The Bulldozer: AMD vs SL

Image via Wikipedia

It’s extremely depressing to hear about AMD‘s new Bulldozer CPU. For one, I’m running an aged Pentium4, and AMD systems are virtually non-existent here in Sri Lanka.  Actually, very few computer users here are actually aware of AMD – saying “I have an AMD Opteron” would immediately be met with a blank stare and “uh…is that a Pentium?”

But this is a country that measures VGA power in GB – people say “I have a 1 GB VGA, why can’t I play Crysis on full?” Ask them what their VGA is and the ysay “uh…Nvidia.” Nvidia what? “Uh….Nvidia Radeon”.
Such is the nature of life here.

I ramble. My apologies. The real tragedy is the Bulldozer. On paper, the Bulldozer is epic. It’s a radical step forward by AMD, and the recent Guinness record for overclocking [8.4 Ghz] is held by an 8-core Bulldozer CPU.

The sad fact is that it will be a long, LONG time before Bulldozer gets within a stone’s throw of Core’s popularity, and the recent benchmarks hurt Bulldozer a LOT. The casual user will look at the Bulldozer benchmark and see that it performs sadly below standard when compared with a Core i7. Few people see beyond the dotted line, which is that Windows 7 cannot take advantage of the Bulldozer CPU. Apparently we’re to wait for Windows 8.

Meanwhile everybody knows Intel is working on Ivy Bridge, their successor the Sandy Bridge CPUs. Who’s betting that Windows 8 will also be optimized for Ivy? Thus, AMD loses the edge [again] to Intel. Microsoft is partners with AMD, so there’s no telling whether we’ll start seeing better AMD support on Windows; but MS is unlikely to irk the biggest CPU manufacturer of the planet – Intel – over AMD. It’s called business.

AMD is pushing Bulldozer all the way; they’ve publicly admitted plans for third and fourth generations of the CPU.  A pity, since we’ll probably never see it here. AMD knows how to innovate, but Intel knows how to market their products.

How do they rise up / CRUNCHER

January, the 27th: 2012. The Global Game Jam kicks off today.

I’m writing this post in a state of black depression. January 27th, and no word whatsoever from Cruncher 2012, Sri Lanka‘s largest  game development “fiasco”. The winners were announced in September. Last year. And no word: no prizes, no prize money, no certificates, nothing. The so-called “Institute of Engineers, Sri Lanka” is silent. Nobody answers their phones.

4250, as a team, has also failed. For the record: henceforth, 4250 is me and me alone. My experiments with Down Under have taken me along some interesting directions; strangely enough, it’s being slowly gobbled up by a side project, which I’ll reveal later.

I once worked on a Godfather-style story for a game called Omerta. While the game didn’t get off the ground due to art issues, it brought me into contact with a thoroughly impressive engine by Chronotek called the TDS engine. Basically, it’s an advanced top-down-shooter engine that uses Game Maker and can be handled by anyone from a novice to an advanced user.

The side project was initially a small shooter with this engine. Due to my artistic limitations [I'll admit - I can draw landcapes in pencil, but I fail spectacularly at important things like player characters], I knocked up a sort of 8-bit arena shooter. This, for better or the worse, is what is merging with Down Under. The 8-bit graphics have gone, but I’ve kept the blocky effect and added a bit of shading here and there. I want to work on something colorful, something loveable, something I can have fun testing. At the same time I’m intent on preserving the fast, scripted shooter action I envisioned for Down Under.

Wow. How far an idea will take us, eh? I’ve always been a bit like this – drawing a cloud and ending up with a Pokemon, for instance. The Maze started out as a zombie arena shooter. But this was a more conscious and sudden choice than the evolution of the Maze: for once, I want to work on something light and cheerful. The world’s ugly enough as it is.

The best of both in level design?

This is something I thought up while tossing around a few plans for Down Under, the Abuse-like platform shooter I mentioned. I’m forcibly keeping myself off game development until A/Ls, but that doesn’t mean I can’t dream.

Procedural generation is not a new thing.  It’s been around almost since the first video games, when systems didn’t have enough storage space to hold that many levels. And I’m frankly obsessed with it, even though I know very little about the complex world of terrain generation algorithms.

So I was in class, sketching out a long-winded terrain generation alg. for sidescrollers [read: Down Under], thinking about how this one would play out. I had been thinking of using triggers and scripted events to maintain “a stream of mercenaries” jumping on the player, guns blazing – and I quickly realized that if I implemented this new process, out went almost all the control I was expecting over the player. It wouldn’t be a speedrun campaign anymore.
So my next question is, why not both? Consider a game where the main level, say a path from A to B, is one created personally by the level designer. Now this path, this level, has many offshoots, which are other levels spawned by a terrain generator.

