The code also did something unexpected but extremely neat – zombies fade into view as they move adjacent to a survivor, so it looks like they’re coming out of a fog to attack you. It’s quite terrifying.

I know a lot of this sounds like gobbledygook as combat has changed so much since the initial video, but I wanted to let everyone know ZH2 is definitely alive. Well, as alive as a zombie game can be. Once you play the combat demo, it’ll all make sense. Trust me!

I’m moving onto the firing code tonight, because it’s been bugging me for a while now. I’m trying to figure out an elegant solution to adding bursts into the existing system, but I’m concerned I’ll need to rewrite it. Which would suck, as I’ve already rewritten it once.

Ah, to refactor or not refactor… that is the question!

Related posts:

1. Zafehouse 2: Zombies glow red now
2. Where’s that Zafehouse 2 combat demo?
3. A cop, priest and nurse walk into a zombie apocalypse…

Fiddling around with the firing logic too. At the moment, survivors try to guess how many shots it’ll take to kill each zombie in their line of sight, starting with the weakest. I thought it was cool until someone pointed out that it’s not realistic. At all. It’s also annoying when a survivor guesses a zombie should take two shots to kill, they fire those two shots and… one of them misses. Cue unexpected flesh-munching.

What (trained) people usually do when they fire a gun is use bursts. The new firing logic will go “Okay, I’m going to fire x rounds at the closest, weakest zombie I can see. If it dies, move onto something else. Otherwise, fire another burst”. The x is determined by the weapon and experience level of the survivor.

Once the combat demo is out, I’ll be curious to hear how people find the auto target selection/shooting done by survivors. I wanted to add more control, without entirely sacrificing the feel of the first game.

Related posts:

1. Where’s that Zafehouse 2 combat demo?
2. Zafehouse 2, drugs and you
3. Zafehouse 2′s shiny new combat window (and mechanics)

Seriously though, the idea of going back to journalism is appealing. But, I know I’ve found my home in the games industry. It’s more fun to make ‘em than write about ‘em. At least for me – I think a few people get hooked on the freebies and junkets and lose sight of what being a journo (let alone a games journo) is all about.

It’s great when you accept that you want to move on; it’s even better when you actually do. That’s the hard part.

Related posts:

1. EA’s open letter to the R18+ debate, some unrelated ranting by me
2. Oz developer news in the local media

Once you’ve gone through the recommended setups, you’ll hunger for a random draw of kingdom cards. Now, you can shuffle and use the included template cards to come up with a fresh combination… or you can jump online and have a website do it for you in seconds.

Sure enough, more than a few people have constructed online Dominion card randomisers and, inevitably, not all turned out equal. I’ve written a couple of short reviews of the ones I’ve found, and ranked them from worst to best.

So, if you’re curious as to which randomiser you should be using, hit the jump!

#5: Card Picker – Dominion
Website: www.irkeninvader.com/cardpicker/dominion

Going to have to mark this one down immediately for only providing the base set, Intrigue and a few of the promo cards and options. Without Seaside, it’s a little useless for those with all of the currently released sets.

It’s definitely phone-friendly, in terms of bandwidth and presentation, but on a proper PC it’s spartan. The text-only presentation is alright, but the images on other sites makes recognition that much quicker. I do appreciate the small icons to the left of the cards that identify attack, victory and normal kingdom cards; at a glance you can see what the general mix is and reshuffle if necessary.

If you scroll down, you can select the type of randomisation and whether reaction cards should be picked if an attack card is chosen. There’s also an option not found on other sites – making sure cards with costs of 2, 3, 4 and 5 are available for a good distribution of prices.

Sadly, that’s about all it has going for it and, as I said, the lack of a Seaside checkbox hampers it severely.

