T w e n t y S i d e d
Desert Bus is a strange vaudevillian affair where our malice can masquerade as altruism.
Postcards from Minecraft, Part 5
I took a week and a half off from Minecraft. While I was gone, the Twentymine community continued to grow. And they continued to build. I think the world is actually expanding faster than I could hope to keep pace. There are 214 locations in the warp list. The server is not even a month old at this point. If I featured a different project here each and every day, we would never catch up.
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(The black cubes floating in the sky are just visual artifacts that you get when you have visibility set to maximum.)
I really like the transparent blue look on the building here. Sadly, you can’t do this with glass. For whatever reason, Minecraft renders glass with a 1-bit mask. Glass can’t be partly transparent. Every pixel is either 100% see-through or 100% opaque. This building was made by placing water blocks at the top of the building and letting the water flow down in great curtains. It’s gorgeous.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Postcards from Minecraft, Part 5”
Desert Bus Appearance
Here is my appearance on Desert Bus from yesterday:
Link (YouTube) |
I was a bit more flippant with answers than I’d normally be, but this was very much a fast-paced affair and I didn’t want to slow things down. The questions about D&D were interesting. Too interesting. The answers required more thought than I could have given them at the moment, and I was shy of anything that required a lengthy reply. Remember that
I was talking into a phone which was going to a cell phone which was feeding into an open mic which was then broadcast over Ustream. I could barely hear James and Paul. (They were easy to hear on the live feed, but that was on a five-second delay.) So I tried to stick to simple questions and keep it moving.
The unnamed technology behind Desert Bus is a remarkable apparatus. Pieced together from web cams, old videogame systems, their video production equipment, numerous computers, monitors, laptops, and a half dozen bits of free (to use) software. They have their live feed. Another feed of the game being played. They have a burgeoning chat room fed to a huge monitor so that the driver can read it. They have the website for announcements and links, and email for side conversations. Telephones for interviews. There’s they Paypal donation system, and then all the scrips that they use to hook into that and display running totals on the website and on the live feed. Then they have some kind of crazy organization system to keep track of the challenges, auctions, and prizes.
Everyone is so impressed with how much money they raise, but I’m impressed they’re able to get the system working at all. Heck, I’m impressed they can even go for ten minutes without throwing a breaker.
Desert Bus
Desert Bus is underway. I’ll be calling in to the show today at 4pm EST, 1pm PST. I have no idea what we’ll talk about. I was pretty relaxed about this until I saw the guest lineup for the last 24 hours, which included Penn Jillette, Yahtzee Croshaw, and Jerry Holkins. The LRR crew have mistaken me for a real celebrity, and we must make every effort to prevent them from discovering their error.
They might have a post up on the official blog where you can leave questions for me in the comments. I don’t know how it will go. But I hope you’ll watch.
UPDATE: All done. Fun interview. I’ll have a wrap-up post along with the interview in the morning.
Spoiler Warning S4E3: I’ve been working on the Railroad…
Link (YouTube) |
Experienced Points: Difficulty is Hard
My latest column looks at difficulty in games by examining the various and wildly divergent entries in the Prince of Persia series.
Also: This weekend is Desert Bus for Hope. Never heard of it? I forgive you. Just read the FAQ.
I’ll be appearing (call in) on the show on Sunday at 4pm EST. We’ll do some sort of interview-type thing. I will try very hard not to ask any members of the LRR cast to marry me, but all bets are off if Paul answers the phone. Just warning you.
Let’s Code
I’ve been corresponding with Michael Goodfellow, a fellow coder who had recently begun a blog detailing a game he’s working on. If you enjoy the coding write-ups that I do around here then do make sure to give this a look. He’s actually working on an MMO. A few people have nudged me to talk about the technology behind Minecraft, but his post explains the core concepts. Pay special attention to the stuff on Octrees. An Octree is just a three-dimensional version of a quadtree, which I wrote about way back in February 2006. (Hey! This site turned 5 years old back in September and I didn’t notice!)
I’m a big fan of “coding in public” like this. When you’re working on a solo project you might have to plow months into your work before you even have something playable enough to show off, and those months of working in the dark can be disheartening. I’ve found writing about my work also helps to to organize it in my mind. And it makes for an entertaining read for everyone else.
Do check out Let’s Code and let him know what you think.
From The Archives:
Diablo III Retrospective
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
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.
Project Octant
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Batman: Arkham Origins
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
Dead or Alive 5 Last Round
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
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.
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.