29 ms·

The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

243 points by namiwang 3y ago

Synaesthesia 3y ago
Wow they went as far as multiple layers of glass with argon pumped between them!
- flangola7 3y ago
  Wouldn't a vacuum between be better?
  - h2odragon 3y ago
    Yes, but then you have the danger of implosion and shards of glass flying everywhere. That's a different kinda spectator sport.
    - flangola7 3y ago
      Then how is argon better than nitrogen and oxygen?
      - h2odragon 3y ago
        More expensive and sexier. What gas you fill that space with is far less relevant to noise cancelling than how the pane is mounted to the others and the floor; but "argon filled!" is great marketing bullshit.
      - jwie 3y ago
        Argon is more dense and inert.
        mrob 3y ago
        But wouldn't density make things worse? Helium can be used for noise attenuation like this because it's light, so you get worse acoustic impedance matching between the panels and the gas. Argon is denser than air.
        h2odragon 3y ago
        Helium would leak out fairly rapidly, no? I can see the benefit of impedance mismatching but i truly think that for an application like this it cannot be worth the effort until you add in the "marketing" intangibles. Why not fill the panels with water? gloinggg edit: IIRC argon filled double pane windows are a thing partly because the argon doesn't absorb moisture like air does; so there's less chance of condensation happening in between the panes. So perhaps they just bought double pane panel that were commercially available and ran with the sales brochure from that to fill out a press release.
      - cinntaile 3y ago
        It's inert, it's abundant and it's the gas of choice in windows so it's probably simply the cheapest choice.
      - jaggederest 3y ago
        Argon transmits sound much worse than air. I believe it's due to the fact that denser gases require more energy to compress and decompress, thus dampening sound vibrations. Even more fancy windows use Krypton, since it has superior thermal and acoustic properties over Argon, but is about 60 times more expensive. Xenon would also be a candidate, but it's about 10 times more expensive even than krypton, and also has the extreme downside of being an anesthetic when inhaled. Edit: Sorry, I guess it has better thermal properties but worse acoustic ones. Helium or Hydrogen would be the ideal gasses for sound reduction.
        pclmulqdq 3y ago
        In general, denser materials are better (and faster) at transmitting physical waves sound and worse (and slower) at transmitting electric waves like heat.
        Terr_ 3y ago
        > Xenon [...] an anesthetic when inhaled. That reminds me of a bit of dialogue from the classic game Deus Ex (2000), where a biotech office-worker is complaining about their job: > This chemoreceptor patent-proposal is kicking my ass. Hundley won't let me down until it's done. Hardly worth filing for, in my opinion. Who wants to smell the difference between xenon and radon?
  - Synaesthesia 3y ago
    I'm also wonder what it is about argon gas that helps prevent sound transmission.
    - fennecfoxy 3y ago
      Argon gas does not conduct heat as well as air, so it's an excellent insulator. <--- why it's used for double glazing in housing, to insulate heat transfer. Which is interesting because the density of argon is greater than air, it does not block or insulate against sound other than the general deadening effect you'd get from multiple layers (energy loss in kinetic transfer from gas to glass to gas to glass to gas again). Vacuum, He or H would've been better imo
    - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
      This [1] explains Sound Transmission Class (STC) ratings. > An STC label delineates how partitions and walls effectively block sound and reduce noise. Ratings are determined by broadcasting a specific auditory tone near the material, and measuring dB on both sides. The higher the STC value, the better its insulation. From the table STC=25 means "Normal speech easily understood" and STC=50 means "Shouting not heard" This [2] table has one datapoint comparison of "airspace" vs argon filled windows. Both have an STC of 35. So maybe it doesn't help. [1] https://www.dillmeierglass.com/news/stc-ratings-of-glass https://www.dillmeierglass.com/news/stc-ratings-of-glass [2] https://www.general-glass.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/AcousticPerfDataTables.pdf https://www.general-glass.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Aco...
      - mrob 3y ago
        I wonder if somebody vaguely remembered the effects of helium fill, which actually does reduce sound transmission, and vaguely remembered that argon-filled windows are a commercial product, and conflated the two because they're both noble gases.
        the_sleaze9 3y ago
        Nothing about the story of this project suggests they are top-tier sound engineers, and when you don't really know what you're doing (said very respectfully) the proposition "we need to fill windows and this is what other people normally do when they fill windows" is a very positive data point. They didn't even start with museum-grade glass for optimal filming, which to a absolute layman like me seems like they just hadn't bumped most of these problems before.
  - jccalhoun 3y ago
    Argon is commonly used for double glazed windows so I would assume that the manufacturer has the experience to do that. Vacuum insulated panels exist but since that is for insulating properties I don't know if there would be any advantage for sound deadening.
    - nativeit 3y ago
      Sounds cannot pass through a vacuum, as sound is fundamentally pressure waves that propagate through air. Someone also mentioned the thermal properties of the fill gas (argon being less conductive than air) and it’s also correlated, as temperature is simply a measure of the kinetic energy of molecules, so a higher mass molecule will require more energy to move, which applies to both thermal conductivity and sound transmission. The more you reduce these problems down to their physical fundamentals, the more related they seem to become. It’s that elegance that got me hooked on electronics engineering—our experience of the universe is remarkable in how frequently a given phenomena can be described using little more than basic principles applied recursively.
      - cwillu 3y ago
        You can support two panes with a gas in between with a strip of soft rubber, whereas with vacuum, I suspect the rigidity of the frame needed to support the panes against atmospheric pressure can easily kill the gains you make in isolation.
        stephen_g 3y ago
        There are vacuum insulated units [1], they need tiny plastic 'microspacers' in them to keep the glass layers apart. 1. https://www.pilkington.com/en/global/products/product-categories/thermal-insulation/pilkington-spacia#overview https://www.pilkington.com/en/global/products/product-catego...
        cwillu 3y ago
        And those spacers are rigid, which will remove a lot of the acoustic gains you'd otherwise get from using a vacuum. It's worth noting that, although the page you linked says “good acoustic performance”, the vacuum windows they offer aren't mentioned on their noise control product page, nor listed in their sound simulator tool.
- bri3d 3y ago
  This is a common consumer product, "gas fill" multi-pane windows. Argon is used in this application because it's not very thermally conductive (it's also used to fill dry suits for the same reason). I found a pretty good "sciencey layman" explanation of "why Argon" for dry suits here, which matches the reasoning for windows: https://www.decompression.org/maiken/Why_Argon.htm https://www.decompression.org/maiken/Why_Argon.htm . I'm not sure how much this carries through to sound transmission and I couldn't find a lot of good literature about it. I'd have loved to see if they did any quantitive testing. It makes sense that Argon would reduce sound transmission some, but I would expect that the properties of the glass sheet itself and the interface between the panes and the frame would be more of an issue than the void between the panes.
