Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Friday Apr 20, 2012

 PAXCast 2012, Part 2Previous Post

Next PostPAXCast 2012 TRANSCRIPT, Part 2 

Gale was nice enough to make a transcript again for us this year, for those of you who aren’t down with the whole podcast thing. Here is part one. Note that I have added links and images, so even if you listened to the podcast you might want to scroll through here and look at the stuff.

S: Hey everybody, I’m Shamus.

J: And I’m Josh. We are here talking about PAX East 2012, which is a convention which none of you have heard of, and we didn’t go to.

S: It’s obscure.

J: Yeah.

S: Let’s dive in, we saw stuff this year, we really focused on the show floor in a way that I didn’t last year, so we’ve got a whole bunch of games we want to talk about. We’re just gonna go plough through this list, and talk about all the stuff that we saw.

J: Yeah, these won’t really be in order, ‘cuz we had the most haphazard schedule that you could possibly have while doing this, and I don’t actually remember when we saw any given game.

S: I know, I lost the chronology here so bad, I have no idea.

J: Yeah, it’s all run together in my head by now. All I remember is, we spent two 14-hour days at the convention centre, and I never want to do that again. [Chuckles]

S: Well, mostly that was because the panels I was on were at the very end of the day, so you couldn’t just leave…

J: All the good panels were at the end of the day, yeah. The LoadingReadyRun, the Giant Bomb, and the Escapist panel.

S: I know, just when everybody is like, “OK, I’ve had enough PAX, I need to go home and pass out.” No, that’s when the best stuff is.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “PAXCast 2012 TRANSCRIPT, Part 1”

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.

 PAXCast 2012, Part 2Previous Post

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PAXCast 2012, Part 2

By Shamus Posted Thursday Apr 19, 2012

Filed under: Video Games 154 comments

 PAXCast 2012, Part 1Previous Post

Next PostPAXCast 2012 TRANSCRIPT, Part 1 

So here we wrap up our trip to PAX East. Check out the podcast below, in which we reveal our most favoritist game of PAX East 2012 ever!

PAX is a bit tough for me. I hate travel. To put it in perspective: I hate travel more than I hate going to the dentist. If you gave me a choice of going to the dentist to have some work done, or going on a five-day trip to a convention, I would pick the dentist. When I’m traveling I feel stressed, tired, and out of sorts. My routine is broken and I become neurotic. I’m also terrified of making some public gaffe. (Seriously. It’s like a phobia. Is there a name for being semi-famous and being afraid you’ll say something absurd that will make you look like a fool?)

However… as much as I hate travel, this is the only way I can connect with people in this way. There’s no place else that I could go to meet you folks, or developers, or my friends at the Escapist. So, I go. I put up with the travel, then I crawl home and freak out for a few days. (I slept 12 hours a day for the first four days after we got back.)

What I’m saying is, it’s murder to attend this thing, but worth it.

I think I’ll have one more PAX Post at some point to tie up all the loose ends, and then we’ll be done with PAX for this year. Next week: Spoiler Warning spoils Alan Wake!

Before I go, here’s another picture of Josh and I. He looks a little grouchy here, but it was the last day and we were both tired.

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.

 PAXCast 2012, Part 1Previous Post

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Video Compression Gone Wrong

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Apr 17, 2012

Filed under: Movies 141 comments

 Mass Effect 3 Ending:
Tasteful, Understated NerdragePrevious Post

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The technology behind image and video compression is an amazing thing. It began as an effort to get more of our pixelated scanned photographs onto a single floppy disk and has now grown into a scientific discipline that blends visual perception with information theory. Throw in some compression algorithms with size / CPU time tradeoffs and a dash of obnoxious patent trolling and you have a field of study that can keep you busy for an entire career.

The early compression systems (like .gif) were just focused on ways to pack together redundant pixels. Kind of “hey, the next twenty pixels are all exactly the same, so instead of repeating the same bit of information 20 times, I’ll do it once with a note on how many times to repeat it.” It was actually a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea.

A picture of St. Louis during the paleolithic age.

This worked great when images were made from 16, 64, or 256 really distinct colors. If there are only 16 different colors in your image, there’s going to be a lot of repetition. However, as the number of colors grows, detecting duplicates and repeating patterns becomes useless. At some point a clever engineer noticed that while your average image of 16 million colors had almost no points where the same color pixel was used again and again, there were a lot of situations where the pixels were nearly the same.

Human beings sense changes in brightness much, much more easily than we detect changes in color. So, what if we just reduced the color diversity a bit? Don’t mess with the brightness, but just fiddle with the hue of pixels to reduce the number of distinct colors. This can be tricky. Check out this image:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Video Compression Gone Wrong”

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.

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PAXCast 2012, Part 1

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Apr 17, 2012

Filed under: Video Games 77 comments

 This Kickstarter BusinessPrevious Post

Next PostPAXCast 2012, Part 2 

Josh and I got together and compared notes on our Pax East experience. This podcast is the result. It’s 35 minutes long, so you can think of it as a spoiler warning without the video portion. Or the other hosts.