#4: Dominion: Random Card Selector
Website: www.craftycoder.com/randomDominion.htm

Well, it should look great on a phone but, otherwise, this one ain’t so hot. While all the current expansions are included, you can’t combine more than two. This means it’s either the base set plus Intrigue or Seaside, or Intrigue plus Seaside. Yes, those are “ors”; the randomiser won’t let you combine the base set, Seaside and Intrigue together.

It’s fast to generate cards, and there’s a text summary followed by the card images. But the lack of configuration options kills it as a realistic choice.

#3 Dominion Deck Builder
Website: www.dominiondeck.com

Here’s a site dedicated to Dominion decks. Sweet, I say, but how’s your random generator?

Presentation is good, as good as other sites which provide image results. All the sets are available for inclusion, as are card types. It’s confusing at first glance – am I selecting card types to include or exclude? Playing around with these checkboxes determined it’s the former, so only selecting say, reaction cards, results in an unplayable set of two cards. Not the best default behaviour.

There’s a save button if you’re willing to register, and hitting back on your browser gives you the previous set, but the actual card generation feels sluggish. It’s not painful really, but compared to the other sites, it’s slow. There’s also no way to apply rules to set generation, so you can’t depend on reaction cards being available for attacks or trash cards for disposing of curses.

A nifty, but not amazing feature found here is the ability to hover over cards and get a clear text description of the card in question.

Conclusion? Competent, but not snappy enough if you want to charge through random sets. The lack of filtering options and the silly combos you can produce on initial usage put it behind Zack’s generator and the Dominion Card Picker.

#2: Dominion Card Picker
Website: www.chrisdouglas.ca/games/dominion

This randomiser is of similar appearance to Zack’s; in fact, the page says Hiwiller’s effort was an inspiration. Functionally though it’s a bit different, but not wildly so.

The most notable addition is the pre-generated set dropdown, which throws up a selection of cards that should play well together. It even includes the recommended sets from the manuals. I’m not sure where the rest are sourced from (some are from BoardGameGeek), but there’s an extensive range of excellent choices.

While it allows you to select which sets to include in the random generation, the only specific condition you can set is whether reaction cards should be included if at least one attack card is chosen. It’s better than Zack’s generator, in that it allows for reactions other than Moat, but Moat is probably the strongest reaction in that it prevents the effects of an attack completely. So it’s more of a side-grade in terms of features.

The outputted card images are a little on the small side, but it’s not like you’re playing with them. The resolution is more than good enough to see what cards have been selected, so it’s a minor complaint, if one at all. What I love is that it’s by far the snappiest generator – once all the images have been cached results appear straight away when you request a reshuffle.

Overall, it’s nice, slick and quick. I’d like more options to filter the cards, but I’m sure there are players that will appreciate the simplicity.

#1: Dominion Card Randomizer
Website: www.hiwiller.com/dominion

Zack Hiwiller (or more accurately, his blog) introduced me to Dominion, and for that I am massively thankful. It should come as no surprise then, that his Dominion Card Randomizer was the first kingdom card selector I came across and used.

It’s served our group well and for a while, we thought it was the only selector that existed. It was only disappointment with a few of its capabilities that made us search for a better one.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Zack’s randomiser has a lot going for it. You can select any combination of sets, including the unreleased Prosperity expansion and the promo cards. Cards can be ordered by cost or alphabetically, with the former handy for quickly placing cards on the table sensibly. Low-bandwidth or image-averse users can choose to display titles only in the final result, and if you’re after a playable set, you can make sure cards with extra buys, actions and attacks are available. There’s also a checkbox to make sure Moat is included if one or more attack cards are.

The output produced is to the point, with images displayed for all the cards. A nice touch is coloured borders so you can easily see which sets the cards are from. Buttons allow you to deal another ten cards, or start over with new options.

The randomiser is also phone-friendly, but I’ve only read this anecdotally.

What lets the randomiser down is the inability to use the back button to review a previous selection, a side-effect of using code to update the page without refreshing. The “provide a trash card” option also doesn’t guarantee a card that trashes other cards, just one that has trashing as part of its functionality (like Feast or Mining Village).

