stumblelog

The Simpsons map, for Quake III Arena. I particularly like the...

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:48:32 +0100

The Simpsons map, for Quake III Arena. I particularly like the scales in the bathroom (you can practically hear the “d’oh!” when you step on them).

-!- intranation changed the topic of #pubstandards to: intranation likes bmarvell's "MEAT"

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:27:00 +0100

-!- intranation changed the topic of #pubstandards to: intranation likes bmarvell's "MEAT"

Mac OS X 10.5.4 released

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:45:00 +0100

…and it still doesn’t fix the problem with Nvidia’s graphics drivers in World of Warcraft. The most popular game for Mac OS X is unplayable on their flagship machine for games, and has been since the end of May. Unacceptable.

Tristram

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:53:00 +0100

Tristram

Blizzard: Worldwide Invitational

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:47:00 +0100

I’m finally back in England after an enjoyable weekend in Paris for Blizzard’s Worldwide Invitational event. The event itself was a mixture of good, bad and awesome, but overall proved interesting and gave a lot of insight into the inner workings of one of the world’s best videogame companies. It also gave some (perhaps unwanted) insight into the inner workings of hardcore game geeks; nothing can quite prepare you for just how extreme their devotion to their hobby is (and I thought mine was pretty strong).

So, the good: panels. Alas, the schedule of events handed out was particularly cryptic about most of the details that each session entailed (and despite asking for one in English I got a French one to begin with) and so I sadly missed out on a couple that sounded (in retrospect) very interesting, about both Diablo III and Wrath of the Lich King. However, those that I did see did give away a few insights. Unfortunately it seems that a lot of Blizzard’s thunder has been stolen by a combination of pre-WWI magazine exclusives and the WotLK wiki, with a number of their reveals being pretty much common knowledge amongst WoW fans already.

You’ll probably find better synopses of these sessions on dedicated WoW sites, but what I enjoyed was hearing how sympathetic the WoW developers — particularly lead developer Tom Chilton — are to making the game fun and accessible to all. This drew murmurs of discontent from the crowd and at one point real cheering when a French girl asked if they didn’t think their were too many ‘newbs’ in the game nowadays. That the Blizzard developers defended their stance and approach was heartening to me, as I’ve no desire to see the hardcore minority dictate a game that has defined the easy-to-approach MMO.

The myopic and selfish interests of the hardcore were the root of one of the biggest annoyances of the whole event; given the opportunity to pick the minds of the people behind the games, so many people squandered their moment in the spotlight with banal, dull or rhetorical questions. Most questions asked prompted responses that could be categorised as: We’ve already talked about that (in an interview etc.); Yes; No; Maybe. Very few people actually drew the developers into an interesting discourse that revealed something new.

The one person who did, asked how Blizzard intended to solve the problem with Battleground games starting with massively skewed numbers on each side. This allowed us to see what the root cause of the problem was (the timer for entering a battleground lasts too long, and so people choose to enter a different battleground if it pops up in the same ‘window’) as well as what Blizzard intends to do about it (a shorter window).

The awesome was exactly what I’d hoped for — and something I’ve been wishing for for the past 7 years — Diablo’s return. The introduction was handled with particular grandeur; the lights dimmed to pick out a guitarist on stage with a red spotlight, who then strummed the opening bars to the recognisable theme from Tristram. The crowd responded with suitable excitement as the rather impressive introduction cinematic was played. The following gameplay preview was also very enjoyable, hinting at a game which will be both true to its roots whilst offering a modern and stylish take on the original gameplay.

Feverish interest in Wrath of the Lich King meant that for a lot of the time the playable StarCraft II area wasn’t nearly as much in demand, and consequently I got to play it for a good couple of hours in total. I’d not played the original (I’d found myself hooked on Total Annihilation before discovering StarCraft) but it seems to have a very pleasing interface and look, with satisfying combat. Whether or not I’ll be able to keep up with the multitasking demands remains to be seen, and I really could have used a tutorial to introduce the various units, but I’m sure that’ll be included in the finished product.

The event was, however, not without its faults. It seems astonishing to me that despite using almost half of the enormous Porte de Versailles exhibition hall for the main stage and seating area, there weren’t nearly enough seats for all attendees to watch the main presentation. The event was oversubscribed in almost all areas; two food stalls (one per level!) for 10,000 attendees (or more?) is simply ridiculous, and the queues and/or competition for seats were depressingly ever-present feature of virtually everything worth attending or trying out. The European tactic of ‘unrolling your beach towel’ was also out in force, with some cheeky individuals claiming whole swathes of seats for half a dozen absent friends, whilst overzealous security guards refused to allow people to sit at the sides of the hall closer to the stage.

I’m not sure I’d go back for a second helping of WWI next year (assuming it’s held in Paris again), but I certainly enjoyed a lot of what was there. Now comes the difficult part: waiting to see the sneak previews metamorphose into real products that we can get our hands on and do what we enjoy most with them: play them with our friends.

