Technology

Panthers solve real-world problems

April 23, 2019 by theCrimson Leave a Comment

Malia Ashmead, Jamison Burch and Emanuel Rossi with the Osiris bioreactor.

Students utilized their knowledge gained through their years at Florida Tech to find solutions to real-world problems and present them at the Northrop Grumman Student Design and Research Showcase.

The event took place on April 12 at the Clemente Center.

“This was the first time that we could really put all of our knowledge to use and see everything we have learned since freshman year,” Emily Perron, an ocean engineering major, said.

Perron’s group, Reef Life, created an artificial reef that creates a perfect surf while also protecting the shoreline and promoting coral growth.

Perron said that the modular design was based off of LEGOs so the reef could be configured in any shape.

“It feels really great to have won Best in Show for Ocean Engineering and to know that someone really appreciated our hard work,” Perron said. “I’m very grateful.”

Reef Life placed first in their category, but success did not come without challenges.

Emily Perron and Stephen Hammond with their artificial reef, Reel Life.

“Originally we tried 3D printing our blocks, and they took 20 hours each to make and kept failing,” Perron said. “We had to make 100 of these blocks, so we had to find a different method of designing.”

Reef Life opted to use molds instead of printing to speed up their manufacturing process.

Dev Patel, an aerospace engineering major, presented the Perching Unmanned Monitoring Aircraft or PUMA.

PUMA can act as both a rotorcraft and a fixed wing aircraft, giving it increased speed and maneuverability.

The aircraft has a claw-like landing gear, which allows it to perch like a bird.

“It’s designed to act as a mobile services platform for emergency service providers,” Patel said.

Computer engineering major, Ahmed Okasha and his team designed an on-board diagnostic tool for the formula electric team.

“Once they build the car, the engineers would basically just walk up and plug in the device to the car and be able to get all the readings that they need,” Okasha said.

The device would give battery voltage, temperature and charging state readings.

Okasha said that in the future, a radio can be added to the device so that it can stay on the car permanently and send info back to the engineers while it’s racing.

“It [completing senior design] feels satisfying, but there’s always that one part of you that feels as if you could have done more,” Okasha said.

Cooper Mitchell, an ocean engineering student, and his team built the foundation vessel SWATH. SWATH is a Small Waterplane Area Twin Hole vessel was built to bridge the gap between large vessels and smaller vessels with not much over complications.

Mitchell’s project reached outside of ocean engineering and recruited the help of aerospace, electrical and computer engineers.

“It’s a great culmination of my ocean engineering degree,” Mitchell said. “We did coastal process, naval architecture, instrumentation, material science and ship design and construction. It showed me to have a full range of experience to take with me into the job market.”

A discrete upgrade to Florida Tech’s surveillance system

April 9, 2019 by theCrimson Leave a Comment

Behind the scenes look at security camera live feed. Photo by Christian Martinez.

Residents of Roberts Hall recently noticed a brand-new security camera outside the dorm where there wasn’t one previously.

This was one of the few noticed around campus, as it stuck out on the back entrance of Roberts Hall and pointing towards the bike rack.

There is no visible camera by the front entrance of the building.

Carlos Cepeda, a first-year computer science major and lab support services worker, said, “My bosses installed the cameras. This is their job. They call lab support to do stuff like this.”

Cepeda appreciates the new camera outside of Roberts since he is a resident there, but would like to keep the cameras outside the building.

Barry Cobb, assistant director of security, said, “Most of these cameras that were put in were replacements for cameras we’ve had all along.”

Cobb explained that the hardware of the cameras degrades over time, requiring replacements of the cameras themselves every five or six years.

The IT department overhauled the system by replacing “about 35 to 40 cameras” with models from 2018 and 2019 that are all digital with no moving parts.

The computers in the security office were also upgraded to monitor the livestreams.

Cobb mentioned that the cameras are all over the place: in elevators, various floors in some of the dorms, watching bike racks and in parking lots.

“They are there,” Cobb said, “If you walk around, you’ll see them.” Cobb said there were no security incidents that pushed for the camera replacements, just a system that reached the end of its life-cycle.

A camera on the side of Roberts Hall. Picture by Christian Martinez.

Thomas Couperthwaite, manager of lab support service information technology, said the installations were mainly done this past November.

“That’s when we started the first few in the parking garage at Panther Dining,” Couperthwaite said.

Couperthwaite said that some cameras were installed as recently as two weeks ago and that there are a few weeks until all of the camera installations are complete.

Some installations were as recent as a few days ago, such as the cameras installed to the roof of Evans Library on April 5.

Couperthwaite said that the cameras vary in quality depending on where they are intended to be installed.

Lower hanging cameras have a smaller resolution compared to rooftop cameras that are up high.

Replacement cameras were easy to swap out with old ones, while new cameras had to have a new data feed set up so they could stream to the security office.

“It’s an ongoing thing,” Couperthwaite said. “Every year we are maintaining and adding more cameras.”

A Casual Review – Grim Dawn: The Perfect Game for ARPG Fans

April 9, 2019 by theCrimson Leave a Comment

With the confirmed release of Diablo Immortal later this year, I figured it would be a good time to talk about Grim Dawn, a game that is closer to the classic actionRPG experience.

Official game poster by Crate Entertainment.

Before I get into the gameplay, I think it is a good idea to look at some data and make some comparisons so that I can explain why I think it is “a good ARPG game.”

Developed and published by a rather small independent developer named Crate Entertainment, Grim Dawn is an ARPG game that focuses on loot gathering and character building.