Besides these niggles, it’s great. Implementing a “save set” option, or at least the ability to hit the back button to see the previous set of generated cards, and an option to have a trash card that can get rid of unwanted cards would make it perfect. As it stands, it’s still the best of the lot.

Conclusion: I’m going to go with Zack’s generator (#1) for creating random sets. However, if you’re after a compiled list of custom-made sets that play well, check out the Dominion Card Picker (#2).

No related posts.

This series of interactive YouTube videos straight from New Zealand puts you in the shoes of a pizza delivery dude stuck in a zombie-infested city. I’ve seen it described as “Zombieland meets Beached As” and, having watched a few clips, it’s a darn accurate assessment.

Could my homeland be any more awesome? Probably, but not by much.

Related posts:

1. Zombies, coming to a Melbourne near you
2. Lifeless, the zombie TV series

Truth is, I underestimated how long it would take to debug. I managed to get the demo feature-complete, but the polish just wasn’t there. I’m really disappointed I didn’t get it done, but I’m continuing to work hard to get it out as soon as possible.

On the upside, setting a deadline helped me focus on what was important and it’s looking good. It also made me chop and change parts of the design that weren’t working, and combat plays a lot better as a result.

The biggest change is the addition of awareness arcs. Originally, each weapon had a firing arc that would determine bullet spread. As time went on, this arc made less and less sense, and the only weapon it applied to in any significant capacity was the sub-machinegun. I wanted to keep the arcs, but disconnect them from weapons while buffing their usefulness.

The result is the awareness arc. Each survivor can be in a focused, normal or heightened state of awareness. These states determine the width of that survivor’s awareness arc. A focused arc grants increased accuracy, but reduced defenses against zombie attacks. A heightened arc reduces accuracy, but the survivor has a better chance of avoiding zombie attacks.

The other big change is that zombies not inside an awareness arc are hidden from view. Each combat you will have to sweep the room using your survivors’ awareness arcs and set where each one should look. This means the cop can be focused on killing zombies, while civilians can make sure he doesn’t get attacked from behind. It also reflects that a lone survivor is more likely to be attacked than a group. Survivors are always aware of zombies directly next to them.

Obviously, a focused arc doesn’t let you cover as much of a room as the heightened arc. Survivors will have access to different arc states depending on their experience level, with a character like the cop able to select from all three and newbies being stuck to one (the normal state).

Melee combat is implemented and working, but I’m not 100% happy with how it works. I’m likely going to cut it from the demo, but it will be the first thing I put back in for subsequent releases. Really, the combat demo will represent an alpha test of the game.

I hope you guys can tear it apart and make it even more awesome.

Related posts:

1. Combat prototype #2 is underway, Zafehouse 2 demo by June (star alignment pending)
2. Zafehouse 2′s shiny new combat window (and mechanics)
3. Who wants a Zafehouse 2 combat video?

The article itself is an extract from a series of essays for the Australia Council, so I’m not entirely sure how it ended up on The Age. It’s possible Mills is completely unaware that his diatribe is being viewed by eyes outside of his regular professional circles, and as such, open to criticism from the industries he so flippantly denounces.

Mills’ piece focuses on the New Media Fund, or specifically, its demolishment. More broadly the article puts forward the need to hold on fiercely to our artistic heritage and that all resources, primarily monetary, should be funnelled into is preservation at the expense of the new, regardless of form or credentials.

You’d think the essay would be entirely academic. Not so. In fact, Mills’ is happy to take low shots at anything he deems “nonsense”:

I opposed it [the New Media Fund] vehemently – and in vain – as it seemed to me just another example of meretricious, self-serving claptrap, which confused content with process, masquerading to the weak-minded as new, with a healthy sense of entitlement to whatever funds might happen to drop from the perch of government.

