Someone made a mod for Fallout: New Vegas that gives Reginald Cuftbert a tombstone in Goodsprings. (The starting town.)
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Thanks to modder FinalFrog. Also thanks to the couple of readers who alerted me to this. I do hope you’ll download the mod and dance on his grave. I know he would’ve wanted it that way.
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“I can’t believe you would do Mass Effect 2 while overlooking [obviously superior game]!”
Sigh.
I wish I could impart just how insane difficult it is to choose a game. There are four of us now. All four of us have different games that interest us. (Which is good.) And we have to do a game that Josh has played. We do not want to run a show where the player doesn’t know where he’s going and other players are shouting directions to him on a five-second delay. “Over there! On your left! No, your… where you were a second ago. Yeah. That switch. Okay, now we go back to the other room….” No. You could do a show where everyone goes in cold, or where some of the commentators go in cold, but having a blind pilot and three backseat drivers is a recipe for disaster and frustration.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning: Season 4”
So when I mentioned that I was out of work, a lot of people emailed me. It really made me aware of just how many people read this blog. Even more importantly, it made me aware of just what a wreck my entire email system is.
Some of this is my own fault. Back in 2000 when I registered this domain, it seemed like a good idea to make a catch-all email address and use it for registering on other sites. If I created a forum account at wombats.com (for all your Australian marsupial needs!) then I’d register with [email protected]. And for a couple of years, this solution worked really, really well. But at some point spammers began dictionary attacks where they would just spam [email protected], so instead of getting one spam I’d get dozens. Then this domain went from being an obscure little thing to something popular. The links from Slashdot, Make, Digg, Stumbleupon, FARK, etc all told the bots, “THIS SITE IS IMPORTANT. YOU SHOULD CARPET-BOMB IT WITH SPAM.”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mail Time”
Maybe the name of the project has given this away, but this game is going to be played on a hex grid. Hex grids are elegant, beautiful, and better-looking than standard square grids. The only downside to using a hex based gameboard is that the computer and I are both rubbish at thinking in hexes.
See, computer memory is really just a long list of addresses. You can think of it like a long street with houses in a row. At the start is house #1, and they go one after another all the way down to house #2,147,483,648 at the far end of the street. This is the structure of the world you work in. You can organize that information (conceptually, in your head) however you like. To can imagine them as a table of values by (say) treating it like a new row every 25 addresses. If you need a grid of data that’s (say) 25×25, then the item in row 2, column 2 is at position #27. Some simple math will let you treat that infinite line of addresses like a grid of points, but in the end your program is still dealing with a long, long list.
If I have a grid of 8×8 points, I can use them to make a 7×7 grid of squares. If that sounds confusing, (and I don’t blame you) then please enjoy the following visual aid, which was crafted by a small team of professional artists over the course of nine days, working in a variety of mediums, from calligraphy pens to watercolor:
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Yes, prints are available.
This is really easy. (Making a grid, not the artwork.) It’s how my terrain project made a grid with millions of squares: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Hex: Part 2”
So Star on Chest flies off into the sunset for the last time. Again.
Next week, we begin my series on World of Warcraft. Here is a sneak peek:
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Note that Cataclysm launches in just seven weeks. This should be interesting.
Here is a comic which is all about Call of Duty. And not Minecraft. Heavens no. We’re talking about real games now. Serious games.
Call of Duty. Not Minecraft.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
T w e n t y S i d e d
