Well, what other conclusion can you draw from this:
"Thousands of older cancer patients are being denied potentially life-saving surgery because of ageism in the NHS."
As we've documented countless times before, the Much Vaunted National Health System© consistently looks for ways to ration care to its elderly population. Certainly, this is an easy (if morally bankrupt) way to rein in runaway health care costs, but it should certainly give pause to those proponents of Obamacare© who are themselves reaching maturity.
Or are just closing in on it:
"The chances of being operated on start falling in middle-age and plummet for those in their 70s and older ... They reinforce evidence showing older people still get a raw deal from the ‘institutionally ageist’ NHS[sic]"
And that's not all: in those cases where local expertise is lacking, few elderly patients are being referred to other experts. Recognizing that Brits lag far behind us in cancer survival rates, lead researcher Mick Peake acknowledges that "internationally our biggest gap in terms of survival is in the elderly," adding "if you can give a seventysomething-year-old ten or 15 years of active life, you should certainly offer it to them."
Or not.
At the risk of emulating a broken record, I would remind our readers that this is the system which "Sir" Donald Berwick (current CMMS honcho) advocates and admires.
Viagra - It's Not For Everyone
Seems the taxpayers have been funding fun for seniors on Medicare to the tune of $3 million. Since 2007 we have been paying for Viagra for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.
The Medicare Part D program was not supposed to fund prescriptions for erectile dysfunction but due to a computer glitch the prescription drug program has paid for it any way.
The insurance program for the elderly and disabled paid out an estimated $509 billion in benefits in 2010, about 11% of which went for outpatient prescription drugs.
But still, the inspector general tells CMS to figure out whether it can claw back some of that money from the pharmacy-benefit managers and insurers that sponsor the Part D plans. (They were supposed to know that ED drugs were excluded.)
That is some recall.
All because of a software problem . . .
Mystery Agency 2 Secrets of the Orient
People are disappearing from the slums of an Indian city under mysterious circumstances! After spotting ghosts, a young belly dancer turns to the Mystery Agency for help. Help Saraja and Scott investigate these disappearances and find a magical talisman in Mystery Agency: Secrets of the Orient! Go on a dangerous adventure and find the ancient artifact before a sketchy gangster boss does!
Shades of Death: Royal Blood
After your father dies, your sister Violet requests your help at the Family Castle. After arriving, things seem to be in disarray. Explore the castle and help Violet get to the bottom of a dark mystery in Shades of Death: Royal Blood. Use your Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure skills to explore the grounds and solve tricky puzzles. Discover what had frightened your father and find the truth behind his death.
Why is this News?
According to HuffPo, "57% of Americans that lost jobs could not afford to buy health insurance".
Well duh?
They probably are having trouble affording housing, food and basic necessities of life.
So why is this the headline?
In addition, 19 million Americans who tried to buy a health plan in the individual insurance market between 2007 and 2010 were either rejected due to a prior health condition or unable to find affordable coverage that fit their needs,
This is so vague as to be meaningless. Why not break it out and tell us how many were rejected for insurance vs. lumping them in with those that could not find a plan they like or could afford?
Of course they neglect to say that those losing jobs will normally have access to COBRA and after that expires, a HIPAA conversion plan. So even if they are denied coverage on a medically underwritten basis it isn't like they are totally shut out of the market.
Somehow this bit of information never makes it into the piece.
The government allows laid-off workers to remain on their former employers' health insurance via the COBRA program, but workers must pay the full cost of the insurance -- their share plus their former employer's share -- which is often unaffordable. The stimulus bill of 2009 provided a 65 percent subsidy for COBRA plans, but Congress dropped the subsidy last May due to deficit concerns.
Flash: The government doesn't have any money. They are tapped out and the Chinese aren't willing to spot us more cash until we show some fiscal responsibility.
The problem isn't health insurance so much as it is the economy. When people have jobs and steady income everything else pretty much evens out.
But I suppose it was a slow news day at HuffPo.
I mean it's not like there is anything going on in Japan or Libya . . .
Close, but no cigar?
I've often wondered why group plans, unlike individual medical, don't differentiate between smokers and non-smokers. It's long been known that tobacco-users have higher frequency of claims, miss more work, and generally drive up the cost of healthcare (and thus, insurance).
Until recently, though, this has not been reflected in group medical plan rates. When requesting group quotes, we typically include sex and age, family status and at least some medical underwriting information, but not tobacco use.
That may be changing, however:
"Some Maricopa County employees are fuming over a new health-plan requirement forcing them to submit saliva for nicotine analysis ... those testing negative for tobacco use are spared a premium that is $480 higher per year."
Covered employees who decline to submit to the testing are automatically assumed to use tobacco, and get hit with that $40 per month surcharge. On the other hand, employees are concerned that the information garnered from these tests may not be limited to tobacco use, but for more invasive purposes.