For a man so deeply involved in the performing arts, an industry propelled by creativity, this is an exceptionally narrow-minded view and, to put it bluntly, an immature one. I cannot see how anyone right of mind would approve of stagnation for any discipline, let alone embrace it with open arms, flowers, and a jar of body chocolate.

That’s not the end of it, however.

I had to read the following paragraph several times before I could fully appreciate its callowness:

No one buys a ticket to the theatre or concert hall to witness something ordinary, something that can be done by any reasonably intelligent person with a modicum of application and training, such as making a computer game or designing an earring.

This does not sound like the opinion of an unbias or informed individual. Far from it. What it does sound like is someone with little regard for what they deem insignificant. Anything they don’t understand or unwilling to expend the time to comprehend should be ignored.

The author’s argument can easily be reversed – with the correct training and education, any reasonably intelligent person can play an instrument or perform on stage. Heck, during my younger years I acted in and directed a number of plays, and I can confidently say that the performing arts and games development share a common but positive afflicition – a thirst for creativity. Both serve as fair outlets for the imagination. Something being “older” doesn’t automatically make it faultless or above question, and it certainly should not be wielded as a weapon to cut down perceived upstarts, especially ones that have proven countless times to be the basis of valid and respected industries for creative and commercial success.

I would go so far as to argue that developing a computer game requires more talent than playing an instrument. With enough practise, anyone can play a piano, guitar or violin competently, as can any discipline reliant on muscle memory. Making a competent computer game? People have been at it years and still churn out stinkers. Computers can also put together songs algorithmically that sound decent (we’ve been doing it since 1995), but ask them to make a computer game of any significant depth and you’re going to struggle.

But I digress. I don’t want to agrue that games are superior in some way to traditional arts, because I don’t believe it to be true. They have their merits and drawbacks, and can be appreciated in myriad ways.

When Roger Ebert (perhaps naively) took to the Internet with his opinion of games and their lack of artistic merit, he eventually relented. While he did not capitulate on his view of games not being art, he did admit his interest in them was minimal, to the point that provided with the hardware and a title to play (thatgamecompany’s Flower), he still declined to give it a shot. As such, could not really assert his judgement as law, and the roaring flamethrowers of gamers everywhere withered in respectful silence. An excellent compromise, I feel.

As long as attitudes like Mills’ prevail, games will never be taken seriously at the higher levels of government where decisions on funding take place. Sadly, I believe it will take a generational shift to oust this view once and for all, or at least temper it with some much-needed humility and common sense.

Let us defend our heritage arts [The Age]

Related posts:

1. EA’s open letter to the R18+ debate, some unrelated ranting by me

A shakycam trailer of The Walking Dead from Comic-Con 2010. Colour me excited, or whatever palette you feel strongly signifies happy.

Is This Zombie TV Show Tipping Its Hat To Dead Rising? [Kotaku AU]

Related posts:

1. Left 4 Dead 2 gets refused classification
2. Lifeless, the zombie TV series
3. Help Zafehouse 2!

Mind you, if the undead do start bashing down our doors, downloads of Zafehouse 2 will be the least of my concerns!

How much do indie PC devs make, anyways? [Gamasutra]

Related posts:

1. Barricading doors 101: How to keep those pesky undead outside
2. Because Farmville isn’t a real game
3. A cop, priest and nurse walk into a zombie apocalypse…

First, history. The original Zafehouse lacked many elements one normally expects from a game. Graphics, a proper tutorial. Sound. These are slowly being rectified in the sequel. Graphics are being taken care of handily, and a tutorial will be implemented once, well, the game is.

Sound… sound was an interesting one. There are many ways to play sounds in Windows and .NET. You can use the basic, in-built functionality in My.Computer. Or you can venture into the slighly more complex world of System.Media.SoundPlayer.

