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I murdered a man yesterday.

Fri, 25 May 2012 19:07:00 +0100

I murdered a man yesterday. Not for revenge; not because I wanted something he had; I think just because I could.

The wall that separates life from death is so thin. Being alive feels so active, so permanent that we forget how little it takes to shatter it: just 10 grams of lead moving at 800 metres per second.

My victim—no, that doesn’t sound right. The man hadn’t seen me lying prone in the dirt beside a bush. He had just gone into a nearby barn, looking for supplies I guess. He was obviously new to the area: a veteran would have long since ditched the small Coyote backpack and Makarov pistol that he carried for something better. And I guess he was low on ammunition, too, because when he spooked a few zeds, he fired only three shots before he turned and ran. Right into my sights.

I suppose I could have helped him out, killed the two zeds that were after him. The thought never crossed my mind—in fact I didn’t really think anything at all. He was there, running, and I was there unseen, with my gun, and him in the sights. I fired once, and he fell.

Murders: 1

The zeds were still intent on him, clawing at his corpse, and ignored me. I shot them too, for safety. Then I figured I might as well see what he’d been carrying. A tin of beans. An empty water bottle. Painkillers. Nothing of any real value. I might have kept the beans; I don’t remember.

While still beside his body, I saw another figure not far off, running along the road that crossed the field ahead. Instinct made me lie down, beside the corpses, as I kept my gun on this new arrival. Coyote backpack. Makarov. Carelessly visible as he ran down the road. Another rookie.

Again, because I could. I fired once, I think I missed. He started, but continued to move. Twice more, and his silhouette collapsed into the grass. I still felt nothing.

Murders: 2

I didn’t have any hope that he would have anything else I wanted. But he did: a compass, a hunting knife, matches. It was only then, taking these from his corpse that I felt a momentary guilt; but it quickly faded, swallowed by the apprehension that someone else might have heard my shots, and do to me what I had just done to these two. I left the road and the buildings behind me, and plunged back into the forest.

80 word review: Prince of Persia (2008)

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:15:27 +0100

I would like to see Duncan Harris get his hands on this game and its colourful, imaginative vistas. It is beautiful in stills, but even more so in motion: the characters are finely detailed and fluidly animated, down to the constant desert wind rippling their hair and clothing. Sadly, the mechanical and repetitive platforming and fighting, and too many collectibles turn the game into a chore long before the story reaches its surprising end. Now, where’s that donkey got to?

Prince of Persia by Ubisoft Montreal, released in 2008.

"But in Driver: SF, the context of a dream world has the polar opposite effect. It doesn’t break my..."

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:59:21 +0100

“But in Driver: SF, the context of a dream world has the polar opposite effect. It doesn’t break my immersion or render my actions meaningless. Rather, it grounds the very weirdness native to all videogames. It justifies those things that sit in the corner of your vision in any videogame world, the things that if you focus on for too long, threaten to tear the fabric of the entire virtual world apart.”

- Brendan Keogh, California Dreamer

Journey

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 22:24:41 +0000

Forward, cautious, over sand to the mountain. Wind blows the sanddrift through my cloak billowing, scarf waving. A sound, musical voice, and I echo it, turn to see echo of myself beside, companion. Through the desert, ruins and stones, as the clothbirds soar.

Drop.

Falling, darkening. Now deep we press on. Sombre void halls, and a red eye glimmering, predator hunting. Cower beneath, breathless till it passes. Forward, cautious, eyes all around. Cautious. Reach at last the light, stretching far underground.

Escape.

Rising to sunlight, now at the mountain. Wind blows the snowdrift freezing. Flagging, upslope, huddling for warmth. Each foot, step, step, step. Cower behind, as the storm rises. Step. Higher. No warmth, no sunlight, no goal. No hope.

No hope.

Moments.

Renewing, respiriting, resinging, break through the storm. Rising and leaping up to the mountain, higher, flying above. Closer the cleft, fuller the thrill, rising and deepening, and climax.

Stillness.

Forward, ascending.

