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The MPAA studios hate us

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:08:04 +0000

The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.

Yet when we watch their movies, we support them.

— Marco Arment, The Next SOPA

Why SOPA, PIPA, DMCA, DEA, etc. exist:

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:31:09 +0000

“We’re dealing with archaic industries that were built around the impossibility of that which is now possible. Their time is up, and they know it. But they are so massive, so enormously powerful, that they are going to do everything imaginable to defend their fortunes. And that’s why we have SOPA and PIPA. They know it won’t beat piracy, because it’s immediately obvious to anyone with half a clue that it cannot. But it will give them terrible control of the internet, that all history shows they will abuse to the most ludicrous degree. It will give them terrible control of the internet, which is presently the thing that terrifies them more than anything else: free.

“The most insane thing is, they don’t quite know what for. They just know that it’s the means by which their business models are rendered pointless, and they know they currently can’t control it.”

— John Walker, Why People Are Still Failing to Accept the True Horror of SOPA/PIPA

Bulletstorm, in 80 words

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:22:00 +0000

When I had killed as many enemies by kicking with my boot as by shooting, I started to question the name of this game. Its points-for-combos approach to combat and emphasis on using environmental hazards is fresh and exciting, but the story it has to tell follows Epic’s trademark bro-gamer recipe, with a sprinkling of comedy—sadly not self-aware enough to be parody. However, I give it points for its lush, colourful (if post-apocalyptic) setting.

Something bothers me about dungeons

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 01:28:47 +0000

Many dungeon designs have the player entering the dungeon, travelling deeper and deeper into it while facing foes and/or traps of increasing difficulty, culminating in a climactic encounter, often a boss or mini boss.

That’s fine: these are chieftains, or guardians of great treasures, or whatnot, so naturally they’d surround themselves with minions for their own defence.

No, what bothers me is what all too often comes next: a convenient doorway that leads directly out of this deepest hold of the dungeon and back to the outside world. Even more irritating is when this exit has you emerging right beneath the entrance.

Brad Gallaway, in his post Fifteen Hours With Skyrim described this happening in Skyrim:

Almost every dungeon I’ve been to roughly follows the same “underground narrow hallways with some larger rooms” blueprint, and each final chamber has a very convenient shortcut door back to the surface.

I’ve not played Skyrim yet, but I’ve noticed this pattern occurring a lot in Oblivion, Fallout 3, and to some extent also in Zelda games and the like.

Here’s why it irritates. Imagine, if you will, a narrator, telling the tale of this hero (my avatar) and his quest into the dungeon:

“The hero Ulfang dares to enter the Cave of Unfirthaur. For days he slays many goblins in the Upper Chambers; he defeats the three Guardian Trolls in the Middle Halls; and finally, a week after entering, he penetrates to the deep Underfortress, where he vanquishes the great Gnarr himself, and takes his prized jewels.”

The narrator takes a sip of water to moisten his throat, and continues.

“Ulfang now spends another week retracing—”

He looks up at me. “You look a little impatient. Tell you what, why don’t we skip ahead to when Ulfang gets back outside. I’ll just pretend that there was a little express elevator here that takes him back to the surface in just a few minutes.”

“Don’t!” I plead. “It doesn’t fit. You can’t break the rules of the world just for me. It isn’t my world—it’s Ulfang’s world, and Gnarr’s. And if Gnarr has a fortress seven miles deep, then by The Dribbling Goddess, Ulfang should have to walk back out the same way he came in!” But it is too late. The narrator has already changed the story.

My complaint isn’t about realism, but verisimilitude. In a moment, the game world has broken the fourth wall and is now acknowledging me, the player directly, instead of my avatar. It’s a disconcerting discontinuity, like the pop and skipping of a scratched track on a CD.

Stalkers and Anomalies

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:02:00 +0000

In Call of Pripyat, there are areas of odd chemical, electrical, fire, or gravitational behaviour (and usually high radiation also); these are called anomalies. For the most part these are merely incidental obstacles in your way, but from time to time objects called “artifacts” appear in them.

These artifacts are highly valuable to sell, but if you carry them they also provide protective ability, mostly against the hazards of the anomalies. So they are well worth the time to carefully explore the anomaly fields (throwing bolts to identify where the anomalies lie and where is safe to walk) to find them.

In the parlance of the game (something it borrows from the book Roadside Picnic which inspires it), “stalker” is the name given to the people who wander the zone, hunting for artifacts. It contrasts with the military or paramilitary factions and bandits who are also there; unlike those groups, stalkers usually travel alone.

The game itself has a very rich AI system: animals hunt, feed, and sleep; and defend their territory against intrusion from humans. But there are also many NPCs from all factions that are AI-controlled. The military go on patrols, the stalkers explore the anomalies hunting for artifacts, and the bandits look for lone stalkers to steal from.

All of this contributes greatly to the feel of the zone as a living place.

I wrote about my experience in Call of Pripyat when I first played it on release in February 2010.

On “the bottom half of the Internet”

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 11:42:12 +0000

“The bottom half of the Internet” is an interesting phrase, especially when it is accompanied (as it so often is) by an admonishment to shun it. The phrase refers to user commentary on websites, and is an implicit declaration of superiority—we are the people you should listen to, not those filthy commenters down there. How could they possibly have anything worthwhile to say?