Both, sadly, are kind of garbage if you’re trying to make a game. That is, a game with more than one or two sounds playing at once. There’s also the problem of being limited to PCM as an audio file format. Hey, if I was willing to have Z2 weigh in at a couple of hundred megabytes, then PCM would be fine. Hilariously so.

But I think my download server (and everyone downloading from said server) would be upset. So upset they might convert from downloadees to “I-hate-you-Logan-for-wasting-my-download”…. ees.

So I started investigating Managed DirectX. MDX is a wrapper around the standard DirectX libraries so you can use them in C# and VB .NET, among other languages. DirectSound under MDX didn’t look too foreboding, and I went ahead and implemented a basic audio engine capable of playing multiple sounds and background music.

Now MDX will play anything that resembles a RIFF. Well, anything that resembles a RIFF and contains a PCM or ADPCM stream. Anything else and it will spit at you like a pretentious hydra being served broiled heads instead of boiled ones. Because hydras like boiled heads.

ADPCM isn’t really a compressed stream. It’s just PCM reduced from 16 to 4-bits. Other stuff happens to maintain sound quality, but essentially you end up with something many times smaller than the original PCM. The only problem is, to (barely) match the compression ratio of MP3, Vorbis or WMA, you have to cut out a channel.

Stereo to mono. Which ain’t so bad. Truly, it’s not. And, in some cases, ADPCM can produce audio that sounds better than what a psychoacoustic codec can crank out. As long as you don’t mind a bit of hissing.

But I wasn’t satisifed. I knew I could do better. I was particularly certain of this betterness when I read that Microsoft was encouraging developers to move from MDX to XNA. It gently encouraged this by flipping the bird to MDX.

Yes, I had just written an audio engine in an API no longer supported by MS. Sweet, I thought, and began searching for alternatives.

There are a bunch of free audio engines that work in .NET, but if you ever want to commercialise your product, then you have to fork out megabucks. And I didn’t want to lock myself into that sort of situation. The idea of using a pre-packaged solution didn’t tickle me the right way either.

I fiddled around with Vorbis, but had trouble tracking down a native implementation in VB .NET or C#. I did find one in the Mono repository, and even got it working. Problem was it was slow (Vorbis-to-PCM conversion, specifically), and it still relied on MDX.

Sucky? You bet. Extra sucky because I know squat about the inner workings of Vorbis and had no idea how to optimise. I didn’t really want to spend time doing it. I have a game to finish, after all.

XNA appeared my only option. After getting the libraries loaded, I realised it was too high level. Which means it didn’t give me enough control over what it was doing. Much sighing occurred.

Then… I found XAudio2. Its documentation was hidden away in MSDN, but there it was. XAudio2 is Microsoft’s replacement for DirectSound, and it’s the underlying tech for XNA’s audio stuff. XAudio2 is nifty. It would have been even more nifty if all the documentation wasn’t as verbose as a mute sports announcer. Oh, the documentation is for C++ only, so make that a mute sports announcer who only speaks Esperanto.

But XAudio2 supports xWMA out of the box. xWMA is a stripped-down version of WMA encased in a RIFF container. Yay! It was exactly what I was after. I grabbed SlimDX, which allows you to access XAudio2 (and other multimedia-related libraries) via a managed wrapper, and buried myself to the armpits in code for a weekend.

Eventually, I came up with something – dare I say it – sound. An audio engine blindingly superior to what I’d previously concocted. It plays up to 64 xWMA-encoded sounds flawlessly and with only a minor hit to memory consumption (much less than the MDX monster I was working with).

Only now I need to include SlimDX with Zafehouse 2. I went from a 9MB audio package encoded in ADPCM, to a 7MB xWMA one with a 3MB DLL. To be fair, the new audio is all stereo (which makes the music sound that much better), but I still feel like I’ve run in a giant circle.

The circle does crack out some fine dual-speaker tunes, though.

Related posts:

1. Streamlining items and supplies in Zafehouse 2
2. Zafehouse 2, now with pathfinding (and outside movement)
3. Zafehouse 2, drugs and you

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Check what famous writer you write like… [I Write Like...]

