Project Hex: Part 2

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Oct 20, 2010

Filed under: Programming 92 comments

Maybe the name of the project has given this away, but this game is going to be played on a hex grid. Hex grids are elegant, beautiful, and better-looking than standard square grids. The only downside to using a hex based gameboard is that the computer and I are both rubbish at thinking in hexes.

See, computer memory is really just a long list of addresses. You can think of it like a long street with houses in a row. At the start is house #1, and they go one after another all the way down to house #2,147,483,648 at the far end of the street. This is the structure of the world you work in. You can organize that information (conceptually, in your head) however you like. To can imagine them as a table of values by (say) treating it like a new row every 25 addresses. If you need a grid of data that’s (say) 25×25, then the item in row 2, column 2 is at position #27. Some simple math will let you treat that infinite line of addresses like a grid of points, but in the end your program is still dealing with a long, long list.

If I have a grid of 8×8 points, I can use them to make a 7×7 grid of squares. If that sounds confusing, (and I don’t blame you) then please enjoy the following visual aid, which was crafted by a small team of professional artists over the course of nine days, working in a variety of mediums, from calligraphy pens to watercolor:

hex_squares.jpg

Yes, prints are available.

This is really easy. (Making a grid, not the artwork.) It’s how my terrain project made a grid with millions of squares: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Hex: Part 2”

 


 

Shamus Plays Champion Online, Part 14

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Oct 20, 2010

Filed under: Column 32 comments

So Star on Chest flies off into the sunset for the last time. Again.

Next week, we begin my series on World of Warcraft. Here is a sneak peek:

shamus_plays_wow.jpg

Note that Cataclysm launches in just seven weeks. This should be interesting.

 


 

Stolen Pixels #236: Breen Interviews Ken

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 19, 2010

Filed under: Column 37 comments

Here is a comic which is all about Call of Duty. And not Minecraft. Heavens no. We’re talking about real games now. Serious games.

Call of Duty. Not Minecraft.

 


 

Spoiler Warning:
Where Do Spoilers Come From?

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 19, 2010

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 135 comments

The show is on hiatus this week. I’ll be announcing the next series on Thursday. In the meantime, I thought I’d give a look at how we do what we do. It’s a lot more complex than most people imagine.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning:
Where Do Spoilers Come From?”

 


 

Postcards from Minecraft

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 18, 2010

Filed under: Pictures 195 comments

Minecraft is the exceptionally rare sort of game that can bridge the gap between myself and my kids. Most titles are a compromise of some sort. I can enjoy a bit of Mario Galaxy, but it doesn’t resonate with me the way it does with my son. They liked watching me play Half-Life 2 or Civilization V, but I don’t think they would have taken interest if not for the fact that I was playing. But Minecraft is just as fun at nine as it is at thirty-nine. And I think it’s the first time we’ve been able to really play together in a multiplayer setting.

minecraft_statue2.jpg

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Postcards from Minecraft”

 


 

Stolen Pixels #235: Laugh or Die

By Shamus Posted Friday Oct 15, 2010

Filed under: Column 30 comments

It’s not about Minecraft.

 


 

Spoiler Warning 3×14: Who’s Your Daddy?

By Josh Posted Thursday Oct 14, 2010

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 159 comments

And so it ends.

Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself.

At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index.

It may be apparent from the way I kept complaining about just about everything while I played, but I didn’t enjoy this season quite so much as Fallout 3. Hell, I was getting frustrated with Bioshock just from watching last episode while I was editing it together. I think the problem was (aside from terrible gameplay balance, boring enemies, and useless weapons) that there just weren’t enough opportunities to utterly break the game in Bioshock – compared to Fallout 3, where I could just walk around and ruin the game designers’ master vision. If they even had one. This is “you have to close all 495 Oblivion Gates that popped up while you were dicking around with the Dark Brotherhood to complete the main story”-Bethesda we’re talking about here.

Even so, I have to admit, I did smile every time I managed to freeze a splicer mid-air.

But that’s all water under the bridge now. In retrospect, this season did provide (in my mind, at least) a fairly compelling counterpoint to Bioshock’s overwhelming praise in the larger gaming community. Was it a good game? Sure, I think I can at least give it that. At least it had some fairly surprising twists – there are a lot of games with gameplay that’s just as bad (or worse) that have no redeeming factors whatsoever. But was it a great game? It seemed like the whole momentum of the game’s story relied on those few twists – or really just the one – and after that truly great moment, not only does the whole game spiral sharply downwards in an irrevocable stall, but I never felt any desire to play it again until we decided to do it for this season.

And yet to play devil’s advocate to my own devil’s advocacy, it is worth noting that the unanimous praise was largely aimed at the console version. I’m not sure if the gameplay was significantly better on the 360 or not – I probably wouldn’t be able to tell, playing shooters with thumbsticks is a skill which endlessly baffles me. But I think I can conclusively say that the PC version of Bioshock, at the very least, fails to live up to its hype. By far.

As an extra note, I had a montage sequence all lined up for the credits of this episode, but when I tried to encode the four minute long segment, Windows Movie Maker immediately attempted ritual suicide and told me it would take four hours to encode the damn thing. In an unrelated bit of news, I am now accepting donations to purchase Adobe Premiere.