  - dguest 3y ago
    The insulation part has a nice handwaving explanation [1]: Heat is transmitted because gas molecules bounce back and forth in a box, picking up energy on the hot side and leaving it on the cold side. The kinetic energy in any gas molecule is proportional to the temperature, and is E = 1/2 m * v^2 solved for v: v = sqrt[ (2 * E) / m ] Faster gas means faster transmission, so the rate is proportional to 1 / sqrt(m). I don't have a good intuitive explanation for the sound attenuation. The acoustic impedance for an ideal gas is going to depend on the mass of the molecules, and having very different acoustic impedance for the two gasses at an interface will minimize transmission. So I would expect Argon to reflect more sound, but I don't have as cute an explanation as the one for thermal transmission. [1] Also completely made up, would love to know if I'm wrong.
Zathu 3y ago
I don’t understand the problem this solves - why not put the players in noise cancelling headsets?
- janosdebugs 3y ago
  Two theories: 1. Noise cancelling headphones don't cancel everything 2. They needed to be able to use mics, which don't work well with a lot of ambient noise.
- npace12 3y ago
  would that work? that's like wearing noise canceling headphones to a concert.
- lijok 3y ago
  Uncomfortable for the players if I had to guess
- etskinner 3y ago
  Read the article; The last couple paragraphs talk about how they tried that and it didn't live up to their standards
- deleted 3y ago
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- Twisell 3y ago
  Maybe reading the article you are reacting to would have helped: - It is a retrospective and the first edition held place in 2011. At that time noise canceling in harsh conditions was not a solved issue. - They actually tried the noise canceling, no box approach at the 2022 event. They reverted to boxes for 2023 because it still need tweaking to drop the box altogether.
- Nullabillity 3y ago
  Have you ever tried using ANC headphones? They'd be better described as noise-reducing. They can also be uncomfortable to some people when worn for long durations, and you presumably do want to let players in the same team communicate to each other.
kzrdude 3y ago
Unfortunately, they serve a machine translated version of the blog text. Well, I don't even know. The language is technically correct I guess, but completely without life and using expressions that one would use in english. That's not bad for an automatic translation.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- december456 3y ago
  You sure about the machine part? While a surprise, it was one of the better localizations i have experienced in the world wide web.
  - ascar 3y ago
    GPT translates incredibly well.
  - teshigahara 3y ago
    In the Japanese translation it was extremely obvious and I had to switch to English. The tone is completely off
  - kzrdude 3y ago
    I'm sure that this is a very low quality text - I was reading the Swedish language version. It has technical qualities similar to human language which makes it harder to pinpoint the problem, but it does not read like something a proficient writer would create. It is translating too literally, preserving almost every word from the original (while adapting sentence structure) and that's maybe the thing I can most easily pinpoint. Colloquial phrasing like "We also had these enormous PCs that Nvidia had lent us" is preserved by translating literally instead of choosing an equivalent level of conversational language but more natural word choice.
- Aachen 3y ago
  Oh, that's good to know. I was surprised to see a German article on HN and, while it's not the first time, I did kinda expect it was a translation. But I didn't think it was a machine translation: anyone so bad at English that they can't read a regular text about a topic they're interested in will be used to running pages through a translator, probably via a browser extension. No need to serve up a machine translation noninteractively. As a German learner, I take every German text at least somewhat as a learning experience and look at the conjugations used. If it had said "this is a computer-generated text" above, I'd have done that. Now I'm not sure what mistakes I've been using as example...
wincy 3y ago
It was definitely an interesting article but the first sentence of the article proper really grabbed me. The weird thing to me about the world is you can have an event that literally millions of people watch around the world, and if you had asked me “what’s the International” five minutes ago I wouldn’t have had any idea, and I’m a very online person! I play video games, even, and at one point played DOTA2! The internet has totally fractionated our culture to subcultures within subcultures, to the point where when people meet in person they have nothing to talk about. Down with the monoculture and all that. It’s astounding how much money and thought and effort went into building the booths too! This is the least surprising part: there is a lot of money sloshing around in the world. The amount of talent to build soundproof booths so people can comfortably play a video game in front of a bunch of people is wild.
- __s 3y ago
  TI is a bit notorious because it's prize pool is massive compared to other esports. Winning TI puts someone's prize earnings past lifetime earnings of most other top player's career prize earnings in other games https://liquipedia.net/dota2/The_International#Tournaments https://liquipedia.net/dota2/The_International#Tournaments https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Portal:Statistics/Player_earnings https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Portal:Statistics/Player_earnin... https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Winnings https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Winnings https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Portal:Statistics/Player_earnings https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Portal:Statistics/Player_ea...
  - bspammer 3y ago
    To hammer it home even more: https://www.esportsearnings.com/players https://www.esportsearnings.com/players 21 dota players at the top before you get a different game (Fortnite)
    - alargemoose 3y ago
      Wow, Not only are the top 21 dota 2 players, all but *4* of the top 50 earners are dota 2 players
leetrout 3y ago
Actual title: "Between the Lanes: The Sound (Proof Booths) of Silence" Is this actually by Valve employees? Or just with Valve's funding?
- VoidWhisperer 3y ago
  According to the text under the first image: "... a blog feature where we let members of our development team walk through some of the challenges, bugfixes, and occasional happy accidents we encounter while working on a game as unique as Dota, and an event as unique as The International." It appears to be from their team's experiences with setting up 'The International' up till now
lijok 3y ago
This is a great article and I understand the need for the booths, but to me personally, they look horrible. It looks as if the players are sitting in a kiosk. Surely it would make for a much more enveloping experience for the spectators if the players were in an open space.
- VoidWhisperer 3y ago
  According to the article, they tried this this past year and unfortunately weren't able to get the sound dampening up to an acceptable standard, so for the time being they are going back to the booths
- jwatzman 3y ago
  League of Legends (a similar game) does this -- no booths, only noise-cancelling headphones, for its large tournaments. There have been several major tournaments where the players have complained afterwards that they could not hear anything during big late-game fights due to crowd noise (since the crowd is also super excited at the big fight). Players need to be able to hear not just the game audio but also communication from their teammates and, despite noise-cancelling headphones, the crowd just drowned everything out. I'm honestly not sure why League of Legends hasn't moved to booths like Dota uses. I'm not sure if you've ever watched one of these tournaments, but they get super noisy, and noise-cancelling all of that is not an easy problem (as the article says).
