Review: Life Is Strange 2 Episode 4—Faith
Developer: Dontnod Entertainment
Publisher: Square Enix
Genre: Adventure
Platforms: Xbox One, PS4, PC
Rating: M for Mature
Price: $29.99 (Whole Season—5 Episodes)
I wonder if this is what everyone thinks when visiting a new church for the first time?
Hot off the wild and unexpected conclusion to Episode 3, Life Is Strange 2: Episode 4—Faith puts us back in the shoes of Sean Diaz, now separated from his brother Daniel and recovering in the hospital. While being tended to by his friendly caretaker Joey, Sean must find a way to evade the police who have caught up to him and plan to take him to prison for the events that occurred way back in Episode 1. After a daring hospital escape, Sean makes things right with an old friend, steals a car, and sets out for the Nevada Desert in search of his brother.
Content Guide
Faith and religion play a huge role in Episode 4. Players will visit a church and meet a pastor who may not be as Holy as she seems at face value. Billboards in the desert have quotes and sayings about Christ and many characters mention their faith and how the church has impacted them both positively and negatively. However, the episode doesn’t endorse or slam Christianity in any specific way, but it does a surprisingly good job of showing both sides of the same coin and how, in the wrong hands, religion can be one of the most deadly weapons one can weld against their enemies. Aside from the heavy religious themes, parental abandonment is also explored as the boys will reunite with someone from their past who they thought they’d never see again. Violence is more prevalent in this episode as we see the main character get brutally beat up at least twice. Characters are also pistol whipped or flung through the air as a result of angering Daniel and forcing him to use his powers.
As usual with these games, language (and frequent use of the ‘F’ word) are prevalent. There is a scene of drug use where two characters are seen smoking cigarettes outside of a roadside motel.
Review
Is this friendly stranger offering a ride a sign from the Lord? He is present on that sign back there after all. Religion (especially Christianity) is explored in depth in this episode.
Life Is Strange 2 is gearing up to have a climax that could potentially surpass that of the first season. By this point, players will have fallen in love with both Daniel and Sean Diaz, the two brothers who have been the focal point of each episode since Season 2 premiered. Here, the brothers are separated after the tragic events that occurred on the weed farm at the end of Episode 3. With only one working eye, sketchy depth perception, and few friends left to rely on, Sean wakes up in the hospital under the care of his nurse Joey, who sympathizes with his plight and laments that he wishes there was a way he could help Sean find his brother and evade the police officers who have finally caught up with him after the events of Episode 1.
Joey, Sean’s nurse, is instantly likeable and I hope we get to see how his story plays out in the conclusion after certain events in this episode.
Most of Episode 4 is spent trying to find out where Daniel is and how to get to him. After looking back at his last journal entry from when he was still with the crew at the weed farm, Sean sees a note left behind by an old friend who might know where Daniel is and believes that he may be in danger. With this newfound knowledge, players must guide Sean out of the hospital so that he can figure out how to reunite with his brother. There is very little new gameplay in Episode 4; however, the drawing mechanic is affected greatly by Sean’s injury. With only one eye, he has far less depth perception now, so drawings take a few more attempts to finish and the lines aren’t as clean or detailed as they were before. This is a neat way of having the overall outcome of players’ decisions impact the experience in a major way.
It’s nice to see Dontnod adding little touches like this to really sell the immersion of playing as these characters and investing in the choices they make.
Now that Sean is short one eye, his depth perception is altered and its hard for him to draw some of the many landscape scenes present throughout the episode. This is a nice little detail that actually changes the gameplay for Sean’s sketches.
As some plot threads are wrapped up and resolved in this episode, some new ones open up as well. The brothers may have evaded the police yet again, but it wont be long before the detective assigned to Sean catches up to them. One thing I don’t like about this season in general is that while the game keeps introducing new characters, we never get a chance to meaningfully follow up with characters introduced earlier in the season. Sure, there are some flashbacks and some references thrown out here and there, but it would be nice to see some familiar faces to provide some reassurance for the pair as they continue their journey to Puerto Lobos and freedom from the nightmare they’ve been living through this entire time.
