UCI race classifications

The Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the world's governing body in the sport of bicycle racing, classifies races according to a rating scale.

The rating is represented by a code made of two or three parts and indicates both the type or style of race (the first part), and its importance or difficulty (the second and third parts). The first part can be an integer or an abbreviation, and the second part, when present, are usually integers. Both parts are separated by a period or decimal point (.).

A higher rated race will result in the successful riders receiving more world ranking points.

Road racing

The first part of the codes to rate a road race is '1' for a one-day race, and '2' for a multi-day (stage) race. They are separated from the second part of the classification, the ranking, by a decimal point. 'HC' (beyond categorization, from French hors catégorie) is the highest ranking category, followed by '1' and then '2'. For example, a race rated 1.1 equates to a one-day, category 1 race.

Castle Story

Castle Story is an independent voxel-based real-time strategy video game under development by Sauropod Studio.

Gameplay

In Castle Story, the player is in control of workers called "Bricktrons" which can be directed to gather resources, build castles and fight enemies. The aim is to build a castle that can withstand attacks from creatures and other players. The game takes place on massive floating islands. The Unity game engine contains a physics engine that allows fully modelled destruction.

Development

An eleven-minute demonstration was released by Sauropod Studio on 24 December 2011. The video revealed the basic design of the game, featuring the yellow "bricktrons" building a castle and mining. The video's end had the developers exploding a castle in order to highlight the use of the Unity game engine.

A demo of Castle Story was shown off in real-time on 31 January 2012 at the International Game Developers Association Montréal DemoNight.

A five-minute timelapse video was released on 6 February 2012.

Minecraft

Minecraft is a sandbox video game originally created by Swedish programmer Markus "Notch" Persson and later developed and published by Mojang. The creative and building aspects of Minecraft enable players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D procedurally generated world. Other activities in the game include exploration, resource gathering, crafting, and combat. Multiple gameplay modes are available, including survival mode where the player must acquire resources to build the world and maintain health, a creative mode where players have unlimited resources to build with and the ability to fly, an adventure mode where players play custom maps created by other players, and a spectator mode where players can fly around and clip through blocks, but cannot place or destroy any. The PC version of the game is renowned for its third-party mods, which add various new items, characters, worlds, and quests to the game.

The alpha version was publicly released for PC on May 17, 2009, and after gradual updates, the full version was released on November 18, 2011. A version for Android was released a month earlier on October 7, and an iOS version was released on November 17, 2011. The game was released on the Xbox 360 as an Xbox Live Arcade game on May 9, 2012; on the PlayStation 3 on December 17, 2013; on the PlayStation 4 on September 4, 2014; on the Xbox One the next day; on the PlayStation Vita on October 14, 2014; and on the Wii U on December 17, 2015. On December 10, 2014, a Windows Phone version was released. All versions of Minecraft receive periodic updates, with the console editions being co-developed by 4J Studios.

Total war

Total war is warfare that includes any and all civilian-associated resources and infrastructure as legitimate military targets, and typically involves the use of weapons and tactics that result in significant civilian or other non-combatant casualties, whether collateral damage or not. American-English Dictionary defines "total war" as "war that is unrestricted in terms of the weapons used, the territory or combatants involved, or the objectives pursued, especially one in which the laws of war are disregarded." The term can also be applied when the war effort requires significant sacrifices by most of the friendly civilian population.

In the mid-19th century, scholars identified "total war" as a separate class of warfare. In a total war, to an extent inapplicable to less total conflicts, the differentiation between combatants and non-combatants diminishes and even sometimes vanishes entirely as opposing sides can consider nearly every human resource, even that of non-combatants, as nevertheless part of the war effort.

Castle

A castle (from Latin: castellum) is a type of fortified structure built in Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages by nobility. Scholars debate the scope of the word castle, but usually consider it to be the private fortified residence of a lord or noble. This is distinct from a palace, which is not fortified; from a fortress, which was not always a residence for nobility; and from a fortified settlement, which was a public defence – though there are many similarities among these types of construction. Usage of the term has varied over time and has been applied to structures as diverse as hill forts and country houses. Over the approximately 900 years that castles were built, they took on a great many forms with many different features, although some, such as curtain walls and arrowslits, were commonplace.

A European innovation, castles originated in the 9th and 10th centuries, after the fall of the Carolingian Empire resulted in its territory being divided among individual lords and princes. These nobles built castles to control the area immediately surrounding them, and were both offensive and defensive structures; they provided a base from which raids could be launched as well as protection from enemies. Although their military origins are often emphasised in castle studies, the structures also served as centres of administration and symbols of power. Urban castles were used to control the local populace and important travel routes, and rural castles were often situated near features that were integral to life in the community, such as mills and fertile land.