No related posts.

Combat’s looking solid right now, as you can see from the above screenshot. Lots of shells, blood and graphical niceties exploding about the place. What’s not so solid is what happens outside of combat. You know, the walking around, searching for gear part of the game.

See, I don’t feel there’s enough going on when you’re not fighting zombies. Sure, you might say, that’s okay – it’s all about putting the undead back to bed – but I don’t think it is. I think there needs to be more going on when the hungry masses aren’t directly in your face.

I can recognise when I’m too close to a project, so I’m putting the call out for some ideas. At the very least, it’ll rejuice my drying creative cogs.

Best to start with a list of things you can do:
1) Move around inside buildings and out
2) Trade items, including ammo, weapons
3) Searching furniture for items
4) Breaking furniture for barricades
5) Barricading. Or yeah, barricading. I meant to show you guys this a lot sooner:

Neat, right?
6) Dispense medicine, break bottles, drink
7) Erm… that’s it, really.

What I believe needs to happen is for more “stuff” involving the survivors themselves. Tweaking personalities or statistics… some element of micromanagment. Something you do on a turn by turn basis to produce… stuff, be it a resources or survivor improvement.

See what I mean? I’m not really churning out the killer ideas here. That’s where you come in.

So, come in!

Related posts:

1. Combat prototype #2 is underway, Zafehouse 2 demo by June (star alignment pending)
2. Streamlining items and supplies in Zafehouse 2
3. A quick Zafehouse 2 screenshot

Embarrassing game magazine covers [GamesRadar]

Related posts:

1. Heh, that old gag

:P

No related posts.

This sad situation arises because:

1) Gaming magazines have all but abandoned original covers for high-res publisher art. Why spend $1000 on a photo shoot when you can slap on whatever images the publisher has on their media FTP? During my tenure on Atomic, we strived to do neat fronts every month. It’s a shame the mag’s recent desertion to gaming-only covers has forsaken this edict… now it just blends into the newsstand like everything else.

2) Publishers promise exclusives… that aren’t exclusives. You only find this out after the mag goes onsale. This happened more than a few times while I was in the magazine biz. Fortunately Atomic was burned only once or twice. After that, we learnt our lesson. It was hilarious watching the bigger mainstream mags getting caught again and again. Going by the above display, it looks like nothing’s changed.

Using precanned art for covers is nothing new and it does work (that is it sells), otherwise we’d have stopped doing it years ago. Does it matter that it makes a mag look like a marketing brochure instead of a serious industry journal? Or that if another mag runs the same art both products look ridiculous (not to mention creatively phoned-in)?

Apparently not.

No related posts.

Update #4: Raven is looking into the problem!

Update #3: Grab v1.3. I’ve fixed a bug that was preventing backups from being created. I also added detection routines to make sure the Singularity path in the registry is correct. Thanks to those who were brave enough to test the patch and find this one for me.

Update #2: v1.2 is available now. I’ve added an undo capability (basically a glorified file copy). It requires backups of the original files created by the program.

Update #1: So some testing revealed that v1.0 had a minor problem… minor enough to make it not work. I’ve uploaded v1.1 which seems to do the trick.

Inspired by this hacktastic workaround for Singularity’s texture streaming issues on PC, I decided to whip up a tool to automate all that byte-changing and hopefully rectify the problem.

I don’t have the game, but I’ve tested the tool as well as I can with dummy files. It should work, but I’m not quite ready to release this to the world at large. If anyone wants to give it a go, I’d love some feedback. Mainly on whether it does anything. Don’t worry, it makes backups of the files before modifying them so it’s easily reversed if something goes wrong.

What it should do is open up Coalesced_INT.bin and increase the texture streaming pool size to 400. It will then calculate the SHA1 hash for the new file and write it to Singularity.exe. That’s it!