  - NelsonMinar 3y ago
    My understanding is LoL productions are still trying to make it look like you are watching actual athletes do a sport. If you lock the away in booths it puts too much of a distance between the audience and the players. OTOH crowd noise giving away what's going on in the game has been a problem since their broadcasts start. It doesn't ruin the game but it's definitely a factor.
    - kang 3y ago
      One solution could be to standardize the "esport booth", so it becomes more like a squash court for example
ateng 3y ago
Could you delay the large screens, commentaries, and live broadcast by 3-5 seconds (or more) such that any information gained from leaked noise would have minimal impact to the players? This would make ANS headphones viable
- CyberRage 3y ago
  some information can be viable for longer than that, there are some extreme cases where 2~3 minutes would not suffice
- xxs 3y ago
  5sec would be way too low for anything meaningful. One of the more pronounced cases, where the audience reacts, is 'smoke' which makes the players invisible until they are close to opponent player (or tower), used in a way to initiated a gank. The 'smoke' last 45seconds. Killing a big NPC (Roshan) is another example as it takes time (and usually more than a single player) to down it. Other cases: buying a rapier - very high damaging and expensive item but it does drop on death - so it's a warning sound, that may take minutes between a conflict and used. Sound proofing however still doesn't solve the issue as it doesn't deal with the vibrations in the venue. Pro players have commented that if they start feeling vibrations while 'farming' alone, they become more cautious - asking a support player to cover the gank or move to a safer area.
  - ufo 3y ago
    translation: gank = ambush, farming = collecting resources without engaging against the enemy team
    - xxs 3y ago
      I'd have considered 'gank' a fairly known/used term.
      - Aachen 3y ago
        I've never heard it in my life and I play games (not Dota) and get around on the internet generally. My first association was clank from hermitcraft's decked out, but that didn't quite fit. Farming is what I figured from context, though
donatj 3y ago
I don’t really get esports or regular sports for that matter, but this seems like overkill? How much of an advantage could they really get from someone yelling at them in the audience? With a decent audience they are rarely going to hear anything other than a din anyway. Doesn’t seem like much more of an advantage than people yelling things at baseball players? Seems like it could just be part of the calculation of the competition rather than working so hard to avoid it.
- Forge36 3y ago
  Enough to give pause. In StarCraft there was a trap set and a fan favorite was about to walk right into it. The audience went wild. And then he stopped all units, and retreated. When interviewed he said he'd stopped because the audience went wild when they shouldn't have. (They cleared the stadium for the next match) Baseball isn't a game of hidden knowledge. The audience mood can give away details about the other team. Think poker. If another player bluffed and the audience gasps, you know something notable happened.
  - Forge36 3y ago
    I did some more digging and found this post https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/40832-starcraft-audience#12 https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/40832-starcraft-audience#12
- andy81 3y ago
  The noise is a common giveaway in pro League of Legends despite similar efforts. Usually when a player is walking up to a hidden enemy the crowd changes in a noticeable way, even on the stream. It's not an individual shout so much as the overall noise.
  - donatj 3y ago
    And what I am saying is why is this a bad thing. Just make it part of the competition, seems way more fun.
    - 3y ago
pluijzer 3y ago
I guess the allure of physical events is twofold, to feel a connection with other fans and to feel a connection with the players. I wonder if this diminishes the latter. Maybe put the players somewhere else entirely and stream it in the form of these stage holograms.
brainzap 3y ago
That the players can see each other also allows for some mindgames, for example “the paper” https://youtu.be/ymWj2brfZlA?feature=shared https://youtu.be/ymWj2brfZlA?feature=shared
- Aachen 3y ago
  Sorry, but what's this showing? Someone walks with paper in their hands, that's what you're referring to, but did this have an effect in some way that was noticeable later in the tournament that isn't shown in the clip? It seems like a joke to bring a stack of papers to a computer tournament, not something to trick the other team into thinking... what, exactly?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - pototo666 3y ago
    context: at Ti8's final, Team LGD played against Team OG. During the draft phase, OG players had some paper, which were statistics of LGD (I guess). Somnus the player said: Ceb is holding a bunch of paper. https://youtu.be/abEDXaPyIOE?t=15 https://youtu.be/abEDXaPyIOE?t=15. In that final, LGD almost won but they lost at the end. That final is arguably the best final in Dota2 history. The moment when Somuns taunted OG was captured by True Sight, which is a documentary for every TI final. LGD players surely watched the documentary or at least the clip many times. The first clip you questioned about is from Ti9, a year after Ti8, where OG and LGD played again. Notail the player took a bunch of paper (way too many for drafting analysis purpose) to remind LGD their tragic loss last year. Hence the mind game. Btw, LGD lost again.
    - Aachen 3y ago
      Thanks for that context! That explains
hyperman1 3y ago
I was served the Dutch translation, and I must say I am impressed with the state of the art of this machine translation. While this still feels mechanically translated English, and accents are missing, it was very readable. I am used to having to translate each individual word to English and swap some verbs to end up with something readable -- with the regular paragraph of total gibberish in between. This reads like at least a high school student's homework.
- batshit_beaver 3y ago
  Valve uses human translators, not ML. So unless you're talking about your browser's auto-translation feature, you are, in fact, reading human-produced text.
  - jvdvegt 3y ago
    Do they? I got the dutch version as well, and it's full of english sentences translated word-by-word.
  - hyperman1 3y ago
    This one is in the uncanny zone. If it comes from AI, I salute the AI. If human, I'd advise Valve to find better Humans.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ricardobeat 3y ago
I wonder if they have looked into air curtains. Commercial installations are at a point where you have this silent, completely invisible sheet of fast-moving air that provides some degree of noise isolation as well - maybe four walls of these + a floating ceiling is enough when coupled with the noise-cancelling headphones.
- seanthemon 3y ago
  I think leave the audience participation in, let the chaos rain supreme!
  - wnevets 3y ago
    There was a recent dota2 LAN without soundproofing and the audience would ruin surprise attacks (aka smoke tanks) or surprise objective taking (aka rosh), it made the gameplay worse.
  - bspammer 3y ago
    That would encourage a much more boring style of gameplay. If you can’t launch a surprise attack because the audience will give it away, the best strategy would be to slowly and incrementally build up a gold and experience advantage.
    - cmcaleer 3y ago
      Very similar issue in CS. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbcdzWQx6WM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbcdzWQx6WM A certain player who used to get accused of cheating a lot learned this trick way before everyone else, but in recent years everyone's been doing it and it can really swing games in a way that's not fun to watch as a spectator.
  - jfim 3y ago
