“When you think of it, most video games take place inside a 2D or 3D space, so playing a game taking place inside a single dimension is very disturbing for both players and game designers!”

– Dr. Ludos discusses the novelty of creating 1 dimensional address bar games. 

Rock Paper Shotgun recently published an interview with some developers who create address bar games, which are meant to be played entirely within a website’s URL.

This is a neat example of developers thinking outside the box, introducing a genre of niche, experimental games worth exploring. 

One of the most well-known examples of an address bar game comes from Corey Johnson, who developed URL Hunter using JQuery back in 2011, initially by accident.

“I was working on some code and I accidentally created a bug that caused the URL address to rapidly change characters,” Johnson explains. “I kept thinking about it on my way home, so I stayed up that night fooling around with it until I had created URL Hunter.”

Johnson credits the inherent restrictions of the medium as its biggest appeal. “Seeing if I could make a game with these extreme limitations was the most interesting part of creating it,” he says. 

“You can’t program it like a terminal-based game because the address bar doesn’t use a monospaced font, so replacing a character causes all the other characters to move slightly. You have to be clever with how you do movement. Back in 2011, I could only get around 10 fps, which was tough to make look good.”

More recently, Ludum Dare 42 (a competitive 48 hour game jam) produced the address bar game Outrunning Space, an endless runner which pushes players back by every obstacle they fail to jump over until a game over is reached.

Its developer, who goes by Dr. Ludos, reveals that the limited amount of time he had to work on a game for Ludum Dare pushed his creative boundaries.

“It forced me to go all the way into minimalism. I chose to make an address bar game because it takes place in a 1D space. It’s quite a challenge to come up with game ideas that can function inside a screen of only 23 characters of width for a single unit of height!”

Dr. Ludos is convinced that address bar games have an incredible amount of potential ripe for other developers to explore.

“Address bar games are an under-explored field, so I think many designers could invent new kinds of 1D games if someone would like to organize a jam or competition centered on that theme.”

The two were having a larger conversation around address bar games, so sure to read the entire piece over at Rock Paper Shotgun, it’s well worth the read.

Starting at 6:00 p.m. PDT today, members of the Xbox One Preview Alpha Ring will begin receiving a new 1811 Xbox One system update (181109-1527). Read on for more about the fixes and known issues in the latest 1811 system update.

Fixes:

System

• Fixes to improve the stability of the console to fix the issue that some users were seeing consoles shutting down after taking a system update.
• Fixes to stop the console freezing when accessing the console Settings menu.  Users will no longer see the Settings menu freeze or fail to load.

Known Issues:

Audio

• We are tracking audio issues in which some games have audio that cuts in and out
• Audio settings reverting to a previous settings after taking an update. Workaround is to please turn on your Audio Receiver prior to turning your Xbox One and the settings will not revert.

 Profile Color

• Sometimes users may encounter the incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.

Eternal Card Game is Now Available on Steam!

Six-guns and sorcery collide in Eternal, the new strategy card game of unlimited choices and unbelievable fun. Eternal brings AAA pace and polish to the infinite possibilities of a deep strategy card game. The only limits are your own creativity.

A number of home automation platforms support Python as an extension, but if you’re a real Python fiend, you’ll probably want Home Assistant, which places the programming language front and center. Paulus Schoutsen created Home Assistant in 2013 “as a simple script to turn on the lights when the sun was setting,” as he told attendees of his recent Embedded Linux Conference and Open IoT conference presentation. (You can watch the complete video below.)

Schoutsen, who works as a senior software engineer for AppFolio in San Diego, has attracted 20 active contributors to the project. Home Assistant is now fairly mature, with updates every two weeks and support for more than 240 different smart devices and services. The open source (MIT license) software runs on anything that can run Python 3, from desktop PCs to a Raspberry Pi, and counts thousands of users around the world.

Like most automation systems, Home Assistant offers mobile and desktop browser clients to control smart home devices from afar. It differs from most commercial offerings, however, in that it has no hub appliance, which means there are no built-in radios. You can add the precisely those radios you want, however, using USB sticks. There’s also no cloud component, but Schoutsen argues that any functionality you might sacrifice because of this is more than matched by better security, privacy, and resiliency.

“There is no dependency on a cloud provider,” said Schoutsen. “Even when the Internet goes down, the home doesn’t shut down, and your very private data stays in your home.”

Schoutsen did not offer much of a promo in his presentation, but quickly set to work explaining how the platform works. Since Home Assistant is not radically different from other IoT frameworks — one reason why it interfaces easily with platforms ranging from Nest to Arduino to Kodi — the presentation is a useful introduction to IoT concepts.

To get a better sense of Home Assistant’s strengths, I recently asked Schoutsen for his elevator pitch. He highlighted the free, open source nature of the software, as well as the privacy and security of a local solution. He also noted the ease of setup and discovery, and the strength of the underlying Python language.