And these levels, of course, are much higher-risk, higher-reward than  A-B path; this would satisfy both speedrunners, explorers, not to mention introducing a voluntary and more natural difficulty system compared to the “Easy” “Hard” “Insane” selection. It’s logical – stick to the main level if you want to pay it safe; head out and explore if you want – but on your own head it is. Here there be dragons.

#SOPAjam: stand up for your rights

If you haven’t heard of SOPA, you’ve been living under a rock. Possibly one buried all the way in the earth’s crust. The SOPA bill is, frankly, a gross violation of practically everything we’ve taken for granted on the Internet. The majority of the Internet shares my view – that those daft enough to propose it should be whacked, preferrably with a length of lead pipe. There’s a whole lot of hullabaloo surrounding the bill, and as it turns out, the bill’s author is also involved in a copyright issue. Talk about irony: clea proof that crooks run the world, or at least think they do.

Enter the #SOPAjam, the newest venture in anti-SOPA measures. What’s it about? Simple. Create an anti-SOPA game, then upload it to anywhere on the internet. I’m tapping this out in the hope that you will respond. Why SHOULDN’T you? Game developers will be among those hardest hit by SOPA; if this thing gets passed, out goes posting trailers, literals, and a whole other set of stuff.

Developers, netizens, stand up for your rights. Get on Twitter, find the #SOPAjam tag, and started game making. You’ve got till Jan 18th. And in case we fail, get those missiles ready.

Related articles

• Going dark for SOPA (hyperorg.com)
• Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian On SOPA: ‘It’s Going To Break The Internet’ (businessinsider.com)
• Boing Boing added to list of sites that will go dark on January 18th to protest SOPA / PIPA (100gf.wordpress.com)
• Awesome YouTube Video Explains Why PIPA And SOPA Are Bad For The Internet Users; You Should Be Watching (essayboard.com)

The death of time; Minecraft’s domination; and more

Image via Wikipedia

Contrary to popular belief:
1) There are only 24 hours in a day
2) There is no known cure for Minecraft addition
3) There is no known cure for gamedev addiction, either

With IndieGraph running smoothly, I’ve established the one-article-per-day credo – very rough given my time schedule, but I wanted to get good content out there; done. We’ve goot indie reviews, developer interviews, and even an article on the
biggest Minecraft clones – enough for any site to be proud of. Tick that checkbox; time to slow down, and keep ‘em coming.
I recently started playing Minecraft [unlike everyone else, I prefer to wait for 1.0 before I commit myself], and it’s truly, incredibly amazing how addictive the game is. Especially once you get the Yogbox mods up and running [had some issues with the installer, so I patched the .jar manualy]. Yesterday, for example: having recently added a balcony to my fortress // mansion-in-the-mountain, I watched the sun set [it's beautiful, even in blocks] and knocked off a creeper who fell onto my balcony; it fell a long, long distance into  the pool below.
And then, the next day, I saw a cat, chasing a red fish. The cat fell into the water. I jumped in after it, but I couldn’t get it up: the thing was mewing pitifully inside – and it died.

Image via Wikipedia

Words cannot describe how sad I felt. I trudged about aimlessly, killed all the fish in the water in anger, and went over to watch the woodcutter before returning to my fortress. It’s amazing how Minecraft – this game with its block graphics,
no real Ai to speak of, and such – has managed to affect me on such a deep, deep level. The cat died in the water; I couldn’t help it, and I felt sad. And frustrated.

How many modern games, with HD graphics and all the next–gen technology, struggle to bring out these feeling in the heart of the player? Sadness. Fear. Longing. Yet here they are, brought out perfectly in a game initially coded by one man. I got stranded one Minecraft day, and climbed some trees to be safe from the [now more deadly] Mo’ creatures mobs that haunt the night. While on the tree, I saw the light of my house in the mountainside – and I felt longing; a need to return, to shut the door and walk around in safety. Similarly, at night I climb the mountain and look out at the moon and the lights of the Guild.
It’s beautiful.
There is no other word for it. The game is beautiful, and even more so because it is almost purely a design win. Minecraft isn’t addictive because of the graphics. Or the great, epic music tracks [what epic music tracks]? Or the Kinect[tm] support and the 16-person multiplayer or the downloadable content [something modern games flog to death]. It’s addictive because of it’s gameplay.

If there is one game that we can point to when we want to prove that gameplay > graphics, it’s Minecraft. In fact, Minecraft does this so well that similar games are automatically termed Minecraft clones – in a way, it’s established monopoly over the design, inspired by Infiniminer as it is. It’s the ultimate sandbox. A Minecraft remake with HD graphics, more mobs and human-esque Ai would still be called a Minecraft clone, and people would return to the original, with all it’s flaws and pixelated beauty.

Score one for Mojang and Notch.