Note: I’m sure Raven will get round to fixing this fairly soon… but then, I thought the same thing about Mass Effect 2′s processor affinity problems.

Download Singularity Texture Streaming Patch v1.32 [Playwrite]

And, if you’d like to do it manually, here are the instructions.
Singularity Texture Streaming Fix [DEAR WANDY]

Related posts:

1. Mass Effect 2 1.01 patch released, dual-core slowdown still present?
2. MassAffinity v0.2 released
3. NVIDIA Forceware 196.75 adds anti-aliasing support for Mass Effect 2

Whimsical metaphors aside, I decided to do something about my .NET focus and its destructive hold on my game development future. So, I present the above screenshot, a little piece I’m working on in Unity. It’s inspired by polyhedral dice and the excellent Dice Wars.

Unity is really, really good. Not only does it support three scripting languages (including C#, yah!), but you can switch between a “Game” and “Editor” view and examine the properties of objects at runtime. It provides an unprecedented level of debugging power, and problems that’d normally take hours to track down and fix can take minutes or seconds in Unity thanks to its potent visualisation abilities. It could do with a script debugger, but I hear that’s on the cards for Unity 3, due in… August. I think.

Unity also allows publishing to iPhone, PC, Mac, Wii and web. You need to make a few purchases to access the iPhone and Wii functionality, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing the gruntwork in the free version.

As for Zafehouse 2… I’m still keen to get a demo out by the end of July. I can’t say it’ll be fully functional, but it will give you a taste of what the game has become. I’ve reduced the scope and halved the length of the a Z2 day to 12 hours. I didn’t feel the intensity was there for 24, and the systems don’t allow for interesting gameplay for such a lengthy period of time.

Looking back at the code, there are a lot of things I’d have done differently. The one building/multiple floors idea was a good one and I’m not sure why I abandoned it. There’s also a heavy focus on combat, which is not what survival horror is about. The original intent was to make Z2 strategic, not tactical, yet that’s where it’s ended up.

I have some ideas for Z3 (yeah, yeah, finish the second one first, I hear you say) and I think Z2 has helped me focus in on what a strategic survival horror game should be.

Related posts:

1. Streamlining items and supplies in Zafehouse 2
2. Oz developer news in the local media
3. Combat prototype #2 is underway, Zafehouse 2 demo by June (star alignment pending)

No, it wasn’t RC’d by the Classification Board – it seems the developer’s convinced the Oz-US latency will make the shooter unbearable. It’s not prepared to cough up the cash to establish local servers and so, the only option left was to not sell it at all.

Fair enough, I say. If I were them, I’d rather put up with six months of angst than five years of it. If Realtime Worlds wants its fill of fanboy ranting about pings, there’s myrid Counter-Strike forums a Google Search away.

I couldn’t tell you the exact costs of getting a server up and running in Australia, let alone the price of ongoing maintenance. I did however rip this comment from the Kotaku post that shines a gilded light on the situation. The context is Heroes of Newerth, but it’s still relevant. Definitive, even:

“We have received some initial prices on hosting boxes in Australia:

Our boxes on average use 4,000-5,000 GB of data transfer a month, we get these boxes for roughly $200 USD each in EU/USA

Provider 1: $1250 per month for hardware, $11,250.00 per month for bandwidth per box, box would support 110 concurrent users
Provider 2: $1100 per month for hardware, $22,500 per month for bandwidth per box, would support about 220 concurrent users.

We have also made inquiries at Internode and are awaiting a quote back from them (it was requested last week Tuesday). So as you can see, the economics of hosting boxes in AU is just not there currently.”

The origin of this information can be tracked down to the Heroes of Newerth forum, and it looks legitimate to me.

Yes, Australia has expensive bandwidth, around four to five times as costly as the US. That’s why we’ll never see local MMO servers. Glad I stopped playing them a year and a half ago.