    Players have said in the past that it makes it impossible to do Roshan sneakily, since the crowd gives it away.
redder23 3y ago
Is this supposed to be impressive. A company who owns a money printing machine is able to build multiple layers of glass with argon pumped between them? Sorry, not impressed.
langsoul-com 3y ago
It's crazy that the booths cost $200k, like how is it even possible they cost THAT much!
- falcolas 3y ago
  Soundproofing requires mass. A lot of it. It also requires careful control of airflow to remove paths the sound can travel. Museum quality glass and argon are both fairly expensive. Especially in quantities sufficient to fill the mass quota.
exabrial 3y ago
Aging myself here... I played a ton of DOTA on the WarCraft3 engine... probably when I should have been studying for engineering finals. What amazed me about the game, and probably why it is so addictively fun to play is you always have two competing things gripping for your attention. On one hand, resource farming _demands_ incredible attention to detail (obtaining the last shot on creeps for a kill, ergo a gold reward). Then on the other hand, you must also be planning your character's build, monitoring minimap, monitoring others' builds, and most especially watching missing enemy players. It's hard to do all of the things effectively... one has to make the farming aspect of the game second nature and remove the distraction to be a good player. (Which I never was) I don't have the luxury of spare time to play long DOTA games anymore, and largely I've replaced it with building things and outdoor sports (MTB racing, Gravel Racing, climbing) but I still look fondly at those times and the IRL and online friend group I had.
- matthewaveryusa 3y ago
  They've added turbo mode recently which keeps most games between 15 and 30 minutes!
  - adamrezich 3y ago
    if it weren't for Turbo I probably wouldn't still be playing 11 years after beta. Turbo is great.
  - sundarurfriend 3y ago
    Since parent said they played DOTA on the WarCraft3 engine: Turbo mode is basically `-em` (easy mode) from Dota 1 with some quality of life improvements.
- deleted 3y ago
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rtpg 3y ago
Valve seems like such a blank check company, able to jump onto projects and apply so much effort to things thanks to their resources Would love to see more about what they’re doing and how they’re organized recently (an updated employee handbook?)
- solardev 3y ago
  My understanding is that they're still privately owned and pretty free, culturally, right? Yeah, I wish they'd make a few blog posts about how they run projects. Would love to see how the Deck, Index, GeForce Now support, etc. all came to be. They're that rare tech company from the 90s/2000s that I still adore today.
  - adventured 3y ago
    You can definitely see the difference in ownership that Gabe Newell brings to Valve, just as Tim Sweeney has to Epic, as founders that have been with the companies from the beginning. They can do things just because they're interesting. They clearly feel free to explore. It's a remarkable luxury of their financial success. Mojang perhaps had that potential (due to how hyper profitable Minecraft was), but, well....
- deleted 3y ago
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WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
Must be super boring to not hear the crowd, perhaps why I found watching dota esport to be super boring
ilyt 3y ago
Well, according to many complaints over time, the answer is "not very well". Oh, well, 12th time the charm
eastbound 3y ago
I don’t understand their setup: - Standard stage/audienxe inclination is 4%, so you’d think they’d set it up at 4% or above… Nope, they incline the windows towards the ground! To wit, they had to transform the ceiling into glass panels, which shows they did have the problem of audience seeing from atop, which adds weight which they later say was one of their major problem. Talk about solving a problem by adding another problem. - Their entire setup has big white beams everywhere, there’s no angle where the audience can see clearly. Why not having seams? - My house has larger glass panels than that, and they are soundproof for the highway. Surely it was possible to ship bigger glass panels, simpler design, oriented towards the top so that the roof can be plain.
xvedejas 3y ago
In Age of Empires tournaments, they simply put the players in a different room from the casters/audience, with live streaming cameras. Maybe because live audiences are relatively rare in these tournaments, there's less of a demand for players to be physically in the same room as the audience?
- reidjs 3y ago
  You may be thinking of pre twitch/YouTube. These players sell out coliseums for $100s of dollars per ticket. The fans want to at least physically see them play, even if it’s through a window. once you rely on webcams then you may as well be watching on twitch for free.
  - ace32229 3y ago
    Specifically, this year's TI finals tickets are $699+fees for the 3 day pass.
Dowwie 3y ago
this photo from the article amazes me: https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//3703047/a37cd40d60d7e6127986ff16e5349ffbcd76cf0e.jpg https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//3703047/a37c... that's a packed stadium, up to the nose bleeds
- deleted 3y ago
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- pyreko 3y ago
  Similar photo from League of Legends' world finals from 2022 (Chase Center): https://res.cloudinary.com/dxb0ptf6a/image/upload/c_fill,dpr_auto,f_auto,g_auto,q_70,ar_4:3,w_986/prod/assets/insights/t1-drx-final.jpg https://res.cloudinary.com/dxb0ptf6a/image/upload/c_fill,dpr... If you haven't been paying attention to the eSports scene it can definitely be really surprising, but the crowd size and the production value of these things is insane to think about, especially if you aren't expecting it for just a video game.
  - JCharante 3y ago
    That looks like a small stadium compared to one used in 2017 https://www.flickr.com/photos/lolesports/38160463331 https://www.flickr.com/photos/lolesports/38160463331
holoduke 3y ago
A bit off topic. But this site is auto translated? Its in Dutch for me and reads like a llm translated piece of text. Very unpleasant to read with overly long sentences and weird expressions.
- roughly 3y ago
  It looks that way, yeah. It’s fine in English, but their “select languages” list has about 30 different languages listed, and I can’t imagine they’ve spent the money to do that the right way.
- AndriyKunitsyn 3y ago
  Valve uses volunteers for the majority of translation work. Some languages are lucky to have competent and committed volunteer translators, others not so much.
- eCa 3y ago
  Another small northern European language here that got an (hopefully) auto-translated version. Completely unreadable. Even if done by a human it is pretty much translated word for word with no feeling for the target language at all.
none_to_remain 3y ago
Ctrl-F "stink": 0 Ctrl-F "stench": 0 Ctrl-F "smell": 1 hit but only for hot insulation smell
rpaddock 3y ago
The former Westinghouse Electric Sharon Transformer Plant is a 58-acre facility located in Mercer County, Pennsylvania. They built substation transformers there. To test them the rolled them into a sound proof room, on a rail car, to listen for hum. Lose windings would vibrate causing hum and generate damaging heat. When I was there I was told that if wanted to rent it, they would fix the 440V door system (someone took the cooper). To give you a size perspective of this place, our tour guide, from the balcony, said "See that toy truck down there? That is a full size 18-wheeler." It took us a 20 minute walk to reach that full size truck that looked like a child's toy in this MASSIVE room.
- Aeroi 3y ago
  thats awesome, what were you going to rent the space for?
  - rpaddock 3y ago
    I just thought it would be cool to see how long people might last in such a room. It was not in my budget. So far at least. Here is the Worlds Quiets Room, as of 2018: https://www.soundacousticsolutions.com/blog/2018/04/05/the-quietest-room-on-earth/ https://www.soundacousticsolutions.com/blog/2018/04/05/the-q...