Related articles

• GR Pick: Fan Creates Tiny 3D ‘Minecraft’ Village (gamerant.com)
• Mojang Admits Minecraft – Pocket Edition Plans May Have Been “A Huge Mistake” (escapistmagazine.com)
• Playing Minecraft at work? Connect Github’s Hubot to your server (minefold.com)
• Like Playing Minecraft? Here are 6 Fun Games Similar to Minecraft (vikitech.com)
• The best Minecraft tools (onsoftware.en.softonic.com)

Construct 2!

If I had to vote, I’d pick Construct as one of my all-time favorite freewares. I’m not going to get into the whole Game Maker-vs-Contruct-vs-Everything Else debate; each to his own. However, while I haven’t officially made a completed game in Construct, I HAVE poked around . . . .and what I saw was an incredibly powerful game creator that’s leagues ahead of all the other freeware.

* I admit, I collect 2D game makers. People collect stamps. I collect software.

Anyway.  I was pleasantly surprised to see Construct 2 on the spiffy website Scirra has got up and running. And they’re offering the new Construct free as well. Splendid job, folks! The free version has got a few limitations, such as only 4 layers [think RMXP], but overall it’s a splendid offer for a high-level HTML5 game creation package.  Have a look for yourself:

 

Now here it gets a bit titchy.  The free version is magic: hell, it’s free. The early adopter price is a promotion offer, but even at retail price that Standard offer is a steal, especially for the money-impaired [read: poor] folks like Yours Truly. The business edition is, however, NOT that great, considering Game Maker prices its own HTML 5 tool at $99. I’m not going to run up a lengthy comparison of both these softwares; I’ve used too little of both to be qualified.

Onwards. My exploration led me to the Construct forums, where  I naturally dug around for good games to put up on Indiegraph. Not much, I’m afraid: most of it’s tech demos. They’re very powerful tech demos, but it appears to me that few developers have sat down to finish a piece of work with Construct. I’m not passing judgement: every tool has a similar phase. As least Contruct, from the day of release, has been recognized as being pretty powerful – unlike Game Maker, who’s first incarnation was cast off as a “programmer’s toy”.
Bear in mind that Scirra has already released the DX-9 based Construct [Contruct Classic] as completely free, open-source product.  Given the power of the original Construct [which came out-of-the box with features like DX9 rendering and Xbox controller support], one can quite honestly expect Construct 2 to make some serious ripples in the game development world. For certain I’m going to have a good poke around. I recommend you do, too.

And now for that download button!
 

What a week!

< Just found out WordPre’s 2001 Annual Report – thank you, WordPress! You folks are a mazing>
I now have some understanding of what people mean when they refer to the A/L Crunch. School has started again with a vengeance[ it’s bye-bye to all the freedom I enjoyed in the holidays. I barely go on Facebook anymore – Twitter once every two days or so. Most of my time has been tied up with Indiegraph, which is coming on simply fantastic. We has one hiccup – integrating a magazine crew – but the boat has been restored. I’m getting more and more active on the YYG and GMC as a side-effect.

What od game development? All but halted, except for the Virtual Pet Projekt, which I now doubt the team will complete. The story of 4250; the others flap around talking until Yudhanjaya steps in, at which point even the talking goes down and I’m left to slough through the project alone. I refuse to step in and restart it; they’ve got to learn to do things – or f*** off. I’m fed up of holding hands. Anyone who takes one month to figure out Game Maker or StencylWorks is pretty pointless from a gamedev perspective.

Happily, Sulaiman is forging ahead, trying out Unity; we’ve got a project in line, something exclusive to the two of us. No worries there. He’s got the drive.

As for me, myself: in doing my research for the VPet project, I found out quite a lot of things – such as luke_escude’s GMech, a  Steam-like app for Game Maker projects. It’s under constant improvement, and is something I’m itching to work with. I’m thinking of a tower defense game. Down Under has fallen by the wayside, because a lot of coders, artists and musicians from the YYG forums have teamed up to make something similar, but a LOT bigger. Think Minecraft on Mars. I’m among them.  The Maze has also passed 1066 downloads, so . . .well, I think I can relax for a bit. And get on with my A/Ls.

 

On the education side of things, I’ve picked up CSS and HTML  from IT tuition. And series mathematics in tuition. And electric field from Physics tuition. Wait, what did I learn from school? Nothing.

Roguelikes coming back?

Roguelikes are a type of game that relies heavily on procedural content generation to assemble levels and even enemies. Often referred to as dungeon crawlers, most roguelikes cast you as a warrior traversing a deep underground area, with each level being created by the game on the fly.

Once upon a time, roguelikes used to be quite popular. Just as military shooters get the blood pumpin’ today, vast, blotchy caverns and Tolkien-ish plots used to be a staple of the gaming life. Now those blotchy pixel and procedurally generated games have given way to more cinematic, epic, 3D adventures. Deus Ex. Mass Effect. Skyrim. We’ve grown bigger and better at almost everything, save one: the joy of random levels, of finding new, unexpected things, of being able to run through a game without a wiki – that’s been lost. And entire generation of gamers my age barely know anything beyond Call of Duty, Need For Speed and Warcraft.

