NEWER POSTS

Stadia’s Pricing Model Will Ultimately Be Its Downfall

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Jul 10, 2019

Filed under: Column 189 comments
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The topic of my column this week is, shockingly enough, described by the title. Stadia makes no sense. Even if Google has truly invented a way to magically solve the latency issues inherent with cloud gaming, this is not something anyone needs. I think their target market is, “People who have top-tier internet, who never have to share internet with housemates, who love gaming but are unwilling to buy dedicated gaming hardware, who own multiple non-gaming devices and want to switch between them at random times while hanging around the house.”

Are there enough of those people to form a customer base? I can’t see how. I don’t think there even enough of those people to fill a Prius.

Based on what we’ve been shown, I think the ideal user of Stadia is, “Person who wants to show off cloud gaming on the stage at E3.” So far that’s just one guy, and I’m pretty sure he’s not a paying customer.

A couple of mop-up points in response to the comments at the Escapist:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Stadia’s Pricing Model Will Ultimately Be Its Downfall”

 

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.

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189 comments

 

Proc-gen ShipShip

By Paul Spooner Posted Tuesday Jul 9, 2019

Filed under: Projects 32 comments
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So far in this series I’ve played with circles and squares in an attempt to explore the range of spaceship designs that look good. Well, maybe “good” is too strong a term. Look not terrible. That look, let’s say, unoffensive in the context of a low-budget star-field.

Let’s talk about the starfield, actually. It’s just a big sphere with a couple particle systems attached to it. There’s a “clumping” setting in Blender that gives it a little texture, and that’s it! Well, I also added a few smudgy galaxies too. I’d like to put some nebulae in as well, but who has time for that? We’re not here for stars! We’re here for starships in space! Spaceships among the stars!

Still could use some nebulae, but otherwise perfect. Okay! Let's never use this background again.
Still could use some nebulae, but otherwise perfect. Okay! Let's never use this background again.

Ideally, though, these ships would be recognizable in another context, like a planet or a hanger or underwater. So that’s what this article is about. We’re going to address the other half of the word. Being in spaceor in the context of stars isn’t enough. We’re going to need to look something like a ship. We’re going to need the stuff I was talking about at the end of the last article:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Proc-gen ShipShip”

 

Paul Spooner likes programming procedural content and gaming when he's not busy with his day-job and family.

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32 comments

 

Diecast #264: Sethian, Satisfactory, Mailbag

By Shamus Posted Monday Jul 8, 2019

Filed under: Diecast 64 comments
Diecast #263: Satisfactory, RPG Mechanics EverywherePrevious Post
Next PostDiecast #265: Clickbait, Speedruns, Emergent Stories

Another wrinkle in the adventure to get the RSS feed working: As I’ve said before, the only way to get the podcast RSS to do its job is to place a link to the show somewhere in the post. I normally generate the boilerplate stuff (like the media player you see below) using shortcode and it creates the links for me. But the RSS generator doesn’t see these auto-generated links, so it doesn’t know this is a podcast. To get around this, I must manually put a fully qualified link using raw HTML in the post body. That’s annoying and will cause chaos if the URL of this site ever changes, but fine.

But I also don’t want 2 identical links to the same audio file. (The auto-generated one, and the manual one I’m forced to add.) That would be confusing for the end user. To get around this, I make the manual link invisible by making it a single empty space. This means it isn’t visible to the user, which is fine since it only exists for the benefit of the dumbass RSS generator.

BUT!

The newer versions of WordPress have made the editor “smarter”. Now it sees an empty invisible link, concludes that’s a mistake, and then silently deletes it from the post. I feel like I’m actively fighting the system all the time like this, where I have to come up with workarounds to protect my other workarounds because the system is trying to do my thinking for me.

Sigh. I don’t know. Maybe the RSS feed will work this week. Maybe it won’t. I did what I could.



Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.

This link exists only so the stupid RSS generator will do its job.

Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #264: Sethian, Satisfactory, Mailbag”

 

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 #263: Satisfactory, RPG Mechanics EverywherePrevious Post
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64 comments

 
 

Baldur’s Gate III

By Bob Case Posted Saturday Jul 6, 2019

Filed under: Video Games 88 comments
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I was expecting many things to happen in the year of Our Lord 2019, but the announcement of a third entry in the Baldur’s Gate series was not one of them. After all, the last entry in the series, the Throne of Bhaal expansion, is now old enough to buy cigarettes in most states. There was said to be a third game in the series planned back in 2003Working title The Black Hound., but it was never made, and is now consigned to the history’s what-if pile alongside a third Black Isle FalloutAlso never made, working title Van Buren.. Since then, Beamdog (developer of the BG and BG2 enhanced editions) has occasionally made noises about making a sequel, but their resources were never equal to the task.

But lo, it has returned. A franchaise last seen in 2001. That was a whole different era. Having Baldur’s Gate III announced at this late hour makes me feel unmoored from linear time. It’s like if Al Gore ran for president, or Phil Jackson suddenly announced he was getting Shaq and Kobe back together again. For RPG fans of a certain age, Baldur’s Gate is one of the four gospels of the Infinity Engine era, along with the two Fallouts and Planescape: Torment.

I know this much: if I can't romance a Mind Flayer, the game will be an unmitigated failure.
I know this much: if I can't romance a Mind Flayer, the game will be an unmitigated failure.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Baldur’s Gate III”

 

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.

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88 comments

 
 

Spider-Man Part 19: Times Square

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jul 4, 2019

Filed under: Retrospectives 62 comments
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After the prison break, Doctor Octopus goes to Times Square and releases Devil’s Breath. It turns into a fine red mist and floats out over the city. The cloud covers the area and Doc puts on a breathing mask. Yes, he waits until he’s enveloped in the cloud before he puts on the mask. No, I have no idea why the animator chose to have him do things in that order. It’s weird.

We do a time-cut to one day later. A lot happens in this missing day. Aunt May gets infected, but keeps tending to the sick and homelessShe wears a mask to avoid spreading the disease. I mean, in most cutscenes, anyway. at FEAST because that’s what saints do. Mary Jane releases a special report that says Devil’s Breath was invented at Oscorp. That’s a huge break for Doctor Octopus, since his plan was to expose Osborn and without this report he had no way of doing that. Then again, this report doesn’t seem to change the way anyone thinks or behaves so…. I dunno.

Yuri fishes Spider-Man out of the river and gets him patched up. After that he returns to duty, even though he still has “14 broken bones”.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spider-Man Part 19: Times Square”

 

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.

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62 comments

 
OLDER POSTS
From The Archives:

Trekrospective

A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.

 

Revisiting a Dead Engine

I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.

 

The Best of 2019

I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.

 

Seven Springs

The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.

 

Object-Disoriented Programming

C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.

 

Project Octant

A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.

 

Pixel City Dev Blog

An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.

 

This is Why We Can’t Have Short Criticism

Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.

 

PC Gaming Golden Age

It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.

 

Wolfenstein II

This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?