243 points by namiwang 3y ago

Synaesthesia 3y ago

Wow they went as far as multiple layers of glass with argon pumped between them!

flangola7 3y ago
Wouldn't a vacuum between be better?
- h2odragon 3y ago
  Yes, but then you have the danger of implosion and shards of glass flying everywhere. That's a different kinda spectator sport.
  - flangola7 3y ago
    Then how is argon better than nitrogen and oxygen?
    - h2odragon 3y ago
      More expensive and sexier. What gas you fill that space with is far less relevant to noise cancelling than how the pane is mounted to the others and the floor; but "argon filled!" is great marketing bullshit.
    - jwie 3y ago
      Argon is more dense and inert.
      - mrob 3y ago
        But wouldn't density make things worse? Helium can be used for noise attenuation like this because it's light, so you get worse acoustic impedance matching between the panels and the gas. Argon is denser than air.
        h2odragon 3y ago
        Helium would leak out fairly rapidly, no? I can see the benefit of impedance mismatching but i truly think that for an application like this it cannot be worth the effort until you add in the "marketing" intangibles. Why not fill the panels with water? gloinggg edit: IIRC argon filled double pane windows are a thing partly because the argon doesn't absorb moisture like air does; so there's less chance of condensation happening in between the panes. So perhaps they just bought double pane panel that were commercially available and ran with the sales brochure from that to fill out a press release.
    - cinntaile 3y ago
      It's inert, it's abundant and it's the gas of choice in windows so it's probably simply the cheapest choice.
    - jaggederest 3y ago
      Argon transmits sound much worse than air. I believe it's due to the fact that denser gases require more energy to compress and decompress, thus dampening sound vibrations. Even more fancy windows use Krypton, since it has superior thermal and acoustic properties over Argon, but is about 60 times more expensive. Xenon would also be a candidate, but it's about 10 times more expensive even than krypton, and also has the extreme downside of being an anesthetic when inhaled. Edit: Sorry, I guess it has better thermal properties but worse acoustic ones. Helium or Hydrogen would be the ideal gasses for sound reduction.
      - pclmulqdq 3y ago
        In general, denser materials are better (and faster) at transmitting physical waves sound and worse (and slower) at transmitting electric waves like heat.
      - Terr_ 3y ago
        > Xenon [...] an anesthetic when inhaled. That reminds me of a bit of dialogue from the classic game Deus Ex (2000), where a biotech office-worker is complaining about their job: > This chemoreceptor patent-proposal is kicking my ass. Hundley won't let me down until it's done. Hardly worth filing for, in my opinion. Who wants to smell the difference between xenon and radon?
- Synaesthesia 3y ago
  I'm also wonder what it is about argon gas that helps prevent sound transmission.
  - fennecfoxy 3y ago
    Argon gas does not conduct heat as well as air, so it's an excellent insulator. <--- why it's used for double glazing in housing, to insulate heat transfer. Which is interesting because the density of argon is greater than air, it does not block or insulate against sound other than the general deadening effect you'd get from multiple layers (energy loss in kinetic transfer from gas to glass to gas to glass to gas again). Vacuum, He or H would've been better imo
  - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
    This [1] explains Sound Transmission Class (STC) ratings. > An STC label delineates how partitions and walls effectively block sound and reduce noise. Ratings are determined by broadcasting a specific auditory tone near the material, and measuring dB on both sides. The higher the STC value, the better its insulation. From the table STC=25 means "Normal speech easily understood" and STC=50 means "Shouting not heard" This [2] table has one datapoint comparison of "airspace" vs argon filled windows. Both have an STC of 35. So maybe it doesn't help. [1] https://www.dillmeierglass.com/news/stc-ratings-of-glass https://www.dillmeierglass.com/news/stc-ratings-of-glass [2] https://www.general-glass.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/AcousticPerfDataTables.pdf https://www.general-glass.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Aco...
    - mrob 3y ago
      I wonder if somebody vaguely remembered the effects of helium fill, which actually does reduce sound transmission, and vaguely remembered that argon-filled windows are a commercial product, and conflated the two because they're both noble gases.
      - the_sleaze9 3y ago
        Nothing about the story of this project suggests they are top-tier sound engineers, and when you don't really know what you're doing (said very respectfully) the proposition "we need to fill windows and this is what other people normally do when they fill windows" is a very positive data point. They didn't even start with museum-grade glass for optimal filming, which to a absolute layman like me seems like they just hadn't bumped most of these problems before.
- jccalhoun 3y ago
  Argon is commonly used for double glazed windows so I would assume that the manufacturer has the experience to do that. Vacuum insulated panels exist but since that is for insulating properties I don't know if there would be any advantage for sound deadening.
  - nativeit 3y ago
    Sounds cannot pass through a vacuum, as sound is fundamentally pressure waves that propagate through air. Someone also mentioned the thermal properties of the fill gas (argon being less conductive than air) and it’s also correlated, as temperature is simply a measure of the kinetic energy of molecules, so a higher mass molecule will require more energy to move, which applies to both thermal conductivity and sound transmission. The more you reduce these problems down to their physical fundamentals, the more related they seem to become. It’s that elegance that got me hooked on electronics engineering—our experience of the universe is remarkable in how frequently a given phenomena can be described using little more than basic principles applied recursively.
    - cwillu 3y ago
      You can support two panes with a gas in between with a strip of soft rubber, whereas with vacuum, I suspect the rigidity of the frame needed to support the panes against atmospheric pressure can easily kill the gains you make in isolation.
      - stephen_g 3y ago
        There are vacuum insulated units [1], they need tiny plastic 'microspacers' in them to keep the glass layers apart. 1. https://www.pilkington.com/en/global/products/product-categories/thermal-insulation/pilkington-spacia#overview https://www.pilkington.com/en/global/products/product-catego...
        cwillu 3y ago
        And those spacers are rigid, which will remove a lot of the acoustic gains you'd otherwise get from using a vacuum. It's worth noting that, although the page you linked says “good acoustic performance”, the vacuum windows they offer aren't mentioned on their noise control product page, nor listed in their sound simulator tool.
bri3d 3y ago
This is a common consumer product, "gas fill" multi-pane windows. Argon is used in this application because it's not very thermally conductive (it's also used to fill dry suits for the same reason). I found a pretty good "sciencey layman" explanation of "why Argon" for dry suits here, which matches the reasoning for windows: https://www.decompression.org/maiken/Why_Argon.htm https://www.decompression.org/maiken/Why_Argon.htm . I'm not sure how much this carries through to sound transmission and I couldn't find a lot of good literature about it. I'd have loved to see if they did any quantitive testing. It makes sense that Argon would reduce sound transmission some, but I would expect that the properties of the glass sheet itself and the interface between the panes and the frame would be more of an issue than the void between the panes.
- dguest 3y ago
  The insulation part has a nice handwaving explanation [1]: Heat is transmitted because gas molecules bounce back and forth in a box, picking up energy on the hot side and leaving it on the cold side. The kinetic energy in any gas molecule is proportional to the temperature, and is E = 1/2 m * v^2 solved for v: v = sqrt[ (2 * E) / m ] Faster gas means faster transmission, so the rate is proportional to 1 / sqrt(m). I don't have a good intuitive explanation for the sound attenuation. The acoustic impedance for an ideal gas is going to depend on the mass of the molecules, and having very different acoustic impedance for the two gasses at an interface will minimize transmission. So I would expect Argon to reflect more sound, but I don't have as cute an explanation as the one for thermal transmission. [1] Also completely made up, would love to know if I'm wrong.