Sky Blues Trust

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:56:00 +0100

Yet again, the Sky Blues Trust has raised my ire with another shocking example of incompetence. Unlike the previous occasion, however, this time they actually responded to my criticism. My exchange with the anonymous SBT Website Admin follows.

I read today on the official CCFC website that the Sky Blues Trust had relaunched their website. Good, I thought to myself; the old site wasn’t particularly well-designed or constructed, so it could do with improvement. So I quickly loaded up the new site to take a look.
My first thoughts: is this a joke? Surely they can’t be serious in thinking that this abomination is an improvement over anything? The colour scheme is garish and unpleasant, the typography is highly inappropriate (have you not heard that MS Comic Sans is considered a ‘joke’ font?) and the new masthead logo looks like it was constructed by a primary school child.
Now, I don’t wish to be overly harsh because I’m sure the person who built and assembled this site not only put their heart into the work but also cares a great deal about Coventry City. However, when you consider that this site is supposed to represent the fans of Coventry City not only between each other and to the wider football supporting community, it does a very poor job of making the trust look like a professional organisation. Quite the opposite, in fact.
What I would suggest is that the Sky Blues Trust first of all considers exactly what they want to achieve with their website — just how important it is to their efforts — and then commit a proportionate amount of their resources to hire a skilled professional to build you something suitable. This home-made approach is not befitting of the biggest independent supporters’ club of a football club like Coventry City.

The SBT Website Admin responded:

Thanks for your constructive criticism.
The colour scheme was taken from Coventry City shirt colours
The logo is the same as always, just put against a “sky” background
The template WAS professionally designed (including the typeface), just adapted in content (we use Joomla as our CMS)
We don’t have vast amounts of money to spend on hiring “skilled professionals” - maybe you’d like to volunteer your services
PS I just had a look at kapowaz.net. Not an example of a well designed site. Dark background & white lettering - not good. Typeface too small for anyone with sight difficulties. Content squeezed into small area. Links that simply reload the page. You need to scroll forever before you get any sort of menu. I could go on.

My subsequent reply to the SBT was as follows:

Well, I’m glad my comments were taken as constructive criticism and not as an invitation for an ad hominem retort… My own website has no bearing on my criticism though (and is representative of one person — me — not an organisation that invites supporters to donate money to). However, since you took the time to respond, I shall do the same so you can understand why I was critical of those parts that I was.
First of all, you say that the colour scheme was taken from Coventry City shirt colours. No freaking way. I’ve been a CCFC fan since I was a small boy (one of my earliest memories of the club was the victory celebrations in the city centre after we won the FA Cup in 1987); of course I’m aware of the motivation behind the base colours. However the particular shade of sky blue in use on the SBT website is garish and unpleasant to look at. There are many shades of blue that one could use that would still reflect the livery of the club whilst retaining readability. Witness the Arsenal fansite Arsenal Mania which retains the sense of a team with a red and white livery, without forcing the visitor to read text on a visually jarring background.
The logo is, as you said, the original Sky Blue Trust logo; that was not what I was intending to draw attention to. The logo has seemingly been cut out from an opaque background so as to overlay it on top of the clouds behind, but the masking has been done poorly, resulting in a ‘jaggy’ edge (this is called aliasing) and a few stray pixels which were not erased, visible on the left of the logo. Also, the logo appears to have been upscaled from its original size, causing it to look blurry and slightly pixellated. The text beside the logo saying ‘Sky Blue Trust’ also appears to have been resized (rather than just set in the appropriate size to begin with) causing the edges to become fuzzy and indistinct. Setting the text in a shade of cyan against the sky blue background also has the effect of making the text unpleasant to look at.
I’m curious as to how the trust can say that it doesn’t have ‘vast amounts of money to spend on hiring “skilled professionals”’ and yet you claim the template was professionally designed? Or should I simply infer the obvious: that you hired a professional, just not a very skilled one?
As it happens I already run a small CCFC news website, and so I wouldn’t particularly like to commit more of my time to any other volunteer project, even though I naturally would like the Sky Blues Trust to succeed in its stated goal of strengthening the bonds of dialogue between the football club and its community.
Regards,
Ben

This is the Heinz advert which was recently pulled following...

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:57:38 +0100

This is the Heinz advert which was recently pulled following viewer complaints regarding the kiss between two men in the advert. This sort of thing gets me just plain mad, particularly when you read that:

it raised the difficult problem of parents having to discuss the issue of same-sex relationships with younger viewers

Oh, this same advert which isn’t actually shown during children-specific programming due to the type of product (which is sufficiently unhealthy as to not be allowed to be marketed directly at kids).

Diablo 3...?

