The point is, if we can store music on a compact disc, why can’t we store a man’s intelligence and personality on one? So, I have the engineers figuring that one out now. Brain mapping, artificial intelligence, we should have been working on it 30 years ago. I will say this, and I’m gonna say it on tape so everyone hears it 100 times a day: if I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Siri to run this place. Now she’ll argue, she’ll say she can’t - she’s modest like that. But you make her! Hell, put her in my computer, I don’t care.
— Steve Jobs, early 2011
(with apologies to Cave Johnson)
For many years, Psychonauts was the only one of my favourite games that I’d never finished. If you’ve played it, two words will be enough to tell you why: Meat Circus. It’s the final level of the game; it gets off to a great start with an annoying escort mission, follows that with an uninspired boss fight, then a long and horribly finicky platforming sequence, followed by two more boss fights that are slight variations on the first.
There is one part in the middle of the platforming sequence that always defeated me: you have to climb around an ascending spiral of walls, jumping the gaps between them. The tightness of the spiral, the fire on the walls that would make you lose your grip and fall, the double-jump requiring very rapid button presses to work at all, and the camera swivelling at inconvenient times all combined to make this section impassible for me.
Two weeks ago, a patch was released for the Steam version of the game, which among other things apparently reduced the difficulty of Meat Circus. I think I’ve figured out what changed: it appears that you no longer fall to your death whenever you take damage in that awful platforming section.
Last night I finally beat the Meat Circus on this new, easier version. It still took me around thirty tries to get past that horrific spiral climbing bit; and I died a dozen or so times on the following section, but fortunately there was a checkpoint after the spiral. After that, the two bosses were a piece of cake, although thanks to another bug the FMV cutscenes weren’t working on my machine, so I didn’t see the final cutscene.
So this is the end of an era: Psychonauts has at last moved to the pile of games I have finished. The final level is still a strong contender for the worst bit of any game I’ve played, but the rest of the game is so hilarious, it’s worth playing anyway.
Little Big Details today showed the form used on Pinboard when entering a new password, where the field for the new password only appears once, and uses very light grey text:
Traditionally, a form will ask you to enter your new password twice, and both fields will be masked with • bullets. The form will ask for the new password a second time in case you unknowingly made a typo the first time. In this case the two fields will not match, so the form can warn you about the typo and ask you to try again. If it only asked for the new password once with a masked field, a typo could go undetected until you try to log in—the correct new password, lacking the typo, would not be accepted. Pinboard’s form solves this by ensuring that you can read back your new password to verify its correctness.
(Incidentally, I have a silly, irrational fear with forms of this type that I will make the same typo both times I enter the password, and so still be unable to log in when entering the password correctly.)
The goal behind masking passwords is, of course, to prevent them being disclosed through shoulder surfing. Pinboard’s light grey text makes it harder to read the password from a distance than if it were darker, but it’s still quite possible. And yet the text is light enough that it will be difficult to read for many users, especially with varied lighting conditions and monitor colour reproduction.
Interestingly, the traditional form with two masked fields has an unexpected benefit, albeit slight. While the intention of the two fields is to prevent typos, by having the user type their password twice without being able to see it, it also begins to train their muscle memory. Having typed the password twice without seeing it, you begin to learn the physical pattern of the letters on the keyboard. It is quite possible to know a password better physically than by letters. I can type most of my passwords rapidly, but have difficulty recalling the actual spelling of them.
“Perhaps DRM does have a place, but Ubisoft has tried harder than any other publisher to solve this problem, and business has suffered. It may well be that piracy is not what ails them, and the secret to selling PC games is to make quality PC versions of multi-platform titles. But you don’t hear that from Ubisoft. What you hear is that they have the right to protect the products that they worked so hard to produce.
“And they do have that right. But PC gamers work hard for their money, too, and they deserve full-featured games that let them have the best experiences possible on their chosen platform. They deserve a publisher that cares more about its customers than its resentments.”
— Rob Zacny, Ubisoft, piracy, and the death of reason
“I don’t know how many more times I have to say this, but I guess at least once: a boss fight is not just a random enemy who’s eaten three times as many protein bars as everybody else. A boss fight is supposed to be a final exam for everything we’ve learned up to that point.” — Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw, of Deus Ex: Human Revolution
In a sudden turnaround of my long-held opinion, I realise now that you can’t reserve a score of 100% for a mythical perfect game, whether Thomas Aquinas spoke of it or not. To point out that an otherwise amazing game has flaws is superfluous. Even the tastiest ice-cream makes you fat.
Accordingly, my review of Deus Ex: Human Revolution reduces neatly to: ★★★★★
We sat, and drank, and talked.
You told of the great final battle when you were a hero;
when Shamus destroyed Gondorf
or something, I don’t know.
