It’s an all-mailbag episode. Thanks to everyone who sent in questions. Also to reiterate what I said on the show: This was recorded on Wed April 25, prior to me taking a trip.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #208: Mailbag”
Well, this is embarrassing. It’s a lot more fun to write about malfunctioning technology than to explain my bone-headed mistakes, but the only way to avoid this sort of thing is to not make bone-headed mistakes and I still haven’t figured out how to do that.
A few weeks ago I posted the Twilight Zone story of creating a MeWe account, having it vanish, creating another, and then having the original account send me a friend request. Last week a member of the MeWe team saw the post. The did an investigation and were able to sort out what happened. (Spoiler: It was user error.)
Back in the old days – in the mid aughts or so – I was juggling three different email addresses. I had one from my internet provider, one here at my domain, and a third through gmail. The plan was that @shamusyoung would be the public-facing address conversing with the masses, and @gmail would be for a small list of friends / professional contacts. However, it was somewhat random which one I’d use when creating a new account someplace. When I’d try to do an account recovery I’d have no idea which email I’d used to create the thing. It was madness.
So about seven years ago I made a new rule: All accounts will use @gmailWhy? Because gmail has better spam filtering than my @shamusyoung address.. So now ALL accounts tie to @gmail. Over time, the @shamusyoung address fell out of use. If strangers want to contact me these days they usually leave a comment on the site or DM me on Twitter. Very few go to the trouble of finding the @shamusyoung contact info.
Obviously my two MeWe accounts were bound to these two different addresses. That was my mistake. I created the first using @shamusyoung and then went looking for it later, assuming it would be @gmail.
So that’s the mistake. But how did I make it? What would possess me to create a new account here in 2018 using an address I barely think about and haven’t typed in years? And having done so, how could I not notice when looking for the account two weeks later?
I THINK this was a result of the way I was invited to MeWe. Someone sent the invite link to @shamusyoung. I’m betting that when I clicked on the link, it set up an account for @shamusyoung without me needing to type in an email. So I didn’t notice I was linking MeWe to the wrong email. At some point in the distant past I set up @shamusyoung to auto-forward to @gmail, meaning this mistake was invisible to me.
So how did I get a friend invite from myself? According to MeWe:
On the first account you must have selected the optional feature to Sync Contacts. If this is selected it will auto invite your contacts ONLY if they join MeWe.
Huh. (That’s a cool feature, although I might suggest that invites make it clear if they’re sent via automated systems or through direct user interaction. Like, if I was divorced I might still have my ex-wife in my old contact list, and thus when trying to import all my buddies I’d end up sending her a friend invite. This would likely create confusion and misunderstandings for both of us. Then again, maybe feature requests like this ought to come from someone who kept their wits on the account creation page.)
So that’s how I created a surreal mystery for myself. I have to commend MeWe’s support for being so good they went and solved my problem without even being told about it or asked to do anything.
Of the game’s three main questlines (Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige), I personally consider Novigrad to be the weakest.
This isn’t because of Novigrad itself, which as I’ve said is one of my favorite cities in all of gaming. Rather, it’s because the quests, which invovle finding Dandelion, unraveling a heist, navigating the city’s underworld, and finally taking on the Church of the Eternal Fire, are frequently disjointed and full of stray threads. During my first playthrough, I remember often losing track of exactly what I was doing and why.
I personally suspect that the entire area was the subject of significant last-minute cuts which required a rapid reshuffling the story. I say I “suspect” this because I don’t claim to have any inside knowledge of the development process – however, the suspicion is a strong one. There were many things here that made my “last minute scramble in development” spider senses go off: how the various figures of Novigrad’s underworld were introduced in more detail than their significance in the story seemed to merit, the detail invested in the buildings of Temple Isle (the Church’s home base), most of which were only seen in one cutscene, the rather wet-fart resolution of the whole “find Dijkstra’s treasure” quest (we just never find it, and we knew it was Dandelion all along anyway), and numerous smaller rough edges, some of which I’ll mention as we go on.
I’m not trying to dump on the developers here. The Witcher 3 was a massive game with massive ambitions, and given all that it’s a miracle it came out as polished as it did. What’s more, as I’ve heard more stories about the development of this game or that game, I’ve come to believe that one of the most important skills a game developer can have – and especially if you’re in a management position – is improvisation.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: Novigrad, Part One”
I loved this game. Then I was annoyed by it. Then I was offended by it. Finally I was appalled at it. Then I quit and wrote this series.
