Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Sunday Jul 20, 2014

 Errant Signal: Call of Juarez: GunslingerPrevious Post

Next PostUnrest: An Honest Postmortem of a Kickstarter Success 

Last weekend I watched a Starcraft 2 tournament where players were competing for about $24,000 in prizes. Note that the money was spread out over the players. The champion only won like 8,000. A lot of people went home with just $200. It’s sort of sad how small the payouts are. The tournament was held in Atlanta. These players came from all over the world, and they only get a few hundred bucks? That won’t even cover the airfare, much less hotel, food, and general pain-in-the-assery of long-distance travel. The vast majority of the contestants practiced for months, traveled thousands of miles, fought hard, and ended up with almost nothing to show for it.

(Even if airfare, hotel, and food were all paid for by the event, $200 is still a ridiculous payout for a tournament that takes that kind of investment of time. And yes, there are other tournaments. But if you look at the number of tournaments and the typical payout to mid-range players, the numbers still look pretty sad.)

It’s not that I think anyone owes these kids more money. I mean, you have to make do with the sponsorship you have. If sponsors only want to give $24,000, then the players can decide for themselves if that money is worth fighting over. It’s just that this seems like bad news for the sport. This isn’t a viable career path for someone, even short-term. Not in the way that traditional sports are. Regular sports make pretty good money. (The league minimum for a rookie NFL player is in the neighborhood of $400,000.) And even if you don’t go pro, playing sportsball in college often means you don’t have to pay for tuition. But StarCraft 2 players? Nobody is paying for their schooling, and it looks like everyone but the top players will probably struggle to attain minimum wage status. And you’ll likely get “too old” and wash out at 27. This suggests that StarCraft 2 pro league will never be more than a niche sportWe’re not going to argue about calling this a “sport”. That’s the most convenient word to use in this context, and I don’t care if it matches your mental or dictionary definitions of the word. Take it easy. pursued by people who love the game enough to put up with the extreme opportunity cost of going pro.

But this weekend I saw a bit of the DOTA 2 tournament The International. Ten million dollars in prizes? Now that sounds like pro-league money! This feels like a REAL e-sport.Whatever that means..

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DOTA 2”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Errant Signal: Call of Juarez: GunslingerPrevious Post

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Marlow Briggs EP3: Marlow Briggs and the Refinery of DOOM

By Shamus Posted Friday Jul 18, 2014

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 75 comments

 Marlow Briggs EP2:
Marlow Briggs and the OH GOD THE SPINNINGPrevious Post

Next PostSkyrim EP52: It's All One Big Yoke 

Link (YouTube)

Well, that was certainly three episodes of Spoiler Warning playing a videogame about a mask that makes a fireman come back from the dead to rescue an archaeologist from the world’s #1 consumer of orange helicopters.

I’m not kidding when I say that Strong Bad as a streamer should be a thing:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Marlow Briggs EP3: Marlow Briggs and the Refinery of DOOM”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Marlow Briggs EP2:
Marlow Briggs and the OH GOD THE SPINNINGPrevious Post

Next PostSkyrim EP52: It's All One Big Yoke 

75 comments

Marlow Briggs EP2:
Marlow Briggs and the OH GOD THE SPINNING

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jul 17, 2014

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 110 comments

 Marlow Briggs Special EP1: Marlow Briggs and the Better Than It Should Be Previous Post

Next PostMarlow Briggs EP3: Marlow Briggs and the Refinery of DOOM 

Link (YouTube)

CAUTION: This episode is basically 20 minutes of low-FOV camera-spinning.

In the debate of “did the developers realize what they were doing?” I think I’ve come down on the side of believing that they are over-enthusiastic, wide-eyed, naive, and completely lacking in self-awareness. Because if somebody did this on purpose I owe them a spin-kick to to side of the head. Actually no. Just a regular kick. I’ve had enough spinning.