And then there are those who, on principle alone, refuse to participate, even though they're not tobacco users:
"I'm going to be penalized this year, but I'm still not taking it," he said. "This is a forced penalty and I've never seen anything like this. It's a disgrace."
I have little sympathy for this particular fellow: as a government employee, the taxpayers foot the bulk of his health insurance costs, and have a right to demand value for their taxes. The gentleman (and his cohorts) are free to opt out of the county-provided plan and find their own coverage in the open market, at their own (increased) expense.
The fly in this particular ointment, though, comes from a spokescritter who admits that they "do not keep data on how much tobacco users cost to insure compared with non-tobacco users." It's not enough that they "believe" that tobacco users cost more in claims; facts, not faith, are required here. It doesn't seem to me unreasonable that such data would be easy enough to get from their insurer(s).
The bottom line, of course, is the bottom line:
"I don't like my fluids on record in some file ... I would prefer not doing it, but we have to, to get the $480. That's about what it comes to."
Indeed.
Until recently, though, this has not been reflected in group medical plan rates. When requesting group quotes, we typically include sex and age, family status and at least some medical underwriting information, but not tobacco use.
That may be changing, however:
"Some Maricopa County employees are fuming over a new health-plan requirement forcing them to submit saliva for nicotine analysis ... those testing negative for tobacco use are spared a premium that is $480 higher per year."
Covered employees who decline to submit to the testing are automatically assumed to use tobacco, and get hit with that $40 per month surcharge. On the other hand, employees are concerned that the information garnered from these tests may not be limited to tobacco use, but for more invasive purposes.
And then there are those who, on principle alone, refuse to participate, even though they're not tobacco users:
"I'm going to be penalized this year, but I'm still not taking it," he said. "This is a forced penalty and I've never seen anything like this. It's a disgrace."
I have little sympathy for this particular fellow: as a government employee, the taxpayers foot the bulk of his health insurance costs, and have a right to demand value for their taxes. The gentleman (and his cohorts) are free to opt out of the county-provided plan and find their own coverage in the open market, at their own (increased) expense.
The fly in this particular ointment, though, comes from a spokescritter who admits that they "do not keep data on how much tobacco users cost to insure compared with non-tobacco users." It's not enough that they "believe" that tobacco users cost more in claims; facts, not faith, are required here. It doesn't seem to me unreasonable that such data would be easy enough to get from their insurer(s).
The bottom line, of course, is the bottom line:
"I don't like my fluids on record in some file ... I would prefer not doing it, but we have to, to get the $480. That's about what it comes to."
Indeed.
Birth of Monster. Part 2.
(Not read part 1? Do so here.)
Molding the Abomination
by Olof Strand (www.OlofStrand.com)
As a modeler the first thing I noted about this character was that the concept design demanded it to be completely unique in all of its parts. Usually it is possible to mirror some parts (e.g. an arm, a leg or some cloth piece) to save texture space and maybe some production time when modeling game characters. Not so this time.
The character was based on a human body type with various deformities and modifications done to it. This meant that I could easily use a regular human base mesh as a starting point. Using already existing meshes as a starting point is, when possible, very important for production efficiency.
Another thing that needed to be taken into consideration was how the character would be rigged for animation later on. In this case the rig would be shared with another character from the game and therefore needed to be built under certain specifications (joints in specific places, etc).
When the the base modeling was done, the mesh was taken into Zbrush for a sculpting pass. The purpose of the sculpting pass is to create details that can be projected on to the final in-game mesh to make it look more detailed than it really is. Since the proportions and general shape where already defined on the base-mesh these should not be changed too much and mostly only minor details were added.
All the separate parts of the base-mesh where imported into Zbrush as separate sub-tools. This made it easy to hide, show and mask parts off. It was also possible to assign different materials to the separate parts as a visual aid. In Zbrush the mesh was subdivided several times giving me more polygons to work with. Once there was enough polygons, new details and shapes could be added by pulling, pushing and using other various tools, almost as if it was a piece of clay.
When the sculpting was done the lowest subdivision level was exported in obj-format to use as a starting point for the final low-polygon in-game mesh. The reason to make a new low polygon mesh and not use the mesh from sculpting is to optimize the number of polygons in the final mesh. This can be very important for performance when added in the game. The mesh used as a base when sculpting has a a relatively uniform tessellation (distribution and a size of polygons) and mostly a quad layout of the geometry (meaning that most polygons are four sided). The in-game mesh then had to be modified to only have geometry where it was needed. By doing this, more details could be added where really needed without decreasing any performance of the final mesh. This process is sometimes called retopologizing and can be done several different ways. Some people like to use the specialized retopologizing tools within Zbrush, but I personally like to use the regular modeling tools in my 3d software.