While this episode was very heavy on the themes of religion, specifically Christianity and how it both helps and hurts those in a congregation, it was nice to see it handled well here. Upon arriving at the church in Haven Point, where Daniel was last seen, Sean notices a mailbox reminiscent of the one his grandparents had in Episode 2, and he wonders aloud if these people in the church are “good Christians like his grandparents.” This is great foreshadowing as the church and its congregation, especially their charismatic pastor, seem a little off from the get-go. Players will get the sense right away that not everything is as it seems with these people. The way that Episode 4 ends is easily the best of the season. We see Sean literally put his life on the line for his brother in a tense stand off that I didn’t expect to go as far as it did. It’s nice to see that the developers are willing to push the envelope and explore the lengths that people will go to cling to family, faith, and their own egos.
This truck driver is an ok guy. He gives Sean one of his wife’s homemade sandwiches after he’d been wondering the desert for days and he is without a doubt the kindest character (other than Joey) that Sean encounters in Ep. 4.
There is one episode left in the season and I’m honestly really hoping for a courtroom trial scene for the brothers to plead their case. This would be a good way to reintroduce all the people the pair have come into contact with throughout the season. This could also pave the way for player choices to have a much more significant impact on the ending this time around as Sean’s new friendships could likely help sway the jury in favor of him and Daniel. But this is all speculation, and it remains to be seen if Dontnod can keep up this pace and have the season finale stick the landing as well as the last two episodes have.
Minecraft Escape Maps
HomeLatest MapsPopular MapsParkour MapsHorror MapsSurvival MapsAdventure MapsEscape MapsPuzzle MapsCity MapsDropper MapsFinding MapsUnfair MapsCreation MapsGame MapsCTM MapsTrivia MapsPVP MapsVariety MapsPvE MapsCastle MapsHouse MapsMaze MapsHide and Seek MapsAmusement Park MapsEducational MapsCustom CommandsPocket Edition Maps
These puzzle maps are focused on escaping various places.
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Map isn’t really long.
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With a huge variety of puzzles, riddles, and a few Easter Eggs hidden within, this map is sure to provide a 1 to 3 hour playtime experience.
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you need to have a careful eye and lot of logic, good luck.
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Maps: Page 1 of 6 |
Station 2.
Development stories of one of Yandex’s most complex devices / Sudo Null IT News We have completely rethought both the interior and exterior design, added a light screen on the top panel and tried to take into account the experience of the previous generation in many components that are not visible at first glance.
I want to share our internal kitchen in a format that has already become traditional for habrastats about new Stations. These will again be several stories about various aspects of hardware development: we will talk about the study of the shape of a room with microphones, the propagation of light in a transparent material, as well as generative animations and the unexpected benefits of FPGAs.
Sound story
We originally designed Station 2 to be smaller than the first Station. At the same time, by the time the design started, our acoustic flagship, Station Max, had already been launched, and it was almost impossible to compete with it in terms of sound in a smaller device.
Then we decided to make the sound different — not directed at a person, but evenly distributed throughout the room (the so-called «360 degree sound»). In addition, we sought to achieve a balance between all frequencies — so that users can often listen to voice compositions (and, for example, podcasts) in parallel with any other business, without being annoyed by too strong «bottom».
The 360 degree mode is already used in our small speakers. In Station Mini, it is achieved due to the speaker directed downwards — with further sound dispersion to the sides. But Station 2 was supposed to be a device with noticeably more powerful and better sound than the Mini. The very first experiments showed that a speaker facing down does not provide the required quality.
In addition, we wanted to keep the hallmark of our older speakers — stereo sound.
As a result of many experiments and testing of a variety of sound schemes, we came up with the one shown in the illustration: two full-range speakers look forward and backward, and on the right and left they are supported by passive radiators responsible for the low-frequency tail.
The main advantage of this scheme: the column can be twisted as you like. You can put the speakers forward-backward — or left-right, which will slightly enhance the stereo effect. But here lies the problem: few people put the speaker in the middle of the room, in real rooms one of the speakers — and in a bad case both — can be close to the wall. Then, due to strong reflections, the sound will deteriorate. Two years ago, we would have given up and opted for a safer sound scheme, but in the midst of the acoustic design of Station 2, we had the first encouraging results of experiments in the field of Room Correction (what it is and how it affects the sound — I will tell in the next story). So we decided to take a chance.