I’d also like to point out that the vehicle we see at the start of the episode isn’t as preposterous as it might seem. It’s based on a real machine, the Bagger 288, which is used to remove massive volumes of overburden (basically, useless dirt and rock sitting on top of the stuff you want) when strip-mining:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Marlow Briggs EP2:
Marlow Briggs and the OH GOD THE SPINNING”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Marlow Briggs Special EP1: Marlow Briggs and the Better Than It Should Be Previous Post

Next PostMarlow Briggs EP3: Marlow Briggs and the Refinery of DOOM 

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Marlow Briggs Special EP1: Marlow Briggs and the Better Than It Should Be

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Jul 16, 2014

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 132 comments

 Skyrim EP51: The Peace Talks Were Successful! Previous Post

Next PostMarlow Briggs EP2:
Marlow Briggs and the OH GOD THE SPINNING 

Link (YouTube)

Everything about this is just so diabolically absurd. The way Marlow walks with his palms facing backwards. The glitchy animations. The nonsensical setup. The Grade-A bulk AMERICAN CHEESE PRODUCT dialog. The way the main bad guy has this massive tent filled with nothing but a desk and henchmen. How he orders his henchwoman to kill Marlow with the (one would assume) incredibly rare, possibly fragile, certainly priceless, clearly impractical DOUBLE SCYTHEActually, there are two blades on each end. Is… is this a QUAD SCYTHE? instead of, you know, just shooting his dumb ass.

I like how the entire game wouldn’t have happened if Marlow wasn’t such a swaggering macho dunce. Like, he could have said, “Okay, sorry for trying to quit. We’re off to translate those codex things now. Bye!” And then just walked out.

But noooo. He just had to pretend he was an invincible murder god. Although in his defense, his reward for being so stupid was to become an invincible murder god. So I dunno. Call it a wash.

For the record: Rutskarn wasn’t available this week, and we didn’t want to finish Skyrim without him. Also, I feel like I really want to see Rutskarn’s reaction to this. We might come back after Skyrim is done.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Skyrim EP51: The Peace Talks Were Successful! Previous Post

Next PostMarlow Briggs EP2:
Marlow Briggs and the OH GOD THE SPINNING 

132 comments

Experienced Points: How Electronic Arts Made Dungeon Keeper A Huge Fiasco

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Jul 15, 2014

Filed under: Column 119 comments

 Experienced Points: The Video Game Industry is Going Through Very Awkward Growing PainsPrevious Post

Next PostExperienced Points: Why is a Bare Breast More Offensive Than a Severed Arm? 

This is your last chance, Electronic Arts. I swear if you don’t completely transform your entire corporate culture THIS INSTANT then my next column will be even longer and more detailed. I will list so many specific problems and cite so many shortcomings you’ll beg me to stop. I will bury you in passive-aggressive bellyaching and whining about missed opportunities. Your move, giant corporation. Your. Move.

So, yeah. This column is mostly me shouting into the hurricane and wondering why it still hasn’t responded to my grievances vis-à -vis the pile of rubble that used to be the school and the entire waterfront district.

I’m not actually surprised that EA hasn’t changed, of course. Even if I magically appeared in the EA boardroom as a pillar of shimmering light and delivered my analysis on a pair of stone tablets, and even if everyone in the room was instantly and seamlessly converted to my way of thinking, I predict it would take a very long time for people on the outside to notice. Corporate culture and company inertia are powerful forces, and you can’t change the thinking of tens of thousands of people with a couple of memos. EA will continue to burn the bridges that they’re standing on for the foreseeable future, and they will continue to stay in business because their cash cowsMadden, FIFA, Sims, Battlefield. are still giving milk and the ambient industry growth is insulating them from the brunt of their own mistakes.

It will probably take a major shift in the industry to even make them think about reform. And even if that happens, the chances are low the current leadership will have the slightest clue how to adapt. And anything large enough to rouse them to action (say, a major economic retraction or industry-wide shift) is also large enough to be the scapegoat for their failures. (Hey, you can’t blame us! The company was just fine until that recession.)

