Posts by Defrag

Skjalg's argument of laziness may sound ridiculous, but it rings true. Companies should do their utmost to remove all of the barriers between the customer and their product. It doesn't matter if it's a small or a large barrier. You can't impulse purchase something very effectively if you have to think too much about it.

I've been on steam since the beta and I've purchased a grand total of one game using it -- Half Life 2. Why? Two reasons.

1. For new releases, steam is very expensive. £40 for MW2? I've seen it for as low as £26 (Sainsbury's stunt) and you can find it easily enough for ~£33 in other places. I'm guessing Valve takes their cut and the game's regular publishers also want their standard cut so it pushes the price up, but I'm not willing to pay an extra £7 for 'convenience', especially when I see the US pricing. I can buy 4 triple A games on steam, or I can buy 5 online for the same money. No dilemma here.

2. Steam doesn't accept debit cards and I neither have nor want a credit card. If I want to purchase on steam, I need to deposit money into paypal and then pay using that. It's too much hassle for me, plus I don't trust paypal -- too many horror stories. As a result, Valve never gets my money, nor do any of the companies that sell their games via steam. It may sound weird to some people, but I am far happier to go to play.com, order and wait for the best part of a week. It takes longer, but I don't have to do anything other than click two buttons on a website. Ever since I started working full time, I am much more mindful about how much time I waste doing stupid bullshit. Stupid bullshit like logging into my bank, moving money into a pay pal account, then remembering all of my details and purchasing. 3 steps instead of 1. 15 minutes of fail instead of 1 minute of simplicity. I don't want to fuck about on 3 websites to order 1 game.

Now, I'll admit that I'm rarely going to purchase new releases of 'big' games on steam because of the price, but there's been loads of games that I would've purchased in an impulse buying mood (especially around the £5 to £15 mark). However, it's too much effort for me. I cannot be arsed to go find my wallet and move money around etc. Instead, I'll fire up an old game or do something else. I would probably spend an extra £50 a year on steam on smaller titles if they removed the barrier. In these cases, the wait does matter because I want to buy and play something now, so I don't want to order via play.

I don't pirate because

A: I cannot be arsed

B: I'm not a student any more. I don't really have an excuse.

skdr: I would, but I don't know any Ellens! Realtime is something like 300 strong now, so I don't know a lot of the folk on APB

Hourences: Kickass! Good luck.

Thanks for clearing it up I doubted they'd go the whole nine yards, but it's still a nice thing to see.

So what does this mean? Do you get access to the full engine or just the tools? (I'm trawling the site for info and coming up short as apparently I can't read )

Quote from atelierz

it was part of the crash course update.

Consider me corrected . I've played about one game since that update, so that'll be why.

Unless it was a very recent patch, it's not fixed. I only stopped playing a few months back. I remember when they changed the tank + witch spawns to be in very similar areas for both teams, but that's about it.

Not sure about the genre, but David Lynch's Eraserhead is low budget and deeply disturbing. Not sure what to make of it, but watch it and you won't forget it.

Quote from Taylor

Well, I'll keep an eye on it. Though, I will explain the rank comment so I don't look like a lunatic. Rank is the name given to a mechanic that's been in games for several decades, particularly arcade games*, that changes the difficulty based on how good you are, or are not. The difference being it was hidden away from the player instead of given a marketing term...

I don't mind this when it's campaign mode, as it makes it possible for friends with different skill levels to play with one another. However, I was pretty irked by the balance choices made for L4D's versus mode, though. The whole point in versus is that it's team v team, and the scoring should reflect the abilities of each team.

For a long time, players thought the health distribution was the same for both teams, but just spread out differently. However, it's not even pseudo-random or indeed remotely fair. The director gives different items to each team depending on how badly hurt they are; this totally ruins the balance on many of the maps. You can be absolutely pounding a survivor team to the point where they're on their last legs. The survivors reach a checkpoint (e.g. panic event health box) and receive 3 medkits, resulting in them carrying on like nothing happened. This is amplified by 'humps' in various maps where some earlier areas are brutal -- one team may get wiped, whereas the other may crawl over the hump but soon get healed up to respectable health levels.

