T w e n t y S i d e d
This comic was more or less a necessity. I found myself with several strips of material, all of which required Garry’s Mod, which is still broken. You know what they say, “When life gives you lemons, complain about it on your blog.” Works for me.
The Truth About The BSP
Warning: The following 2,400 words attempt to take very complex 3D rendering problems and reduce them to simple language so that you can peer into the polygon-based sausage factory that is the videogame industry. I’m not sure if I pulled it off.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Truth About The BSP”
Archive Binge
The Irregular Webcomic crowd has launched Archive Binge, a service that will take an existing webcomic and feed it to you via RSS at the rate you choose. So, if you’ve never read Order of the Stick before, all you have to do is:
1) Go into the kitchen
2) Open freezer
3) Insert head
4) Close freezer really hard
5) Realize the pain and facial damage is a just punishment for missing out on such a fine webcomic.
6) Go read OOTS
But you’re daunted by reading all 672 strips at once, you could tell Archive Binge to make a special RSS feed that will give you 2 OOTS strips every day until you’re all caught up.
It’s a great idea. Note that if you sign up for Irregular Webcomic and elect to read one a day, you will never catch up because David Morgan-Mar is an unstoppable madman. However, if you elect to read two Irregular Webcomic strips each day, then in 2407 days – just over six and a half years – you’ll be all caught up. Yeah. You might want to read more than one of those a day.
DM of the Rings is one of the available comics. If you’ve always wanted to read that, now would be a good time to do so. I won’t even make you do the freezer thing.
Hey, Garry Newman
Hey Garry. Five days ago you put out an update to Garry’s Mod to add achievements. This update broke the save system. I tried to post the following comment on your blog:
FYI: As of the update, saving is completely broken for a large number of people. As in, any attempt to save the game (menu, quicksave, autosave) will instantly crash GM.
http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=799934
But that was caught in the moderation trap. I also left out an important detail: It kills the file you’re saving to in the process. There is a thread at facepunch, and couple more in the Steam forums, and several people claim to have sent in crash reports, and there are lots of people waiting to hear something, but you have yet to post anywhere that you’re even aware of the problems.
It’s been four or five days and for a lot of people, (like me) the software is broken and useless. Re-installing will just re-install this same broken version. It’s impossible to roll back to a previous one. We’re stuck until you fix it and we don’t even know if you’re working on it yet.
If you’re gonna fire updates from the hip without testing, that’s cool. But then keep your eyes open for a problem like this and be ready to deal with it. Either that or playtest it until you’ve worked out the big game-killing bugs. But pushing an update that breaks the software and then wandering off for five days without checking on things or acknowledging the bug is infuriating. This is commercial software now. You got my money, and I got trashed save game files and a couple of hours of my time down the drain trying to troubleshoot a problem that turned out to be not on my end. I’ll bet there are thousands of people out there who are wasting their weekends un-installing recent mods, thinking one of those is the cause. A public announcement would go a long way to reducing the ambient level of rage over this mess until you can sort it.
In conclusion, please do something.
Aside: I really, really hope Valve institutes a “beta” system, where updates go out to a minority of people who opt in for them, and if those people don’t report any problems it can then be released to the wider community. This is not the first time Steam auto-patching has killed something with no recourse for the end user.
Head. Hit. Keyboard.
Hammer Rant
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been mucking about with Hammer, the Valve level editor. Doing so provides an interesting peek inside of Valve studios. When Daikatana came out in 2000, there was a joke about how the game was polished, but mired in the previous technological generation and old design philosophy. It went something like, “Diakatana: Best 1997 game released in 2000.” Well, Hammer is my favorite level editor of 1999.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hammer Rant”
Guitar Hero + Rubik’s Cube x 2 = Hard
There are things which are easy, and then there are things which are decidedly not easy:
Link (YouTube) |
I would classify this as the latter.
Experienced Points: Online Activation Is a Ripoff
An entire column dedicated to making the case that online activation is a Bad Idea as a form of DRM. I had to give my boilerplate “Steam is not the same as simple activation”, because if I didn’t do that it would instantly hijack the conversation and we’d be arguing over Steam the whole time. I mentioned that their system of auto-patching is pretty nice. Far better than Googling around, looking for a patch, trying to figure out if I have it, or need another one before this one, or if I need a special one for my region, and then shuffling off to FilePlanet and downloading 50MB worth of ads while waiting in line for my 5MB patch.
Of course, as soon as I wrote that the auto-patch system came back to bite me, and an update to Garry’s mod broke the software. Since I had no idea there WAS an update, I wasted a lot of time trying to fix what I thought was a problem on my end. And because of the way the system works, there is no way to return to the previous version. My software is dead, and I just have to wait for someone else to fix it. Grr.
You can turn off auto-patching on a per-game basis, although it’s on for all games by default. Some games need auto-patching. You need to keep Team Fortress 2 up to date, or you can’t play online. But single player games don’t have that problem. I probably need to go through all my games and set policies for each to keep this from happening.
Man, I hope Garry gets it fixed soon.
From The Archives:
Autoblography
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.
The Game That Ruined Me
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
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.
Silent Hill 2 Plot Analysis
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Who Broke the In-Game Economy?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.