I had to tinker with the speakers — they needed broadband, with the best possible amplitude-frequency response, but at the same time very compact. In addition, a feature was discovered: with this arrangement, you need to monitor the position of the center of gravity of the device.
The higher it is, the less stable the column becomes. Therefore, the speakers use specially shaped magnets, additionally weighted to ensure stability. And yes, our speakers are traditionally custom-made — it is impossible to find such speakers on the open market.
An unexpected advantage of the symmetrical layout was that the sound at high volume does not provoke unnecessary vibrations of the case. The latter negatively affect everything, including the quality of Alice’s voice recognition, because microphone membranes vibrate along with the body.
Room Correction story
In the reviews for the first Station and Station Max, users often wrote to us that «there is too much bass.» Even in instrumental tracks and in music with an orchestra, low frequencies sometimes prevailed. But we noticed that part of this perception is due to exactly where the column is located. A small study showed that a significant number of people have the Station on a shelf in a niche, and someone has it on the floor in the very corner of the room.
Walls and partitions in close proximity create acoustic limitations, and most often the frequency ratio changes precisely in the direction of more bass.
The problem seems to be solved by the equalizer that we launched last December. But the equalizer is a feature more for music lovers than for all users. I wanted the Station out of the box to play pleasantly for the human ear (even if it was placed in a closet).
On the one hand, there are solutions on the market that allow you to adapt the speaker system to a particular room. On the other hand, we are usually talking about systems of several speakers, and the sound quality is optimized for the listener located at a specific point — conditionally, on a sofa in the middle of the room.
To automatically change settings depending on the environment, you need to be able to understand something about this environment. The column does not have lidar, like an unmanned vehicle: it cannot determine the shape of objects around.
But she has microphones.
Using the Station 2 microphones, we recorded the sounds it reproduces in a reference acoustic chamber. When the speaker plays these same sounds in the user’s real environment, it evaluates the difference between what it hears and the reference. Thus, she can roughly understand how the environment distorts the sounds played. Suppose the volume of some frequencies turned out to be louder than the reference by 2-3 decibels. Then the Station will make the sound at these frequencies quieter.
At first we tried to regulate the sound in this way at all frequencies. We spent many weeks on tests, but in the end we realized: the perception of the «tops» depends on the location of not only the speaker, but also the listener himself. We have not yet learned how to find out where a person is located relative to the Station, and besides, there are several listeners. But the bass, as well as part of the mids really effectively adjust to the room.
Design story
Coming up with the design of a new generation of devices is not an easy task.
It is important that users familiar with previous Yandex Stations see belonging to this family in the new column as well. On the other hand, you need to bring something new.
To begin with, we decided to find out what external properties people most associate with Stations. It turned out to be:
- Simple forms — simpler than, say, Amazon Echo.
- Glow — LEDs around the volume control on the first Station, a glowing Alice logo on the Mini Station, and so on.
- Body fabric.
All three features were important to keep. Station 2 is the second device after the Yandex Module, made in accordance with our new design language, which we plan to use in the future. The main property of this language is its two-dimensionality: there is the main part responsible for the function (in this case it is covered with fabric, the function here is the sound), and there is the upper part responsible for the emotion. If you look at the Module and at the power adapter from Station 2, you will see the same two-volume and the same shapes.
More about the design
Compared to the first Station, I wanted to achieve more elegance. Therefore, we made a smoother shape of the base, which creates a slight illusion that the Station does not touch the table: you do not see the place of contact. In one of the prototypes, the walls almost seamlessly passed into the bottom, but the column was easy to drop by simply hitting it with your hand. Then we decided to complicate the lower part a little, but keep the general concept of rounded corners.
To make it easier to compare the «falling» of the prototypes, we began to put them on an inclined surface and see at what angle the column starts to fall. Although the standard tests for the limiting angle of inclination did not give any terrible values, it was felt that something was wrong. Then they came up with another simple test that allowed us to introduce a measure of dynamic stability (conditionally, we simulated the situation when your cat hits the column sideways).
