I’m spending most of the day asleep. And even when I’m awake I’m still grouchy, distracted, and befuddled. Things are rough, but hopefully they’re about to get better. With any luck, I’ll have better news next week.
Anyway, this is it. The mailbag is finally clear. If you still have unanswered questions now, it’s because you didn’t send them in.
Link (YouTube) |
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #380: Mailbag Mania”
As is the standard of RPG’s, the Bahamut is headed straight for Dalmasca, but it will patiently check its speed so that it does not arrive until the party is done chopping off monster parts in a swamp to haggle for new boots. But Ashe & Co, LLC. already stocks the biggest boots in all Ivalice, so it’s time to get in the Strahl and set Ivalice right with a hearty bout of impassioned philosophical and ethical debate between heads of state, assuming we have time between the epic cyber-Saiyan showdown.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A Travelog of Ivalice, Part 17: A New Hope”
Recently someone sent me a link to this video, where the author takes us on a tour through my old stomping grounds: Active Worlds: The 27-Year-Old Virtual World You Haven’t Heard Of
Link (YouTube) |
What a blast from the past. This software was my life for about 16 years, from 1994 to ~2011-ish.I don’t remember what the end date was. For the last 6 months I was working part-time on again / off again. So my job sort of fizzled out rather than ending abruptly. I was pretty checked out by the time it was over, much more concerned with this website and the work I was doing at the Escapist. In the 90s I did a little of everything: I made 3d models, created texture maps, built environments, provided tech support, and authored tools. I even maintained the website for a bit. Then in 2001 I was moved to the programming staff and I began working on the software itself.
I made some of the stuff you’ll see in this video. At the 1:20 mark, the author jumps to Metatropolis. That was my baby. Like Facebook’s Metaverse, I named the place after the virtual world in Neal Stephenson‘s book Snow Crash. In my defense, the book was a lot more relevant in 1997 than it is today. I realize the Metaverse is a bit cringe and out-of-touch today, but I made Metatropolis in 1997 when this stuff was still sort of hip and forward-looking. I talked about some of the Metatropolis rendering tricks back in 2009 during my procgen city project.
At 1:44, you can see a streetlamp on a corner. Today, that would be easy to create. You just make a lamp and stick a light source under it. But real-time lighting and shadows were not feasible on the consumer hardware of 1997, so I had to fake the light. That pool of light on the ground is a custom texture with a hand-drawn shadow. Ridiculous. Most kids in 2022 would look at this and see how primitive it all looks, but in 1997 it looked like I’d pulled off some Carmack-level sorcery and jumped ahead a couple of graphics generations. But no. It was all smoke and mirrors. The illusion was broken the moment you placed another object under the light and saw it didn’t cast any sort of shadow.
Let me end this with a comment I left on the video:
I was a developer on AW from 1994 to 2010. I know from the outside it felt like the company had no plan. Internally, it was because most of our income came from corporate clients. Those outrageously priced universe servers? Lots of companies would buy those, and then pay us to make content for them. They wanted a platform for training, remote meetings, distance learning, etc.
Those corporate clients kept the lights on for years, but they also took a ton of our time. We had to take those jobs to pay the bills, but those jobs also greatly slowed down our progress on the software.
Thanks for such an in-depth video. It was great to see those garish old polygons again.
This thing was a big part of my career. It looks old and janky now, but I’m still happy I got to be a part of it. This was a fun way to spend my 20s and 30s.
I don’t know why Paul and I get such joy out of dunking on No Man’s Sky. The game received over a dozen major updates since it was released six years ago. You’d think that, “Oh wow. The new content is awful and doesn’t address the core problems with the game!” would get old. But I guess not. I will never forgive this game for the way it spurned its own potential to give us a game about inventory sorting and bar-filling.
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #379: The Hyper Batman Ultra Deluxe”
On Thursday night I sat down with Chris and Steve and we did a podcast on Spider-Man: No Way Home.
For those of you who just want the health update: Surgery is over. I’m recovering nicely. If all goes well, then in about 2 weeks my health should really improve. I’ll have more details later.
I did this podcast because it was a nice low-effort way to produce some content and let everyone hear that I’m doing OK. In this podcast We talked Spider-Man, and I also give my 1-minute review of THE BATMAN.
I’d like to review just exactly what happened on our trip to the Pharos.
Settle in.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A Travelog of Ivalice, Part 16: Black Hole Sun-Cryst”
I’ve spent a lot of the last two weeks thinking about creativity and motivation. As my health has deteriorated, my behavior has shifted from high-creativity tasks to low-creativity ones.
Below are some example behaviors. At the top of the list are the high-creativity tasks that require lots of mental power, and at the bottom are uncreative pursuits for when I’m operating in Zombie Mode.
I’m used to spending most of my week in the top 8, pumping out #content and consuming articles that will later become grist for the mill. But over the last few weeks I notice that I’ve been spending more and more time in the bottom half of the list. The article you’re reading now marks the first time in days that I’ve escaped the bottom 3.
I’m not suffering or anything. I’m probably doing great, all things considered. But I really do miss that constant surge of creative energy.
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
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