all gout, all the time

So my sore foot just kept getting worse despite all efforts of rest so I returned to a doctor. One quick look and he just said 'gout' and prescribed some drugs.

I was a little sceptical and the list of side-effects of the colchicine was a little off-putting but I gave it a go. Well within a few hours all the pain was gone and within a day so was the redness and swelling of both feet.

I guess what I had the last couple of winters was also gout - even though it didn't really appear that way.

Drugs were the last thing I wanted but lifestyle wasn't doing it so that's that I guess. It's probably still going to take a while to get the dosages and medications correct but at least this rules out everything else and has me mobile enough to get back to living.

Despite the weather last weekend I hit the road for a ride intending to just visit friends but nobody was home so ended up doing the 65km round-trip city to coast triangle. It was cold and windy and I took it pretty easy (i'd only just taken the drugs a couple of days before) so it took me over 3 hours and fortunately I missed the rain. Despite freezing my knees and toes (the rest was rugged up adequately) it was more enjoyable than I expected.

Now, if only winter would end ... it's been bitterly cold this year.

Update: Through the last 3 weeks i had some symptoms return a couple of times. Taking some colchicine cleared it up and it seems to be reducing in frequency and intensity ... but yeah it's still around and that colchicine is not good stuff. I'm not really sure the allopurinol is helping or hurting just yet, or if diet is still an issue or not, or really resolved anything; something for the next dr visit. But apart from one day a week ago i've been mobile enough to live normally; although it's been cold, wet, and pretty bloody dull for the most part so it hasn't made much difference. At least the wet has cut the edge from the bitter cold so it feels like winter is finally on it's receding edge. Update 2: I went back to a doc and he took me off the allopurinol. That seems to have been keeping the gout going. So after a week or so its cleared up and i've not had an attack since. It's still a bit sore and not fully vanished but it's the best it's been for months and now i'm doing enough just to get sore from doing too much. I'm pretty much eating normally but i haven't tried grog yet.

the risk of centralisation

So I don't really have much to say here but this is mostly just to add a "see, that's what happens" with regards to an apparent on-going problem with sourceforge.

I noticed a maintenance message a couple of times in the last few days and just put it down to being on the wrong side of the world as per usual; but it seems they've had some disk failures and restoring a site of that magnitude to full functionality isn't a trivial task.

Of course, the catch-cry is to use github, but that is also at the whim of hardware faults or just economics (as in the case of google code's demise), and savannah isn't immune to either. This also holds for blogger and wordpress and all these other centralised services, whether they be 'free-but-you-are-the-product' ones or paid services.

Not that I think the software i've been playing with has any intention to be the solution to this problem but decentralisation is an obvious answer to managing this risk. It may mean individual sites and projects are more susceptible to overload, failure, or even vanishing from history; but by being isolated it better preserves the totality of the culture represented in these sites and projects. Economically it may also be more expensive in total but as the cost is spread wider that concern just doesn't apply (parallelism and concurrency is wonderful like that).

I was already focusing on my current software project being 'anti-enterprise' - not in an economic or political sense but in an engineering sense - but events like this encourage me.

digest nonce

Intended to do nothing with the weekend ... but then i had "nothing better to do" so did a bit more hacking on the server. I had intended to go look for an updated distro for the xm, but promptly forgot all about it.

I did a bit of work on a `cvs-like' tool; to validate the revision system and to manage the data until I work out something better. The small amount I did on this exposed some bugs in some of the queries and let me experiment with some functions like history logging. The repository format is such that data updates are decoupled from metadata updates so for a history log they have to be interleaved together. I also came up with a solution for delete and other system flags: I already had an indexed 'keyword' set for each artifact so I just decided on using that together with single-character prefixes to classify them. Apart from these flags I will also use it for things like keywords, categories, cross-reference keys, and whatever else makes sense. System flags probably don't need indexing but it's probably not worth separating them out either. But the short of it is I can now mark a revision as deleted and it doesn't show up on a `checkout' of the branch containing that mark.