To do this, we used a weighted container on a flexible suspension and recorded the angle of the initial deflection of the load, at which the device falls after the impact. This exercise checks not only the geometric and mass characteristics — the area of \u200b\u200bthe support and the position of the center of gravity. It also tests the influence of the stiffness and shape of the sticker on the bottom of the column, the coefficient of adhesion, and so on.
Devices with the same label perimeter but different widths of the support band gave different results. This is how we chose the optimal shape of the base: on the one hand, it does not break the illusion of “airiness”, and on the other hand, the Station is not afraid (or almost not afraid) of domestic animals.
If you look closely, the bottom surface is not easy:
The choice of fabric was a separate task. We wanted to take a step further — to make the Station feel like a piece of furniture, look good in most environments.
After experimenting with different fabrics, we realized that melange canvas solves this problem best of all. You may be familiar with these fabrics, they are often used in clothing and upholstered furniture:
Source
Melange means that the thread is woven from fibers of different colors and the material itself is made from this thread. We add 30% gray thread, so we get an «anthracite» dark color with lighter patches:
But among the first Stations, people often chose the light gray version. In the new column, the same coloring would not look good with a black top panel. We got out of the situation by inventing a «sand» variation. Blue «cobalt», in turn, is almost the same black, only more interesting: people often look for something similar.
Top panel story
The idea of glow, which I listed above among the main properties of Yandex Stations, is brought here almost to the absolute.
We decided to make an LED screen as one of the most technically suitable for our purpose: to illuminate the top panel from edge to edge. On this path, many difficulties awaited us, only some of which we presented in advance.
The concept of light diffusion is found in user devices, although not very often. Typically, one or more lenses are placed above the light sources. We conducted experiments with different types of LEDs, their number and mutual arrangement — it became clear that we would need clearly more than 50 diodes. With so many lenses, it was impractical to use, the device would have turned out to be too expensive. It was necessary to develop a panel that would diffuse the light beautifully by itself.
The photo shows two materials of the same properties, but different thicknesses
We started to try: laying translucent plastic fragments on top of the board with LEDs. It was important that one diode does not light up the entire panel, but also does not look too accentuated, like a bright dot.
I wanted something in between: so that the light flows smoothly between the diodes. Moreover, the picture had to be clearly visible in the sun. Glossy surfaces glare more, matte surfaces can affect saturation. Even the process by which matting is performed plays a role.
An additional complication was that it was required to place a central unit on the panel, an “island” with touch buttons and microphones. We considered the option of lighting the entire panel, including through the printed circuit board of the island: it was supposed to be made either from a transparent film or from ordinary fiberglass — thin to translucent. Alas, not everything can be transparent: we tried, but in the light from the diodes, tracks, microcircuits and resistors with capacitors could be seen. Therefore, we still allocated a special place for the island. They tried to choose its size so that users do not make mistakes when pressing the buttons and do not hit the microphones with their fingers.
By the way, if you swipe all three buttons, the next or previous track will turn on.
The presence of the central block imposed restrictions: additional LEDs appeared in the Alice logo, the light from which just had to be more pointy than the rest. In one of the prototypes, we went too far — bright dots clearly appeared in the logo. And in another, the light from the diodes around penetrated into the openings of the microphones: they cannot be completely isolated.
In the final version, the components of the island are hidden under an opaque central part of the film that lies on top of the entire top panel. The scattering of light inside the plastic (polycarbonate to be precise) is achieved by adding a special scattering agent, the composition of which is almost as secret as that of Coca-Cola. The ends of the top panel are visible from the sides — the light reaches them too, so even if the column is above eye level, it will still visually tell you what action is currently being performed.
The backlight is provided by 84 LEDs — it was on this number that we eventually stopped.
Creating a glowing top was one of the longest stages in the development of Station 2. This happened also because the production of such complex “sandwiches” with IML film of a sufficiently large area is not a trivial task. We found only one company in China that could make panels of the required quality.
A story about generative animations
The screen, the device of which I described above, does not allow demonstrating any specific objects or indicators. It would seem that 84 LEDs are enough, but in fact this roughly corresponds to a resolution of 7×12 pixels without the island — less than in the first phones with color screens. For comparison, the display of Nokia 3310 has a resolution of 84×48, totaling 4032 pixels.