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:52:00 +0100

When Blizzard announced their Worldwide Invitational 2008 event at the start of the year, I was drawn to this line from the WWI website:

your goody bag will also contain an access code for the beta test of an upcoming Blizzard game

Given that there are two upcoming Blizzard games that everybody knew about; Starcraft II and the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft, it seemed odd that Blizzard would be so unspecific about which game the beta key would be for. Coupled with the fact that Blizzard used a similar event to WWI to announce Starcraft II, it seemed to me quite plausible that maybe, finally Blizzard would unveil Diablo III to the public.

As the months went by I became less convinced, and began to assume that the beta key would actually be for Wrath of the Lich King. That was until I saw today that Blizzard has changed their homepage to yet another teaser splash screen. A teaser for an already-announced game wouldn’t make a lot of sense, and coupled with this, the diablo3.com domain name no longer redirects (as it has done for years) to diablofans.com. The whois data reveals that the domain is indeed owned by Blizzard, although it’s possible this has been the case for a while (at least at one point the domain belonged to a fan site).

The final clue? Blizzard’s top-most job posting on their site says the following:

Hot Job – Lead 3D Environment Artist
Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of Diablo and Diablo II, is looking for a lead 3D environment artist skilled at creating models and texture maps for both architectural and natural environments. The ideal candidate has experience modeling and texturing assets for a diverse visual range of environments.

Why, exactly, would you mention a franchise most recently updated in 2001 so prominently in a job-posting when you have several more recent (and prestigious) games you could mention? To attract the hottest talent with a subtle hint as to what they’ll be working on, perhaps?

hmm, I've not seen a band play live in too many years

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:13:34 +0100

hmm, I've not seen a band play live in too many years
and all the new people have ridiculous names
"Radioactive Pigeon Fancier" and the like
You never know, Enya might tour again soon :D
you bastard

Adding an eject button to the standard dialog common ‘drag to...

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:36:00 +0100

Adding an eject button to the ~~standard dialog~~ common ‘drag to install’ pattern for disk images (or indeed, any removable drive) in OS X would be very helpful for occasions like the above. After installing, I’ll probably want to eject the disk, but in order to do that, I’ll have to click the window mode button in the top right so as to view the list of drives then eject it. So why not just add an eject button to the title area of the window?

Absolute genius.

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:01:51 +0100

Absolute genius.

"Dell’s punches would be boring — simple jabs. And none would work. Dell would sweat his clothest..."

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 08:20:43 +0100

“Dell’s punches would be boring — simple jabs. And none would work. Dell would sweat his clothest through. Jobs’s punches would be completely unexpected and nearly always successful. He’d rarely sweat. And the way he fought would make everyone wonder why everyone doesn’t fight like that.”

- Comment from Otto regarding Michael Dell’s suggestion that he could take Steve Jobs in a fist fight.

anyway, laters - it's homotime for me

Tue, 20 May 2008 17:44:44 +0100

anyway, laters - it's homotime for me

Developers; Users; Open Source; UI

Thu, 01 May 2008 13:59:54 +0100

The above can come to no-good end when mixed in the wrong proportions. Case in point, this firestorm that has enveloped the Pidgin userbase following a change to how the text entry area within IM windows behaves (previously it was resizable; now it auto-resizes based on how much text you enter).

Whilst on one side I’m definitely a proponent of benevolent dictatorship where UI decisions are concerned, there’s a clear and demonstrable lack of common sense from some of the developers here, for instance:

People don’t realize the entire window is a click target for giving the input area focus

It should be noted that this assertion is implied to be the fault of the end user; in essence, the fact they don’t know about this feature makes it their own fault.

This is wrong; plain and simple. There is no such thing as User Error in a software program - if the user interface isn’t clear enough then the user will simply behave in a way that they feel is appropriate, or become confused and frustrated when they can’t do what they’re trying to. Simply foisting extra responsibility upon the end user to somehow psychically detect unobvious features is not the solution.

Is Mike Arrington a Dick?

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:05:51 +0100

Don’t blame Ryan King for this one.

Photo

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 23:07:35 +0100

Oh, the drama

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:54:59 +0100

To all individuals complaining about not being able to get a ticket for BarCamp London 4:

Bugs in the ticket system are not the fault of the organiser
If you exploit bugs in the system to register early, you shouldn’t be surprised if your ticket gets cancelled
If you get somebody else to register for you, either as a favour or by offering them free dim sum, you shouldn’t be surprised if that doesn’t work out for you
Bitching about it on Twitter isn’t improving your chances of getting in on the reserve list

Michael Arrington

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:35:20 +0100

Well, he found out about Blaine leaving Twitter two weeks after I did, so I'd suggest being the bleeding edge of start-up news mightn't be TC's hand any more. Linkbaiting is a more sustainable model.

the xbox is for when I want to play with myself (or others over t'internet)

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:22:48 +0100

the xbox is for when I want to play with myself (or others over t'internet)

"2.7"

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:28:00 +0100

“2.7”

- The average viewer rating (out of ten) on iMDB for Uwe Boll’s (presently released) videogame adaptations.