I did a bit of investigation into berkeley db je to see about some features I was interested in and along the way upgraded to the latest version (damn that thing doesn't sit still for long). This is also AGPL3 now which is nice - although it means I have to prepare a dist before I can switch anything on. Probably for now i'll stick with what I have; I was looking into having a writer process separate from the readers but I didn't get to reading very much about the HA setup before moving onto something else. It's just getting a bit ahead of where i'm at.

The driver of this is more thinking about about security than scalability. It's not really a priority as such; but its too easy to do stupid things with security and i'm trying to avoid any big mistakes.

So I had a look at what plain http can do and toward that vain implemented a chunk of RFC2617 digest authentication. This guy's code helped me get started so I could just skim-read the RFC to start with but eventually I had to dig a bit further into the details and came up with a more reusable and complete implementation. The main differences are requiring no external libraries by using javase stuff and the nonces are created randomly per-authentication and have a configurable timeout. It all works properly from a browser although nobody seems to use any http auth anymore; I presume it's all just done with cookies and if we're lucky some javascript now (and perhaps, or not, with ssl).

After I did all this I noticed the Authenticator class that can be plugged into the HttpContext and with not much work I embedded it into a DigestAuthenticator. Then made sure it will work free-threaded.

One problem with digest auth is that a hash of the password needs to be stored in plaintext. Although this means the password itself isn't exposed (since people often reuse them) this hashed value is itself used as the shared secret in the algorithm. And that means if this plaintext hash is accessed then this particular site is exposed (then again, if they can read it then it's already been completely exposed). Its something I can put in another process quite easily though.

I'm not sure if i'll even use it but at least I satisfied my curiosity and it's there if i want it.

Oh, along the way I (re)wrote some MIME header parsing stuff which I used here and will help with some stuff later. It's no camel but I don't need it to be.

On Sunday I thought i'd found a way to represent the revision database in a way that would simplify the queries ... but I was mistaken and since I still had nothing much better to do end up filling out some of the info implementation and html translator and found a way to approximately align the baselines of in-line maths expressions.

bring out the maths.

I wasn't going to bother with supporting the @'math{}'[sic] command in my texinfo backend, but a quick search found jlatexmath so I had a bit of a poke and decided to drop it in.

He's some examples as rendered in my browser:

The first of each row is rendered using jlatex math using Java2D, and the second is rendered by the browser (svg). They both have anti-aliasing via alpha and both render properly if the background colour is changed. Most of the blur differences seems to be down to a different idea of the origin for pixel centres although the browser is probably hinting too (ugh). But the png's are also only 4 bit as well; but they hold up pretty well and actually both formats look pretty decent. Alas the poor baseline alignment, but this is only a quick hack and not a complete typesetting system.

The SVG should at least scale a bit; unfortunately it tends to get out of alignment if you scale too much. Hinting maybe fucking it up?

When I did it I first I hacked up a really small bit of code which directly outputs SVG. It implements enough of a skeleton of a Graphics2D to support the TeXIcon.paintIcon() function. Only a small amount is needed to track the transform and write a string or a rectangle.

As an example, @math{E=mc^2} gets translated into this:

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="65" height="18" version="1.1">
<text x="2.00" y="15.82" font-family="jlm_cmmi10" font-size="16.00">E</text>
<text x="18.26" y="15.82" font-family="jlm_cmr10" font-size="16.00">=</text>
<text x="35.14" y="15.82" font-family="jlm_cmmi10" font-size="16.00">m</text>
<text x="49.19" y="15.82" font-family="jlm_cmmi10" font-size="16.00">c</text>
<text x="56.12" y="9.22" font-family="jlm_cmr10" font-size="11.20">2</text>
</svg>

There are some odd limitations with svg used this way, no alt tag or way to copy the image pixels is a pretty big pair of problems. So I also looked into inline PNG and since I was going to that much effort seeing how small I could make it by using a 4-bit image.

After a bit of poking around I worked out how to generate a 4-bit PNG with the correct alpha directly out of javase. I render to a normal 8-bit image and then copy the pixels over to a special 4-bit indexed image using get/setRGB(), and the ImageIO PNG writer writes it correctly. Rendering directly to the image doesn't work (wrong colour selection or something to do with the alpha channel), nor does image.createGraphics().writeImage(8bitimage), although a manual data elements write should and will be the eventual solution.