When the modeling was done it was time to create the uv-map. A uv-map is basically a way to show where parts of model belong on a flat surface, the texture. This is called a projection, and in this case a 3D to 2D one (the model is in 3D and the texture 2D). Unless the 3D object is a very simple one (like cube or plane) this is a very tricky operation and it is almost impossible to maintain the same ratios as on the model. A good example of this is to look at the various ways our planet earth (a 3D object) has turned into maps (a 2D surface) and all of the distortions and/or strange layouts that follow.
There are some conventions that should be followed when laying out this uv-map. The most important is probably to make sure to put seams (places where polygons split up during the 3d to 2d projection) in places where they are not very visible. This since it is often very hard to match up colors of pieces not next to one another on the texture. Seams can also mess up shading when using normal maps. On a humanoid character a good place to put them could be on the inside of the arms and legs for example. This character also have some irregular areas that have to be given some extra thought. For example the head had an unusual shape making the uv-mapping extra tricky. Once the placement of seams in the uv-map have been established the chunks where laid out to maximize the use of the texture space.
Before starting the actual texturing work I generated colors for some of the texture maps from information in the high poly mesh. The textures produced this way were the normal map and an ambient occlusion (AO) map. The normal map gives the mesh some extra detail and makes it seem like it is made up from more polygons than it really is. The AO map was to be blended into the diffuse (the base color) texture to give a greater sense of detail and form. Basically, AO is a calculation of how much light reach each point on the mesh, making creases darker and pointy details brighter.
The diffuse map represent the base color of the character and was created in Photoshop by using a mix of various photos, custom Photoshop brushes and the previously mentioned AO map. The diffuse map was extra important as it was also used as a base for creating some other maps like the specular and gloss map. These two are black and white maps that control how light will affect the model. Specular determines the strength of shininess on an areas and gloss how sharp the shininess is. Some of the detail in the diffuse was also used to add extra details in the normal map, like wrinkles and scars.
Once the texture was completed, the model was ready to be used in-game!
It's Alive!
By Thomas Grip (Frictional Games)
Before the model could be used in game, some other things was required. First the model needed to be rigged and skinned, a process where the mesh is connected to a skeleton. This skeleton then need to get animations and not until that was done where we able to get a it into the game. This job was made in part internally and partly by an external company. There were a lot of job put into this, but is unfortunately outside of the scope of the article. To some sum things up: we got the creature moving and it was now time to put inside the game.
For Amnesia: The Dark Descent we use a proprietary engine called HPL2 which is a vastly improved and revised version of the engine that powered the Penumbra games (although quite old now as we are developing version 3 of the engine for our upcoming game). It uses a rendering algorithm called deferred shading at its core, a technique that is very useful when rendering lots of lights. It works by drawing out the the normals, depth, specular and diffuse colors to separate buffers and then use these to calculate the final color of a light. Normally when drawing a light, all models that intersect with the light needs to be found and then redrawn based on the light's properties. The nice thing about deferred shading is that models are only need to be drawn once, saving tons of rendering time and allowing more predictable frame rate.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent can be a quite dark game in places, sometimes making it hard to see enemies properly. To remedy this we added a rim lighting algorithm that made the creature's outline light up when in dark areas. This proved extremely moody and when walking in dark passages the player could suddenly get a glimpse of disturbing silhouette slouching off in the distant. After this final touch, our creature was ready to frighten unknowing players!
Hopefully this article will give you some insight into the work that it took to create an enemy for our game. It was quite a long process and took several months from idea to finished asset but we think the final result is well worth it!
Molding the Abomination
by Olof Strand (www.OlofStrand.com)
As a modeler the first thing I noted about this character was that the concept design demanded it to be completely unique in all of its parts. Usually it is possible to mirror some parts (e.g. an arm, a leg or some cloth piece) to save texture space and maybe some production time when modeling game characters. Not so this time.
The character was based on a human body type with various deformities and modifications done to it. This meant that I could easily use a regular human base mesh as a starting point. Using already existing meshes as a starting point is, when possible, very important for production efficiency.
Another thing that needed to be taken into consideration was how the character would be rigged for animation later on. In this case the rig would be shared with another character from the game and therefore needed to be built under certain specifications (joints in specific places, etc).
The basic mesh created before importing into Zbrush. (Click to enlarge.)
When the the base modeling was done, the mesh was taken into Zbrush for a sculpting pass. The purpose of the sculpting pass is to create details that can be projected on to the final in-game mesh to make it look more detailed than it really is. Since the proportions and general shape where already defined on the base-mesh these should not be changed too much and mostly only minor details were added.
All the separate parts of the base-mesh where imported into Zbrush as separate sub-tools. This made it easy to hide, show and mask parts off. It was also possible to assign different materials to the separate parts as a visual aid. In Zbrush the mesh was subdivided several times giving me more polygons to work with. Once there was enough polygons, new details and shapes could be added by pulling, pushing and using other various tools, almost as if it was a piece of clay.