Easy Extensions

“Python makes it very easy to extend the system,” Schoutsen told me. “As a dynamic language it allows a flexibility that Java developers can only dream off. It is very easy to test out and prototype new pieces on an existing installation without breaking things permanently. With the recent introduction of MicroPython, which runs on embedded systems as Arduino and ESP8266, we can offer a single language for all levels of IoT: from sensors to automation to integration with third-party services.”

In Schoutsen’s ELC 2016 presentation, he described how Home Assistant is an event-driven program that incorporates a state machine that keeps track of “entities” — all the selected devices and people you want to track. Each entity has an identifier, a state condition, and attributes. The latter describes more about the state, such as the color and intensity of the light on a Philips Hue smart bulb.

To integrate a Philips Hue into the system, for example, you would need to use a light “component,” which is aware of the bulb and how to read its state (off or on). Home Assistant offers components for every supported device or service, as well as easy access to component groups such as lights, thermostats, switches, and garage doors. Setup is eased with a network discovery component that scans the network and, if you have a supported device, sets it up automatically. 

The software is further equipped with a service registry, which provides services over the event bus. “We can register the turn-on command for a light, and have it send an email or SMS,” said Schoutsen. “A timer can send a time change event every second, and a component can ask to be notified at a particular time, or in intervals. Based on time change events, it will trigger the callback of the components.”

Each component writes its state to the state machine, emitting a state change event to the event bus. “The light component would register its turn on service inside the service registry so that anyone could fire an event to the event bus to turn on the light,” said Schoutsen.

You can easily integrate a light component with a motion detector component using an automation component. This would listen to the motion detector events, and fire a “turn light on” event to the event bus, which in turn would be forwarded to the service registry. The registry would then check to see that the light component can handle the event. “Automation components can listen for events, observe certain attribute states or triggers, and act on them,” explained Schoutsen.

Another component type handles presence detection. “The platform can check the router to see which phones are connected in order to see who is home,” said Schoutsen. “Other components are responsible for recording event and state history, or for entity organization — grouping multiple entities and summarizing their state.” Components are available for integrating third party services, such as MQTT or IFTTT, and other components export data to external databases and analysis tools.

Schoutsen went on to explain concepts such as a “platform” layer that sits above the entity components. Each platform integrates an “abstract base class,” which “acts as the glue between the real device and the one represented in Home Assistant,” said Schoutsen. Later, he ran through a code example for a basic switch and explored the use of trigger zones for geofencing.

As Schoutsen says, Home Assistant is “gaining a lot of traction.” Check out the complete video to see what happens when Python meets IoT.

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The next time you’re shopping at a duty-free store, whether for an expensive whiskey or high-end cosmetics, chances are high that you’d pick up a bottle that was born in one of Piramal Glass’s manufacturing facilities with the help of an army of IoT sensors and advanced data analytics in the cloud.

With four manufacturing facilities spread across India, Sri Lanka, and the US, Piramal Glass is one of the world’s largest designers and producers of glass packaging for the pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and perfumery, and speciality food and beverage industries. The company counts 17 of the world’s top 20 cosmetics, perfumery, and skin care brands like LVMH, Coty, Sisley and Yves Rocher, as its customers. In fact, one in every three nail polish bottles in the world is manufactured by them.

But for one man being at the pinnacle of the industry wasn’t enough.

“Glass manufacturing is a complex industry with fixed costs and capacities that are therefore very sensitive to variations in demand. It was imperative to optimize the operations to drive profitable growth and it was evident that Industry 4.0 was one of the key levers to achieve this,” says Vijay Shah, Director, Piramal Glass & Executive Director, Piramal Enterprises Ltd.

Going digital

According to the ‘Unlocking the Economic Impact of Digital Transformation in Asia Pacific’ study conducted by Microsoft in partnership with IDC Asia Pacific, while 90% of organizations in India are in the midst of their digital transformation journey, only 7% in the entire region can be classified as Leaders. These are organizations that have full or progressing digital transformation strategies, with at least a third of their revenue derived from digital products and services. Leaders of digital transformation experience double the benefits of Followers, and these improvements will be more pronounced by 2020.

The management at Piramal Glass knew they had to become Leaders of digital transformation and set new benchmarks in the glass manufacturing business if they had to stay ahead of the curve. The writing was on the cloud.

“Digital can mean different things to different people. For us, it is to drive operational efficiency, enhance customer experience, and generate new revenue models by leveraging emerging technologies,” says Poorav Sheth, who joined Piramal Glass in November 2016 as its first Chief Digital Officer.

To kickstart the digital transformation of a legacy manufacturing business, Sheth conducted roadshows and workshops across the company’s offices and manufacturing facilities with demonstrations of latest technologies like IoT, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence (AI).

“We wanted to educate everyone–from those involved in production to operations to marketing—what was possible with digital transformation. We conducted envisioning sessions, which lead to people coming up with different concepts that they thought would enhance their functions,” he recalls.

One of the asks that came up frequently was could the manufacturing process get smarter to improve production efficiency and reduce defects? Glass products are produced in a continuous manufacturing process, where the raw materials go into a furnace to create molten glass, which is then formed into a bottle that goes through various treatments and checks before it is packed. It is a tricky process because you can’t pause it in case something goes wrong. In the earlier scenario, if a production batch was witnessing higher rejections at quality control, they could only hope to fix the problem in the next batch.

