Elemental Magic

Make More Immersive and Engaging Magic Systems in Games Game Magic: A Designers Guide to Magic Systems in Theory and Practice explains how to construct magic systems and presents a compendium of arcane lore, encompassing the theory, history, and structure of magic systems in games and human belief. The author combines rigorous scholarly analysis with practical game design advice in the form of a magical recipe book (grimoire). The book gives you an in-depth understanding of the history and structure of magic to make your games richer and deeper. It shows how to set up tables of correspondences and spell components as well as how to write programming code integrating these components as part of game mechanics. It also illustrates how to divide a simu...

While many Photoshop Elements users are content with using the software for correcting exposure, sharpening edges and removing unwanted objects from their photographs, there's a whole world of opportunity out there for creating fun photomontages, powerful panoramas and dynamic distortions just waiting to be discovered. How to Cheat in Elements 9 is the answer to anyone who has ever wanted to take their creative skills in Elements one stage further. Starting with the basics of layers, selections and transformations, readers will be creating their own movie posters, textures and caricatures in no time at all, while sections on outputting your images for web or print enable anyone to wow their friends with their creations. Covering the latest tools and ...

This text offers an introduction to quantum computing, with a special emphasis on basic quantum physics, experiment, and quantum devices. Unlike many other texts, which tend to emphasize algorithms, Quantum Computing without Magic explains the requisite quantum physics in some depth, and then explains the devices themselves. It is a book for readers who, having already encountered quantum algorithms, may ask, "Yes, I can see how the algebra does the trick, but how can we actually do it?" By explaining the details in the context of the topics covered, this book strips the subject of the "magic" with which it is so often cloaked. Quantum Computing without Magic covers the essential probability calculus; the qubit, its physics, manip...