Zathu 3y ago

I don’t understand the problem this solves - why not put the players in noise cancelling headsets?

janosdebugs 3y ago
Two theories: 1. Noise cancelling headphones don't cancel everything 2. They needed to be able to use mics, which don't work well with a lot of ambient noise.
npace12 3y ago
would that work? that's like wearing noise canceling headphones to a concert.
lijok 3y ago
Uncomfortable for the players if I had to guess
etskinner 3y ago
Read the article; The last couple paragraphs talk about how they tried that and it didn't live up to their standards
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Twisell 3y ago
Maybe reading the article you are reacting to would have helped: - It is a retrospective and the first edition held place in 2011. At that time noise canceling in harsh conditions was not a solved issue. - They actually tried the noise canceling, no box approach at the 2022 event. They reverted to boxes for 2023 because it still need tweaking to drop the box altogether.
Nullabillity 3y ago
Have you ever tried using ANC headphones? They'd be better described as noise-reducing. They can also be uncomfortable to some people when worn for long durations, and you presumably do want to let players in the same team communicate to each other.

kzrdude 3y ago

Unfortunately, they serve a machine translated version of the blog text. Well, I don't even know. The language is technically correct I guess, but completely without life and using expressions that one would use in english. That's not bad for an automatic translation.

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december456 3y ago
You sure about the machine part? While a surprise, it was one of the better localizations i have experienced in the world wide web.
- ascar 3y ago
  GPT translates incredibly well.
- teshigahara 3y ago
  In the Japanese translation it was extremely obvious and I had to switch to English. The tone is completely off
- kzrdude 3y ago
  I'm sure that this is a very low quality text - I was reading the Swedish language version. It has technical qualities similar to human language which makes it harder to pinpoint the problem, but it does not read like something a proficient writer would create. It is translating too literally, preserving almost every word from the original (while adapting sentence structure) and that's maybe the thing I can most easily pinpoint. Colloquial phrasing like "We also had these enormous PCs that Nvidia had lent us" is preserved by translating literally instead of choosing an equivalent level of conversational language but more natural word choice.
Aachen 3y ago
Oh, that's good to know. I was surprised to see a German article on HN and, while it's not the first time, I did kinda expect it was a translation. But I didn't think it was a machine translation: anyone so bad at English that they can't read a regular text about a topic they're interested in will be used to running pages through a translator, probably via a browser extension. No need to serve up a machine translation noninteractively. As a German learner, I take every German text at least somewhat as a learning experience and look at the conjugations used. If it had said "this is a computer-generated text" above, I'd have done that. Now I'm not sure what mistakes I've been using as example...

wincy 3y ago

It was definitely an interesting article but the first sentence of the article proper really grabbed me. The weird thing to me about the world is you can have an event that literally millions of people watch around the world, and if you had asked me “what’s the International” five minutes ago I wouldn’t have had any idea, and I’m a very online person! I play video games, even, and at one point played DOTA2! The internet has totally fractionated our culture to subcultures within subcultures, to the point where when people meet in person they have nothing to talk about. Down with the monoculture and all that. It’s astounding how much money and thought and effort went into building the booths too! This is the least surprising part: there is a lot of money sloshing around in the world. The amount of talent to build soundproof booths so people can comfortably play a video game in front of a bunch of people is wild.

__s 3y ago
TI is a bit notorious because it's prize pool is massive compared to other esports. Winning TI puts someone's prize earnings past lifetime earnings of most other top player's career prize earnings in other games https://liquipedia.net/dota2/The_International#Tournaments https://liquipedia.net/dota2/The_International#Tournaments https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Portal:Statistics/Player_earnings https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Portal:Statistics/Player_earnin... https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Winnings https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Winnings https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Portal:Statistics/Player_earnings https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Portal:Statistics/Player_ea...
- bspammer 3y ago
  To hammer it home even more: https://www.esportsearnings.com/players https://www.esportsearnings.com/players 21 dota players at the top before you get a different game (Fortnite)
  - alargemoose 3y ago
    Wow, Not only are the top 21 dota 2 players, all but *4* of the top 50 earners are dota 2 players

leetrout 3y ago

Actual title: "Between the Lanes: The Sound (Proof Booths) of Silence" Is this actually by Valve employees? Or just with Valve's funding?

VoidWhisperer 3y ago
According to the text under the first image: "... a blog feature where we let members of our development team walk through some of the challenges, bugfixes, and occasional happy accidents we encounter while working on a game as unique as Dota, and an event as unique as The International." It appears to be from their team's experiences with setting up 'The International' up till now

lijok 3y ago

This is a great article and I understand the need for the booths, but to me personally, they look horrible. It looks as if the players are sitting in a kiosk. Surely it would make for a much more enveloping experience for the spectators if the players were in an open space.

