The title is not a typo. This is actually about programming for Kerbal Space Program. For those of you who’ve been missing out on the programming content around here: Your time has come. We talk about programming on the Diecast, and then tomorrow I have a new programming series starting.
Episode edited by Issac.
Show notes:
01:20 KSP Modding
26:08 Unity game Engine
43:57 Programming in C# versus C++
Have you heard about MeWe? It’s selling itself as the “next-gen” social media platform. More specifically, it’s trying to be the anti-Facebook by promising it won’t do data harvesting or sell your personal info. So I tried it. But before I talk about the Twilight Zone strangeness I encountered, please enjoy this barely-related rant on the current state of social media:
I realize that selling personal info is the most egregious sin that SM platforms perpetrate, but it’s not the one that annoys me the most. What really bugs me is the algorithm-driven “curation” of content. Both Twitter and Facebook became significantly less interesting to me when the platform began “helping” me by showcasing content it thought I wanted to see and burying content it assumed I didn’t care about. It’s true that I never left comments or pressed the like button on Aunt Edna’s cancer treatment updates. But I didn’t engage with that stuff because… well, you don’t always need to say something, you know? But those updates were still important to me. It’s also true that I’d sometimes hit the like button when cousin Jimmy posted something humorous, but that doesn’t mean I come to Facebook to find funny images.
But those are the assumptions that drive the Facebot, so that’s what I saw in my feed. Over time the important family updates vanished and were replaced with a really shitty version of Imgur. Yuck. I can still see updates from family, but I have to go to each and every family member’s page / feed and view it directly. That’s a lot of trouble and a lot of clicks to find out there aren’t any updates, which means I revert to the pre-SM behavior of “I’ll just assume someone will email me if anything really important happens.”
I have the same problem with Twitter. I’ve turned off every type of “help” I can find in the settings, but I can tell it’s still doing some level of curation. I’ll refresh the page two hours after my previous visit, and I’ll still see the same handful of mega-popular Tweets from major organizations / famous individuals featured at the top, and the dashed-off thoughts of my friends and colleagues (which is what I’m here for) will have vanished into the snowstorm and can’t be found anywhere in the timeline.
If my brother Tweets, “Shit. Just got a flat.” then I want to read that, even if he only has six followers and nobody in the world “likes” the message. I’m not here for your creepy-ass Orwellian algorithm-driven popularity contest / outrage generator. I just want to see what’s going on with my friends and family. Twitter is still useful to me as a way to broadcast updates to my audience, but as a source of information it’s completely useless.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Me, Myself, and MeWe”
Note: This post is going to show both gore and nudity. Together. I’m going to share a particular screenshot from the game and I don’t want to undercut the point I’m making by censoring stuff out.
Just, you know, be aware of this if you happen to be reading at work.
Once BJ gets back from Venus, everyone throws a party. The team gets drunk and acts silly. It’s a fun scene and sort of hints at the stuff that goes on around the submarine while you’re off doing all the work.
Having said that, this is a really odd thing in terms of tone and story structure. This is like the rebels throwing a party just before assaulting the Death Star. This is the point where most stories bring our heroes low with self-doubt, personal loss, or internal conflict. Normally you’d expect the writer to remind us of the stakes, or even raise them. If the stakes have been large and abstract before now (the city is in danger) then this is where it would become personal (your partner / parents / dog is in danger) and vice versa. Maybe the writer would spend some time to drive home just how bad things have gotten. Show us how terrified the villagers are, or how much the hostages are hurting. Remind us of the personal drama that made our hero begin this journey in the first place.
This story hit the emotional low point at the two-thirds mark when BJ lost his head, and then we did the fetch quest to Venus. It’s fine to have an unconventional story structure if that’s what you need. Having a party at this point isn’t strictly wrong or anything. The rules of storytelling aren’t written in stone and having a party before a big battle is a real thing some people do to take their mind off the stress.
The problem is that we’re going into the last stage of the game and it doesn’t particularly feel like it. You can have an unconventional structure, but you still need to maintain the sense of tension that pulls an audience through a story.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Wolfenstein II Part 10: Party Time”
Before we continue with the main quest, I’d like to take some steps to advance the game’s biggest and most elaborate side questI’ve decided to run this whole ‘Gwent is the main quest’ gag deep into the ground, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.: the search for Geralt’s adoptive daughter Ciri.
Now for an aside that concerns games and their presumed audience.
