So I’m playing a lot of Civilization V these days. A process which led to the creation of this comic and the loss of a couple of nights of sleep. It’s been a while since I’ve really experienced the Civ bug in full force.
It’s a remarkable game. The game has so many complex systems that work well together, remain roughly balanced, remain consistent, and follow the pseudo-historical premise of the game. It’s a remarkable achievement.
EDIT: Whoops. I’d intended to post this after today’s comic. The screenshots are spoiler-ish, so you might want to see today’s comic before reading further.
Some people expressed interest in what I was doing that led to yesterday’s post. I’m not one to miss an opportunity to talk about myself, so let’s do that.
Ever since DM of the Rings CXXXI I’ve used my own software for making comics. It’s 100% homebrew code. It looks thus:
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Ok, I never have the window this small. I usually run it full-screen, so it looks like this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Comic Press”
I program in C++ for a living. I loved doing it in my late 20’s and early 30’s, but over the past few years I’ve gotten fed up with this language and its cryptic aggravating bullshit.
One of the strengths of the language is the way that you can use libraries written by someone else. The language is 31 years old at this point, and odds are good that if there’s something you need your program to do, someone else has already come across the problem, solved it, and put the thing out there for people to use. For example, if you need a really fast algorithm for sorting a big wad ‘o data, or generating high quality pseudo-random numbers, then you don’t need to knock yourself out. Just use what’s already been written. There’s no reason to do it yourself unless you see some flaw in the existing solution and you think you can do better.
Things get tricky when you have a solution that incorporates another solution which incorporates another, and so on. You go and grab a chunk of code for (say) calculating the shortest distance between any two wombats. You think you’re done, but when you try to use it you find out it depends on other files you don’t have. It turns out the shortest-distance stuff incorporated someone else’s code, which was a program designed to differentiate between wombats and hamsters, which in turn used some guy’s 1988 C code to rate things according to how furry they are. Suddenly you’re performing some sort of archaeological data mining, looking for fragments of code written by a teenage Bjarne Stroustrup in 1965 and trying to translate his comments from the original Danish.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Object-Disoriented Programming”
So, the whole 2D vs. 3D gaming thing….
Link (YouTube) |
Amazing. How does something like this even get made? An incredible amount of work went into this, from a lot of different people. It’s a blend of art from very different mediums. Everything from Pixar 3D to Nintendo 2D. With appropriate music. Voice actors. Sound effects. The YouTube pages says nothing about why this was made or who funded it.
But thanks, whoever you are. I love when the internet dispenses free stuff.
Looking back, I kind of wish I’d combined this week’s column with last week’s. It’s one of those situations where I had one-and-a-half points to make. A bit big for one column, but too small for two. Ah well.
I suppose I chafe more than most at fanboys because they really hate the work I do here. I prefer to write about stuff that’s broken in games and talk about how gameplay or story could have been done better, because those are interesting conversations. But fanboys simply can’t wrap their heads around this sort of conversational analysis and keep trying to see it as a thumbs up / thumbs down review. A common demand is “YOU NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE GOOD PARTS OF THE GAME.” Which isn’t really true. My goal is to talk about the stuff that interests me, not offer consumer advice. I see that most people leaving comments have already played a game or made their decision not to buy it. We’re just talking about stuff the way friends do.
Ann: Did you see that part of the movie where the hero jumped out of the helicopter and didn’t die because he landed on a bad guy? I thought that was lame.
Bob: Me too.
Carl: YOU NEED TO MENTION HOW AWESOME THE ACTING AND SPECIAL EFFECTS WERE.
And Good Old Games went out not with a bang, but a incoherent tirade.
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
A lot of people have been asking us to move the show to Blip.tv. We gave it a try. It didn’t work out. Blip can handle HD video. It can handle half-hour shows. But it can’t handle a half hour HD show. There is an encode that happens on the server side, and it always fails out because it takes too long. So it looks like we’re stuck with Viddler for now.
Oh, and the episode ending the way it did? Totally not related to my comic earlier this week. Just an odd coincidence.
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.
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
T w e n t y S i d e d
