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I write like…

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

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

Sweet.

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

Help Zafehouse 2!

Yes, you can help Zafehouse 2 be better!

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.

Continue reading ‘Help Zafehouse 2!’

It really does look like they’re all taking a power dump

As per GamesRadar’s witty prose. Seeing as we’re already on the topic of magazine covers, it seemed appropriate.

Embarrassing game magazine covers [GamesRadar]

Because Farmville isn’t a real game

Oh snap, Zynga. These guys got you real good!

:P

Heh, that old gag

Couldn’t help but giggle at this post on Kotaku, showing the latest covers for the (I’m guessing) US versions of Gamepro and Edge.

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.

Singularity automated streaming texture patch

Update #5: Raven has released a patch that fixes the streaming texture issue. Yet from what I hear, the FOV is still not as good as it could be and cannot be edited.

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]

Rolling with Unity, Z2 update

I’ve realised that VB .NET is a dead end when it comes to building games. I’ve grown fond of its quirks and comfortable with its loquacious prose, but I can’t escape the fact .NET limits me to Windows. Yes, I could court XNA for its Xbox 360 connections and Mono, which opens up roads to Mac and even iPhone, but I’m not prepared to embrace the technical wrangling required to make this orchestra of cross-platform love sleep happily in the same bed.

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.

Continue reading ‘Rolling with Unity, Z2 update’

Why are there no MMO servers in Australia?

Realtime Worlds’ GTA-inspired MMO APB won’t be released in Australia, according to this post at Kotaku Australia.

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.

Oz developer news in the local media

Kotaku AU
Aussie Pirate Adventure To Walk Steam Plank

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.

Gamers are spoiled idiots

Not all gamers. Heck, that’d be one hell of a generalisation. I’d say quite a few. A lot. A fair share. A decent chunk.

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]