VoidWhisperer 3y ago
According to the article, they tried this this past year and unfortunately weren't able to get the sound dampening up to an acceptable standard, so for the time being they are going back to the booths
jwatzman 3y ago
League of Legends (a similar game) does this -- no booths, only noise-cancelling headphones, for its large tournaments. There have been several major tournaments where the players have complained afterwards that they could not hear anything during big late-game fights due to crowd noise (since the crowd is also super excited at the big fight). Players need to be able to hear not just the game audio but also communication from their teammates and, despite noise-cancelling headphones, the crowd just drowned everything out. I'm honestly not sure why League of Legends hasn't moved to booths like Dota uses. I'm not sure if you've ever watched one of these tournaments, but they get super noisy, and noise-cancelling all of that is not an easy problem (as the article says).
- NelsonMinar 3y ago
  My understanding is LoL productions are still trying to make it look like you are watching actual athletes do a sport. If you lock the away in booths it puts too much of a distance between the audience and the players. OTOH crowd noise giving away what's going on in the game has been a problem since their broadcasts start. It doesn't ruin the game but it's definitely a factor.
  - kang 3y ago
    One solution could be to standardize the "esport booth", so it becomes more like a squash court for example

ateng 3y ago

Could you delay the large screens, commentaries, and live broadcast by 3-5 seconds (or more) such that any information gained from leaked noise would have minimal impact to the players? This would make ANS headphones viable

CyberRage 3y ago
some information can be viable for longer than that, there are some extreme cases where 2~3 minutes would not suffice
xxs 3y ago
5sec would be way too low for anything meaningful. One of the more pronounced cases, where the audience reacts, is 'smoke' which makes the players invisible until they are close to opponent player (or tower), used in a way to initiated a gank. The 'smoke' last 45seconds. Killing a big NPC (Roshan) is another example as it takes time (and usually more than a single player) to down it. Other cases: buying a rapier - very high damaging and expensive item but it does drop on death - so it's a warning sound, that may take minutes between a conflict and used. Sound proofing however still doesn't solve the issue as it doesn't deal with the vibrations in the venue. Pro players have commented that if they start feeling vibrations while 'farming' alone, they become more cautious - asking a support player to cover the gank or move to a safer area.
- ufo 3y ago
  translation: gank = ambush, farming = collecting resources without engaging against the enemy team
  - xxs 3y ago
    I'd have considered 'gank' a fairly known/used term.
    - Aachen 3y ago
      I've never heard it in my life and I play games (not Dota) and get around on the internet generally. My first association was clank from hermitcraft's decked out, but that didn't quite fit. Farming is what I figured from context, though

donatj 3y ago

I don’t really get esports or regular sports for that matter, but this seems like overkill? How much of an advantage could they really get from someone yelling at them in the audience? With a decent audience they are rarely going to hear anything other than a din anyway. Doesn’t seem like much more of an advantage than people yelling things at baseball players? Seems like it could just be part of the calculation of the competition rather than working so hard to avoid it.

Forge36 3y ago
Enough to give pause. In StarCraft there was a trap set and a fan favorite was about to walk right into it. The audience went wild. And then he stopped all units, and retreated. When interviewed he said he'd stopped because the audience went wild when they shouldn't have. (They cleared the stadium for the next match) Baseball isn't a game of hidden knowledge. The audience mood can give away details about the other team. Think poker. If another player bluffed and the audience gasps, you know something notable happened.
- Forge36 3y ago
  I did some more digging and found this post https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/40832-starcraft-audience#12 https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/40832-starcraft-audience#12
andy81 3y ago
The noise is a common giveaway in pro League of Legends despite similar efforts. Usually when a player is walking up to a hidden enemy the crowd changes in a noticeable way, even on the stream. It's not an individual shout so much as the overall noise.
- donatj 3y ago
  And what I am saying is why is this a bad thing. Just make it part of the competition, seems way more fun.
  - 3y ago

pluijzer 3y ago

I guess the allure of physical events is twofold, to feel a connection with other fans and to feel a connection with the players. I wonder if this diminishes the latter. Maybe put the players somewhere else entirely and stream it in the form of these stage holograms.

brainzap 3y ago

That the players can see each other also allows for some mindgames, for example “the paper” https://youtu.be/ymWj2brfZlA?feature=shared https://youtu.be/ymWj2brfZlA?feature=shared

Aachen 3y ago
Sorry, but what's this showing? Someone walks with paper in their hands, that's what you're referring to, but did this have an effect in some way that was noticeable later in the tournament that isn't shown in the clip? It seems like a joke to bring a stack of papers to a computer tournament, not something to trick the other team into thinking... what, exactly?
- deleted 3y ago
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- pototo666 3y ago
  context: at Ti8's final, Team LGD played against Team OG. During the draft phase, OG players had some paper, which were statistics of LGD (I guess). Somnus the player said: Ceb is holding a bunch of paper. https://youtu.be/abEDXaPyIOE?t=15 https://youtu.be/abEDXaPyIOE?t=15. In that final, LGD almost won but they lost at the end. That final is arguably the best final in Dota2 history. The moment when Somuns taunted OG was captured by True Sight, which is a documentary for every TI final. LGD players surely watched the documentary or at least the clip many times. The first clip you questioned about is from Ti9, a year after Ti8, where OG and LGD played again. Notail the player took a bunch of paper (way too many for drafting analysis purpose) to remind LGD their tragic loss last year. Hence the mind game. Btw, LGD lost again.
  - Aachen 3y ago
    Thanks for that context! That explains

hyperman1 3y ago

I was served the Dutch translation, and I must say I am impressed with the state of the art of this machine translation. While this still feels mechanically translated English, and accents are missing, it was very readable. I am used to having to translate each individual word to English and swap some verbs to end up with something readable -- with the regular paragraph of total gibberish in between. This reads like at least a high school student's homework.

batshit_beaver 3y ago
Valve uses human translators, not ML. So unless you're talking about your browser's auto-translation feature, you are, in fact, reading human-produced text.
- jvdvegt 3y ago
  Do they? I got the dutch version as well, and it's full of english sentences translated word-by-word.
- hyperman1 3y ago
  This one is in the uncanny zone. If it comes from AI, I salute the AI. If human, I'd advise Valve to find better Humans.
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ricardobeat 3y ago

I wonder if they have looked into air curtains. Commercial installations are at a point where you have this silent, completely invisible sheet of fast-moving air that provides some degree of noise isolation as well - maybe four walls of these + a floating ceiling is enough when coupled with the noise-cancelling headphones.

seanthemon 3y ago
I think leave the audience participation in, let the chaos rain supreme!
- wnevets 3y ago
  There was a recent dota2 LAN without soundproofing and the audience would ruin surprise attacks (aka smoke tanks) or surprise objective taking (aka rosh), it made the gameplay worse.
- bspammer 3y ago
  That would encourage a much more boring style of gameplay. If you can’t launch a surprise attack because the audience will give it away, the best strategy would be to slowly and incrementally build up a gold and experience advantage.
  - cmcaleer 3y ago
    Very similar issue in CS. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbcdzWQx6WM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbcdzWQx6WM A certain player who used to get accused of cheating a lot learned this trick way before everyone else, but in recent years everyone's been doing it and it can really swing games in a way that's not fun to watch as a spectator.
- jfim 3y ago
  Players have said in the past that it makes it impossible to do Roshan sneakily, since the crowd gives it away.

redder23 3y ago

Is this supposed to be impressive. A company who owns a money printing machine is able to build multiple layers of glass with argon pumped between them? Sorry, not impressed.