Sorting winners from losers

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:57:00 +0000

(This is a cross-post from nodraw.net)

In my TF2 king of the hill map koth_skylab, I wanted an ending sequence that would use a trigger to set the losing team on fire.

The usual way of distinguishing between teams in a trigger is to use a filter_activator_tfteam. It has a Team property which can be set to the red team or blue team. Spawn room doors are a typical use of this filter, to allow only Red players into the Red spawn room, and only Blue players into the Blu spawn room.

An alternative property, Associated Control Point, allows the filter to allow only playersfrom whichver team owns a particular control point. A trigger using this filter, connected to a door, would only open the door for Red players if Red had captured the control point, and similarly for Blue if Blue owned the point. If the control point was neutral, the door would open for nobody.

Finding the winners

In a king of the hill map, there is a single control point. Each team must try to hold the point for as long as possible. A team wins when they have held the control point cumulatively for a certain time; e.g. three minutes. Consequently, you can identify the winning team as the team that owns the control point when the round finishes. The winning team then gets ten seconds or so—the “humiliation period”—in which to slaughter the losers.

When the Red team wins a round, the tf_gamerules entity sends the OnWonByTeam1 output; when Blue wins, it sends the OnWonByTeam2 output. If you have a trigger, filtered by the control point, that is initially disabled, and then enable it when either team wins, only the winning players will activate the trigger.

I don’t really want to set the winners on fire—it would be a strange reward for winning—but I’ll add the logic here so you can see how it works. When the trigger gets an OnStartTouch input, it sends the IgnitePlayer output to !activator, which is the special identifier for “the entity that sent the input”, which in this case will be any player matching the filter. Hammer may not recognise these options, and will display them in red, but they will work just fine in the game.

Finding the losers?

Finding the losers should be easy. The third property on filter_activator_tfteam is Filter Mode. Set this to Disallow, and instead of allowing the matching team to activate the trigger, the filter will disallow them, and allow every other player to activate it. The team-filtered door in the second example above would open for both teams when nobody owned the point, for the Red team when Blue owned the point, and for the Blue team when Red owned the point. For pyromaniacs, the trigger shown below will set the entire losing team in the trigger area on fire.

However, there is a catch. If you enable this trigger during the round, it will work exactly as expected: the team that owns the point will be unaffected, and the team that doesn’t own it will burn. But if the trigger is enabled in the humiliation period after the round ends, both teams catch fire.

It turns out that for the duration of the humiliation period, all team-based filters will always match the winning team. This is so that the winning Blu team can open the spawn room doors of the losing Red team (or vice-versa), to slaughter any cowardly players trying to hide in it—a worthy cause, indeed.

But it causes me a little problem: although I can identify the winners, those-who-own-the-control-point, the inverted logic those-who-don’t-own-the-control-point that should identify the losers also matches the winners. It’s incredibly funny when both teams catch fire, but it’s not quite what I want.

All is not lost

I can still identify the losers, and only the losers, but those-who-don’t-own-the-control-point isn’t good enough because of the peculiar behaviour of filter_activator_tfteam after the round. What I need is to take the effect of the winning team filter (which still only matches the winners after the round ends) and invert its logic in some other way.

There’s another filter entity in Source, filter_multi, which allows you to create complex filters by performing logical operations on several other filters that you specify. If you set its Logic Type property to AND, it will pass only if all the other filters pass; set it to OR, and it will pass if any one of the other filters pass. I don’t need that capability here, but filter_multi also has a Negate Outcome property, which turns what would be a pass into a fail, and vice-versa.

What this means is that the output of the filter_multi is not affected by team logic or humiliation periods at all, but only by the outputs of the other filters it specifies. So although the Filter Mode property of the filter_activator_tfteam turned out to be unsuitable, if I use a winning team filter and send its output through a negated filter_multi, it will match only the losing team.

Final notes

There’s one small issue remaining with our trigger and filter set up: the filter_activator_tfteam matches all players on the winning team, and so the filter_multi, being negated, matches everything else. Not just players, but all other entities. The fix for this is easy: just ensure the trigger flags are set to just Clients.

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