August 2011 Archives

Last weekend I shot Dimitri Rascalov. Actually I shot him twice, once for each of the two possible endings in GTA IV (a video game). Since getting a new computer at the start of the year, I have started playing a few games. Before this year the last game I played was Homeworld around 2003, a bit of an aberration really. The last time I often played games was in the early 90's - Doom, Civ (the original), Dune 2 and SimCity. Good times. So my experience of the last 20 years of computer games is minimal, but the 10 years before that (basically my teenage and uni years) I played quite a bit. So based on the small sample size of four games in the last 6 months, I would say computer games now are far better.

Admittedly, I've only played some of the better modern games - the excellent GTA IV, Mass Effect 2, Portal and the merely good LOTRO. Apart from the obvious improvement in graphics over time, what stuck me was the appearance of proper storylines. The only detailed storylines I remember from older games were from the Infocom text games. Now a storyline seems to be mandatory. Over four months I played 73 hours (or so Steam tells me) of GTA to complete the main story. Still I am only at 78% complete due to the side missions and tasks I skipped. The only games I have ever played more are Civilization and Elite. The reason for this is I wanted to see if Niko (the GTA player character) achieves the American dream he is chasing (although in a criminal manner). In other formats the story would be like an overly long B gangster movie. However, it is quite involving when you are actually playing it - it certainly didn't feel like a grind to complete. Also, the world in GTA felt almost alive with people walking around and rush hour traffic. A couple of time I just cruised around Liberty City sightseeing and listening to the radio. Ahh, the music in all the games is good, so much better than the reactive beeps I remember from past games. Now there is proper music mixed with games effects.

The only downside to GTA was the clunky controls. If GTA had the silky smooth controls of ME2 I would have no complaints. Mass Effect had a space-opera scifi plot that again got me involved. When one of my team mates (played by the computer) got shot in the final mission (nicknamed "the suicide mission") I was a little upset. With the best and smoothest graphics I've seen so far and an atmospheric soundtrack, the experience is quite cinematic - only controlled by the player. Portal is the shortest game I've played, but that is no complaint - it was just right. I was utterly gripped by last hour. My hands were shaking a little from the tension when I finished. The 10 hours or so of gameplay leading leading up to the end perfectly built atmosphere at same time as entertaining me with puzzle solving. So much thought must have gone into structuring the finely balanced final product. Genius.

So no complaints or nostalgia from me. Hopefully this is part of a trend of continual improvement and it only gets better from here. I am very much looking forward to the next set of modern games. I've lined up Modern Warfare, Bioshock, Just Cause 2 and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (mainly so I can cruise around a recreation of medieval Rome!). The only downside is that it is clear that it took large teams to finish these games - so there is no hope of me creating anything nearly as polished. The end credits are as long as those at the end of a movie. No longer can just a couple of people create a cutting edge game (like Elite). Still, well done to everyone who helped make them.

For a game idea I needed a model of a spaceship. Having learnt from previous tutorials, the main goal of this tutorial is to properly texture a simple model for game engines. Instead of having multiple materials for the mesh and textures applied to just a few faces, there should be a single material for the entire mesh and textures should be images applied to all the faces. Also normal maps should not be black and white, but a special colour scheme. Thus setting up UV mappings and proper normal maps is critical.

The continuation of this post is a set by step tutorial detailing my methodology.

Available from iTunes or Oxford University Podcasts

This podcast is a single 41 minute (16.6MB) audio-only interview. In it Bryan Ward-Perkins of the Oxford University History Department answers questions about the fall of Rome. He has written a book on the same topic. The podcast is well produced.

Bryan Ward-Perkins contends that the Western Roman empire "fell" rather than declined, and that the transition was quite nasty for the previously Roman people. This is despite the newcomers (mainly Germanic tribes) often trying to imitate Roman culture. The fall occurred over different timespans in different parts of the empire. In Britain the collapse was very fast and deep, while in Italy it took a couple of centuries for complex society to fade away. After this time it is hard to tell what is happening in Western Europe (hence the name Dark Ages). This is not only because there is a paucity of literary works from this time, but also less archaeological evidence. People owned fewer things and new stone buildings were rarer. The use of small coins declined as trade diminished and anything other than the local market disappeared. For instance, in Britain producing pottery seems to have gone from a specialised profession to something done ad hoc by the people who needed it (rather than buy pottery from a market). Society became less connected and complex as the middle and lower classes dissolved into either the few extremely rich people or the vast poor peasants.

What is your earliest memory? Are you sure?

I always thought my earliest memory was laying on a folding bed and feeling the ground shake, so I ran outside to the garden next to a large rock. This was in Australia, but wasn't the house in Leeming we moved to sometime in 1979 (because I know we were there by the time I started school). Thus it must have occurred sometime in 1978 or 1979. I always assumed it was 1978. However, using the power of the Internet, I looked it up. Here is a list of the earthquakes of note in Western Australia. Not many and only one of around the right time. The Cadoux earthquake was at 9:48 on the morning of 2 June 1979 and was strong enough to be felt in Perth, 180km away. This seems way too late, I thought we had moved to Leeming by then. I couldn't find when the Leeming house was built, but we were definitely living there by 1980 as that was when I started primary school at Oberthur and I have a few memories of that time. I also went to pre-primary at Oberthur while in Leeming, but I don't know for how long.

So is the memory correct? I know there was an earthquake, but was it at the same time as the folding bed and rock? It is possible the memory is accurate. If I did less than 6 months pre-primary, it could have been just before we moved to Leeming. Or maybe I'm conflating two different memories. The memory is more vivid than others from around the same time: visiting our house in Leeming when it was being built; hearing that the class mouse had died in pre-primary; and, seeing the changing light display on the Old Swan Brewery as part of the Perth Sesquicentennial. Those memories are more static, like they are really memories of a photo (but as far as I know there are no photos of these events). Perhaps they are memories of memories. The rock/earthquake memory has movement and context. There also exists a photo of me next to the rock from around that time. Maybe a long time ago the memories of various things got merged. I'm not sure anymore.