T w e n t y S i d e d
A three year old girl sums up the plot of Star Wars:
Although, it’s possible she was just reading George Lucas’ original script.</snark>
Man, that is one cute kid.
XFire Debate Aftermath, Part 4
Jay and Corvus have posted the last round of questions and answers in response to the XFire debate.
That’s it. All done now. I must say that I enjoyed the post-debate questions even more than the debate itself.
Also: Frayed Knights is about to enter alpha? *Sniff* They grow up so fast, don’t they?
Un-Enlightened
Here is a YouTube video for Enlighten, an SDK that game developers can use to add indirect shadowing and radiosity to a scene.
Radiosity is where it takes into account the fact that light bounces off of things. Your closet isn’t pitch black just because no lights are on in there. Light is bouncing off the walls in the room outside, and being reflected into the closet so you can still see the boxes of Christmas decorations and your dusty golf clubs. Also, radiosity lighting takes into account the color of the walls. If you shine a white light on a red wall, stuff nearby is going to look a little pink. The light coming off the wall is going to be red, and it’s going to illuminate stuff in red.
I guess I should get this out of the way: Yes, this is very impressive. It’s wonderful what technology can do. Just ten years ago effects like this were so insanely expensive in terms of processing cycles that you usually didn’t even want to use it for pre-rendered stuff. Now we can do it in realtime. The effects demonstrated are an amazing accomplishment, a blend of artistry and mathematical prowess.
But so what? Aside from saying, “gosh, look at this cool rendering stunt they can do”, why should I care? Is it nice? I guess so. Even under the idealized demo conditions the effect is so subtle I probably wouldn’t notice it if I wasn’t looking for it. Is it worth running out and buying a new graphics card? Nah. Is it worth the increased expense of development, because of the cost of the SDK and the work required from artists in order to take advantage of it? Of course not.
Yes, I’m on another one of my luddite rants. Note that I don’t have anything against pretty graphics, but I do have a problem with graphics at the expense of the game itself. As the race for better graphics goes on, developers are finding themselves making games that cost twice as much to develop, run on half as many computers, and look 8% better. We passed the point of diminishing returns with this stuff years ago, but PC developers, publishers, and reviewers can’t seem to stop the mad pursuit of the Shiny New Pixel. When a reviewer feels the need to ding STALKER because it only looks as awesome as last year’s games, the review system has graduated from mild eccentricity to full-on bat-shite crazy.
Longtime PC developer Cliff Bleszinski says that “PC Games are in disarray”. Epic Games, who began life on the PC platform, now see their PC efforts as “secondary”, and therefore (I assume) see themselves as primarily console developers. I doubt the thought has entered Bleszinski’s considerably intelligent head that maybe some of the blame for this goes at the feet of places like Epic. I had many, many gripes with the Unreal Tournament 2k series and with Unreal 2. I had long lists of things that put me off of both games. Nowhere on any of those lists was, “the graphics should be better.” Put the pixel shaders down and go make me a game I want to play, man.
I guess at some point enough PC developers will go under or get bought up and converted into console game developers. Once the herd is sufficiently thinned, the remaining ones might act on survival instinct and start looking for ways to stay in business, graphics be damned. There are more PCs in the world than all three of the major consoles combined. The PC has a few technological and interface advantages that can still set it apart. I’m convinced that the PC market doesn’t need to “die”, and it doesn’t need to be in “disarray”. It just needs developers that learn, or remember, how to make fun games.
Fav.or.it?
This irritates me. It’s a service called fav.or.it. It’s a feed aggregator thing that lets you interact with a website – including adding comments – without actually visiting the site. It sort of acts as a front end for all the blogs you read. From their site description:
Full cycle feed reading. We aggregate – you read and reply all without leaving our site.
Here is the problem I have with it:
I don’t mind when individual people read my site without seeing my ads. Some use Firefox’s ad blocker. Some just read the RSS feed without visiting. That’s fine. If you stop by and look at the ads and click on them when you see a game that appeals to you – I see that as a gratuity. It’s a way of leaving a tip and thanking me for whatever efforts I make here. And it wouldn’t be a gratuity if it wasn’t optional. You’ve got every right to block or ignore ads. I try to keep them out of the way so they are there if you’re interested, but not so they’ll get in your way if you’re not.
But what bugs me about fav.or.it is that they are attempting to, in essence, poach my content. You sit at their site and see their ads alongside my writing. Not leaving a tip is one thing. Swiping someone else’s tip is quite another. And having a company swipe a tip from an individual is just low.
