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Jansic's Blog

8th Mar 2010 - 14:31	Monitored
When my Philips 200W6 TFT monitor developed a fault earlier in the year I found that replacing it was much harder than I'd anticipated. My first theory when replacing the monitor was that, if I bought it 4 years ago for £250, then an equivalent monitor today must be cheaper! I first purchased an Iiyama E2202WS at £125. Before it had arrived I saw a similar Iiyama in real life and didn't like the colour reproduction. I turned the monitor away without even opening the box. Perturbed by this, I did a little research and ordered what was seemingly the best panel I could find for under £150 - a Samsung P2270. Overall it's a nice monitor but the abysmal colour and weird viewing angle inversion was much worse than my ailing Philips. I sent the Samsung back. It was at this point that I did some research into the monitor I already owned. What I hadn't realised was that my Philips contained an IPS panel and I'd only been looking at monitors with TN panels. Filtering the market for IPS panels was hard, though I eventually came across the Dell 2209WA. It's probably the cheapest IPS you can buy at around £225. £225 is far more than I'd intended to spend but the Dell is an excellent monitor. I suppose if you've never had a good quality monitor then the mediocre quality of TN panels wouldn't be an issue. For me I didn't even know what the difference would be.
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1st Feb 2010 - 13:18	Bioshock returns...
As much as I disliked it I couldn't just leave Bioshock there unfinished. This weekend I put a little time aside to complete it, which I did. Overall it took about 12 hours of total play time, I saw pretty much everything and achieved the 'good' ending. A little back-track-reloading also allowed me to get the bad ending but it really wasn't worth the extra effort. Overall, Bioshock is much less of an innovative modern game than its hype portrayed. Design-wise it's decidedly average, reeking of late 90's level layout & mission structure, especially towards the end - the level where you lose control of your plasmids is lame and the penultimate 'escort' level is wholly frustrating and annoying. Story-wise it plays out a lot like SS2, in fact, pretty much exactly like SS2, so there's no innovation there either. Often I don't really care about the quality of audio in games and I tend not to notice the difference between average audio and very good audio. Bioshock is one of those rare games with sub-standard audio, not in terms of quality but in terms of its use. Bioshock is an incredibly noisy game. Everything in it makes a sound and the volume levels are set in such a way that they screw with the positional audio cues; something as simple as reloading your gun can pull your attention to the left - when your gun and the enemy are both on your right. Nowhere are the volume levels worse than with the dialogue; especially the audio diaries and the radio comms. Frequently you'll turn a new corner, trigger the next bit of exposition and end up in frantic fight which blots out things you needed to hear. The inventory system is also gripe-worthy. You have an inventory but you can't view it, so you can't tell what ingredients you're holding (for the U-invent machines). When you loot things (like bodies, desks and bins) the loot might contain undesirable items along with desirable ones. Since there's no way to filter out the ones you want and there's no way of seeing how much of an ingredient you have, you end up always taking everything - just in case. By this reasoning looting really should be automatic. As an aside there's a 'search again' tonic that lets you optionally look harder in containers to find more stuff - the problem is, if you do 'search again' you lose the original stuff. Mechanically you know it's just done another dice-roll but from a realism point of view it makes no sense... I could pull it apart all day but now it's finished and really can move on to a better game.
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28th Jan 2010 - 13:02	DirectX SDK version mismatch.
A while back I had some problems with silent errors from the DirectX Effect creation functions. Specifically relating to effects pools. I thought I'd fixed the root of the problem at the time. I recently moved to the August 2009 SDK and my application started generating silent errors when run on my Vista test machine. What confused me is that installing the August 2009 redistributable package didn't work, but removing my effects pools did fix the problem. I can't have that though, because I need the effect pools. Further investigation showed that the redist does _not_ install the updated D3D compiler DLLs that you link against with the SDK - even though the cab files are in the install. To fix the problem, find the right cab file for your CPU and copy the D3DCompiler_42.dll to the Vista system and effect pools magically start working again.
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26th Jan 2010 - 13:27	Repeated shock, horror optional.
I recently borrowed Bioshock from a friend. Eager to see what all the fuss was all about I installed it and started playing pretty much immediately. Bioshock has a bit of a retro look in terms of its graphics but also a very retro feel to its gameplay. It's set in an underwater city, but it could just as well have been set in space. Hang on, I've played Bioshock before - in 1998, except back then it was called System Shock 2! BioShock is a different game to SS2 (well, it tries), the graphics and audio are better (if you like shrink-wrapped-plastic lighting, flakey positional audio and out-of-sync subtitles), the story's different (well, they renamed the characters) and the gameplay mechanic is new and innovative - okay, I definitely lied about that one - guns are still 'guns', psi powers are 'plasmids', cybermodules are 'adam', psi-hypos are 'eve' and hacking is, err, 'pipemania'. I suspect that if I hadn't played System Shock 2 through two, three maybe even 4 times, then Bioshock would be groundbreaking. As it is Bioshock is a retrograde step in modern gaming. If it was a carbon copy of SS2 it might have stood a chance, but stripping out parts that added depth (like an inventory and ambient research) and keeping the parts that detracted from SS2 isn't really the way to do it. Spawing enemies into empty rooms was lame back in '98 and it didn't get any less lame in 2007. Oh, there is one thing, Bioshock tricks you with a pseudo-moral dilemma - do you kill or cure to get your cybermodules. While there's a minor (numeric) penalty for being good, there's no concept of moral-alignment and because there are no NPCs there's no point caring about the choice you make. So what was the point, really? I'm 6 hours in and I really can't be bothered to continue. The story is so full of holes it'd let water into the city. The challenge is an arduous crawl, death is an inconvenience and overall the rewards aren't worth wasting time on. I have some Fallout 3 DLC to play somewhere...