Sorry I didn’t have time to make a transcript, which is a common request whenever I post audio like this. If you’re of a mind to make a transcript yourself, please feel free to email me and I’ll post it so the audio-less folks can get in on the conversation.

The audio player below (assuming it shows up for you) is a WordPress plug-in and it behaves a little wonky on Chrome. If it doesn’t work for you just use this direct download link so you can listen to it on your Sony Walkman, which I guess is what you young people are using these days.

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.

 This Kickstarter BusinessPrevious Post

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The GUI Problem

By Shamus Posted Sunday Apr 15, 2012

Filed under: Programming 121 comments

 Let's Code Part 33: Taking ContributionsPrevious Post

Next PostProject Octant Part 1: Introduction 

You might remember that I wrote a program for laying out comic strips. I stopped using it when I stopped working on Stolen Pixels to become an author. I think about Comic Press now and again, feeling vaguely guilty that I’ve got this useful chunk of software sitting on my hard drive, basically going to waste. I should clean it up and release it to the public. Or do some tipjar-based development on it. Or something.

And then I remember that Comic Press is in this oddball limbo state. It was written in Visual Studio 6, which came out in 1998. It uses a ton of non-portable Windows code. I can’t even compile it now that I’ve migrated to Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express. I need to update all of the dialog and menu code to get it running. But if I’m going to do that, I should fix this interface to make it a little more portable. But if I’m going to do that…

Hm.

You might remember that a couple of years ago I wrote a rant on how much of a monumental pain in the ass it is to use someone else’s library, particularly in C++. I wrote that when I was looking for a GUI system to work with OpenGL. I just revisited the issue this week, and re-familiarized myself with all the annoyances I’d forgotten.

A GUI system is what enables you to add standard controls to your program. Buttons, menus, checkboxes, file open dialogs, scrollbars, edit windows, and so on. See, in Windows (or Linux, MacOS, etc.) the operating system can do all of that for you. With a few lines of code I can make a button…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The GUI Problem”

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.

 Let's Code Part 33: Taking ContributionsPrevious Post

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This Kickstarter Business

By Shamus Posted Saturday Apr 14, 2012

Filed under: Video Games 208 comments

 Pax East 2012: The Exhibition Hall Part 3Previous Post

Next PostPAXCast 2012, Part 1 

This post is probably going to be a little ramble-ific. This Kickstarter business has everyone talking, and I’m getting emails asking me what I think of it, if I’ll be joining in, and what it means for game development. So let’s talk about this.

It was almost exactly a year ago that I got home from PAX and began to get the itch to program a little something, which eventually became Project Frontier. Really, PAX should have the opposite effect. This is not a place to go to follow your dreams as an indie. This is a place to have cold, cruel truths pressed deep into your skull while eating the worst nine-dollar hamburger in existence.

At the indie booths, you’re looking at the super-rare 1% of indie developers who are lucky and tenacious enough to bring a product to market. For every indie showing off a game there are a hundred others who got bored and quit, encountered some insurmountable technology hurdle, realized the prototype wasn’t very fun, or ran out of time / money. A few were lucky enough to be able to see it through to completion, but there’s still quite a bit of culling to take place between this point and signpost labeled “success”. Many will languish and only sell a few units, resulting in a hefty net loss that sends them back to their day job. A few might do well, and sell enough units to pay the bills, although once they divide their profits by their hours worked they’ll end up making less than minimum wage. A couple of lucky ones – the 1% of the 1% – will bring in enough cash to enable them to self-finance another game.

That’s the way it goes. The same is true for a lot of other creative people. Musicians probably have it even worse. (Although thankfully the cost to write a song is a lot less than the cost to make a game.) Heck, I’m thrilled at how warmly my novel was received and I’d be a fool to complain, but nobody is calling me up and offering me $Rowling bucks for the thing. For every Neal Stephenson, Terry Pratchett, and Douglas Adams in the world, there are ten thousand people like me, writing novels while we do something else to pay the bills. It’s tough all over, is what I’m saying.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Kickstarter Business”

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.

 Pax East 2012: The Exhibition Hall Part 3Previous Post

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Pax East 2012: The Exhibition Hall Part 3

By Shamus Posted Thursday Apr 12, 2012

Filed under: Video Games 73 comments

 Pax East 2012: The Exhibition Hall Part 2Previous Post

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Here we are on part 3. We still haven’t talked about the best game in the show. That will come last. Don’t worry. It’s worth it. But first let’s talk about some of the other games we saw, or walked by, or thought about, or saw on a billboard as the crowd pushed us along to our doom.

Organ Trail

Indie devs The Men Who Wear Many Hats took the mechanics of the classic Oregon Trail and re-imagined it as a zombie apocalypse adventure. They have painstakingly re-created the style and interface of the original, which came out on the Apple in 1971. When I was born.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Pax East 2012: The Exhibition Hall Part 3”

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.

 Pax East 2012: The Exhibition Hall Part 2Previous Post

Next PostThis Kickstarter Business 

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OLDER POSTS



From The Archives:

Organ Trail

The Best of 2011

DM of the Rings

Trashing the Heap

Object-Oriented Debate

Best. Plot Twist. Ever.

Free Radical

Megatextures

A Star is Born

Civilization VI

Spoiler Warning