NEWER POSTS

This Week I Played… (October 2019)

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 14, 2019

Filed under: TWIP 170 comments
This Week I Played... (September 2019)Previous Post
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I wasn’t able to record a Diecast this week due to family engagements. I realize you can’t listen to this blog post during your commute, but I thought I’d cover some of the week’s topics anyway.

Saturday was Issac’s birthday!

Issac edits both the Diecast and our This Dumb Industry videos. He turned 18 on Saturday.

That’s it. The last of my kids has stopped being a kid. I’m now the father of 3 adults.

In addition to editing the shows, he sometimes captures gameplay footage for the videos. A week ago I was trying to figure out why his Borderlands 3 footage was blurry and I realized he was using the super-annoying 16:10 monitor I handed down to him years ago. I forgot all about that dumb thing. His native resolution was 1680 x 1050, which means all of his footage needed to be upscaled, and then cropped / squashed.

So I got him a proper 1080p monitor for his birthday. I don’t have anything against 16:10, except that it’s annoying to have when your job involves creating 1080p content.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Week I Played… (October 2019)”

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This Week I Played... (September 2019)Previous Post
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170 comments

 

Programming Vexations Part 7: Where Does the Time Go?

By Shamus Posted Thursday Oct 10, 2019

Filed under: Programming 66 comments
Programming Vexations Part 6: The CompilerPrevious Post
Next PostProgramming Vexations Part 8: The Problem With Libraries

Last week I talked about the compiler and what it takes to turn source code into a program. At the end I talked about the apparent problem where the compiler seems to be slowing down in proportion to Moore’s Law, creating a stalemate where faster processors don’t do much to reduce compile times. This naturally leads to the question:

So what is the compiler doing with all those CPU cycles?

There doesn’t seem to be an agreement on this. I can’t even find any proper research on the topic. All of the discussions take the form of repeated platitudes and received wisdom on Stack Overflow.  As far as I can tell, nobody has done the homework to compare the performance of C compilers in the mid-90s with the compilers we’re using todayIf I’m wrong and there is indeed research on the topic, then please drop a link in the comments!.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Programming Vexations Part 7: Where Does the Time Go?”

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Programming Vexations Part 6: The CompilerPrevious Post
Next PostProgramming Vexations Part 8: The Problem With Libraries

66 comments

 

Control Part 3: Unbalanced by Design

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 8, 2019

Filed under: Retrospectives 119 comments
Control Part 2: Chopping FirewoodPrevious Post
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Last time I whined that there was too much combat in what should be a slow-burn mystery thriller. But that’s not my biggest gripe with the game. My biggest gripe is how the game manages difficulty. For you. 

Death-Based Difficulty is a Terrible Idea. Please Stop. 

Minor nitpick: The game constantly auto-generates these timed Hiss Node missions. The missions fail if you die. So every death creates an announcement that you failed a quest you weren't doing and don't care about. It's weird.
Minor nitpick: The game constantly auto-generates these timed Hiss Node missions. The missions fail if you die. So every death creates an announcement that you failed a quest you weren't doing and don't care about. It's weird.

I should have remembered that Remedy is fond of auto-balancing difficulty based on death. That’s a system where the more guys you kill, the harder the game hits. The more you die, the more foes are nerfed. In racing games we call this “rubber banding”, where the other cars will drive faster if you’re ahead and slower if you’re falling behind. It makes the race exciting and interesting until you spot the cheating, at which point it ruins the entire experienceFor me, anyway. The practice is so common I figure it must be what most people want???. 

The last chapters of the original Max Payne were an exercise in obsessive save-scumming to compensate for the ridiculous insta-deaths you’ll experience when entering a new room. Once you’ve killed enough mooks without dying, the rest of them are turned into flawless killbots with millisecond reaction times. You’ll open the door and instantly three mooks will snap fire directly at your face for an abrupt and unavoidable trip to the Game Over screen. When this would happen, I’d deliberately charge face-first into the room a few times and let them murder me until the difficulty system had backed off again. 