You can verify that this happens by going into spectator mode when dead as infected, then clipping your free roaming camera through the boxes where items are dished out. At the start of the round, each box contains 4 pills max. As the survivors take more damaged, pills turn into medkits. If you need the health kits, they are magicked up. If you don't need the health kits, you don't get them. As a result, it is possible for a team to take a pounding but to score respectably, whereas your team coasts, gets no extras and maybe wins by 100 to 400 points tops depending on the difficulty multiplier. It's possible to dominate on 4 maps, but still lose the finale if they make to the chopper and you get wiped. E.g. you score 400 more per round in rounds 1 to 4 -- their team limps home each time after using about 9000 health kits. Then, on the finale, you get someone punched off a roof by a tank and get wiped... the other team can now have one lucky-ish round and win despite getting dominated in rounds 1 to 4.

I hope they haven't carried this system over to L4D2 because it was really crap.

There was a simple server mod that altered this behaviour for the better. You were given 4 health kits in the safe room, and beyond that you could only find pills. I.e. you'd better save that medkit until you're black and white each time or you're going to lose. It made the game a lot more tough if you took a beating as survivors To me, this was the best way forward. It meant if you were playing a bad round, you got punished for it. You didn't magically get over a 'hump' and coast home with loads of health that you were only entitled to because of how badly you were playing.

Quote from Sentura

out of curiousity, which code changes are we speaking here? anything you could disclose?

As Wacko said, I have quite a few posts on testability + automated testing on my blog. A great distillation of testability concerns can be found on Misko Hevery's website. He's the man when it comes to test driven development + automated testing. Google test blog is another good one.

dux: You might want to use pm for stuff like that in future

Anyway, I've just changed job. I'm still at Realtime Worlds, but now I'm now a plain ol' Software Engineer instead of a Software Engineer in Test.

While Thrik is 100% right about popularity of blogs being strongly related to community participation and 'celebrity' factory, you should bear in mind that blogging isn't all about popularity! For me, blogging has been a very effective tool for rationalising and better understanding the subject matter of each post. In particular, it's often the case that we just 'know' why something works or does not work. When you write a blog post about the topic, you must understand the topic before you can explain it to someone else. On quite a few occasions, I've had "aha!" moments while typing a post .

My job up til now has involved convincing software engineers to change the way they write their code, so being able to put forward a convincing argument was extremely important to me, and blogging definitely made a difference. I would thoroughly recommend blogging as a way to better understand your chosen field.

Nice update. I think that's much easier to browse now

Nice stuff, but crank up the Anti-Aliasing when grabbing viewport captures. No need for jaggies in a portfolio

Don't really care about trailers usually, but that was cool. Especially the helicopter chocolate comment.

P.s. I reserve the right to lol at all of the people in the L4D2 boycott group who will inevitably cave in and buy it. It's gonna be awesome.

Nice. I have nothing constructive to add, unfortunately!

MX518. Cheap, excellent shape and the tracking is as good as you'll ever need. I had an MX510 before that, and the MX518 is basically the same. Why mess with perfection? Also bought another of these for my work PC.

Only downside is the stupid sensitivity changing buttons. I always disable those because they're a pointless gimmick.

I'd bin some of that 3D stuff, as a few of the stills look ropey. Basically, go through your site and be brutally honest about what your finest work is. Don't show anything else. I'll add a note to your linkedin because you were very dependable and level-headed on FF

On the topic of portfolio sites, this is an excellent article (I got the link from mapcore ages ago, can't remember who originally posted it): Your Portfolio Repels Jobs

The sooner folk ignore this clown the better

Very cool, but they've got to be very careful with that sort of 'protection'. I've read about similar things before and there was a lot of negative word of mouth about it. In particular, I remember reading about one game which included several deliberate crash bugs in the pirated version; the game soon gained a (totally unfair) reputation as being really buggy because of it! Furthermore, the more features you add, the bigger the risk of adding more bugs and/or introducing the sabotaged feature in a legitimate customer's copy.

Subtly destroying a pirate's enjoyment of the game is pretty funny though, and I'm guessing since it's buried in the game mechanics it'll be a little harder for the pirates to find & fix. Not that much harder, though...