Though recently, roguelikes seem to be returning. Torchlight and Diablo III  are bringing the fight back on the 3D level, while games like Edmund Mcmillen‘s the Binding of Isaac are slowly bringing back the joys of 2D dungeon crawling to the modern gamer. Lately, I can’t help but notice that the “#D is everything” debate is wearing thin, and indies are straying off the Angry Birds path and onto procedural content, and eventually on to roguelikes. Nethack’s being reincarnated, so to speak, as a new generation of “retro” games. I’ve got a review for one of them [ Legends of Yore ] in the background as I type this. Even Minecraft, come to think of it, has certain roguelike elements.

I can’t help marvelling at the power of roguelikes. From my own tussles with procedural game development, I know how powerful it can be [and how difficult it is to get right]. A roguelike’s a game that never runs out of maps, never stops delivering new content; a game that, if enjoyable enough, will last you a lifetime. A good game designer has to balance the gameplay of a roguelike down to pinpoint levels  – there’s no set pieces here, no previously choreographed cutsenes, nobody telling the player to “Move to Point A and flank the soldiers at B, Private”. you’re essentially putting the player in the hands of the machine, so you better tell it exactly how it should go about things. There’s a lot more to it than just building a level generator and poking in a few Elvish items.

I’m getting sleepy now. Nevermind; my rant is at an end.  Final word: Roguelikes are coming back [they appear to] as indies, and I for one welcome them. It’s time we got something unknown to explore.

Related articles

• ROGUES ROGUES EVERYWHERE but there is unfortunately a more limited selection for Macs (ask.metafilter.com)
• Roguelike Radio: The Binding of Isaac (rockpapershotgun.com)
• Potions And Pitfalls: My Year In Roguelikes (rockpapershotgun.com)

IndieGraph: we’re getting bigger

I’ve stayed away from 4250games for almost two days now. The reason: IndieGraph’s expanding into a magazine. I’ve teamed up with dragonwing over at Golden Claw Games [http://www.goldenclaw.net/] to make the IndieGraph magazine a reality.

Why a magazine, when we were fine as we were? Well, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. Seeing the number of indie magazines that have bit the dust is depressing, but now we’ve got content ; and now we’ve also got superb writers. Christopher Newton [my old friend from the YYG, bunnypopop] debuted with a pretty solid review. We’re discussing stuff; everyone’s on their toes – work will resume at lightspeed once the initial ideas and responsibilities are hammered out. In short, we’re kicking.

STATUS REPORT: As for our virtual pet widget, I’ve had little contact with Kushan and Dave; new year activities have kept us confined to our homes. However, I’ve found a way around our graphical limitations. A lot of high-quality online virtual pets exist that we can’t compete with. I don’t want to run up a small Flash widget against, say, Moshimonsters. However, my search for monster graphics let me down a different, and altogether more unique path: the virtual pet’s going to become something . . . well, a lot familiar and altogether less animalistic. Cryptic post? I’ll keep it that way until we have something up and running.

Hit the ground running – with StencylWorks?

I, as far as my individual efforts are concerned, am off gamedev. Call if a New Year’s resolution, if you will, though I don’t have much truck with that kinda thing. I have 7 months left for my finals and it’s time to pull through with my studies. In 7 months – freedom; to pursue my degree, to work out nonstop at the gym, to accept the offers from my friend’s COD4 clan and be a competitive gamer, and to make games.

Goodbye, Abuse-style thingy -
Wait, it’s only 7 months. And trust me: Down Under is going to be BIG. Not Abuse-big, but big in platformer sense; think Abuse meets Knytt meets …. Karoshi. Who knows how good the game will be? I don’t, but I’m gonna do my level best.

Meanwhile, the others @ 4250 [yes, the "silent" others] have started up a new project with my assistance; a virtual pet. I’m not going into details, but *ahem* this isn’t your average “pet”.

We decided to go Flash -  for monetization purposes, but mostly because Flash, as a way of building games, offers us far more coverage than Game Maker.  There’s so many Flash games sites out there; tiny compared to the number of people who distribute freeware .exes. After ambling about a bit, we cracked open StencylWorks. And AM I impressed! It’s not all accessible on the first go to someone who’s used to GM – but one hour with StencylWorks, and you’re converted. It’s yet another “Make games without coding platform” [we need to speed] but this one’s done right. You slot in logic loops ad actions like pieces from a puzzle. I’m enthralled; building the game is like playing tetris. Wow.

Related articles

• Time to Code….. (redsundevelopment.wordpress.com)
• VIDEO: Webscape: Build your own games (news.bbc.co.uk)