It wasn’t a very good system.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Control Part 3: Unbalanced by Design”

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Control Part 2: Chopping FirewoodPrevious Post
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119 comments

 

Diecast #275: Back to School, Kerbal Space Problems, Wendy’s Game

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 7, 2019

Filed under: Diecast 69 comments
Diecast #274: Borderlands 3, Mailbag, RaytracingPrevious Post
Next PostDiecast #276: Apologies, Manifold Garden, Mailbag


Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast275

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #275: Back to School, Kerbal Space Problems, Wendy’s Game”

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Diecast #274: Borderlands 3, Mailbag, RaytracingPrevious Post
Next PostDiecast #276: Apologies, Manifold Garden, Mailbag

69 comments

 

Programming Vexations Part 6: The Compiler

By Shamus Posted Thursday Oct 3, 2019

Filed under: Programming 82 comments
Programming Vexations Part 5: The Vexations BeginPrevious Post
Next PostProgramming Vexations Part 7: Where Does the Time Go?

In the last entry, I said that waiting for a program to compile is one of the vexations of programming. I’ve spent a lot of time writing about code over the years. I’ve (hopefully) explained things in easy-to-understand terms. With any luck, you’ve learned something along the way. 

The time has come to admit that I’ve been lying to you. Or at least, I haven’t been giving you the full story. After all this time I figure you’re finally old enough to hear the truth.

Vexation #2: Compiling is Not Programming

In the past, I’ve described the process of compiling your program like this:

It really is that simple!
It really is that simple!

You just shove your source code through the magical compile-o-matic and out pops a video game!  

The reality is that it’s not nearly so simple. In the world of C++, the “compiler” isn’t even a single program! The reality is closer to something like this:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Programming Vexations Part 6: The Compiler”

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Programming Vexations Part 5: The Vexations BeginPrevious Post
Next PostProgramming Vexations Part 7: Where Does the Time Go?

82 comments

 

I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 1, 2019

Filed under: Column 100 comments
This Dumb Industry: RaytracingPrevious Post
Next PostBlizzard's Folly

Like most of my work, this video / article was completed over a week before publication. Below, I brought up a lot of gripes about how the Borderlands 3 loot system works. Then early last week we got a patch to address these problems. I was worried I was going to need to rewrite the video or scrap it entirely. But as luck would have it, Gearbox’s changes were quite small and timid, so the patch didn’t fix my gripes so much as mitigate them very slightly.

Maybe some future patch will fix my concerns, but this seems less like a balance problem and more like a deliberate (although somewhat inexplicable) design decision. I guess we’ll see in the coming weeks. At any rate, to make sense of this we need to jump back a few months.

Back in January of this year – back before Borderlands 3 was announced – I had an article on the Escapist listing 5 reasons why I was worried about the game. Now the game is released and we’ve all had a chance to play it, so I thought it would be good to look at how it turned out in light of my concerns.

You can read the article below, or you can see the video version on YouTube.


Link (YouTube)

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3”

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This Dumb Industry: RaytracingPrevious Post
Next PostBlizzard's Folly

100 comments

 

Diecast #274: Borderlands 3, Mailbag, Raytracing

By Shamus Posted Monday Sep 30, 2019

Filed under: Diecast 51 comments
Diecast #273: The Mailbag Strikes BackPrevious Post
Next PostDiecast #275: Back to School, Kerbal Space Problems, Wendy's Game

No, the show wasn’t canceled. We just took a couple of weeks off. Now we’re back and feeling better than ever feeling exactly the same as before except now we’ve forgotten how to run the show. Enjoy!



Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast274

Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #274: Borderlands 3, Mailbag, Raytracing”

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Diecast #273: The Mailbag Strikes BackPrevious Post
Next PostDiecast #275: Back to School, Kerbal Space Problems, Wendy's Game

51 comments

 
OLDER POSTS
From The Archives:

Resident Evil 4

Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?

 

Raytracing

Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?

 

MMO Population Problems

Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?

 

Good to be the King?

Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?

 

Netscape 1997

What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?

 

Skyrim Thieves Guild

The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.

 

The Loot Lottery

What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?

 

Grand Theft Auto Retrospective

This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.

 

Shamus Plays LOTRO

As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.

 

The Terrible New Thing

Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.