Related posts:

1. Strong dollar strikes again, Modern Warfare 2 US$30 more in Australia

If you’re a Monkey Island fan, you might want to check out Jolly Rover. It’s a new point-and-click adventure from Aussie developer Brawsome, and it’s coming to Steam early next month.

Expected an interview from Andrew Goulding, left disappointed.

Screenplay
Developing for the iPhone

Demand for Australian programmers who can create applications for the iPhone is far exceeding supply, making it difficult and expensive for many companies who want to turn a great idea into a popular app.

Jason Hill continues to reinforce Screenplay’s Oz pedigree with a great interview with Conor O’Kane (formerly of Tantalus) and comments from Klicktock’s Matthew Hall. Setting the standard, and setting it high.

On the interview itself – why no questions about the iPhone 4.0 OS agreement? No good learning to use Torque or Unity for the express purpose of iPhone development if you can’t use them for… iPhone development! Worst case scenario, of course.

News.com.au
Brisbane Studio Behind Popular App Fruit Ninja

Since its release on April 21, the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch application — a game which involves slicing fruit like a ninja — has been downloaded by more than 400,000 people worldwide.

Cashing in on the iPad wave, but still good to see the local focus, especially on Fruit Ninja, which has only just started rolling its recognition snowball. Includes a couple of catchy, but info-light comments from the developer.

The Age
iPad games put Oz on the map
Video covering Firemint’s titles. Prefer my news in written form, but I’m sure this will be more digestible to the wordphobics.

Related posts:

1. Finally, an article on the local industry… from IGN!
2. What’s wrong with the latest Develop 100?
3. Strong dollar strikes again, Modern Warfare 2 US$30 more in Australia

Or, to put it another way: Too many.

I was going to find the time to editorialise my views on piracy and how it’s soured the attitudes of developers towards the PC as a platform – including my own. Before I could, the excellent David Wong over at Cracked has done it for me, using the Humble Indie Bundle as a launchpad.

From the last part of his article:

That [the Humble Indie Bundle] was a bundle of DRM-free independent games that, combined, would normally sell for $80. The makers offered the bundle as a direct download to the consumer – no corporate middle men – and let customers pay whatever they wanted… If ever there was a measure of the gaming community’s sense of entitlement, this was it.

US$9.18 turned out to be the average amount people were willing to part with for to own the bundle’s five games. Not a great return on investment for the pack’s US$80 RRP, but it’s been shown before that the income produced from a “pay-what-you-want-model” is mediated by what people can afford rather than perceived value.

This isn’t why too many gamers are spoiled idiots. No, it’s the next nugget that drives the point home:

More than a quarter of the downloaders stole it outright. That’s right. More than a quarter believed that even one penny was too much to offer in return for the hundreds of hours of labor it took to create the games.

Are we talking about P2P? No, no we are not:

…This is just the people who pirated the games directly off of the game maker’s server. In other words, they intentionally used the game developers’ resources so, in addition to paying nothing, they would actually cost them additional money on bandwidth.

At least going the P2P method you’re getting it via the path of least resistance. From a purely psychological perspective, it makes sense. But to grab it from the developer’s own hardware? As Wong puts it, you’re not only depriving the creators of well-deserved income, you’re reaching into their pockets and taking what they already have.

In short: You’ve gone from idiot to full-bird dickhead.

We need to kill the mentality of developers being “The Man”; a duplicitous and intangible entity you need to boycott or steal from to convince it of the evil of its ways. Developers are people. They have families and homes. And they need to make a living, just like anyone else.

If you want to make a statement, sure, don’t buy a game. But stealing and then playing it? Can you think of anything more hypocritical?

5 Reasons It’s Still Not Cool to Admit You’re a Gamer [Cracked]

Related posts:

1. EA’s open letter to the R18+ debate, some unrelated ranting by me
2. Freeplay 2009: Listen to me talk about fan-people
3. What’s wrong with the latest Develop 100?