But how to use 84 diodes to show interesting animations while playing music? The solution was born as a result of close interaction between a developer and a designer with a technical background.
We represent the audio track as a sequence of raw data, cut off the emissions in them, and smooth them out. At each moment in time, the renderer sees a frame with a set of data distributed by frequencies and their number (conditionally, at high volumes such and such, at medium volumes such and such, at low volumes such and such). Next, we distribute data to all LEDs: we determine which group of diodes is responsible for which frequencies. If there are a lot of «bottoms», the corresponding diodes flash more intensively, and so on.
However, in this mode, the animations looked too simple. Therefore, we came up with a mathematical modification of the data. From each point, we build the so-called Manhattan distance, and not one LED is already on, but a kind of circle around it from several diodes. Finally, we will randomize the borders of this shape a bit. It turns out spots of an indefinite shape that continuously “flow” into each other — the picture changes as the track plays.
I have described how images are drawn on the top panel. How are colors chosen for them? Our designer drew a large gradient map — with a complex, multi-colored and non-linear gradient. At each moment in time, a set of colors for LEDs is taken from a certain fragment of this map, then from a neighboring one, taken with a shift, and so on. Therefore, the images in the course of the animation smoothly change not only the shape, but also the color. Even for the same music track, unique combinations are generated each time.
The story of chipageddon and FPGAs
In the habrastat for the release of the new Station Mini, I talked about chipageddon — an iron deficiency that arose due to a pandemic. That experience prepared us for the fact that things would not be easy with the components for Station 2.
Chipageddon most affected the availability of three nodes — the Type-C controller, STM32 (more on that below) and the amplifier. The latter had to be changed during development: initially we designed the column for a different model.
It turns out that Class D amplifiers with digital inputs and built-in signal processing are just a handful of SKUs in the entire market, and their tuning varies greatly from one manufacturer to another. So we had about two months to bring the sound level on the new amplifier to the specified requirements.
Our previous speakers used a standard STM32 as the LED controller, and the first versions of Station 2 were no exception. But at the beginning of last year, STMicroelectronics stopped supplying these controllers to the market in millions of batches, as before. The decrease in production volumes provoked a chain reaction: many companies began to buy the rest of the STM32 for future use. As a result, the chips not only went up in price, but disappeared from the market altogether. At that moment, Chinese analogues with the characteristics we needed (memory size and frequency) were available. But there were few of them, they cost about 2.5 times more than the STM chips we know and were not supplied with such detailed documentation.
We also looked at domestic microcontrollers: they turned out to be even more expensive, plus there were doubts about the possibility of producing hundreds of thousands of chips in the required (short) time frame.
Then one of our distributors suggested a more affordable FPGA (Field-Programmable Logic Integrated Circuit) as a replacement for the STM32. Powerful circuits of this type are used for complex calculations and fast processing, such as Fourier transform or video transcoding. Simple FPGAs, in turn, are quite used to control simple devices. We were also convinced that the distributor was ready to quickly prepare the MVP of such a solution, and in the meantime we would have managed to gain expertise in an area that was not entirely familiar. The fact is that working with FPGAs is not the same as working with STM32. Yes, both there and there you write code in the IDE, but FPGA programming is based on a completely different logic.
FPGA on the board of Station 2
We have already solved the problem of controlling LEDs in Station Max: there were 400 single-color diodes; here — 84 four-color (RGBW), a total of 336 channels.
But we remembered that the FPGA is about parallel processing, and decided to take advantage of the opportunities received. The STM32 controlled four hundred diodes through shift register chips connected in series into one 400-bit register. And the FPGA controls seven 48-bit chains in parallel (plus one shorter chain for the logo LEDs). This made it possible to increase the frame rate to several hundred per second, which means to improve the smoothness of the animation.
But LEDs are easy, even with a frame buffer and 256 brightness levels per channel. It turned out to be much more difficult to build a touch control.