The self-applauding sentiment inherent to the phrase seems so obviously deserving of derision that I’m surprised it needs pointing out; but it seems many deploying the phrase have their heads so far up their own intestinal tracts that they’ve become accustomed to the smell of their own shit. If only they would pull their heads out, they might find that there is a fertile field of others’ shit out there too. (I fear I was carried away by a turn of phrase and have taken this metaphor a little too far.)

Well, let us leave the sewerage department for the moment. These would-be aristocrats of the Internet make another mistake: they attempt to justify their commentatist polemic with attempted rational argument. They start with broad generalisations, that comments are useless reactions, not considered argument. They use ludicrous examples (I found a wonderful specimen just the other day: “When Leonardo da Vinci painted the ‘Mona Lisa’, after all, he didn’t leave a blank bit at the bottom”). And they finally shore up that rickety structure by dusting off the long-discredited anonymity argument.

Of course, I don’t at all mean to defend the deluge of thoughtless wittering that occurs wherever people communicate—whether in neckties around a punch-bowl, or beneath an entertaining YouTube video, or even in the blog posts of all those well-educated, literate twats—and I doubt even the authors of most comments would consider their efforts worthy of permanent preservation; but if the Internet is good at anything, it is perpetuating all that happens on it. The horde of reaction-seeking trolls deduced this long ago, and use it to their advantage when leaving useless, provocative comments. But the subtlest dress up in the suits and ties of the commentatists, and post as one of them.

(Comments are closed for this article)

Talker: San Francisco

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:57:18 +0000

I shift into a random vehicle, a red sports car of some kind. I’m interrupting a conversation: the girlfriend of the driver I’m possessing is declaring that nothing in the city scares her. I take that as a personal challenge.

I hit the accelerator and touch the handbrake, drifting the car sideways down the winding road. She yawns exaggeratedly. I swerve into oncoming traffic, barely missing a large truck. That doesn’t even merit a response. I have to step up my game.

I see a car transporter truck ahead, with its ramp down. Floor it, shove in a boost to reach 150 miles an hour, and take the ramp at an angle for a high corkscrew. The car is flying through the air, upside-down, and she says one word:

“Lame.”

I laugh aloud.

This game has a truckload of incidental dialogue. I’ve psychically commandeered hundreds of cars while playing it, and although not every car has a passenger (and hence dialogue), a good many do. I’ve heard dozens of these short conversations, and not run into any duplicates yet. And each has more lines of unique dialogue as you drive recklessly, get chased by the cops, lose the cops, or just obliterate your car against a wall. The scenarios are diverse and creative:

Two gangsters in a stolen car, desperate to avoid police attention.

An octogenarian woman, whose suddenly reckless driving frightens her daughter in the passenger seat.

A blind passenger who thinks a demon has just possessed the driver.

While in a high-speed pursuit, a cop reveals to her partner that she is transsexual.

Keep in mind that these are all incidental: they form part of no mission, but occur as you shift into random cars. The creativity and humour in the writing added greatly to my enjoyment of the game.

Plus ça change, plus ç'est la même chose

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:12:30 +0000

Via @brainpickings:

I’m amazed that I can watch video from 1901 on YouTube. That’s one hundred and ten years old!
Oh look, it’s erotic in nature. Well, it’s meant to be titillating at least. Undergarments in 1901 were rather more substantial than many complete outfits these days.
You have to sit through a copyright notice at the start of the video. Worse: a copyright and patent notice.

“Many games designers think its their job to tell stories, but games isn’t a story medium,...

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 23:57:53 +0100

“Many games designers think its their job to tell stories, but games isn’t a story medium, they should go write books or make films. Many artists think that games are about attention to graphical details and in extension to proving how ambitious they are. They should go make art. No, games are about mechanics, they are about feedback, and that is something that programmers provide.”

— Eskil Steenberg

I want a sequel to Shadow of the Colossus

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:19:42 +0100

I want a sequel to Shadow of the Colossus. You are a pilgrim riding a grey horse, and you travel to the site where each colossus in turn. You gaze in awe at their majestic bones merging into the Earth, and you remember. That’s all.

The True Origin of iPhone 4S’s Siri

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:54:51 +0100

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)

The End of an Era

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:31:01 +0100

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.

UI: Entering a new password

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:58:06 +0100

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…”

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 00:21:45 +0100

“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..."

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 22:22:00 +0100

“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

Deus Ex: Human Revolution: A Review

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 22:25:54 +0100

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...

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:51:27 +0100

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.

Colorblindness simulation in the Source engine

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 09:55:34 +0100

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.

— Radiator Blog

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?

Putting the bits together

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:

Deuteranomaly/deuteranopia (red/green), which affects about 5% of men.
Protanamoaly/protanopia (red/green), which affects about 2.5% of men.
Tritanomaly/tritanopia (blue/yellow), which affects less than 1% of men and women.

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.

Results

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:

Identity (normal appearance)

Protanopia

Deuteranopia

Tritanopia

Try it for yourself

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.

One more thing

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...

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:06:34 +0100

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.

Simulate cellular connections on Mac (for iOS simulator)

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:36:31 +0100

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 20ms
Now 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.