The different subdivision levels in z-brush. (Click to enlarge.)
When the sculpting was done the lowest subdivision level was exported in obj-format to use as a starting point for the final low-polygon in-game mesh. The reason to make a new low polygon mesh and not use the mesh from sculpting is to optimize the number of polygons in the final mesh. This can be very important for performance when added in the game. The mesh used as a base when sculpting has a a relatively uniform tessellation (distribution and a size of polygons) and mostly a quad layout of the geometry (meaning that most polygons are four sided). The in-game mesh then had to be modified to only have geometry where it was needed. By doing this, more details could be added where really needed without decreasing any performance of the final mesh. This process is sometimes called retopologizing and can be done several different ways. Some people like to use the specialized retopologizing tools within Zbrush, but I personally like to use the regular modeling tools in my 3d software.
The final version of the low polygon mesh. (Click to enlarge.)
When the modeling was done it was time to create the uv-map. A uv-map is basically a way to show where parts of model belong on a flat surface, the texture. This is called a projection, and in this case a 3D to 2D one (the model is in 3D and the texture 2D). Unless the 3D object is a very simple one (like cube or plane) this is a very tricky operation and it is almost impossible to maintain the same ratios as on the model. A good example of this is to look at the various ways our planet earth (a 3D object) has turned into maps (a 2D surface) and all of the distortions and/or strange layouts that follow.
There are some conventions that should be followed when laying out this uv-map. The most important is probably to make sure to put seams (places where polygons split up during the 3d to 2d projection) in places where they are not very visible. This since it is often very hard to match up colors of pieces not next to one another on the texture. Seams can also mess up shading when using normal maps. On a humanoid character a good place to put them could be on the inside of the arms and legs for example. This character also have some irregular areas that have to be given some extra thought. For example the head had an unusual shape making the uv-mapping extra tricky. Once the placement of seams in the uv-map have been established the chunks where laid out to maximize the use of the texture space.
The uv-map layout. (Click to enlarge.)
Before starting the actual texturing work I generated colors for some of the texture maps from information in the high poly mesh. The textures produced this way were the normal map and an ambient occlusion (AO) map. The normal map gives the mesh some extra detail and makes it seem like it is made up from more polygons than it really is. The AO map was to be blended into the diffuse (the base color) texture to give a greater sense of detail and form. Basically, AO is a calculation of how much light reach each point on the mesh, making creases darker and pointy details brighter.
The diffuse map represent the base color of the character and was created in Photoshop by using a mix of various photos, custom Photoshop brushes and the previously mentioned AO map. The diffuse map was extra important as it was also used as a base for creating some other maps like the specular and gloss map. These two are black and white maps that control how light will affect the model. Specular determines the strength of shininess on an areas and gloss how sharp the shininess is. Some of the detail in the diffuse was also used to add extra details in the normal map, like wrinkles and scars.
The final normal, diffuse, specular and gloss maps. Notice that all use the uv-map layout as base. (Click to enlarge.)
Once the texture was completed, the model was ready to be used in-game!
Renderings of final model using different setups of texture maps. (Click to enlarge.)
It's Alive!
By Thomas Grip (Frictional Games)
Before the model could be used in game, some other things was required. First the model needed to be rigged and skinned, a process where the mesh is connected to a skeleton. This skeleton then need to get animations and not until that was done where we able to get a it into the game. This job was made in part internally and partly by an external company. There were a lot of job put into this, but is unfortunately outside of the scope of the article. To some sum things up: we got the creature moving and it was now time to put inside the game.
For Amnesia: The Dark Descent we use a proprietary engine called HPL2 which is a vastly improved and revised version of the engine that powered the Penumbra games (although quite old now as we are developing version 3 of the engine for our upcoming game). It uses a rendering algorithm called deferred shading at its core, a technique that is very useful when rendering lots of lights. It works by drawing out the the normals, depth, specular and diffuse colors to separate buffers and then use these to calculate the final color of a light. Normally when drawing a light, all models that intersect with the light needs to be found and then redrawn based on the light's properties. The nice thing about deferred shading is that models are only need to be drawn once, saving tons of rendering time and allowing more predictable frame rate.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent can be a quite dark game in places, sometimes making it hard to see enemies properly. To remedy this we added a rim lighting algorithm that made the creature's outline light up when in dark areas. This proved extremely moody and when walking in dark passages the player could suddenly get a glimpse of disturbing silhouette slouching off in the distant. After this final touch, our creature was ready to frighten unknowing players!
In-game screenshot showing of the rim-lighting on the creature. (Click to enlarge.)
Hopefully this article will give you some insight into the work that it took to create an enemy for our game. It was quite a long process and took several months from idea to finished asset but we think the final result is well worth it!
An in-game screenshot of the final rigged model in a scene. (Click to enlarge.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
