I never saw this coming, and I’m still stunned. “More like Doom” is not the direction I would have chosen for the Fallout franchise. In fact, my desires run in the polar opposite direction. Still, I’m experiencing a giddy fanboy anticipation wondering what sort of Frankenstein monster technology we’ll have once we get done stitching these companies together. Perhaps it’s the programmer in me overcoming the gamer in me.
Tuesday will see the end of Left 4 Dumb. On Tuesday You’ll also get two Stolen Pixels. Today, you just get the one.
Coder Chris Whitworth read my Pixel City series and decided to implement his own version of it using Microsoft’s XNA/C# tools. Note that this isn’t a fork or a port. It looks like he’s starting over from scratch, but borrowing some minor details. (Like the techniques I used on the windows.) The series begins here. His series is longer and more detailed than the one I wrote, and he’s using a much more modern approach than I was. (He’s using vertex buffers and shaders, which are the indoor plumbing of graphics programming today.)
My favorite entry so far is #13 (the most recent, as of this writing) where he breaks the city into building plots. The animation of that is pretty cool.
Gosh. It’s been a couple of weeks since I logged into WiiFit. I should hop in and see…
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NINETY ONE DAYS!?!? Where does the time go?
I was glad to see I hadn’t swelled up like Marlon Brando during my three months of indolence and apathy. On the other hand, I’m disappointed to see how feeble I’ve become. An hour of simple, low-key walking (I was watching Chronicles of Riddick during my workout. Very underrated movie, in my opinion. It’s not “Star Wars” good, but it’s well above “Attack of the Clones”. You can’t be too picky with space opera. It’s not like they make movies like this every year. I’m not going to be one of those nerds that sniffs at everything that comes out of Hollywood because they refuse to make a seven-picture adaptation of the Foundation series. The fact that the Drooling imbecile Michael Bay‘s Transformers movies did better than the Riddick movie is exactly the sort of crime that the Necromongers will bring up to justify wiping out our species. Transformers can be thought of as the thinking man’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, but only if the thinking man is willing to forgo the thinking. Riddick wasn’t deep or profoundly clever, but it was at least internally consistent and big enough to contain the over-the-top dialog. As a nice bonus, it had real actors instead of underwear models and real cameramen instead of peg-legged drunks trying to shoot the movie during their step workout. Which reminds me, I was in the middle of a sentence…) has reduced me to a state of gelatinous agony.
Ow. Keeping in shape is hard.
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| Image unrelated to article. |
But I wonder how true this really is?
I know in the games I run, I prefer to have the players collaborate and come up with their meeting as part of their backstory. Aside from giving them a chance to come up with something more interesting than “tavern” , it can also reveal inherent flaws in the party that might ruin the game later. If they’re having trouble coming up with a justification for why the Neutral Good Elven ranger Guybush Treewood would team up with the Chaotic Evil rogue Dead Slash, then perhaps there is a good reason for that, and maybe we need to re-think this group before it leads to friendship-destroying conflict.
[poll id=”6″]
Okay, this poll is futile. The permutations of how this could be handled are just too complex. Having said that, I am curious how other people launch new campaigns.
A while back I talked about a campaign where I collaborated with the players to design their backstory, from childhood to the beginning of the game proper. We didn’t actually play the game, but I still like the idea.
But I can’t help wondering if the tavern thing is as common as lore makes it seem.
Yesterday the news reached maximum saturation levels with stuff about the death of Michael Jackson. I know I said I wasn’t going to write about it, but the question is driving me crazy:
Do people really care this much?
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| The CNN homepage. The main story, and the first seven top stories are all essentially the same story. Is this really a picture of what people want to know? |
I’ve seen this effect before, where the news is obsessing over something that doesn’t seem to interest people. In the past I’ve always assumed it’s because I’m part of an atypical subculture and my interactions are limited to people who are just as screwy as I am. But the delta between observable interest level (zero, or even negative) and actual news coverage (intense and sustained) is so massive that I’m starting to wonder if the “atypical subculture” is actually the people who make the news. In general, most of our mass media and news comes from New York and LA. Maybe those folks are just a lot more interested than the rest of us. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the world really is riveted by this stuff and I’m simply a member of a deviant nerd cult.
Do people really care this much? Is this the central conversation around the water cooler and the dinner table? Is this monopolizing people’s thoughts like a space shuttle disaster or the assassination of a world leader?
I apologize for bringing this up while some people seem to be grieving, and I apologize again for bringing it up if you’re sick of it, but I really am puzzled by this disconnect.
Left 4 Dumb, Part 21. It’s the beginning of the end, now.
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I’ve realized that one of my great joys in writing is finding cracks in an existing plot and coming up with “clever” explanations to cover them. During DM of the Rings, I explained the seeming nonsense and inexplicable changes of the Lord of the Rings movies. In my book, I filled in plot holes in System Shock. A lot of my humor is based around finding gaps in someone else’s writing (real or contrived on my part) and then justifying it in unexpected ways. I really, really wanted to do that for Left 4 Dumb.
The one thing that prevented this was that I just couldn’t get screenshots using the in-game environments. I use Garry’s mod to set my scenes, but Left 4 Dead uses a newer version of the source engine and GM can’t load the levels. It was possible to get the character models out of the game, but I was still stuck using levels from Half Life 2 or Team Fortress or other Valve games.
What I wanted to do was to go through an existing campaign. This would have provided a familiar story arc to hang everything on, so that I didn’t have to waste panel space setting the stage. Like DM of the Rings, the story would have supported the comic instead of the other way around. This would have left me free to make fun of individual areas and set pieces. It also would have made for better screenshots, since I wouldn’t have been fighting to keep explicitly Half-Life themed scenery out of every other shot. (I never really thought about that aspect of Valve level design until now, but there are very few spaces in the game that don’t have Half-Life specific elements in them. Graffiti, combine infrastructure, posters, not to mention the stuff that would clash with L4D, like pseudo-Euro signs, buildings, and automobiles.)
Below is a bit of what I wanted to do. Note that this is just a synopsis, not a series of jokes. This won’t be funny, although maybe you’ll be able to see how it could have been funny. Maybe. I dunno. Read it and find out, I guess.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Left 4 Dumb: The Master Plan”
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
T w e n t y S i d e d