Without going into exhaustive detail, at some point in the eighties the game industry collectively decided that they were going to consider young boys to be their core audience. I’m quite familiar with this, since I was on the receiving end of it, and am pretty close to the bulls-eye consumer for this model. I played Super Mario Bros. and Zelda when I was in elementary school, Wolfenstein and Doom when I was in middle school, and Final Fantasy when I was in high school. At some point I played Fallout, which detoured me slightly (though permanently) off the beaten path, but broadly speaking their whole “market to young boys” thing definitely worked in my case.
This strategy was the product of an industry trying to find its legs again after a painful crash. But what started as a temporary tactical move calcified into habit, and the (AAA at least) games industry has kept making and marketing games mostly towards me and people like me ever since. Of course, now my generation is well into its thirties, so I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that starting around five years ago a new kind-of-genre has emerged that I’ve come to call the “Dad Game.”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: Dad Games”
This is a strange gig. I spend more time thinking about, writing about, and reading comments on videogames than I spend playing videogames. A lot of this job involves arguing. Not the nasty stressful kind of arguing. I mean just general disagreement and confusion. “Oh I can’t believe you like this / how can you not love this” kind of disagreement.
As you work to be understood, you’ll naturally be drawn towards writing longer and longer criticism. I think of it as the Joseph Anderson effect. You might only have 800 words of criticism on a subject, but if you’re trying to avoid arguments then it’ll take you another 12,000 words to support your thesis and harden it against predictable dismissals.
When you’re a new critic, it begins with a simple naive statement of opinion:
“I didn’t like Shoot Guy III.”
But that’s not very interesting. Your review is short and there’s very little for anyone to think about. The whole thing reads like a list of likes and dislikes: I like the shooting, I didn’t like the wacky fast-talking animal sidekick, I thought the zeppelin chase was cool, I thought the ending was dumb.
So then a reader will ask why you didn’t like those things. And yeah, that’s a fair question. So in the future when you write your reviews you spend a little more time describing where the game fell short.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Industry: This is Why We Can’t Have Short Criticism”
Episode edited by Issac.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #204: Left 4 Dead, Factorio Pricing, Minecraft and World Scale”
I’m a bit torn on this stream. On one hand, it was amazing to return to this game after so many years. This game is a joy. On the other hand, I’m really frustrated with my moment-to-moment decisions while playing.
Link (YouTube) |
See, even though it’s been at least seven years since I played, I still have huge parts of the game memorized. I spent a lot of the stream running on muscle memory and auto-pilot. The thing is, that’s completely inappropriate behavior when you’re playing with a newbie and a couple of bots. You can see this in the subway when I get separated from the group. I run over to the ammo pile because everyone always runs over to the ammo pile because why would you go anywhere else? But of course Paul was just moving as felt naturally and wasn’t thinking, “we need to sprint to the next subway car because this tunnel makes us really vulnerable to ambushes and we need to get away from the witch”.
So then a wave of zombies showed up, and instead of running back to the group like I should have, I backed into a corner like you would in a normal game. I sat there for a second, seriously expecting the rest of the group to pile in around me. By the time I realized that this expectation made no sense, it was too late and we were all swarmed.
Now, in this instance it worked out. I died and we got to show off that part of the game and how death worked. But I kept behaving like that the entire stream. The moment I stopped actively thinking about it, I reverted to the usual behavior and resumed sprinting through levels, only to turn around and realize I’d ditched the team. Again. The whole point of playing with Paul was to take a sightseeing tour through the levels and point out the interesting details, and my constant pushing ran directly counter to that. And I couldn’t stop doing it.
I guess it didn’t hurt the stream, but I was really frustrated with myself for not being able to break old habits.
Also, the game feels very different compared to what I remember. Tanks go down in seconds. Witches seem incredibly rare. Waves of zombies seem rare. We hardly ever faced more than one special infected at a time. Maybe I’m remembering the higher difficulty levels, but I seem to remember Tanks being an ordeal even on normal. Maybe the game has been patched? I dunno.
Anyway. It was still a good time, despite me constantly playing in a way that undermined what I was trying to do. Maybe I just need to give it another try. But Paul also suggested Factorio multiplayer, and that might be fun too. We’ll see.
In any case, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to stream this week. My sleep schedule is madness. I’m living on a 26 hour schedule and sleeping 6 hours a night. This happens to me sometimes. It seems like it would be nice having the extra hours of productivity, but I’m actually pretty confused and scatterbrained when this is going onNow that I think of it, maybe that explains why my concentration was so bad in L4D.. It’s entirely possible that I’ll be sleeping during my normal stream time, and I’d hate to make plans and then stand you up later.
Anyway, thanks for showing up and hanging out.
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
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My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
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.
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T w e n t y S i d e d