Grim Dawn is often described as a “spiritual successor” of Diablo 2 by many members of its community and critics, which says a lot about the game.

Diablo 3 is a sequel to Diablo 2 developed by Blizzard Entertainment, the company that is known for making highly praised games such as World of Warcraft and Starcraft.

The development of Diablo 3 took the company around 11 years to finish, and only one major and one minor expansion pack have been released ever since it’s initial launch.

The last expansion pack of Diablo 3 was released five years after the initial release, and it bearly had any content.

Crate Entertainment, on the other hand, announced the development of Grim Dawn in 2010 and later revealed that there were only two full-time employees in the company on their kickstart page.

Grim Dawn was eventually released in 2016.

Crate Entertainment has released two major and one minor expansion packs for the game in just three years.

While Diablo 3 is not necessarily a bad game, it is hard to think of a reason why a small company with 13 employees and mostly crowdfunded budget can spend almost half as much time to make a similar, if not better, game than a multi-million dollar company with a huge amount of resources.

There is definitely more information that needs to be looked at when it comes to comparing two similar things.

With that out of the way, let’s look at the gameplay.

Grim Dawn has its own unique style of world design and choice of music.

Like the title suggests, the visuals and soundtracks of the game are grim and often gives the player a sense of dread.

The world is falling apart and people are turning against each other, but there are still exotic locations to visit and cool gears to find.

While elements such as storytelling and character designs are important to a game, I think what makes this type of ARPG fun is the character and class customizations, and Grim Dawn is a very good example of this.

From a gunslinging necromancer to a greatswordwielding mage, Grim Dawn offers its players a huge variety of choices.

In Grim Dawn, the player gets to choose from one of the six bases plus three DLC classes once they reach to level two.

Each class has many different skills for a player to choose from, and the play style within a single class can even vary from the player’s choice.

In addition, the player will get to choose a second class specialization once they reach level 10, and the chosen class will be combined with the first class to become a completely new class.

This means that there are a total of 72 classes for the players to discover and experiment with.

On top of that, when the player get their first devotion point, they will meet the devotion menu, a passive skill system that allows the player to gain additional modifiers and abilities to further customize their character.

It is also worth mentioning that Grim Dawn features replayable content such as endless dungeons, harder difficulties and online co-op up to four players.

To conclude, Grim Dawn is an ARPG game with classic gameplay of the genre and a huge variety of customizations, and it is frequently being updated by the developers.

The game is currently available on PC and Xbox One.

A Horrible Review – Fourth Life considered greatest game in human history

April 1, 2019 by theCrimson Leave a Comment

After seven years of development and crowdfunding, Best Games Studios has finally fulfilled its promise of “creating the game that everyone dreamed of.”

Fourth Life is a massive multiplayer online first-person role-playing action survival sandbox simulation sports shooter real-time strategy battle royale game that has the most innovative game-play mechanics the world has ever seen.

Unlike other game developers, the people at Best Games Studios understand and know what the gaming community wants for their games.

Instead of choosing inferior and obsolete gaming platforms such as PCs and consoles, the developers of Fourth Life wanted everyone to enjoy the game and have made the decision to release exclusively on mobile because “everyone has a phone.”

The processing power and the state of the art hardware of smartphones are capable of handling the otherwise impossible engine that the game runs on for around 30-45 minutes, depending on the player’s preferred phone of choice.

If the player decides to get the Ultimate Deluxe Collector’s edition of Fourth Life for $300, the game will also come with a compact-portable power bank which will extend the possible play time.

Now let us talk about what makes Fourth Life so special: the game-play.

In Fourth Life, the player gets to choose to be whatever they want to be.

The forward-thinking developers of the game have added over 500 gender and sexual orientations for the players to choose from, such as Attack Helicopters, Goats, Pizza and Chairs.

The players are even allowed to customize the look of their character pixel by pixel, which is the true character building that everyone wanted.

After choosing what or who they want to be, the players are thrown into the immersive world of Fourthland, a place where magic and technology coexist and the world is open for the players to explore.

At the very start of the game, the players have to find a purpose for themselves as the game heavily emphasizes on making your own choice, which means that there are no set objectives and no real NPCs to interact with the players.

However, with a small fee of $30 per month, the player is able to access additional features of the game such as crafting and learning magic.

On top of the monthly subscriptions, the players can also purchase in-game currency to participate in what is probably the most exciting and addictive game mode of all time: Loot Roulette.

Unlike the questionable loot boxes that some other game companies have been implementing, the Loot Roulette is a perfectly fair and balanced mode that allows the players to acquire loot by playing the in-game roulette.

Although the win rate and chances of Loot Roulette were not posted by the developers of the game, Best Games Studios has assured players that the roulette is perfectly balanced because it functions just like a real-world roulette.

Aside from the breath-taking Loot Roulette game mode, the game also has a very competitive and advanced battle royale mode.

Unlike most popular battle royal games before the launch of Fourth Life, the battle royale mode of the game has completely removed the element of luck, as this would make the game unfair and not fun to play.

Instead, the players can use the in-game currency they’ve purchased to choose accurately where they’ll be dropping and what kind of loot they will acquire, a truly fair and open battle royale indeed.

Fourth Life is a completely perfect and functional game that will just keep improving by itself.

Even the developers at Best Games Studios have claimed to stop any further development and maintenance of the game shortly after its release because of how perfect it is.

To conclude, I’ll give Fourth Life the highest score and recommendation: 10/10; it’s all right and the only entertainment you will ever need.