It makes for a compact image and in base64 the image is about the same size as the svg.

<img alt="e=mc^2" src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAEE
AAAASBAMAAAD2w64vAAAAMFBMVEUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAABaPxwLAAAAD3RSTlMAESIzRFVmd4iZqrvM3e5GKvWZAAAA+0lEQVR42mNgoAg
wBhFSIcqRwMDAhE+F888GAip2MT4AWsXAwLbi1UfVpgvYlHCqQ4TzgEzshgQzQGyxYWD4i1UBy1k
HmAqHf1hVWO0F+oUFqIiXweEAknjlGSGZh7H+TJMvzFaG2MLybTbYVTOBYAqQu65mZeOaLwxa1Wo
wPVwLmByQjGDmCmA5wHCE4RiDEpgPMuMAwwFlhIq/LBeYLzDKMGsz3IM4l4FB8cA/Bt8JDJwTgNz
fOQwM+oe5D7BuUHoP8xADg/0kBrYPDAzf06FCOodZDrBulAUG5S+wrQyak7R96zORHFK4zvQWi+E
WNi7rC/iiRACMiAMA0lo9OMkFb4YAAAAASUVORK5CYII="></img>

FWIW this is how I create the image that I write to the PNG:

static BufferedImage createImage4(int w, int h) {
        int[] cmap = new int[16];
        for (int i = 0; i < 16; i++)
                cmap[i] = (i + (i << 4)) << 24;
        IndexColorModel cm = new IndexColorModel(4, 16, cmap, 0, true, 0, DataBuffer.TYPE_BYTE);

        return new BufferedImage(w, h, BufferedImage.TYPE_BYTE_BINARY, cm);
}

One might notice that the colour palette is actually all black and only the alpha changes - if a browser doesn't support the alpha colourmap then the image will be black. Bummer.

Wikipedia uses 4-bit png's for it's maths equations but I think it only has a transparent colour - and in any event they clearly only work if the background colour of the browser is white. Starting at fully white pages for 10+ hours pre day just burns your eyes out so I force my browser to roughtly amiga-console-grey because that's a colour someone actually thought about before using it. I think we can 'thank' microsoft for the brilliant white background in browsers as before IE they weren't so stupid to choose it as the default. White on black isn't much better either.

But as a result this is the sort of fucked up crap I get out of wikipedia unless I disable my style overrides:

I've started exporting it's pages to PDF so I can actually read them (using a customised mupdf which uses a grey background) but it's formatting leaves a little to be desired and if anything by making it appear like a paper it just emphasises any (of the many) shortcomings in the information content and presentation.

Pretty much any site with maths is pretty shit for that matter; everything from missing or low-quality 2-bit renders to fat javascript libraries that do the layout client-side. Dunno if this approach will be much better but I'm not going to need it very often anyway.

For various reasons from the weather to health to work I've been feeling pretty flat lately and it had me thinking about the past a bit. To think that i've gone from hand-coding raster interrupts and sprite multiplexors to writing information serving software "for fun" is pretty depressing. Computers used to be a much much more fun hobby.

texinfo is still TeX

I've been poking at the texinfo parser this week. I was hoping to do a quick-and-dirty parser of a sub-set of it but with a bit more ... but that bit more turns it into something a lot more complex.

The problem is that texinfo isn't a 'file format' as such; it's just a language built on tex. And tex is a sophisticated formatting language that can change input syntax on the fly amongst other possibilities. Unlike xml or sgml(html) there are no universal rules that apply to basic lexical tokens, let alone hierarchical structuring.

After many abortive attempts I think i've finally come up with a workable solution.

The objects in the parser state stack are the parsers themselves so it various the parsing and lexical analyis based on the current environment. Pseudo-environments are used for argument processing and so on. The lexical analyser provides multiple interfaces which allows each environment to switch analysis on the fly.