Foreign names from foreign places.
Each of you was there, those many separate times.
“It was awesome” you all said.
I smiled and nodded, and echoed “awesome.”
It’s all Italian to me.
Your princess is in another country. I was never there.
I want to speak out, admit, I—no.
I stamp the desire underfoot like a mushroom,
ashamed of my ignorance.
No more.
I do not know your Marios,
your Zeldas or Arans. These are false gods.
I will be true, and a heretic.
This is no shame.
I worship other heroes,
Threepwoods, Dentons, Garretts.
I told their stories, and in telling became them.
I journeyed through Angband, Daventry, and the planets of Vorticon.
I stole the Amulet of Chaos from the temple.
I saved the wumpus from Jasper Slake.
I destroyed the three Shadowlords.
These are my victories, my memories, and I will not disown them.
They made me what I am.
A PC gamer.
While making a Portal 2 map last month, Robert Yang asked:
Was choosing “red” a bad idea / horribly insensitive to colorblind people? Like, will they be able to distinguish the non-portalable metal plating from the stone walls? I don’t want a BioShock 2 debacle on my hands.
This gave me an idea. I knew there was research into simulating the effects of colourblindness, and had come across applications that implemented the method from that paper: Color Oracle for one. I also knew that the Source engine supported colour mapping. So why not combine the two, to simulate colourblindness in game?
Colour mapping in the Source engine is done with the color_correction entity. You can start the game—Team Fortress 2 for example—in “tools” mode to create and save a colour map file. You then create a color_correction entity in your map within Hammer, and configure it to use your colour map file. But the tools for creating colour maps are fairly basic, and I needed more.
So I wrote a short Python script to convert a colour map to a .tga image file, and vice-versa. I also set it up so it could generate an identity colour map file or image; that is, one in which every colour remains the same.
There are three common forms of colourblindness:
The simulation that is done here is of the “anopia” forms, where one of the types of cones in the eye is missing or completely non-functional. The “anomaly” forms are less severe, but as I understand it, if your visual design is accessible to people with deuteranopia, it will be at least as good for people with deuteranomaly.
To create the colour maps for these, instead of doing the maths described in the paper, I converted the identity colour map to an image and opened it in Photoshop. I then used Color Oracle to view the image with each simulation, took a screenshot of each, and saved them back to .tga files. Finally, I converted each of the .tga files back into colour maps to use in the game.
The last step was to put the necessary entities into my map to turn on colour correction with each colour map in turn, and test it out in the game. Here is each colour map image, with a screenshot of how it appears in-game:
I have posted the colour maps and the python script on GitHub. I have also included a prefab of the colour correction entities, so you can easily drop them into any map you’re working on.
Because the script will convert any suitably-sized .tga to a colour map or vice versa, you are no longer limited to the tools Valve provides to create colour maps, but can use all the tools that Photoshop or any other image editor provides to adjust the colours in the image, then convert the result back to a color map for use in the game.
John Gruber, commenting on an extrapolation of Apple’s growing role in the games industry:
“And the Apple TV doesn’t support apps yet.”
And I’m far from certain that it ever will. The biggest problem for games on the AppleTV alone? The controller sucks. Even for the little it has to do right now, the remote is clumsy, and slow to give feedback. You can’t press the buttons quickly. It takes too long to start scrolling, and you always overshoot. It’s really not enjoyable to interact with the AppleTV via the remote.
With iOS 5 and AirPlay we already have the ability to play a game on the iPad or iPhone, with the display on the TV. But it’s reliant on the phone rendering and encoding the video data, and streaming that to the AppleTV—and it lags, quite noticeably, if that video is anything to go by. And it eats your iPad battery much faster.
What the AppleTV could do really well is run half a game—graphics rendering, physics, networking. Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch runs the other half—input, game logic, drawing only the secondary display on the device. With the huge bandwidth and processing demands of the video streaming gone, the control responsiveness would increase, and the battery drain is gone.
Right now in the iCloud beta, I can buy an app on my iPhone, and it automatically downloads and installs on my iPad, too. The same infrastructure could allow the “server” half of a game to automatically download to my AppleTV, so it was ready to play as I continue my game in the living room.
Oliver Drobnik, at Cocoanetics writes:
Now our trick creates a new IP firewall rule restricting the bandwidth to 112 kBits. You have to do this modification as root, hence the sudo and the first sudo will ask for your root password.
sudo ipfw add 500 pipe 1 ip from any to any sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 112kbit/s plr 0 delay 20msNow you can test your app in simulator and enjoy the much faster turnaround when debugging the handling of slow connections.
To remove the firewall rule you use the following command:
sudo ipfw delete 500
I keep intending to make a note of these commands for future reference, every time I see them—this time I’ve done it.