22 Oct 2011, 09:08
In a couple of Gamasutra blog posts, Adam Saltsman (of ‘Canabalt’ fame) ranted against what he feels are ‘evil’ game design systems. I characterized his arguments as ‘hysterical’, which is perhaps a bit unfair since rants are meant to be hot. Anyway, at some point I felt compelled to write a long reply, and I’m reposting it here. I’ve edited it only slightly, so it’s possible that some of it is confusing outside of the context of the original discussion.
My guidelines are not for gamers; they’re for humans. My guidelines are not about styles of game or difficulty of game; they’re about treating players with a modicum of respect.
Now, we agree that all players and all humans should be treated with respect. But there is no inherent lack of respect in ensuring that your game encourages players to pay if they like the game and want to enjoy more of it. If anything, you are asking players to respect YOU as a creator by paying something for the enjoyment they derive from your work. Short of a pure donation model, this encouragement must affect the product you create in some ways. That doesn’t make the creator greedy, which seems to be Adam’s characterization of the monetization process.
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08 Oct 2011, 02:00
If you played with the Stage3D spinning cube sample I linked in the previous post, you will notice one thing: the vertex colors in the vertex buffer are given as 3 floats (red, green and blue). This is rather wasteful in most cases because color components often vary between 0.0 and 1.0, and it’s more efficient to specify vertex colors (including alpha) as a single 32-bit value. For example, in hexadecimal notation, 0xFF800040 would mean alpha of 1.0 (0xFF), blue 0.5 (0x80), green 0 (0x00) and red 0.25 (0x40).
If you look in the Stage3D docs, you will find the constant Context3DVertexBufferFormat.BYTES_4 to use in the call to Context3D.setVertexBufferAt(). But if you naively just change the vertex buffer array to turn each vertex color’s set of 3 components into a single hex value, make dataPerVertex = 4 instead of 6, and use BYTES_4 for va1, then you will find that the colors are coming out wrong. Why? Because the function VertexBuffer3D.uploadFromVector() always stores the values from the Vector in floating point format. Of course! This is the most common situation for the components of the vertex positions, normals, texture coordinates and such. But we need our BYTES_4 color value to be stored verbatim as a 32-bit uint.
Vector. and uploadFromVector() do not give you control over the byte format of value. How do you solve this?
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06 Oct 2011, 08:06
A couple of days ago, Adobe released to the masses a new version of their Flash Player, and an updated SDK. The biggest change (for me at least) is the inclusion of hardware-accelerated 3D, known as Stage3D. Here’s a quick tour of what I did to compile and run my first Stage3D program (Windows 7 PC but should be applicable everywhere). Useful because the Adobe site is not really clear about this.
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29 Sep 2011, 21:50
I have been playing around with HTML5, Canvas and WebGL. Not a lot to show for it, but at least I forced myself to write a bit again. Check it out here if you’re curious, and good luck reaching a score of 150 on Lesson 5!
By the way, for some reason Firefox has started to run Lesson 5 rather slow in both my PCs. I’m pretty sure it used to be a rock solid 60 fps back when I wrote the game, but at some point either upgrading past Firefox 5, or upgrading to Windows 7, has made it slow.
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24 Sep 2011, 12:25
I may be getting interested in writing stuff again with more depth and detail, appropriate (even if small) audience, and with clearer ownership than social networks provide. Twitter is cool as a sort of RSS aggregator; Facebook has become intrusive, annoying and just generally inadequate for anything but on-the-fly photo and YouTube sharing; and Google+ has flatlined. In preparation for more writing, I have added a WordPress blog to my site, because my old blog system was fun to write but boring to maintain and extend.
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30 Jun 2011, 22:53
12 May 2011, 12:44
Time for that old laptop to receive Ubuntu 11.04!
Er…
Apparently, the graphics card is too old to run the fancy new Unity UI. Ah well, in any case, it’s a good idea to have a working Linux machine.
Then, the same problem as before. And I hate myself for not detailing precisely what I did to speed up the HDD. I need to fix this ASAP because the system has started doing massive checks to update packages and the machine is completely unusable.
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22 Apr 2011, 00:44
I wrote a minimalistic photo gallery for my wife. It’s a quick mix of php and MySQL on the server, css/html page, and some Javascript+jQuery for a still unfinished slideshow function.
The layout spec was:
– left-side navigation column – picture to the right of the navigation, with a title centered underneath – work with pictures of varying sizes – a screen-wide footer – as little else as possible
I wanted to make it as friendly as possible to screen sizes and form factors, so that even in the smallest or weirdest screen, you would see as much of the picture as possible.
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17 Apr 2011, 13:33
In the previous post, I made references to MySQL but didn’t say anything about a quick local setup. So here’s what I did for mine:
– Download MySQL binaries from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/. I chose the huge 64-bit Zip archive.
– I unzipped the /bin/, /data/, /docs/ and /share/english/ folders into my destination MySQL folder. Then I deleted all the .pdb files.
– Start the server via start mysqld. You can later stop it with mysqladmin.
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16 Apr 2011, 01:56
Since I started working on Pyro’s server backend for its social games, I have grown to love the nginx web server. Compact, efficient and fully featured, it’s a great alternative to Apache if you are in full control of your web server and apps.
A few days ago nginx came of age with the release of 1.0, so I did a refresh of my simple web dev setup at home:
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