langsoul-com 3y ago

It's crazy that the booths cost $200k, like how is it even possible they cost THAT much!

falcolas 3y ago
Soundproofing requires mass. A lot of it. It also requires careful control of airflow to remove paths the sound can travel. Museum quality glass and argon are both fairly expensive. Especially in quantities sufficient to fill the mass quota.

exabrial 3y ago

Aging myself here... I played a ton of DOTA on the WarCraft3 engine... probably when I should have been studying for engineering finals. What amazed me about the game, and probably why it is so addictively fun to play is you always have two competing things gripping for your attention. On one hand, resource farming _demands_ incredible attention to detail (obtaining the last shot on creeps for a kill, ergo a gold reward). Then on the other hand, you must also be planning your character's build, monitoring minimap, monitoring others' builds, and most especially watching missing enemy players. It's hard to do all of the things effectively... one has to make the farming aspect of the game second nature and remove the distraction to be a good player. (Which I never was) I don't have the luxury of spare time to play long DOTA games anymore, and largely I've replaced it with building things and outdoor sports (MTB racing, Gravel Racing, climbing) but I still look fondly at those times and the IRL and online friend group I had.

matthewaveryusa 3y ago
They've added turbo mode recently which keeps most games between 15 and 30 minutes!
- adamrezich 3y ago
  if it weren't for Turbo I probably wouldn't still be playing 11 years after beta. Turbo is great.
- sundarurfriend 3y ago
  Since parent said they played DOTA on the WarCraft3 engine: Turbo mode is basically `-em` (easy mode) from Dota 1 with some quality of life improvements.
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rtpg 3y ago

Valve seems like such a blank check company, able to jump onto projects and apply so much effort to things thanks to their resources Would love to see more about what they’re doing and how they’re organized recently (an updated employee handbook?)

solardev 3y ago
My understanding is that they're still privately owned and pretty free, culturally, right? Yeah, I wish they'd make a few blog posts about how they run projects. Would love to see how the Deck, Index, GeForce Now support, etc. all came to be. They're that rare tech company from the 90s/2000s that I still adore today.
- adventured 3y ago
  You can definitely see the difference in ownership that Gabe Newell brings to Valve, just as Tim Sweeney has to Epic, as founders that have been with the companies from the beginning. They can do things just because they're interesting. They clearly feel free to explore. It's a remarkable luxury of their financial success. Mojang perhaps had that potential (due to how hyper profitable Minecraft was), but, well....
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WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

Must be super boring to not hear the crowd, perhaps why I found watching dota esport to be super boring

ilyt 3y ago

Well, according to many complaints over time, the answer is "not very well". Oh, well, 12th time the charm

eastbound 3y ago

I don’t understand their setup: - Standard stage/audienxe inclination is 4%, so you’d think they’d set it up at 4% or above… Nope, they incline the windows towards the ground! To wit, they had to transform the ceiling into glass panels, which shows they did have the problem of audience seeing from atop, which adds weight which they later say was one of their major problem. Talk about solving a problem by adding another problem. - Their entire setup has big white beams everywhere, there’s no angle where the audience can see clearly. Why not having seams? - My house has larger glass panels than that, and they are soundproof for the highway. Surely it was possible to ship bigger glass panels, simpler design, oriented towards the top so that the roof can be plain.

xvedejas 3y ago

In Age of Empires tournaments, they simply put the players in a different room from the casters/audience, with live streaming cameras. Maybe because live audiences are relatively rare in these tournaments, there's less of a demand for players to be physically in the same room as the audience?

reidjs 3y ago
You may be thinking of pre twitch/YouTube. These players sell out coliseums for $100s of dollars per ticket. The fans want to at least physically see them play, even if it’s through a window. once you rely on webcams then you may as well be watching on twitch for free.
- ace32229 3y ago
  Specifically, this year's TI finals tickets are $699+fees for the 3 day pass.

Dowwie 3y ago

this photo from the article amazes me: https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//3703047/a37cd40d60d7e6127986ff16e5349ffbcd76cf0e.jpg https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//3703047/a37c... that's a packed stadium, up to the nose bleeds

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pyreko 3y ago
Similar photo from League of Legends' world finals from 2022 (Chase Center): https://res.cloudinary.com/dxb0ptf6a/image/upload/c_fill,dpr_auto,f_auto,g_auto,q_70,ar_4:3,w_986/prod/assets/insights/t1-drx-final.jpg https://res.cloudinary.com/dxb0ptf6a/image/upload/c_fill,dpr... If you haven't been paying attention to the eSports scene it can definitely be really surprising, but the crowd size and the production value of these things is insane to think about, especially if you aren't expecting it for just a video game.
- JCharante 3y ago
  That looks like a small stadium compared to one used in 2017 https://www.flickr.com/photos/lolesports/38160463331 https://www.flickr.com/photos/lolesports/38160463331

holoduke 3y ago

A bit off topic. But this site is auto translated? Its in Dutch for me and reads like a llm translated piece of text. Very unpleasant to read with overly long sentences and weird expressions.

roughly 3y ago
It looks that way, yeah. It’s fine in English, but their “select languages” list has about 30 different languages listed, and I can’t imagine they’ve spent the money to do that the right way.
AndriyKunitsyn 3y ago
Valve uses volunteers for the majority of translation work. Some languages are lucky to have competent and committed volunteer translators, others not so much.
eCa 3y ago
Another small northern European language here that got an (hopefully) auto-translated version. Completely unreadable. Even if done by a human it is pretty much translated word for word with no feeling for the target language at all.

none_to_remain 3y ago

Ctrl-F "stink": 0 Ctrl-F "stench": 0 Ctrl-F "smell": 1 hit but only for hot insulation smell

rpaddock 3y ago

The former Westinghouse Electric Sharon Transformer Plant is a 58-acre facility located in Mercer County, Pennsylvania. They built substation transformers there. To test them the rolled them into a sound proof room, on a rail car, to listen for hum. Lose windings would vibrate causing hum and generate damaging heat. When I was there I was told that if wanted to rent it, they would fix the 440V door system (someone took the cooper). To give you a size perspective of this place, our tour guide, from the balcony, said "See that toy truck down there? That is a full size 18-wheeler." It took us a 20 minute walk to reach that full size truck that looked like a child's toy in this MASSIVE room.

Aeroi 3y ago
thats awesome, what were you going to rent the space for?
- rpaddock 3y ago
  I just thought it would be cool to see how long people might last in such a room. It was not in my budget. So far at least. Here is the Worlds Quiets Room, as of 2018: https://www.soundacousticsolutions.com/blog/2018/04/05/the-quietest-room-on-earth/ https://www.soundacousticsolutions.com/blog/2018/04/05/the-q...