Error handling or recovery? Yeah no idea yet.

Streaming would be nice but I will leave that for another day and so far it dumps the result to a DOM-like structure. I could implement the W3 DOM interfaces but that's just too much work and not much use unless I wanted to process it as XML directly (which i don't).

I still need to fill out the solution a bit more but it's nice to have the foundation of the design sorted out. It's been a long time since I worked on trying to write a `decent' solution to a parser as normally a hack will suffice and i was pretty rusty on it.

puppeteer

Took a break from the break from hacking and started looking through the old PS+ games I hadn't gotten around to downloading. Also cleared out some of the lesser ones; things i thought might be worth looking at further but now there's just not enough time for really good games so i know i'll never look at them again. Could always re-download anyway.

Anyway one of those games I downloaded was Puppeteer.

Very impressed with the game. By setting it on a small stage they managed to craft a quite exquisite piece of software. A very solid frame rate with NO TEARING, with very good use of per-object motion blur and decent AA. Very high quality textures and models with detailed and charming animation. Short loading times. Absolutely incredible presentation that makes it look like a real puppet stage setting up and tearing down between stages. I only found it too dark and had to turn up the brightness on my tv.

I kept thinking it must've cost a packet to make ... and in this day and age when a piece of shift flash or phone game passes as 'good enough', and even triple-a games are often a lot of technically incompetent snot, it's disappointing that the game didn't get much higher sales.

It's obviously a childrens game but the narrator and players don't mind throwing in some humour for the adults and even though I wasn't thoroughly enthralled myself (just can't seem to care about anything much) I laughed out loud more than once. And of course the puppet-stage setting is perfect for breaking the 4th wall at any time, which it does often. The two player mode seems to revolve around controlling a faery (in one player mode you control both) so it's also a perfect play-with-your-kid game.

Definitely a case of restaurant food vs chucky-d's. I guess it's a question of whether there is a commercial place for this quality in the 6-12 age bracket? I guess not going by it's sales. It deserves a PS4 port and technically (and for that matter aesthetically) it's already better than most PS4 games i've seen even without any enhancements whatsoever.

Anyway, definitely worth getting if you have kids and a ps3 or even if you just appreciate well-made software. It shows what games could be like if people didn't just put up with jank.

Others

I haven't even looked at the other PS+ stuff yet and I got a few disks last week, and bought some other PSN goodies: resogun+driveclub expansions, astebreed and jamestown. (+ maybe more on sale, i can't remember).

I'm pretty shit at resogun but it's just too good; the added modes aren't as varied as the base game but they're going to take a lot of playing to get good enough to know that for sure. As for driveclub I barely know most of the cars in the base game and although i've nearly finished it I don't really care much about the pre-set races for the most part (they can be good filler though) - and this is all the season pass adds (and mostly super-cars at that) - but well I'm a fan I guess.

jamestown is very 90s arcade stuff and like with those i'm kinda shit at it. Each level is fairly short but fun enough but I need quite a few more DEX points before I can weave my way through all the bullets on screen without just dying. It's no SWIV and i'll probably never finish it but it's there I guess (need another controller and visitors I would say).

astebreed was pretty much on a whim and I went in totally blind. It's the only thing I regret now, at least so far. It's fast and well presented but the gameplay mechanics are just not for me. There are 3 main weapons. A magical machine-gun thing; which you pretty much just constantly hold down the button for. A sword thing which causes damage and destroys yellow and purple (iirc) projectiles; so you pretty much just trigger it constantly, occasionally holding it down for a super-swish. And a ranged/targetted rocket-spray weapon which uses a mechanic I've seen in other jap games that I quite dislike. You hold down a button to target (fucking R3 at that) and then release to fire. i.e. you're constantly just holding that and releasing that as well. So the game pretty much devolves into maneuvering between the red projectiles or beams overlayed with a mass of visual noise whilst you're incessantly pumping the other weapons. There's a bit of timing/rhythm to it but to be honest it pretty much just sucks. ~$25 I could've spent on something else but I guess it's no big deal and maybe i'll find something i like if i play it more later (he says knowing full well he's spent $80 and never gotten around to even opening the box, and he has tons of other things he needs to go through).

