They do cover choke points and nodes which may only exist for certain periods of time (which imply other conditions could be used as well).

I remember Exo Squad. I liked that show. I wonder if it was any good. Sounds like a silly thing to say, but I know for a fact that many of the shows I remember liking were, in fact, crap. I went back and watched some old TMNT cartoons, and in one of them they block bullets with a trashcan lid. Seriously.
And don't even get me started on Thundercats.

I've heard Exo Squad described as the US's answer to the original Gundam -- If Gundam is WWII in the Pacific Theater with Giant Mecha, Exo Squad is WWII in the European Theater with Giant Mecha. It's also often listed with Gargoyles and Avatar: the Last Airbender as examples of the US produced animations that treat their audiences as mature and sophisticated without simply throwing in sexual themes or gratuitous violence to get a "Mature" label branded on it "to protect the children" Not that there isn't any violence in those shows, but what is there is significant and important for the greater plot and character development.

heh, try these cats one of the days:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bXiJYcK4-GU

"Require" is a tricky word here. Technically, anyone with a MacBook and a camera can make a movie, but Hollywood movie studios still use massive amounts of equipment. Professional recording studios still have racks and mixer boards, even though that's a mature technology that can be mimicked by a copy of ProTools.

In addition to a large amount of processing power, you also need a large amount of file storage. Raw simsense recordings are huge files and you typically need libraries of many simsense clips, pseudosim fills, and sensory loops to make a professional simsense recording or a convincing set of memories for programmable ASIST biofeedback. Keep in mind that while you can take shortcuts with a sim that will be playing back on a consumer commlink, when you're fooling the brain into believing false memories being accessed only through natural wetware over long periods of time, the quality needs to be top-notch and the simsense needs to be very carefully applied.

There's also still a lot of dedicated hardware in the simsense business, much like today's sound cards, graphics cards, and physics cards, which all apply their own hardware power to specific tasks. You can buy EC/IC modulators tasked to process specific sensory or emotive tracks, with built-in hardware architecture and software optimized for that job. That's just one example. In the case of PAB units, there are very likely dedicated hardware pieces that can fine-tune the application of certain EC/IC tracks to particular portions of the brain.

For the most part. Sky Captain And the World of Tomorrow was done in Adobe After Effects, if I remember right. I'm certain that the optical printers used for the first generation muti-layer matte shots are no longer in use as that's all done in computer these days. Reel-to-Reel audio tape decks have been replaced by digital sound libraries. Sure, you still see large mixer boards with dozens of sliders for audio editing, but most of those are merely input devices for systems that have been converted entirely to digital processing. In fact on many of those mixer boards, you can press a button and the sliders all move to saved preset locations on their own.


Ah, yes. This is the part where we've gone from the mainbook's sidebar "A Note on Storage Memory" from p.212, which states "Major advances in computer storage memory and data compression technologies by 2070 allow vast amounts of information to be stored in relatively minute spaces." to the "OMG!!!1! DIR-X WET RECORDS ARE HUEG!!!!" viewpoint of this chapter. Jaring, but acceptable considering that Dir-X is the only ASIST compression format that's lossless. Still, now we have our hard benchmark for "How big is too big" for 4th Edition's "no bookkeeping" storage: a 3 megapulse per second stream of data.


And this hardware is somehow immune to whatever passes for Moore's Law in the 2050-2070 timeperiod? So many other things in Shadowrun have shown obvious advancements in the march of progress to 4th Edition: smartgun adaptation now can handle grenade arcs as a standard feature, something you used to have to buy the premium version of smartlinking and still needed an extra rangefinder accessory to achieve; Tactical networks that used to require specialized military-grade cyberware can now be achieved entirely in software packages run on consumer grade hardware; but all these extra hardware widgets for tweaking high-end sim have never been miniaturized or consolidated?

"I'm sorry Mr. Simsense Editing Equipment Company Sales Rep, we're just not interested in your sleek, streamlined model that's 1/10th the size of what we bought from you 5 years ago. We're in the brainwashing buisness here; our clients have certain expectations of us. If we didn't have large bulky scary equipment, they may get the idea that they could just hire a guy with a briefcase full of gadgets, hole up with the subject in some dirty motel room somewhere for a week or two, and get the same quality results. I don't think either of us wants that, Mr. Sales Rep. In fact, if you'll just sit down in this chair right here, and let me slip this on you, I can guarantee that you won't think either of us want that either."

Much of the post-production effects work of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was done on seven Mac workstations running Adobe After Effects, yes. But then they sent the shots to a PC render farm because you would never have seen the movie if they rendered the effects on those seven G5s. And post-production for that movie still took over a year.

Technology changes, yes, but so do the expectations for the technology. Hollywood consumes computer power at an increasing rate, even as fast as the technology advances. Which is not to say that things can't be done with small, portable production facilities. They can. Even PAB brainwashing can, you just won't have the edge that the big boys have.



You pretty much touched on it. Most data going through the Matrix is highly compressed. Simsense wet records are uncompressed and DIR-X is lossless, which still produces very large files. For the kind of work where you are carefully applying simsense to a person's brain to change their memories or behavior, you can't have network transfer lag, dropped frames, or buffering hiccups.



There is the assumption that simsense has not stood still in twenty years. Just like video quality in real life has not stood still in the past twenty years, simsense quality has advanced also. The increased quality has increased hardware demands.

I understand where you're coming from, but I wrote the section based on my experience. My degree is in Film and for my day job, I work as a Multimedia Engineer. There have been a lot of advances in the miniaturization of media production, but as I'm budgeting out data center costs for our rack of Adobe Flash Media servers, it's hard to convince me that everything in simsense production can be done well on a commlink. PAB especially, since it has to be the most precise application of simsense technology.

