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I’m not sure whose mic I should really complain about here. I know Shamus would want me to complain about his microphone, but the truth is he couldn’t really help it – it was an old mic and he couldn’t get to the store to replace it in time. But Rutskarn’s microphone is just bad. And he should feel bad.
Huh? What? You want me to say something about Alan Wake? Uh, shadow darkness dark dark presence dark shadow car crash dark Barry shadow Rambo. Dark.
Back when I was talking about making beveled edges, some people asked why I didn’t just lift up the corners of cubes to make slopes instead of mucking around with the soft / solid geometry business. At the time, I wanted to avoid a system where I would attempt to build a cube:
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And wind up with this:
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I actually had the program doing this when I was working on beveled edges, and it was messy and frustrating. After a while I got used to it, but that wasn’t really the same as having it be intuitive in the first place. To do this right, you’d have to move away from cube-based building and adopt some sort of point-based system. To the end user the difference is purely semantic, but internally a point-based system would have a big impact on how you generate geometry.
That sounds really interesting, but I can’t let myself be distracted from my important goals of… of… What was the point of this project again? Oh, right: Screwing around and working on whatever I find interesting, and damn having a plan. That goal is 100% compatible with tearing the guts out of the engine and starting over with a different system. So let’s do that.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Octant 10: Marching”
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So… we’re watching a television commercial for a videogame. This television commercial is taking place within the context of a book, all of which is inside an actual videogame, and which is now in our Let’s Play. So I guess Alan wake wrote a Verizon wireless commercial into his book? So do we blame him?
You know, I don’t really have a serious problem with in-game advertising as long as it’s seamless and not mood-breaking. The television ad was not seamless, and it was mood breaking. By putting it in the middle of this scene that was (or aspired to be) full of tension, it yanked me out of the game and made me resent Verizon. I don’t mind if Peter Parker drinks a coke. I do mind if he drinks a coke while Uncle Ben is bleeding out on the sidewalk. Product placement should never conflict with the tone of the scene, or it will ruin both the scene and the advertisement.
This is especially egregious since we just finished a nice long segment where the ad would have been just fine, perhaps even a welcome novelty.
I’m not just saying this because its an ad for a giant corporation. Even if this had been for a small company, an indie developer, or even a charity – this was the wrong time. This particular ad was a mistake that was a detriment to the developer, the advertiser, and the consumer.
I know some people point out that it’s the job of marketing to get you to notice a product, even with a negative emotion. But that’s just saying advertisers don’t have to be good at their jobs, which is obviously not true. Yes, crappy little companies harass us with shouting infomercials, disingenuous half-promises, or ear-murdering jingles. But generally the big brands (like Verizon) try to keep it clean. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” only applies if you’re an unknown, fighting to be remembered. Once you’re a household name you’re not worried about coverage, you’re worried about perception. If someone is looking at two world-famous products, you don’t want to be known as the “irritating one” or “the stupid one”. I seriously doubt the market of “People who have heard of Sprint but don’t know about Verizon and happen to be in the market for a mobile phone” is particularly big.
A lot of this ties in with stuff Chris said in his retrospective on Sonic the Hedgehog and how Sonic was marketed next to Mario. Check that out if you missed it. Also Penny Arcade mentioned this last week, in relation to the brand placement in Draw Something. I’ve never played it myself, but I understand that this was a conversation that people were having.
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Josh is discovering an inordinate supply of haunted furniture. For the record, I have yet to see a single physics glitch or take damage from scenery. (Deliberately hostile items excluded.)
What episode was this again?
I’m still working on the project. The stuff I’m working on now is a little boring and would mostly be a re-hash of stuff I’ve discussed before. So rather than do that, let’s talk about data structures.
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Remember the little red cube. We’ll see him again later.
When a programmer sits down to write some software, the question comes, “How will I represent this problem in code?” This is actually one of my favorite parts of the job. (Or hobby, in this case. Unless you’re hiring? Do you want to fund development of this project? It has no gameplay, no plan, no support, and it doesn’t even work yet. Let me know if you’re interested!) If I need to store a historically important date like August 24, 1971, then there’s a lot of ways I could do it. I could store it as a text string: “August 24, 1971”. But then it would be hard to do math on it. (Say, to calculate how long it’s been between then and now.) I could store it as a group of three integers: 8, 24, and 1971. I could store it as the number of seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970: 51,840,000. The latter is great for doing math (and is actually how most systems store time internally) but it means you have to do a messy conversion when you want to display the date to the end user. Because if you display a date as 51,840,000 then the end user will find you and burn your house down.
What method will be fast? What will take up the least memory? What will make for clear, readable code? These are questions that programmers love to ponder before coming up with the wrong answer and making a mess of things.
Which brings us back to the problem of storing large tables of data.
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We look at this and see a table. But internally, computers don’t “do” tables. They’re not really into 2-dimensional kind of stuff. Computer memory is a long, long line of values. If you’ve got four gigabytes of RAM, then you’ve got four billion little memory addresses in a single row, and it’s up to the programmer to make sense out of them.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Octant 9: Data Structures”
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The headache stabbed me in the brain. And then I wrote a novel. Sounds about right.
Let’s see: Goofy puzzles. Occasionally awkward dialog. A wall between story and gameplay. A seemingly boring jerk for a protagonist. Repetitive foes. Terrible lip sync. Checkpoint saves.
We’ve accused Alan Wake of all of these, and I don’t think we’re wrong. But I think all of those problems are even worse in Silent Hill 2, which I still regard as one of the more powerful games I’ve experienced. I’m still gnawing on this, and I can’t speak for the rest of the cast, but I suspect that if the game had connected with me on an emotional level (dread, sorrow, anger, whatever) then I wouldn’t be focusing on these problems.
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“As I approached the Spoiler Warning I saw it was covered in dark shadows. The shadows blocked out the light so I could only see darkness and shadows. It was terrifying. After gathering up some batteries and watching half an hour of crappy television, I approached the darkness and drew near to the edges of the dark shadows that blocked out the light, making things darker and spookier.”
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
T w e n t y S i d e d
