Jansic's Blog

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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30th Oct 2009 - 13:19	7 and other stories
I fixed the car! Actually I fixed it about 2 months ago but couldn't be bothered to post. The cam-carrier resealing was quite simple (if not messy) and the FTO received a cambelt change and some new auxiliary belts in the process. It's been running fine since the work was done, now all I need to do is sort out the leaky differential seals. I also bought Windows 7. After many years of using unused, hand-me-down, bundled or MSDN freebie copies of the various OS revisions I've finally bought a proper copy of MS's latest offering. I started with a nice new hard disk and Windows 7 went on easily enough. Isolating and installing the appropriate applications was a chore but nothing was particularly difficult. The one real pain was rearranging my disk drives. Copying old data into the correct location on the new drives required passing through a temporary drive so that I could swap data over and resize some partitions in the process. All in, it took me took about three days to get my machine working how I like it. Now I can get back to doing some programming and other useful things.
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21st Sep 2009 - 13:21

Up-da-tea

Lots of stuff has been going on lately. Lots.

Car:

Most of the last two weeks the FTO has been in pieces. The rear cam carrier & camshaft oil seals have been leaking and this last weekend I finally managed to reassemble it all. Fitting the timing belt was far easier than last time and I was quite happy when the engine started that there were no obvious timing issues. However as with all things, you tend to rush the last few tasks and as it is the engine is warbling quite noticably. This probably means I've overtightened the cambelts or the camshaft journals and the tappets are probably a bit tight too. The annoying part here is that it's almost a complete disassembly to access the parts involved; something that'll have to wait another week.

Most annoying is that the heater matrix is leaking, again. I really don't see how because the unit is practically brand new; but it leaks quite profusely into the passenger footwell. Regardless of how it's been damaged, removal and replacement is a mammoth task. I've bypassed it for the moment with a bit of pipe and two jubilee clips in the engine bay but as the daytime temperature drops I'll need it fixed soon. I hope it doesn't need a new unit because originals are around £150 and this month has been rather expensive.

Also in the high-expenditure department; A-plan quoted me £660 insurance this year, up £30 on the previous year. I've now switched to Direct Line's fully comprehensive offering of £380 - the cheapest I've ever paid for insuring the FTO.

Games:

I completed Fallout 3; the ending was poor, so poor in fact that I have reloaded from a previous save and am now exploring the world. Fallout 3 babysits you to an ending, offers you the illusion of choice and then plays some mediocre black & white video for a few seconds before the credits roll. What happened to the open-ended world you got to roam around in at the completion of Oblivion and Morrowind?

Also in the news, NC-Soft are shutting down Dungeon Runners; the free-to-play (with micro-transactions) game with a miniature team of three developers apparently wasn't very profitable. Hot on the heels of Tabula Rasa, I'm wondering if this is to do with the market climate or just NC-Soft being mediocre.

In the better-games-department there's a new DotA map, 6.63, and I must say that the changes are not what I'd expect. The hero tweaks are very much for the tournament crowd and I'm bemused by their making the weak characters even weaker and the strong characters even stronger. Never mind, we shall see how this pans out next Wednesday.

Programming:

I've not had much chance or program lately but that I have done has been quite productive. I got DaK terrain rendering properly then after much frustration with OpenGL's state mechanism I've rewritten the core for DirectX 10, we'll see how this pans out. Overall I'm quite positive about how the coding is coming along and that's good.

Jans.

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24th Aug 2009 - 13:22	Lannage
Well that was entertaining. This last weekend's organised gaming finished yesterday evening and was possibly one of the better large-scale sessions we've had in a long while. All the usual suspects turned up including Sneeze and we managed to rattle through many computer games (some of them even entertaining) including Warcraft 3 - DoTA, BF1942, AvP2, Dawn of War (Dark Crusade) and a little UT2004. We also found time for a few board games. - Friday evening it was War on Terror, an mildly entertaining offering but our first play didn't really get the most from the mechanism, it could well be worth revisiting. - Saturday evening brought us Arkham Horror, a complicated game and with the high number of people present Matt offered to GM to speed up the play. We did win; although in part this was due to a little tweaking by the GM. - Finally our lazy Sunday was filled by Munchkin an easy fallback, it's a pity we didn't get time to play Zombies vs Humans though as there was plenty of time. There are some pics pending somewhere although they're probably only of interest to the people who were there. As an aside, today's xkcd is pretty good (and accurate). Jans.
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