T w e n t y S i d e d
And now I present… my most terrifying comic to date!
Which actually isn’t all that terrifying, really.
About Spoiler Warning
Yes, Spoiler Warning was slated to begin this week. The delay is 100% my fault. I decided more or less at the last minute to muck around with the show.
One of my ongoing worries with the show is that it does a bad job at setting up the premise for newcomers. Unless someone watches the very first episode (which is probably our worst episode, so this isn’t something we want to encourage) they won’t get it. They’ll see footage and people talking and assume, “Oh, another MST3K / Unskippable ripoff. Pass.” The thrust of the show is to have the sort of conversations about a game that you would have with your friends while sitting on the couch and passing the controller around.
But we don’t want to have to re-explain the premise at the top of every episode. Finally I pitched the idea of just depicting the premise, and Rutskarn delivered:
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We might fiddle with this a bit. Labeling the empty seat “YOU” was my idea, but now that I see it in action I’m not crazy about it. But Rutskarn did a tremendous job. While I haven’t met her myself, I have it on good authority that the drawing of Mumbles is uncanny in its likeness to the genuine article. At any rate, this will lead off the show for the foreseeable future.
Also, Josh is getting a (gifted) copy of Adobe Premiere Elements, which should eliminate his twice-weekly torment at the hands of Windows Movie Maker.
Also, I’ve been wanting to tighten up the show a bit. I dislike the time we squander at the start of every episode. (Particularly at the start of a new series, when viewers are most likely just looking a menu while we talk.) Also, the cross-talk gets on my nerves. So, I’ve been trying to look for ways to mitigate both of these and make the show a little more polished. We even went so far as to edit out bits of off-topic rambling at the introduction. I realize that most of you would rather just have an extra minute or two of unpolished video than wait for an entire week, but I hope you’ll indulge me this delay. The drive that makes me able to run this site also demands that I do this sort of thing now and again. And it’s much less disruptive to do this between series then to stop in the middle of a series.
The show will launch soon. Sorry again about the delay.
Shamus Plays World of Warcraft, Part 1
My new let’s play has begun over at the Escapist.
This should be interesting. Lord of the Rings Online is something like 1/40th the size of World of Warcraft. A far larger portion of the audience has likely played the area of the game I’m describing. I wonder how that will impact reader’s perceptions of the story.
Ah well. This was a long time in the making. Hope you like it.
Twenty Sided Minecraft Server
By popular demand, there is now a Twenty Sided Minecraft server. Connect to:
twentymine.com
The server is both donated and administrated by Clint Olson. You might remember Clint from the last time he did something cool for us.
Everyone is a tourist by default, so people can come in and take the tour at any time without us having to worry that an anonymous user will wipe the place out overnight. If Clint or I are around and we feel safe building with you, we can bestow build privileges. (This will be made easier if your in-game name matches the name you use here on the site.) I realize this has a very “gated community” feel to it, which isn’t very welcoming. Sorry about that, but in a game where dozens of people can have their work obliterated by malicious users, we have to err on the side of caution.
No formal rules other than common sense manners: Don’t modify other people’s property without asking. Don’t take stuff that doesn’t belong to you. Don’t be a jerk, etc.
Clint has been building in here for a while now. (You’ll know his stuff, he favors working in glass.) I’ve been building in here since yesterday. Just look for the bridge leading to the ridiculous mountain of smoothstone.
See you in the game. Thanks again to Clint.
EDIT: Duh. I forgot to mention the coolest feature: Check out the Google-maps style view of the world, which updates every n hours, where n is a number I forgot to ask Clint.
EDIT 2: Okay, that didn’t work. Server ran fine with three of us in testing, but just a couple more people CRIPPLED it. It’s alarming how quickly the resource usage goes up when you add users. Have to keep reminding myself that even though the game looks retro it still has cutting-edge performance needs.
EDIT 3: Back up again at a proper domain, on a more powerful machine. There’s a 10 person limit in place now. We’ll see how well this works.
Stolen Pixels #238: After After Curfew, Pt. 2
Part two of our Halloween special!
This is probably the most I’ve ever shown of the studio within a comic. Funny story about the studio…
For the last few years I’ve been making due with all of these old hard drives in my machine, which added together came to just 700GB. Given that this one machine holds all my games, all my (at the time) day job work, all my programming projects, all the stuff for this website, all my comic stuff and the source screenshots…. whew. It was a really tight fit. I’d needed the upgrade for a couple of years, but wasn’t eager for the work disruption and expense involved with an upgrade. A couple of months a go I bit the bullet and got myself a proper 2TB SATA drive. (The old ones were IDE.)
On Sunday I discovered that I’d missed something in the migration. The source file for Studio 17 (where the Dr. Breen’s show takes place) is gone. I’ve searched all drives, likely and unlikely, and the file is nowhere to be found. I still have the level, which means I can still load it up in GMod and take my screenshots, but I’ll never be able to edit it again. If I wanted to change the level in any way – add a hallway, change some lights, add some more detail – I’d have to rebuild the whole place from scratch.
I can’t believe I lost that file.
Postcards From Minecraft, Part 2
Another week, another ill-advised civil engineering project. This time it’s a glass underwater tunnel.
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The statue from last week (which is visible on the right edge of the above shot) was built with the help of my 10 year old daughter, while this one was actually devised by my 12 year old daughter.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Postcards From Minecraft, Part 2”
Sintel
Four years ago, I wrote a tirade about Blender. I was bitter and angry that the thing was very much impossible to learn and the docs were very much not written yet. I gather it’s improved greatly since then. For example, it was used to make this movie:
Link (YouTube) |
From the YouTube description:
“Sintel” is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film.
This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.
Hats off. That’s some amazing work. I’m happy to see Blender thriving and helping people make cool stuff.
From The Archives:
Denuvo and the "Death" of Piracy
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
The Dumbest Cutscene
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
Deus Ex and The Treachery of Labels
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.