My new let’s play has begun over at the Escapist.
This should be interesting. Lord of the Rings Online is something like 1/40th the size of World of Warcraft. A far larger portion of the audience has likely played the area of the game I’m describing. I wonder how that will impact reader’s perceptions of the story.
Ah well. This was a long time in the making. Hope you like it.
By popular demand, there is now a Twenty Sided Minecraft server. Connect to:
twentymine.com
The server is both donated and administrated by Clint Olson. You might remember Clint from the last time he did something cool for us.
Everyone is a tourist by default, so people can come in and take the tour at any time without us having to worry that an anonymous user will wipe the place out overnight. If Clint or I are around and we feel safe building with you, we can bestow build privileges. (This will be made easier if your in-game name matches the name you use here on the site.) I realize this has a very “gated community” feel to it, which isn’t very welcoming. Sorry about that, but in a game where dozens of people can have their work obliterated by malicious users, we have to err on the side of caution.
No formal rules other than common sense manners: Don’t modify other people’s property without asking. Don’t take stuff that doesn’t belong to you. Don’t be a jerk, etc.
Clint has been building in here for a while now. (You’ll know his stuff, he favors working in glass.) I’ve been building in here since yesterday. Just look for the bridge leading to the ridiculous mountain of smoothstone.
See you in the game. Thanks again to Clint.
EDIT: Duh. I forgot to mention the coolest feature: Check out the Google-maps style view of the world, which updates every n hours, where n is a number I forgot to ask Clint.
EDIT 2: Okay, that didn’t work. Server ran fine with three of us in testing, but just a couple more people CRIPPLED it. It’s alarming how quickly the resource usage goes up when you add users. Have to keep reminding myself that even though the game looks retro it still has cutting-edge performance needs.
EDIT 3: Back up again at a proper domain, on a more powerful machine. There’s a 10 person limit in place now. We’ll see how well this works.
Part two of our Halloween special!
This is probably the most I’ve ever shown of the studio within a comic. Funny story about the studio…
For the last few years I’ve been making due with all of these old hard drives in my machine, which added together came to just 700GB. Given that this one machine holds all my games, all my (at the time) day job work, all my programming projects, all the stuff for this website, all my comic stuff and the source screenshots…. whew. It was a really tight fit. I’d needed the upgrade for a couple of years, but wasn’t eager for the work disruption and expense involved with an upgrade. A couple of months a go I bit the bullet and got myself a proper 2TB SATA drive. (The old ones were IDE.)
On Sunday I discovered that I’d missed something in the migration. The source file for Studio 17 (where the Dr. Breen’s show takes place) is gone. I’ve searched all drives, likely and unlikely, and the file is nowhere to be found. I still have the level, which means I can still load it up in GMod and take my screenshots, but I’ll never be able to edit it again. If I wanted to change the level in any way – add a hallway, change some lights, add some more detail – I’d have to rebuild the whole place from scratch.
I can’t believe I lost that file.
Another week, another ill-advised civil engineering project. This time it’s a glass underwater tunnel.
 |
The statue from last week (which is visible on the right edge of the above shot) was built with the help of my 10 year old daughter, while this one was actually devised by my 12 year old daughter.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Postcards From Minecraft, Part 2”
Four years ago, I wrote a tirade about Blender. I was bitter and angry that the thing was very much impossible to learn and the docs were very much not written yet. I gather it’s improved greatly since then. For example, it was used to make this movie:
Link (YouTube) |
From the YouTube description:
“Sintel” is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film.
This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.
Hats off. That’s some amazing work. I’m happy to see Blender thriving and helping people make cool stuff.
Remember when that meanie Shamus Young made fun of the nice folks at Obsidian for no good reason? What a jerk, right? Well, New Vegas is out now, and here is what I have to say about it.
Imagine if the captain of the Titanic somehow survived the sinking of his vessel, and was given another. Which he ran into another iceberg. Then he was given a third ship, which ran aground. Then his fourth ship caught fire, flooded, then ran into an iceberg and sank.
And then imagine if everyone said about the captain, “That poor man. He has the worst luck, always getting stuck with such flimsy ships.”
Obsidian has now released four wrecked ships: One with LucasArts, One with Atari, one with Sega, and one with Bethesda. Are we maybe to the point now where we can stop thinking of them as the victim? Like the guy who has had four disastrous marriages, “Dude, maybe the problem isn’t ‘women’. Maybe the problem is you?” I don’t know, but other companies do seem to bring functional products to market through these same publishers.
When I wrote the article I hadn’t confirmed that the savegame-destroying bug (!!) was fixed yet. I actually found out about the patch while I was writing the article. But I tried the game out just now and the bug still seems to be in effect.
The shame of it is, if the thing actually worked this game would be far superior to Fallout 3. The main plot, while not awe-inspiring, is a lot more coherent. The gameplay changes are nearly all vast improvements. The interface is better. The guns are more fun. The music (which is from the original Fallout (drink!)) is a welcome improvement. Leveling seems less broken. The setting feels slightly more coherent. (Although I’ve only seen a tiny bit of it so far.) The world is more interesting (more colorful) to look at.
But once again Obsidian has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. We can all lament the awesome game they nearly made for us. Maybe they’ll even do the right thing and patch this title until we have it. But the blame for this mess must fall squarely on the shoulders of the people who made it. The victim is not the developer, but the gamer who gave them a chance they didn’t deserve and bought this game. (I’ll excuse myself from the victim group. I suspected this game would be a wreck but bought it because I wanted to write about how it all turned out, good or bad.)
Someone made a mod for Fallout: New Vegas that gives Reginald Cuftbert a tombstone in Goodsprings. (The starting town.)
 |
Thanks to modder FinalFrog. Also thanks to the couple of readers who alerted me to this. I do hope you’ll download the mod and dance on his grave. I know he would’ve wanted it that way.
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
T w e n t y S i d e d