What made it more difficult was that data points from every batch were captured manually in paper logbooks which were painstaking to analyze. Often, the actions taken were based on the skills and experience of the expert and not so much with data. Could going digital change this?

It was game on for Sheth and his team of seven experts.

Getting real-time manufacturing insights

In July 2017, Sheth’s team started with a proof of concept to implement Real Time Manufacturing Insights (RTMI) in three production lines in one of the facilities based in Kosamba near Surat, a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat. The idea was to put a bunch of sensors on the production lines and see the data they could get and what they could do with the data. For this they decided to work with Microsoft and Precimetrix, a Microsoft partner.

“We were impressed with the platform approach Microsoft has taken with Azure IoT and the industrial automation experience Precimetrix brought to the table. We worked as a team and they also guided us on the kind of sensors and gateway devices we should use,” Sheth explains.

Like most things, the task at hand was easier said than done. There were nearly 100 sensors and data acquisition devices that already existed in the furnace alone! Add to it equipment sensors throughout the production line to monitor every aspect of their functioning to specialized camera-based sensors in inspection machines. The team also had the task of installing as many as 4,000 sensors that had to be connected and analyzed through RTMI.

“We are excited to partner with Piramal Glass as they create a strong foundation for driving transformational change. It is significant that our technology enabled the plant operations to continue as usual during the rollout of the Azure IoT solution, ensuring no disruption to the core manufacturing and deep integration with critical business processes,” says Sashi Sreedharan, Managing Director, Microsoft India.

Once the tricky part of installing the sensors and hooking them all to the cloud with Azure IoT Hub, the digital team started collecting every data point they could get from the production line. The sensors sent data every second, offering a microscopic peek into every machine and every process from the time raw material was fed into the furnace to the time the bottles came off the conveyor belts to be packed and shipped.

“We involved everyone from the production teams who were manning the lines, to quality control teams, to figure out the kind of data that’d be most useful to them. They came up with new suggestions frequently, which showed they were invested in the process,” he says.

Within three months the entire data collection process in those three lines was made paperless with dashboards that were accessible on smartphones, laptops and even large displays on the factory floors. A custom solution was developed on top of this platform to provide stage-wise losses, production reports, quality control workflows as well as role-specific KPIs. Actionable alerts were sent through SMS, email, and push notifications, whenever an anomaly was detected, or the production efficiency dropped. The benefits of RTMI were immediate.

Plant managers could now monitor the key performance metrics of the plant without having to wait for the notebook logs at the end of every shift, enabling them to take faster decisions. It also created a real-time feedback loop between the quality control and production teams, where operators managing the shop floor could spot the exact place where defects were emanating from and fix it to reduce rejections.

The project was such a success that the management decided to roll it out across all the 60 manufacturing lines Piramal Glass currently runs in four manufacturing plants spread in three countries. Starting in March this year, Sheth and his team has already implemented it on 46 lines in just six months and hope to complete the remaining before the end of the year. With this, Piramal Glass has created the first of its kind Smart Manufacturing platform with customized dashboards and workflows.

RTMI, which is a customized, first of its kind home grown solution in the glass manufacturing industry, not only offers more insights in real-time than the existing Manufacturing Execution System but also reduces the cost of ownership by 70%. RTMI has led to 40% reduction in manual data gathering, which has resulted in 25% improvement in employee productivity. The real-time feedback loop has led to 5% reduction in defects, which translates into better quality and enhanced predictability of delivery timelines for Piramal Glass’s customers.

“RTMI has democratized information availability and provided actionable insights to our skilled workforce. It has resulted in 1% improvement in production efficiency with a payback period of less than a year,” says Shah.

Bringing AI to glass manufacturing

There are more than 150 variables in the glass manufacturing process and a slight change in any of the variables could impact the product. With the implementation of IoT sensors and RTMI, Piramal Glass is now able to monitor most of these variables in real-time. So far, the company has analyzed more than 200 million data points from the 4,000 sensors.

From adopting disruptive technologies like IoT and AI, to creating a culture of agility and competition, to measuring digital transformation successes with new key performance indicators, Piramal Glass is a Leader in digital transformation in every sense. But this is just the beginning.

“Implementing IoT sensors is not the endgame. They only provide data, it is what you do with that data is the key. We’re now developing a Digital Twin for our production lines where we have implemented AI and Machine Learning models using the Microsoft Cognitive Services platform. This will enable us to predict production efficiency, defect causality and product quality, for every batch, based on input parameters derived from RTMI,” Sheth says.

“Microsoft is committed towards the technological advancement of the manufacturing sector in India and has made considerable investments to help drive digital transformation across optimized operations, innovative products and services, engaged customers and empowered employees,” adds Sreedharan.

Oh, snap. Avengers: Infinity War is coming to @Netflix on December 25. pic.twitter.com/EMB8LgicdT

— NX (@NXOnNetflix) November 19, 2018