It’s a shame. They could be doing better, and we could be getting better products.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Experienced Points: The Video Game Industry is Going Through Very Awkward Growing PainsPrevious Post

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Diecast #66: LEGO Movie, Divinity, Valiant Hearts

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Jul 15, 2014

Filed under: Diecast 195 comments

 Diecast #65: Medal of Honor, Steam Summer Sale, Chef JoshPrevious Post

Next PostDiecast #67: Unrest, Mailbag 

Just before this episode went live, Josh sent me a link to this, which is probably the most unsuitably high-quality image of Reginald Cuftburt ever produced. It’s like seeing a classical marble bust of Spongebob. Anyway, share it on Facebook or GeoCities or Angelfire. Or Tumbl it. Or Twit it. Whatever it is you young people do with data when you’re doing internet show-and-tell.

Download MP3 File
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Hosts:
Josh, Shamus, Mumbles, and Campster.

Show notes:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #66: LEGO Movie, Divinity, Valiant Hearts”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Diecast #65: Medal of Honor, Steam Summer Sale, Chef JoshPrevious Post

Next PostDiecast #67: Unrest, Mailbag 

195 comments

Project Unearth Part 6: Kissing Cubes

By Shamus Posted Sunday Jul 13, 2014

Filed under: Programming 31 comments

 Project Unearth Part 5: Speed BoostPrevious Post

Next PostProject Unearth Part 7: Oh Please, Shut Up About Shadows Already 

Shadow volumes are interesting things. For everything that casts a shadow, you need to have a fully enclosed solid. Because of the way our shader works, for every triangle we need to know what its 3 adjacent neighbors are. And when I say “need” I don’t mean “ought to” I mean it’s impossible to do otherwise. You can’t supply a triangle to the shader without neighbors for the same reason you can’t draw a triangle with less than three vertices. It wouldn’t make any sense. (And if there aren’t 3 neighbors? Then this isn’t an enclosed solid.)

Let me bring up this diagram again:

/*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This shader takes a triangle of type GL_TRIANGLES_ADJACENCY. It takes the 
following form:
 
                 1-----2-----3
                  \   / \   /
                   \ /   \ /
                    0-----4
                     \   /
                      \ /
                       5
Points 0, 2, and 4 are the points of the triangle actually being drawn. 
Points 1, 3, and 5 are corners of adjacent triangles, provided by OpenGL 
for the purposes of being able to analyze the topology here in a geometry
shader.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*/

This is no big deal when you’re using models made by artists. Maybe the artist has some kind of tool or conversion utility for identifying all the triangle relationships. But this becomes tricky when we’re building objects on the fly. When I’m building a particular cube, I can’t hook its triangles up to its neighbors, because at least half of them haven’t been built yet. I could peek at the next-door cube to see what I will eventually build there, but I won’t know what vertices it will use until I get there. So what you have to do is just build a bunch of triangles and then stitch them together when you’re done.

This is actually really time consuming. Like, 90% of the time spent waiting for chunks to appear is waiting for it to thrash through these huge lists of triangles and figure out which ones are neighborsThis is the major reason I’m not using larger chunk sizes. Larger chunks make this triangle-matching less efficient. There are ways to improve this, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.. Eventually I’m going to have to fix that. Chunks take about a quarter second to form. A given scene with even a modest view distance will have hundreds and hundreds of chunks. Which means filling in a scene can take a few minutes. While this doesn’t matter from a gameplay standpoint (this isn’t a game, and nobody is ever going to play it, so who cares?) it does matter from a testing perspective because I do a lot of tests and I’m really impatient. But this is a challenge for a future post. In the meantime…

It turns out that we have a problem:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Unearth Part 6: Kissing Cubes”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Project Unearth Part 5: Speed BoostPrevious Post

Next PostProject Unearth Part 7: Oh Please, Shut Up About Shadows Already 

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