Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
KG’s just posted on RPS about modders finding a fairly straightforward way to use UnrealEd with Mirror’s Edge. The interesting snippet to me though is that this may get patched out because shipping an Unreal-engine game with UnrealEd “costs extra”.
This isn’t surprising – GarageGames have just basically taken that decision with Torque3D – but it is interesting. I’d like to know how much more it is. Anyone know?
We should really boo Epic for this though; modding should be available on as many games as possible and we want great tools like UnrealEd anywhere we can. But of course if it didn’t cost extra maybe it wouldn’t be so good etc etc FREE MARKET etc.
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Monday, April 13th, 2009
In one of the Eurogamer series of gold-selling articles, this quote came up:
In fact, a former Jagex source tells me that when Jagex banned all IPs connected to gold selling, “they lost 10 per cent of their membership, and still haven’t recovered in terms of numbers since they did it two years ago. Even though they have almost stopped gold selling in RuneScape, it has cost them two million active accounts; i.e. there were four million players, there are now two million players, of which less than one million actually subscribe.”
… what? That’s not 10%. That’s fifty percent. What?
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Monday, April 13th, 2009
I know I know – DRM is bad. But if it were possible to have a system which really did stop piracy and didn’t cause too much of a problem to the paying customer it might be good.
So I’ve got two new DRM ideas – one of which is probably a little insecure but is generally applicable, the other I think is very secure but only works for procedurally generated games.
As you may or may not know, multiplayer games don’t tend to have a problem with piracy. The reason for this is that they rely on a service on the developers/publishers’ servers, and that service can be refused to people who don’t have a valid CD Key, and not more than one person can play with the same CD Key at the same time. This system just basically works.
So I thought to myself – is there any service which could be withheld to the server for a single player game?
Before I go any further, I want to make a disclaimer. Both of these ideas are based around needing to be connected to the internet when you start, and both would suffer from the “when the servers get switched off my game won’t work!” problem. I take the second one of these very very seriously and as a gamer I hate the idea. We would need a trust that these services would be made public domain after five years – without that these ideas are completely inviable.
That having been said, let’s get on with it.
Idea 1: Procedural single player games: Keep the level generator on the server
This idea is pretty simple. Say Spelunky was a paid-for game. Every time you play Spelunky, the levels you play are completely new. They are generated. Instead of being generated on your client, they could be generated on a server and sent to you – but only if you pass authorisation.
Problems:
(a). Difficult to stop multiple-people-one-cdkey abuse. You’d probably have a limit of, say, 50 new games a day. You know, a number which one person will never go over.
(b). People could distribute the new games they get. This would be partially alleviated by giving everyone the same progression of random levels, so it would be very difficult to find a “new” game by shady methods.
Idea 2: Save format is different to load format
[Edit: after talking it through with some people I'm pretty sure Idea 2 is just useless]
This idea would work for any game which you needed to save. The idea is that the savegame produced by your client cannot actually be loaded by your client – it has to be sent to the server to be converted.
Problems:
(a). Basically, this would not stand up to a really concerted attack – a group of skilled crackers comparing the save and load-formats to make their own convertor.
Discuss!
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Sunday, April 12th, 2009
Bethesda don’t like doing full length expansions any more. Boo! I don’t like one hour long “experiences” in an RPG, surely that’s crap.
Posted in News | 6 Comments »
Saturday, April 11th, 2009
No looking this up, only guesses please – why is “Descent To Undermountain” (1997 PC action RPG) possibly the best stupid game name ever?
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Thursday, April 9th, 2009
We went to the Gamespot UK offices in London today to take part in their podcast and pimp Village and Synapse! Take a listen – it’s very long, but we’re in all of it.
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Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
The very silly, almost Progress Quest like daftness of My Brute comes to Visiting the Village.
Challenge our pathetic Samuel L Jackson-looking brute here.
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Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
Help us get some more listeners!
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Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
Bam! That’s the sound of Episode 5 arriving. This week: lawnmowers and Pauly Shore. Guaranteed Spelunky-free!
What’s that? Oh, it’s only the show notes…
Carless defends the IGF – via Auntie Pixelante
LittleBigPlanet community explodes – via CVG
EA drops copy protection – via Fidgit
Pro gaming in a recession – via NY Times
PS2 is a gateway drug to PS3 – via Ars Technica
Defending Larry – via Eurogamer
Reggie Fils-Aime interview – via MTV Multiplayer
Lego Rock Band – via Kotaku
Blizzard own the rights to Redneck Rampage – via Eurogamer
Vampire: Bloodlines interview – via Rock Paper Shotgun
Wii-controlled Lawnmower – via Go Nintendo
BONUS LINK! This made us laugh this week.
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Monday, April 6th, 2009
Make friends with other hideous Villagers using a popular social networking system. YAY!
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