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21st Jan 2010 - 11:51	Use banana on ocelot (when less is less)
Some time last week I started playing Batman: Arkham Asylum, which I got free with my graphics card. It didn't take long to complete, roughly a week of intermittent play. Arkham Asylum is a story driven game, with a decidedly linear plot-line, some puzzle interaction and some combat interaction. There are many games that fall into this genre and good balance comes from pacing the delivery of the story with the gameplay mechanic. Batman mostly does everything right, it's a good story backed up by a playable game but here's the important part: it's not a great game. Batman is presented as a large world portraying a comic book story, where you use a selection of gadgets (delivered in a predetermined order) to turn the pages. At the start it's fun but as you reach the end of the game it all becomes laborious and redundant. When reach the final battle you're just going through the motions; and when you're finished you really are glad it's over. Batman: Arkham Asylum is never greater than the sum of its parts, it merely works very well. Contrast this with something much older, like Outcast. With its large world, storyline, puzzles and combat, it's different theme but it's in the same genre. The difference here is that Outcast's story unfolds fluidly and you can also find your own enjoyment within the world beyond that of the game. I never sat and watched the sea in Batman but I've sat on the docks in Okasankar, staring across the waters, listening to the lapping of waves. I couldn't be bothered finding all the Riddler's trophies but I've spent hours catching Fae fruit. There are many ways to extract enjoyment from a game, some games purposefully prevent it, others don't. Outcast is a game which is more than the sum of its parts and that makes it a great game. This ability for a game to have more than was designed in, is the difference between League of Legends and DotA. One is a custom streamlined game based on a purpose built engine, the other is a multiplayer hack built upon an old but feature rich RTS. After having played some practice matches with friends I've come to the conclusion that it's this distillation of the game that ruins the League of Legends gameplay. It's a copy that fails to capture its essence of the original. In a masochistic way I'd actually like to try out Heroes of Newerth. Though I expect that would merely mean I'd own 3 mediocre copies of a game I already have for free. muses
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14th Jan 2010 - 13:07	League Of Legends
One of the most played games this (last) year has been DotA, a teamplay Warcraft 3 mod. It's very good and I enjoy playing it. I was recently given League Of Legends as a gift. Ignoring the the subtle differences in implementation it's essentially a carbon-copy of DotA. DotA is finicky but good. League of Legends is polished and also good. I play it, I win some, I lose some, that's how gaming is... What I don't understand is why I don't actually enjoy playing it. Really. Why is that? Apart from subtle mechanical differences and some polish in the UI the whole premise is absolutely identical to DotA - even the map is the same shape! I have my suspicions that it's due to League of Legends being almost exclusively an online experience. It's not that online play is bad, but I play games in order to have fun. League presents its games in a way that winning is good and losing is very bad and its community acts in very much the same way. The randomised matchmaking system means you'll never be in the same team of anonymous people more than once and that makes every game you play very aggressive and not just against the opposition - you're playing to win or not play at all. There's practice mode, of course, but getting the necessary 10 people together to play a balanced game is difficult. For my kind of gaming, League of Legends defeats the point. I'll keep on playing it but I don't think I'll ever enjoy it.
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17th Dec 2009 - 12:39	All terminals great and small
I bought the FTO a suitable battery but of course Japanese terminals are smaller than UK ones - so it didn't fit did it! This then necessitated the purchase of some new terminal connectors from Halfords (at least they were cheap) that had to be fitted first. I spent an hour in the rain last night, stripping cables, attaching connectors and shredding my fingers. The battery clamp doesn't quite fit, and the positive terminal cover doesn't fit either. It works though and seems to be charging properly, only time will tell if it's going to last.
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15th Dec 2009 - 12:55	Batteryout
The FTO wouldn't start this morning so I extracted the battery and put it on charge. After 3 minutes it was full, a highly improbable and dubious outcome. Returning the battery to the car confirmed what I had feared - that it's no longer taking charge. It's a stock Halfords Nissan Micra battery and I should've expected it to be crap but when I put it in 6 years ago I really didn't know much better. sigh Anyhow I'm going to treat the FTO to a nice new high-output battery from Camberly Autos. A proper, branded, Japanese one.
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20th Nov 2009 - 13:22	Pools
Last night I implemented DirectX10 effect pools in the Dak code. Wrapping it all up was pretty easy - you end up with a tree of parent shaders and child shaders. To achieve this you merely load the child effect with the D3D10_EFFECT_COMPILE_CHILD_EFFECT flag set; but it doesn't always work and sometimes it fails silently. This problem manifested itself for me as D3DX10CreateEffectFromFile returning E_FAIL and a null error buffer pointer - not a lot of use. Hours of experimenting were wasted to discover the fault was in the shader code and for some reason the compiler couldn't tell me what it was! More experimenting revealed that it was to do with my DepthStencilState in the effect pool header. I hadn't marked it as shared and, for each shader it was included in, it was generating multiple copies of the state. Why the compiler didn't see this I have no idea; but prefixing it with 'shared' solved the problem. It's not the only declaration that fails in this way; a quick experiment showed that a number of other declarations also fail silently. If you're having silent failures from the D3DX10CreateEffectXXXX functions and you're using effect pools. Check your header declarations are shared properly!
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9th Nov 2009 - 13:24	Zii 8
We released our ZMS-08 system on a chip today. Please go and buy them, for I like beer.
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