You never know how things will go with new ideas like this. This site will probably come and go without a second look from anyone. But sites like this might be the new MySpace. It’s hard to tell. Maybe there are other sites out there that are doing this already and I just don’t know about them. If this sort of thing became really popular, then bloggers would be forced to stick ads in with their content instead of off to the side if they wanted their readers to see them.
I’m not sure if it would irritate me enough to block fav.or.it from accessing my site. I suppose it would depend on how useful the thing was and how many people participated. Would people really use this? It seems like it would be boring to surf the web via a single site. Everything would look the same. Sites would lose their personality because you wouldn’t be able to see their layout or their theme. On the other hand, something like this could be nice when reading one of those sites which are smothered in ads. Fav.or.it would strip it down to the bare content and spare you the visual clutter.
But my opinion on the thing doesn’t really matter in the long run. I’m a content producer, and in the end the net is ruled by content consumers. If the masses decided they wanted to read the net this way, writers would be obliged to put up with it or go without readers. You can always IP ban fav.or.it and its kind, but if that’s where your readership comes from you’d just be cutting off your own legs.
Anyway, I’m not crazy about it.
EDIT: To be clear, this is more than just a “feed” reader. For this to work, it has to bypass the feed and lift the content directly from the site. (Otherwise you couldn’t comment.)
The Root of All Evil, Part 2
Here is a tragic, heartbreaking, and infuriating story about a couple who let their baby die. You see stories like this from time to time, and it never gets any easier to stomach. In this case they left the kid in his car seat and didn’t take care of him for ten days. During those ten days, they watched tv, played videogames, ate, sat on the couch, and basically lived as if they didn’t have a kid. So what headline does Fox News give the story?
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Amazing. Man, we’d better ban videogames quick before parents start eating their babies. I’m glad Fox News is here to keep us informed.
NOTE: Twenty minutes after I wrote this they changed the headline on the front page a bit, although the focus on “Video Games” is still there. (Also, the number of days was changed from ten to eight.) I expect this to keep changing as stories get shuffled around. Still, the screenshot you see was taken from the site at ~4:30pm EST.
Campaign Notes: Tarson’s End
I mentioned before that I was planning on running a Star Wars campaign for our gaming group, but backed out when an opportuinity opened up to participate on an indie videogame RPG. I’d already written a good part of the setting, and I thought I’d post some of my notes here for the curious. As always, feel free to borrow any of this for your own games if it suits you. Share and share alike.
Here was the planet where our campaign was going to start. It still has a few rough edges, story-wise. I haven’t checked the names of places to make sure they fit with canon, and I haven’t fleshed out the characters, but this is where it was headed. The point of this planet was to give all the players a common origin. They were going to “grow up” on this planet.
The campaign would begin with a brief session of pure roleplaying and discussion. No dice, no combat. I’d explain the setting, offer them some choices, and ask them some questions about how they wanted to spend their teenage years, which they would discuss and answer as a group. I’d use these answers to determine how the various factions in the gameworld related to them. No matter what choices they made, they would leave the world with their own spaceship, an NPC droid, and at least one major faction pissed off at them. What ship / droid / faction they ended up with would depend on the choices they made. They could end up wanted criminals, or maybe have a bounty on their head. Maybe their choices would benefit their families, or possibly harm them. These choices and outcomes would give the players a coherent backstory and a set of common goals. Once the choices were made they would begin the campaign proper and we’d play normally.
It’s a bit unconventional to begin a game this way, but it sure beats meeting in a tavern and trying to hammer out a sensible backstory from there.
So here is where they are from:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Campaign Notes: Tarson’s End”
Pixelninja
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A lot of people fail to realize this, and so for every well-crafted Mahoro costume out there you’ll have a scrawny guy in an oversized Batman outfit and a fat guy in Vulcan ears and a dirty t-shirt.
Still, when someone does well at Cosplay, the results are really amazing. Here is a young lady who did a brilliant Samus Aran (of Metroid fame) that would pass for a professional quality costume in my book. If they made a big-budget Metroid Prime movie, I doubt the main character would look much better. (The excellent photography helps.)
The other costumes are worth a look as well. Nicely done.
From The Archives:
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Raytracing
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
How to Forum
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Project Frontier
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
Silent Hill 2 Plot Analysis
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Skyrim Thieves Guild
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.