Let’s start with the small problems…
The English translation of this game is atrocious. This means the English voiced dialog is atrocious. Typical forum-goers often accuse the developer of just using random people off the street to voice these characters, but I recognize some of these voice performers from anime and other videogames and they’re clearly talented professionals. This is one of those unfortunate situations where the actor takes the blame for the failings of the director or the writer. It’s pretty hard for a performer to make a line sound good when the phrasing is stilted and overly verbose.
Even the best actor in the world can’t do their job if the dialog isn’t clear about what their character is like, what the context of the scene is, and how the lines are intended to be read. This is the sort of mess you get when the actor is just handed lines to read and shoved in the direction of the microphone. Undoubtedly these people all had to perform in isolation without hearing the other characters in the scene, so it’s not surprising that everyone feels like they’re part of a different game.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Black Desert Online #2: The Honeymoon is Over”
Last time I talked about making a special shader in Unity. It turns out that writing Unity shaders is a mixture of awesome and awful. But before we can get into that, we need to fix these buildings:
See, I’m going to be writing the lighting shader. My hope is that I’ll be able to use Unity to save me from the arduous task of writing my own shadowing system. I want buildings to be able to cast shadows on each other, the ground, and even themselves. But a cube doesn’t have any overhanging bits that might cast shadows on itself. So before I go messing around with shaders, let’s make some more complex buildings.
I don’t need to make the full building generator just yet. All I need is something complex enough to self-shadow.
I’ll probably throw most of this code away later. These buildings are stupidly primitive. There’s a triangle pair for every single window, there aren’t any “gaps” with no windows, the ledges all look the same, there’s no street detail, and there isn’t any clutter on the roof. But these buildings can self-shadow, which is what counts.
So let’s work on that shader…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Pixel City Redux #3: Shader Rant”
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #207: Minecraft Scripting, Aer, Business Rant”
It’s been a while since I played an MMO, hasn’t it? And I’ve never played one quite like this before. I’ve mentioned Black Desert Online a few times in the past and nobody really took much of an interest, so I suspect most of you are indifferent to this thing. But I’ve never let indifference interfere with my blathering before, so we’re going to spend a month with this game.
Over the past couple of weeks I had a blast in Black Desert Online, and then I stopped having a blast and the whole experience felt more or less like a waste of time for reasons I’ll get into later. But first let’s talk about what drew me to the game.
Black Desert Online is a Korean MMO and almost everything about it is strange to me. The design is strange, the release schedule is strange, the business model is strange, the setting is strange, the interface is strange, and the dialog is strange. I can’t tell how much of the strangeness comes from the developers and how much comes from its home culture. Note that in this context, “strange” does not mean “bad”. It’s just, you know, unexpected.
I understand that Korean games are ridiculously grind-y by reputation. When I hear something described as “grindy”, I think of the ancient past of 2002, when I played Dark Age of Camelot and the most expedient way to level was to stand in the same spot and farm the same cluster of mobs for an hour. Black Desert might be grindy, but it’s not that sort of grindy. Maybe it’s grindy by the standards of kids today, or maybe it breaks from the norm set by other Korean MMO titles, but it’s not a grind in the sense of killing the same monster 60 times in a row.
The strange thing about the release schedule is that they didn’t immediately target the North American market. They went for South Korea first (which is pretty understandable) in 2014, but then in 2015 they released in… Japan and Russia? They finally got around to North America and Europe in 2016 and South America and MENA in 2017.
This isn’t a complaint or anything. It’s not like North America is automatically entitled to get stuff first. It’s just an unexpected choice because NA is often thought of as a very lucrative market so developers like to target it as soon as possible. Conversely, Russia is often a low-priority market because it has a reputation for being a difficult place to operate. I wonder if this unorthodox release order means the usual conventional wisdom is no longer true. Is Russia an easier place to do business? Is North America not as lucrative as it used to be? Or does Publisher Kakao Games have other practical / logistical reasons for pushing NA and Europe off for a couple of years?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Black Desert Online #1: Strange But Cool”
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
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.
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
T w e n t y S i d e d