No Man's Sky

ign and a few other places have a few bits and bobs about this during this through July. Nothing really new but a few things more fleshed out slowly, presumably as part of the PR build-up to launch.

I'm still blown away by the graphics here but for different reasons I might be blown away by a game like The Order. It's unclear if it's running on a PS4 but it feels quite alive for something running at that framerate (and thank fuck: no tearing). Much like it felt the first time I visited a city in ratchet and clank; except here it is not merely background decoration. Yet all some sad cunts can do is complain about a little bit of latency in the terrain generation around the periphery; jesus get a fucking life. Although it has it, I would myself be fine even if it had no anti-aliasing whatsoever; I find that aesthetic quite pleasing on low-texture models just as I did back on the Amiga.

At first I was a little shocked at how quickly the wanted level escalated into the players death - but then I thought it's actually a good idea. I like the idea that the universe itself is trying to stop you being a fuckwit and just indiscriminately killing every animal that moves and mining every bit of land you see. This is very good.

It also means that it's decidedly not a tourist or walking simulator; it's actually a game with high risks for player actions or even just mistakes. All other things look gamey too; clockwork atro-physics, simple flying and shooting. Nice, although there can be satisfaction in becoming a master airliner pilot; most people just want to have the fun bits.

Crafting looks, well, like crafting in any other game. Seems the point is to buy or find blueprints for the upgrades, find or buy the raw materials, hit a button to combine. Buying new ships/suits/guns will provide a new thing to look at as well as a different number of upgrade/storage slots.

I like the cleaninless of the UI which bares some similarity to Destiny. But it also shared Destiny's shitty finger-cursor-thing. Why then the dpad works so well for this kind of menu? Could redeem itself if it runs of the touch-pad.

Confirmation of rotating planets is nice; one hopes that extends to the whole solar system. I mean Damocles did that on an Amiga (w/ day/night) so it should be the bare minimum expected to be honest. Sure it will be a clockwork universe but that's good enough.

I'm rather pleased that it is a single-player game. The whole point of 2^64 planets is that everyone gets their own game to play - despite it all being in the same universe. I'm not sure how one will navigate given it's size but it should also be interesting to see the galactic map fill out by other players - maybe the blink or light up as they are discovered or maybe you can only find them with effort or locally. And for those that want a 'social' experience; there's the whole fucking internet there to enable that, let alone just turning to those in the same room. I imagine there will be a lot of streams/video recordings and screenshots of this one; i'm sure it wont hurt that it such an appealing facade and it may be the only way anyone else ever sees what you saw.

I'm actually pretty surprised how many people seems disappointed this game doesn't have pre-defined story or NPCs. Surprised just doesn't do my feelings half a justice: baffled, confused, somewhat disgusted to be frank. Are people lacking even the smallest amount of mental maturity that they cannot partake in some activity without explicit directions? Jesus how the fuck do they know when to go do a shit? Minecraft demonstrates that at least some children still have some curiosity bones left so at least it's not everyone stuck with this severe mental handicap. Anyway; there's simply no physical or economical way to create a game this big and put any sort of meaningful pre-generated assets in it. I think there will be some lore related things but hopefully not too many, or any tutorial things. With only a dozen people making it, any extraneous fluff seems unlikely.

Or stuff like base building? 2^64 is a number so big it's clearly impossible to comprehend for most and they just relate it to something they know already without realising it has no worth.

Another good thing is that Hello Games' director Sean Murray seems very set on the game he wants to make and isn't interested in any outside noise. Once you start listening to whiners you can easily break your vision and end up with a broken game or just make silly mistakes. I think the driveclub director gives a little too much weight to internet forums for instance. From the IGN video view count it looks like he's onto a winner anyway, even if many people seem to let their imagination escape reality a bit too far.

It still bugs me that people pronounce this as 'nomansky', have they got 'diagon alley' disease from mr potter or something? (i always thought that was such an awfully cheesy and dumb bit of the movies).

Anyway i'm obviously rather interested in this game; excited even.

