so different difficulty options that you can change in the system settings, but DotEmu’s ports have just four: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Very Hard. Whereas the original release of Shock Troopers adjusted the damage you take depending on what difficulty you were playing on, the difficulty options in the Steam version, from what LordBBH can tell, do... absolutely nothing. If it were anyone else I would chalk it up to not knowing the game well enough to spot the differences, but this guy knows.

There’s also another issue that’s entirely specific to Shock Troopers and definitely worth noting. There were two versions of the game, and the thing with Shock Troopers is you can either select one character or a team of three that you can freely swap between in-level. In what’s generally considered the “main” version of the game, a team has individual life bars for each character. In the other version, the whole team shares a single life bar. This minimizes the difference between playing as a team and playing as a single character, and the version of the game that uses the shared life bar is treated as more of a curiosity than a thing people play. The DotEmu port uses the single life bar version, and there’s no option to switch to the other one. This is probably an easy thing to overlook if you’re not, you know, a company in charge of porting the game to a different platform. But if you are, it shows a real lack of knowledge and care for your product in my eyes.

If you want a really, really long look at LordBBH playing and discussing the Steam version of Shock Troopers (and a little bit of the next game), he uploaded a video of it to his YouTube channel. For now though, let’s move on.

Twinkle Star Sprites is a cute versus shoot ‘em up game where players compete to clear out the enemies on their side of the screen and launch attacks at the other player. According to the info I received, the Steam version has all the general problems of the previously discussed games, but with a couple of fun unique wrinkles. First of all, the online leaderboards report impossible scores. Like, scores in the billions. For a while people weren’t sure whether it was a bug or people were hacking, but it turns out the leaderboards take the sum of all scores attained in all the versus matches you’ve played and post that. This makes the feature useless for competition, as you can rack up higher and higher scores simply by playing more. 

The other thing I was told is by far the weirdest one I’ve heard. While the previously mentioned useless difficulty options actually do something in Twinkle Star Sprites, what they do is increase the frame rate. The game itself is unaltered, it’s just sped up. I have absolutely no clue how or why this would happen, and I didn’t receive details on how much each option increases it by, but this is apparently a real thing that happens and I kind of can’t believe it.[UPDATE 1/12/17: My source on this has gotten back to me with claims that this does not actually happen. Whether or not it never did or was fixed in a patch is unknown. The difficulty settings currently do nothing. Leaving everything here for transparency.]

With that we’ve gone through all the specific examples I was told about and could find on my own, so that about wraps up the “what” of this whole situation (for now). Now we have to move on to the “why”. Why are these ports so consistently shoddy? Why does a company that positions itself as trying to make sure classic games don’t “get lost” continue to bungle everything in both the most basic and most baffling ways? The answer to that isn’t exactly clear. We could look at the case of DotEmu (legally, don’t start) using Nebula, an emulator last updated in 2007, for their 2015 Neo Geo Humble Bundle releases and question their competency. We could look at stuff like the apparently lacking Heroes of Might and Magic 3 HD release or the fact that their promotional Windjammers PS4 theme contains no actual elements from Windjammers and question their passion. We could look at any number of things and take any number of guesses, but I have a feeling the real reason for all of it is simple: they can get away with it. You can technically play through everything beginning to end, and the amount of people who care about these games to the point of easily noticing and articulating these flaws is minuscule compared to the greater number of players. Major outlets aren’t going to report on the input lag of a specific port of a 17 year old game. Negative Steam reviews complaining about frame drops aren’t going to drown out the people going “just like my child days!” and giving a thumbs up (except in the case of specific franchises where obsessives outnumber nostalgia fiends). The people just coming to these games for the first time aren’t going to have the frame of reference to know something is wrong, for all they can tell the game just normally sounds like that. DotEmu can phone it in because there’s not enough people to get the word out that they’re calling collect.

As for the final question: “where” does all this leave the PlayStation 4 port of Windjammers? Only time will tell. DotEmu has been talking up how they’ve had the French Windjammers community constantly playtesting and giving feedback to make sure they get things right, but then again David Sirlin said the same thing about having pro players help with the development of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. It’s just not enough of an assurance to make me overlook the company’s extremely rough track record. I hope they prove me wrong and knock it out of the park. I would love to have an official and fully featured re-release of this game that I love, but I’m not holding my breath. My money’s on it being another in a line of DotEmu botch jobs. For a company supposedly devoted to making sure old games aren’t forgotten, it’s almost ironic that they’ve so consistently helped make sure they’re something even worse: misremembered.

Did I miss something? Get something completely wrong? Do you have something to add about a different game? Let me know! I want to update this article with as much relevant and accurate information as possible! Feel free to get at me on Twitter or send me an email.