I feel reminded of the fabulous, wasteful graphics of Loom. And of the first 20MB? harddisks bought for WingCommander. "Who needs that", we said.

And since the PAB is the same tool you use to unwash a brain as it is to wash it in the first place, all of the increased quality goes into measure and countermeasure, which is why other factors where increased quality may have been a boon, such as the duration of the operation, have remained as stagnant as the equipment sizes.

The upside to this is that using a modern PAB to reverse a decade-old brainwashing should be like hot knife through butter. Perhaps a houserule that drops the test interval from a week to 2 days when reversing avery old programming job?

What I'm really missing from Unwired are centralized radio tricks, both in fluff and crunch: Things like signal rating modifiers, using shortwave, etc.

There are some pieces scattered around the book, but especially 'Landscaping for Signal Attenuation' looks strange.

I imagine you could do teleporting nodes simply by shifting links around. One-way nodes are a little weirder, since there still has to be some sort of connection between your persona and your icon.

I'm not sure precisely what you mean, but I've always seen things like "using shortwave" to simply be about changing one's Signal rating. As far as using different wavelengths is concerned, keep in mind that digital data transmissions use more than one frequency at a time, so it gets a bit more complicated than at first blush.

Something like this or this.


Not really. Long range, low bandwidth with relatively low power.


The use a certain part of the spectrum, though - ah ultra high frequency one most likely, given the transmission rates.

The problem is that when you drop the bandwidth you also drop the speed of data transmission, and therefore the amount of "usefulness" of the Matrix. If the bandwidth is too low, then there's less information per unit time, which could result in an inability to use VR (for example).

That is actually an advantage. Then I can use my low bandwidth connection to have full term communications, but no exposure to any hacker risk.

So? If you want to radio a message around the world without relying on infrastructure, that doesn't matter. At all.

That's quite true, but I was under the impression that Unwired was about the Matrix. If that's the case, then why would low-bandwidth communications be included? It seems to me that sort of tool would be more appropriately included elsewhere. I mean, I cover wireless in my networking classes, but I don't talk about walkie-talkies.

Actually, it such 'exotic' things were covered in the Matrix SB.

And given that Unwired was the last main book - the one concerning hacker and rigger tricks - it's pretty much the one were one would search for those things. Simply because it isn't fit for SotA-style books...

So were dungeon-crawl-style Matrix runs, to be fair.


We're going to have to disagree, here. We've already agreed that low-bandwidth communications basically bar Matrix use. In that light, I consider such communication tools to be more along the lines of the various runner toys in Arsenal than something to be used in the Matrix. Consider also that things like directional antennae, smart jammers, and HERF guns are also in Arsenal.

There are a lot of methods of communication that are not covered in Unwired: snail mail, package delivery, semaphore, lasers (that's in Arsenal too, I think), smoke signals, etc. I suspect that this was intentional on the part of the devs.

Also, let's keep in mind that people tend to use the technology with the highest level of usability and convenience. I'd like to point out that we're discussing this on a Web forum, and not an email list, newsgroup, or BBS.

If you did want to communicate via low-bandwidth channels, I don't see why you couldn't. If it was me behind the Big Black Screen, I'd probably figure that standard wireless antennae weren't designed for it, and so one would have to do a hardware hack. The good news is that just about everything would have the parts, what with wireless being ubiquitous and all. I'd probably rule that the Signal rating of the resulting device would be the number of hits you get on the Hardware + Logic Test, plus like one less than the original device's Signal rating (to account for the threshold for building the thing in the first place).

Those are in Unwired, too. Check the Security chapter.


Nope, they bar VR use... AR encompasses basic terminal stuff, which is perfectly possible over low bandwidth.


Sure I can - it's just about that I missed the fluff side about it in Unwired. Like a SigInt post or something.

=ib...


Maybe. It depends on what you're using the AR for.


It comes down to opportunity costs. I can't speak for other writers, but I tried to wedge in as much useful stuff into my chapters as I could in the word budget I was given.

That being said, is there a section of Unwired that's, say, around 250 words (about half the length of one of the chapter fiction thingies) that you think should have been substituted?

The one about degrading software?
Or the pretty much obvious-redundant character generation tips?

Honestly, there are quite some named software compilations which are nice, but I'm not certain at all if I will ever see them used. Of course the same applies to the whole Agent/IC/Worm... they are pretty much the same, except for the name.

Not my chapter, but it'd fit in with the whole hacking thing, I think. On the other hand ...


Aside from the fact that it's the wrong chapter (to be fair, though, I didn't make that a parameter of my question), I'd be willing to bet you large sums of money that the intent there is aimed at the player who is new to the Matrix specialist. If that's the case, then I think the tips are more valuable than rules to make low-tech shortwave radios.

yep, toss the to be hacker the book, have him read up on the first couple of chapters at least, and presto

Sure there is use in it, but not excessivly so: Unwired a supplement, not a required read for newtimers. It's nice to have such tips in it, but usually, when people pick it up, it's already way past that point. But, granted - it's at least less excessive than The Awakened Character.

That said, you might have noticed that the original statement was not entirely serious.


On the other hand, showing that there is more to to Electronic Warfare than to improvise jamming and more to the wireless world would be something I expected from Unwired. Shortwave was just one example... one that can become pretty high-tech in the case of OTH-RADAR.

Well, there's value to you, value to a veteran player, value to a player who's never used the Matrix before, and value to a newbie. Your mileage may vary.


I did, but I thought you were taking a different angle. Sorry.