FPS Losers Anonymous: My name is WorldMaker and I suck at aiming...
Sigh. Gave up after only a round and a half of trying to play Halo 3 multi-player tonight. It's funny... I have the Gold account and a bunch of online great multiplayer games, but few multiplayer achievements and I rarely have the patience to play much more than a round or two every few months. I've even felt intimidated playing Uno online and I'm not that bad at Uno (which is more luck than strategy, anyway)... Xbox tries to let people self-categorize with a couple of labels ("Pro", "Recreation", "Family", ...), but at least for me it doesn't seem to work or there are just a lot of jerks in "Recreation". I know I suck, you don't have to keep telling me. Also, I couldn't figure out how to switch Halo 3 out of Slayer matchmaking... I'm hoping its just the goofy EXP thing and "basic training", because I feel like an idiot and I'm not a big fan of free for all deathmatches (because I suck).
Random Fact of the Moment: The Fusionists
From the Gospel according to Wikipedia: Louisville in the early part of the 20th Century was home to a small radical anti-corruption party called the Fusionists. I'm very tempted to start claiming to be a Fusionist and see if I can get a new movement started... Not because Louisville's mayorship is corrupt, but because, well... (cough*Halliburton*cough, cough*Blackstone*cough...)
Halo and Story Telling (or Lack Thereof)
After having the beautiful story telling of Bioshock I'm trying to prepare to get back into "traditional FPS mode" for my ("unfortunately" requisite, but not in the Bioshock awesome way but the "how can I own a 360 and not own that" way, not that I don't like Halo) pick-up of Halo 3 today after class. Gabe (Penny Arcade) linked a cliff's notes of the Halo story so far that is maybe a bit wordier than it needs to be (if I wanted to read the novels I would read the novels, heh), but it gets the point across. Much more interesting to me are the videos intercutting the games' cutscenes with some simple explanatory intertitles. I've known since Halo 1 that there was an interesting story in the games, and I've seen a good portion of the cutscenes before in my own play and in my watching others play and I've even seen some of the wild exploration of Halo thematic elements, so I can't claim to not know what Halo's story "is". I can claim that I forget it easily and have to be reminded often. Halo is an interesting FPS, but it's an awful story-telling vehicle, particularly in contrast to Bioshock, but everything can be pretty bad in comparison to Bioshock...
Halo's game play really is the interstices that make for intertitles of "making your way halfway across the planet and mowing down lots of enemies on the way". So much of the story really is so much of the cutscenes and the cutscenes are far enough apart that it's hard to remember where you are in the story. I can certainly understand why some think that Halo has no more story than Quake, because you ...
Quote of the Moment: Geriatric Ancestors and their Engineering Wisdom...
When you were a kid, your grandma probably taught you the ancient proverb, "when all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail."
Actually, that's a lie. My grandma never taught me that. I just find it amusing to consider a possible future where a new generation of programmers could be raised on such nuggets of engineering wisdom from their geriatric predecessors.
Indeed. (From Shawn Hargreaves on XNA's Model is not a Hammer)
Come Join the Militari: Some Game Ideas
Something the other day just reminded me of one of my far out, really expensive game ideas... I don't foresee having the budget to pull it off any time soon but I figured it might be interesting to talk about it. One of my disdains in virtual worlds these days is with the over-use of mechanic "vending machine NPCs". One answer you hear a lot is "build better NPCs", which is an interesting choice but pits you head to head with the Turing Test every day. I prefer the idea of as much as possible using real people. The King you hear about in the town? An actual player with "duties" and "responsibilities" befitting a King. The crazy cat lady that gives you those weird quests into the Dark and Damp Dungeon of Doom? Sometimes it's anyone who is bored and wants to try a hand at giving a few cryptic clues and laughing at the corpses of idiot adventurers that failed to heed the warnings...
So one of my ideas was to build "the ultimate sci-fi military throw down"... Invite a bunch of the leading military sci-fi writers to pitch ideas for cool weapons technology, interesting battle scenarios, world building, timelines, etc, then build a virtual world around it as sort of the "military sci-fi author's playground set". Throw in everything but the kitchen sink: twitch FPS mode, leadership-based RTS modes, everything. Then tell a drawn out campaign with it... Here's the fun part, I'd be very interested in putting the writer's themselves in the early leadership openings (Generals, Admirals, whatnot). If the military sci-fi leaders had virtual armies at their command, whose strategy would reign supreme? It could be the Iron Chef of Military Battles. Who do you think would win? David ...
reStructuredText 2 Anywhere
reStructuredText 2 Anywhere is an advocacy group and friendly cloud service for reStructuredText (reST or RST). reST has become one of my common writing formats at this point (all of my blog posts, issue tracker posts, source control (revision) comments for the last while (including this one) have been in reST) and rst2a is a pretty neat idea. The site has two major components: 1) It has a simple writing box to write an reST document and get back stylish HTML or PDF, alongside an reST quick reference. 2) A style gallery to promote interesting styles for reST such as nice PDF document styles. I'll probably make more use of the second part of the site, personally, but I might send people to the first part when I need them to work with reST.
Enlark and the Future: Exploring "Casually Immersive"
I haven't yet written the "Business Plan". I'd rather not right one, but one of these days I probably will have to. Even though I don't have the formal documentation I certainly have considered plans for the future. I just recently mentioned Enlark's opening gambit, and I wanted to at least touch on where I see the company going in the mid-to-long term. (This is personal speculation, there is certainly not exactly official stand point, yet.) The first project, the Pink Godzilla Dev Kit, is pretty firmly in what today people are calling the "casual" space. Some developers quarrel with the term (and some studies are showing that "casual players" are anything but casual); I'm a bit more ambivalent towards the term. I'm pretty happy with that. "Casual" is a growing space and there are a lot of good things happening there. There are much worse places to try to be, especially for a small start up. I think there are two good rules in the current casual space that I would be applying regardless of the subject matter or the game. Both rules boil down to Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS): the game should be easy to pick up and play and the game should be easy to put down should "real life" intervene.
The place I see Enlark pushing into and exploring, because it interests me, are some of the more immersive sides of the casual space. I can't say that we'll be the first in that niche, as I think the "casual industry" is mostly about applying older game styles and ideas to new games. (That is one of the reasons I prefer the "Arcade" term for the casual space... In many ways the casual industry is about reintroducing ...
The PHP Problem
PHP is a problem for everybody and very few want to admit it. It's a bad language, poorly designed, and it's become the de facto entry level language insuring a vast supply of bad coders and worse code, but it sure does run everywhere... It doesn't even really make all that much sense. With all of the security problems inherent in PHP as a "platform" there are many commodity "web hosts" that will provide PHP support but not something much more useful and secure such as ASP.NET or Python or Ruby. (Then you have the ouroboros loop that everybody supports PHP because everybody "knows" PHP and everybody "knows" PHP because that's the only thing supported...) It's almost a travesty of mass proportions, and something of a major setback to the science of computing. If you can read PHP but can't read a legible language like Python, then you need your head examined. Period. End of story. If you prefer a mess of spaghetti code over a plainly architected system, you have no business even being involved in programming. You certainly have no merit to any business of mine...
Personally I gave up entirely on PHP "programming" over a year ago, and you would have to do a lot to get me to ever even touch that language again.
