I had this idea that I should do a comic about New Vegas and it seemed like a good idea and so I made the comic and then I sent it in and now it’s up and you can totally read it.
Am I the only one who wonders if the “inkblots” test in new Vegas is some sort of strange shout-out to the “inkspots”, who did the music for previous games? Yes? Okay then. It’s just me.
“A five-minute, non-technical explanation of where the internet comes from, how it works, and what it has to do with nuclear weapons.”
Link (YouTube) |
In an ideal world, I would have posted this a few days ago to assuage our sorrows from lack of Spoiler Warning this week.
This project began last week when my mother asked me about the internet. This is basically the answer I gave her, although I didn’t have a chalkboard on me at the time. It seemed to satisfy her, and I thought others might find it useful or interesting. I know a lot of this stuff will seem remedial to the folks that visit this site, but it’s my hope this will be passed around to those that are a little less tech-savvy. It went over well with my kids, at any rate.
Share and enjoy.
I’ve been forgetting to link to this lately. Here is the entry from last week:
Shamus Plays WoW 5: Another Day, Another Mine
And yesterday:
Shamus Plays WoW 6: Overwhelmed by Kobolds
Next week, Cataclysm launches!
Although…
Am I the only one who is wondering what the selling point of Cataclysm is going to be? I mean, everyone gets the new Azeroth. Everyone gets access to the new class / race combinations. (I think 95% of all players just rolled Human hunters. The other 5% rolled Night Elf mages.) What does the expansion offer, besides the ability to be a Worgen or Goblin. Don’t get me wrong, those are pretty cool. But I don’t know if they’re $40 worth of cool. Especially with so much other new content to explore. Maybe there is other content in the expansion, but Blizzard is doing an uncharacteristically poor job of tantalizing me with them.
If you remember from last time, I’ve got a bug in my program. It’s supposed to look at the terrain and determine which way is downhill, and it’s coming up with the wrong answer. Sometimes.
I’m going to post a block of code directly from the project. This is the top of the file called Hex.cpp:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Hex Part 6 – A Comment on Comments”
You show up in a videogame, you end up in my comic. Those are the rules and there’s no sense crying about it now.
I’ve said before that I find the 3-panel joke to be one of the more challenging. I’m actually toying with the idea of doing a few, just for the sake of variety.
Part 2 of Michael Goodfellow’s game-building series is now available. He’s tweaking the site in response to feedback, adding RSS feed, making clear the goals of the project, and generally learning to blog while making a game.
This week he’s working on collision detection, one of my weak areas. (My other major weakness is animating skeletal meshes – making characters walk and such. Hate that stuff. It’s one of those jobs that is hard to break down into manageable bits of complexity.) It’s difficult to get it working, and even harder to get it really, truly right. A slight misstep can burn a ton of precious CPU time, and no matter how long I work on it or how well it works I’m always left with the nagging impression that I’m probably missing something.
Okay, I need to do some more work on my WoW series, so it’s time to get back into the game again. I should check up on my main character and see where I left off. And this is where I discover I have a Serious Problem. This problem leads me to Google, which leads me to forum threads. I think the behavior of WoW forum posters is well-known, but in case you’ve missed that particular aspect of internet culture, I will add some of that flavor to this post.
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The problem is this: Dalaran is the major end-game city. From there, you can teleport to any of the other racial cities in the game. The common wisdom among players was to have a high-level character teleport you to Dalaran, which you could then set as your home. You could then use your hearthstone to jump back to Dalaran at any time, and from there teleport to the city of your choice. It was a great time-saver.
But this weekend I logged in to find this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Postcards from WoW, Part 7”
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
T w e n t y S i d e d
