Archive for April, 2007
Sunday, April 29th, 2007
New beta is out, with the weapons now restricted, game mode options in the prefs.cs file (trust me that helps), and a new game mode called Golden Sword.. which I’m sure Paul will be unhappy with me for having done.
In Golden Sword one player is “it”, and has a big, fast, one-hit-kill sword. Everyone else must try to beat him, and whoever does becomes the Golden Sword-holder. Pretty simple, but I reckon pretty fun too. Took an hour or so to do, I think it’s a nice addition to the DT game-mode canon.
Jimmeh and Zamez have very kindly installed the beta of phpBB3 for our forums. We’re hoping that the spam-control on these ones will actually work, and that we can get them to look nice enough that they don’t bring down the rest of the site. If not, we may have to pay for vbulleting or something.
Watched the NFL draft with Tom yesterday. Just a great thing to have on in the background while you drink several bottles of Vermouth. I’ll probably need to get onto the localization stuff this week, which is a bit boring, but has to be done…
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Friday, April 27th, 2007
You’ll be seeing a load of things that look like “&whatthehellisthis” around the site for the next few days while we attempt to integrate our world ranking system with The Information Superhighway. Please ignore them, they won’t hurt you unless you poke them.
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Thursday, April 26th, 2007
It happened very gradually, but I think it’s now general knowledge that wii-esque motion sensing is not The Next Big Thing for hardcore gamers. In an unnaturally relaxed way, gamers in the know have come to realise that motion sensing just doesn’t offer the level of fine-detail to make it useful as a fundamental part of games’ control systems in general.
The Wiimote’s rotation/twist sensing, while much more exact than the motion sensing, is proving to be a bit of a novelty.
The Wiimote’s pointer, however, has shown itself to be by far the most interesting aspect of the Wii functionality. Otherwise known as “the bit sony didn’t steal”, pointing is really quite exciting from a game design point of view. I don’t think anyone expected that, but it is honestly enough to make future Wii titles very original and very interesting. I’m hoping designers realise that they can make games which only leverage that part of the Wii’s innovations, and don’t keep trying to make motion sensing meaningful where it doesn’t need to be.
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Wednesday, April 25th, 2007
There has been a giant void of useful information here recently.
Posted in News | 3 Comments »
Monday, April 23rd, 2007
Forums are currently down due to us updating some stuff on the server. Sorry about that – we’re looking into it.
EDIT- Forums are back! Didn’t check before posting this…wow. Everything is happy in Happyland.
Posted in News | 11 Comments »
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
Greetings, folks, and after today’s invigorating playoff match between Faxmachinen and Nazriel which ended thus:
Faxmachinen vs Nazriel: 5-4
Faxmachinen is the winner.
Faxmachinen breakdown:
W L L L W W W W
…we’re left with only four combatants. Semi-final time, natch.
Here’s our patented and entirely fair matchup system:
I can now officially announce that the matches are as follows (not that I just, in reality, flipped a coin to decide this or anything):
Dr Pineapple vs. Malakian
Faxmachinen vs. Toshers
Good luck, and may the least sword-flailing-like-an-idiot man win.
EDIT: If anyone is available to observe the matches, and maybe record a commentary, or, even better, FRAPS video of it…or EVEN BETTER – FRAPS VIDEO WITH A COMMENTARY…then please give me a shout via the Contact button at the top of this website.
Posted in News | 2 Comments »
Saturday, April 21st, 2007
As promised yesterday, Determinance owners can now get the first update beta at the forums. As one illustrious disciple has already pointed out, not much of the new stuff is working so far, although I believe the World Ranking is working, which is quite a big deal in itself. Archa (1) FTW.
This kind of signals a return to full time work on development. The last two months have been all about looking after new players, having business meetings, worrying about reviews, and a lot of beer. The next two months will be about programming, playing with the testers, and a lot of beer. Oh yes, I’m sure you didn’t see that one coming at all.
If you own Determinance, you are doing us a massive help by testing. The downside of adding so many new features is that it requires a lot of time to make sure they’re working, so we need as many of you as can help.
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Friday, April 20th, 2007
Ok, don’t get too excited – the first beta does not have most of the new features in, and is very rough around the edges. However, we need to start testing it now as Determinance has had a major core engine update this week, and I need everyone to crawl over it with a fine-tooth comb to see what’s wrong with it.
The update will be posted in the forums, and there will be seperate downloads for those of you who bought from GarageGames and those of you who bought it from Manifesto or Plimus. Make sure you get the right one.
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Thursday, April 19th, 2007
The following appeared on my abortive old blog The Hard Line last year. I recently re-read it, and thought you might find it interesting.
The industry is in a bad state. Nothing original is being made and Eeyay workers have long hours. Everybody knows that. Games journalists who jump on creative games and herald them as the next coming are not, despite what they think, helping.
Everyone who has ever reviewed Psychonauts desperately want you to buy it so that more games like it will be made. They think they can get you to buy it by giving it ninety percent. Unfortunately, Psychonauts is not a ninety percent game. It’s a seventy-five percent game trying something interesting. I’m sure giving it ninety has got a lot of people to buy it, but they’re now pissed off with having a sub-par game they were promised was good. How about reviewers tell the truth – that it’s a mediocre game doing something interesting – and talk about it a lot, rather than deceiving people.
Eurogamer, a good site apart from their us-against-the-world complex, awarded Psychonauts best new game of 05, and I’m quite sure they knew they were being precocious children while they were doing it. But hey, we’re an online magazine, we can do left-field stuff, it’s our right. In fact, it’s not just our right, it’s our duty! If you want to praise Psyconauts do it by reviewing it five times, or by putting an advert for it on every page, or by creating a new award that it actually should win, like Best Game With A Static-Egg Transition of 05.
Journalists are stuck in a system where a medium score will prohibit sales, but a high score will be dishonest. But that system’s there for a reason: the score should be an absolute, a rating of how much you will enjoy this game and for how long. A reviewer has a thousand other words to describe everything else.
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Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
Regular readers will know that I’m a huge Tribes 2 fan. Back in ‘02 I found a hack which would allow me to run pretty much any script code on a game-server, by using an eval-back-door in the voting code. While GarageGames were working on the final patch, I emailed them the hack and the fix, but never heard back. I presumed they’d fixed it already.
However, I just took a look at the code where the hack used to be:
//Tinman – PURE servers can’t call “eval”
//Mark – True, but neither SHOULD a normal server
// – thanks Ian Hardingham
Game.evalVote(%typeName, true, %arg1, %arg2, %arg3, %arg4);
My name is in the Tribes 2 source. I am enough of a huge fan for that to have made my day.
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