My column this week is aimed mostly at the hardware newbies who aren’t sure what things inside their PC are called, how they relate to each other, or why they need to be replaced. I doubt the audience for this sort of thing is very big, but I’m hoping it will unravel the mysteries for a couple of people.
Although, if you need advice on what graphics card to buy, you’re on your own. I can only suggest you get a red one.
Reader Jared recently went through the Diecast archives – all 119 episodes – and noted who was there and who hosted. This resulted in some interesting trivia:
Shamus has attended 116 episodes and hosted 49 episodes.
Josh has attended 117 episodes, partially attended 1 episode, and hosted 31 episodes.
Chris has attended 108 episodes, hosted 7 episodes, and partially hosted 1 episode.
Rutskarn has attended 75 episodes, partially attended 5 episodes, hosted 30 episodes, and partially hosted 1 episode.
Mumbles has attended 44 episodes, partially attended 1 episode, and partially hosted 2 episodes.
Jarenth has attended 10 episodes.
SuperBunnyHop has attended 3 episodes.
Krellin and PushingUpRoses have both attended 2 episodes.
Arvind, Randy, and Glitch have each been in 1 episode.
Thanks to Jared for putting that together.
Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #120: Deus Ex Preorder, Narcos, Hitman Movie, Mad Max Game”
I’ve spent years criticizing leaders, executives, and other management-types, insisting that their “death-march crunch mode” approach to production is harmful, wasteful, and counter-productive.
Maybe it works for ditch-diggers or truck driversI’m not saying it does. I’m saying I don’t know. I try not to do jobs that involve dangerous tasks like driving, lifting heavy things, or being too far from a coffeemaker., but for jobs that focus on mental acuity – particularly creative tasks – you suffer from a massive drop-off in quality above a certain limit. The limit is a little bit different for everyone. Some people hit it at 45 hours, some people at 50, and a few (mostly young people) are good until 60 or so. But once you go above the limit, you’re not going to get any more good work out of them. Worse, if you push them too far then it will lower the quality of all of their work.
The effect ramps up gradually over time. You can probably get away with a couple of 60 hour weeks without any serious drawbacks, but as weeks turn into months, the problem intensifies dramatically. Usually. For most people. As far as we can tell. Look, like a lot of organic processes, it’s variable, unpredictable, and hard to measure. The point is…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I Am a Bad Boss”
Link (YouTube) |
I find it interesting that everyone has a different idea of what the worst part of the game is. Mumbles hates the underwater stuff on Manaan. Rutskarn hates the undercity. I hate the Late Game SlogTM. Josh hates the part where Rutskarn makes shitty puns when we least expect it.
For those of you who have played: What part is the worst?
Daggerfall kicks off with a history lesson and follows it with an FMV. Modern sensibilities do not so much recoil as uncoil, but if you can bear it, you’ll learn two things pretty quickly: that Uriel Septim is a personal friend of yours…
…and you're a trusted Imperial agent with a very specific, defined track record of service. So far we’ve had two Elder Scrolls games and both have begun with the assumption that you’re a relatively senior imperial agent. The manual actually tells you what you did to win his esteem, but if you ignore this cursory storytelling–easy to do, even in the days when a manual was important–it almost seems as though you’re supposed to be playing the same character you did in the first game. Either way, taking only these games as precedent, one would not predict the Elder Scrolls series would become known for letting players determine their own backstory (which, as we’ll get into, was a pretty revolutionary idea for a CRPG).
You’re charged with putting to rest the ghost of King Lysandus and recovering a letter intended for the queen of Daggerfall. The game starts with you getting shipwrecked and ending up in a dungeon. This will set you up for the rest of the game’s story: political overtures and cloak-and-dagger aesthetics setting up series of elaborate puzzle dungeons.
Which is not to say the game’s theme is halfhearted. Far from it, actually: the game's high fantasy trappings are wrapped up tight in a Game of Thrones-styled thematic fabric, highlighted by the fact that the playable area of this gameâ€"the Iliac Bayâ€"isn't one placid nation, but a collection of tense, culturally opposed factions on the brink of war. The missions by and large involve nosing into the affairs of various royal families, peeking behind the scummy veil of propriety to uncover a cobwebbed heap of romantic intrigue, betrayal, conspiracy, murder, and naked women, like, seriously everywhere.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Altered Scrolls, Part 5: Cloak and Fanservice”
Link (YouTube) |
New games have spoiled us. There’s this unspoken assumption: If you change zones, have a cutscene, or pass through a loading screen, you get an auto-save. But in 2003, this was not a rule. We had all three of those things happen here without getting a save. Spoiler: This comes back to bite us in this episode.
If you want to know about this Invisible War game we were talking about, there’s an Errant Signal episode for that.
I find the comparison interesting because both of these games came out the same year and both were multiplatform releases, coming out on both Xbox and Windows. The original Xbox had just 64MB of ram. For comparison, Good Robot – the 2D side-scrolling indie game I’m helping to develop – currently eats about 200MB. To be fair, a lot of that bloat comes from the third-party libraries we’re using. Over the last 12 years, a lot of software has come along to relieve coders from the drudgery of making their own code for interfaces, audio code, rendering pipeline, controller input, and a dozen other things. That’s wonderful, inasmuch as it’s made the current surge in indie development possible for a whole generation of developers who would rather focus on gameplay than building complex technical frameworks. Sure, there’s a steep performance cost to doing things this way, but like I said in the column this week, Moore’s Law was pretty sweet while it lasted, and gave us so much extra power to spend on stuff like this.
Still, it’s amazing to think that my little game uses more than three times as much memory as KOTOR. Actually quite a bit more, since certainly the Xbox operating system would have eaten into that 64MB.
EDIT: Actually Good Robot only uses 132MB. I was looking at the numbers for the debug build when I wrote this post. So Good Robot is only twice the size of KOTOR, not three times the size.
I think one of the big technical blunders for Invisible War was moving to bump-mapping and bloom lighting. Those technologies were pretty new at the time. KOTOR doesn’t do any of those fancy tricks, and has a super-primitive lighting model. Going strictly by technology, KOTOR came out in 2003 but was using technology from 1999 or so. It’s also third-person, so the camera is further away from the scenery. Which means they can get away with low-resolution texture maps.
Not only were the texture maps in Invisible War larger, but they needed double the texture maps, because bump mapping / normal mapping requires another texture. The bloom lighting would have required an extra framebuffer, which would have eaten 3 precious megabytes all by itself.
EDIT: 3MB was based on the assumption that this game ran at 720p, but it was only 480p. So the bloom framebuffer would have been just under a megabyte. I still say that’s not the best use of resources in such a memory-starved situation, but not nearly as bad as 3MB.
By not blowing memory on fancy rendering tricks, BioWare was able to spend more of their meager memory budget on game space: Rooms and corridors and such. Yes, KOTOR looks pretty barren and could clearly use some furnishings here and there, but it’s still better than Invisible War and their closet-sized cities.
Like I said last time, the conversation with Vigil is my favorite part of the game. That incredible music plays, you’ve got your two favorite companions with you, and Vigil lays it all out. He explains just how long the odds are, just how powerful the enemy is, but he also explains the little glimmer of hope you have.
As much as I love this section, you knew we weren’t getting through it without a little nitpicking, didn’t you? Let’s paraphrase / summarize this conversation:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 12: A Chat With Vigil”
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
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?
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
T w e n t y S i d e d