The STM32 has a built-in touch interface controller, the FPGA does not. It would seem that there are many individual touch microcircuits, they are made by a lot of manufacturers, but Chipageddon crossed it all out. The necessary chips are not on the market — the last batch of several hundred thousand that we managed to purchase will be useful for the production of Station Mini.
Therefore, we began to build a touch key controller on the FPGA. It is enough to connect the touch zone with two FPGA legs and with one capacitor. But due to the design of Station 2, the tracks from the integrated circuit itself to the keys had to be run all over the board, through connectors and along a flexible cable — and there were a lot of noisy LED control signals around. The first firmware with touch functionality worked well — until they turned on the animation. At this moment, false positives began to fall: the system thought that the key was pressed, even when no one touched the column.
I had to collect raw data from sensors, analyze them and build digital filters, at the same time selecting parameters to reduce noise. Then we found that the average signal level from the touch zone changes slowly over time, so the response threshold must be made adaptive. But that was not the end either. It turned out that the quality of the signal depends on the specific microcircuit.
Conventionally, 17 out of 20 columns in the test batch worked reliably, and on three we observed false positives. We tweaked the filtering parameters — three «bad» ones were fixed, but four «good» ones broke.
This effect turned out to be due to the fact that each microcircuit has individual delays in each cell, that is, the signal transmission speed is slightly different. We are talking about nanoseconds — even such differences affected. In the end, we managed to rewrite the measurement algorithm so that the difference between the microcircuits did not affect anything. But by this time, we had already managed to add a special “touch signal quality meter” to the FPGA firmware and introduce it into the production testing procedure. Now we make sure for each instance of the Station that all touch controls work properly.
Zigbee story
Previously, Alice managed smart home devices only through the clouds. The “turn on the light bulb” request was sent to the Yandex smart home cloud, then to the light bulb manufacturer’s cloud.
Only it gave a signal to the light bulb to turn on — and so with most devices. This scheme is unstable and fragile, which led and leads to delays in the execution of commands.
The modern Zigbee standard allows you to send commands locally, from a speaker to a light bulb. This is possible when there is a Zigbee chip both there and there. Such chips can operate on battery power for several years — dozens of times longer than Wi-Fi modules. True, the amount of data that can be sent is much more modest for Zigbee, but this is enough to control a smart home. In addition, a Zigbee network is a mesh network in the sense that devices with constant power (such as sockets) can act as repeaters and automatically expand the coverage of the network. Then the new devices will choose the closest repeater to connect to, and if it fails, they will quickly rebuild to the changed topology.
Somewhere inside the case, it was necessary to find a place for the Zigbee module. As a result, we placed it on the same board with the LEDs of the top panel, right under the touch buttons — it was at this point that the maximum distance was reached from all metal components that could degrade the antenna parameters.
The speaker still turns to the cloud for voice recognition, but for us, the emergence of Zigbee is a step towards a completely local smart home.
Pre-release version of the board with LEDs and a Zigbee module
The story of a full-fledged Type-C
At the end, we answer Habr’s most popular comment to posts about previous columns! What was the difficulty with the implementation of the Type-C port in the first generation Stations? The fact is that when users see Type-C, they expect that they can power the device from any adapter, for example, from a mobile phone kit. The task arises: to understand whether the connected adapter is suitable for us. To do this, they came up with the USB Power Delivery (PD) protocol.
For the protocol to work fully, two special chips are needed — both in the adapter and in the device. The adapter uses a chip to tell you what voltage and what current it can provide. The device in response «tells» what its needs for voltage and current are, and the connection occurs with those parameters that are suitable for both sides.
When we were designing the Station 2 power system, for the first time we were able to agree on affordable PD controllers for both the adapter and the device. The power supply was specially designed for this speaker, it has exactly the parameters that are needed, but it is adapted specifically for playing music — it is capable of briefly delivering current much higher than the nominal one. And, of course, you can charge any other devices that support PD from it.
But the main difficulty is not in developing a suitable adapter, but in somehow handling situations when the power supply either does not have a PD chip, or it does, but it is not able to provide enough power. We made a volitional decision at this point — to let the Station boot up and inform the user at a low volume that a more suitable adapter should be used. If the power supply supports PD-profile [15V 3A] , then the speaker will be fully functional.
These are not all stories.