From what I know (and because of what I don't know) it seems like the game I never knew I wanted, But I actually always wanted, from the first day I worked out how to play a bare-disk pirate copy of Mercenary: Escape from Targ.

the future is micro?

Although i haven't been terribly active on it i've still been regularly mulling over a few ideas about the future of the stuff i did on google code, and this blog.

My plan some time ago was to setup a personal server locally - it wouldn't handle much traffic but I never got terribly much - and this is still the plan. The devil is of course in the details. If it turns out to be inadequate I can always change to something else later but given the site history I find this unlikely.

This choice is also intentionally something of a political one. Centralised control of information is becoming a significant societal problem and with the cheap availability high speed internet, computing power, and storage provides a means to tackle it head on via decentralisation.

Micro-Server

So after a few small experiments and mostly in-head iterations i've settled on a implementing stand-alone micro-server with an embedded db. I was going to play with JAX-RS for it but the setup required turned me off it. I think the tech is great and the setup is necessary but I just don't need it here. I have the knowledge and skills to do almost everything myself but at least initially i'm going to use the JavaSE bundled http server with berkeley db je as the transactional indexing and storage layer.

After many iterations I have designed an almost trivial schema of 3 small core tables which sits atop JE which allows me to implement a complex revision history including branches and renames. Think more of a `fixed' cvs rather than subversion; copies aren't the basis of everything and therefore aren't `cheap', but branching and especially tagging is (revisions are global like svn). Earlier prototypes supported both cheap copies and branching but i felt they lead to unworkable cognitive complexity and I realised that since I think the subversion approach just isn't a good solution at all I should not even try to support it. The work I did on DEZ-1 was for this history database and revisions are stored using reverse deltas. Although this is not the aim or purpose it should be possible to import a full cvs or subversion revision tree and retrieve it correctly and accurately; actually I will likely implement some of this functionality as a basis of testing as this is the easiest way to obtain effectively unlimited test data.

Atop this will sit a wiki-like system where nodes are referenced by symbolic name and/or branch/revision. Having a branch-able revision tree may allow for some interesting things to be done: or it may just collapse in an unscalable heap. Binary data will be indexed by the db but storage may be external and/or non-delta where appropriate.

From very long ago I was keen on using texinfo as the wiki syntax; i'm still aiming for this although it will mean a good deal of work converting the blog and posts over even if automated. The syntax can be a bit verbose and unforgiving though so i'll have to see how it works in practice. There are some other reasons i'm going this route although it is unclear if they will prove useful or not yet; some potential examples include pdf export, response optimisation, and literate programming. Its likely i'll end up with pluggable syntax anyway.

The frontend will be mostly be html+css and perhaps small amounts of javascript; but it's not going to be anything too fancy initially because I want to focus on the backend systems. Authoring is likely to be through external command line and/or desktop tools because I find the browser UX of even the most sophisticated applications completely shithouse and the effort i can afford them would render any I made even more pathetic.

The project itself will also be a personal project: it will be Free Software (AGPL3) and maybe someone else will find it interesting but providing a reference product for others isn't a goal.

Living prototype

This project actually started years ago as everything from a C based bdb prototype to a JavaEE learning exercise. In the distant past I have ummed and ahhed over whether it should be absolute bare-bones C or full-blown JavaEE. I think it may well never get much beyond these experiments but unless I start it definitely will not. So I thought it's about time to put a stake in the ground and get moving beyond experimentation.

So my latest current plan is to begin with implementing my internode software pages. A read-only version covers the basic response construction, namespace and paths, and file and image serving mechanisms. Then moving on to authoring touches on revision and branch management. Adding a news system will allow this blog to be moved across. Comments would make sense at this stage but aren't trivial if moderated, as I would desire. This is most of the meat and would also allow some version of the google code stuff to make it across. Then I could think about what next ...

The idea would be to go live as soon as I get anything working and just continue working on it 'live'; availability not guaranteed. A system in constant pre-alpha, beta, production.

I'm pretty sure i've got the base of the revision systems working quite well. Object names (& other metadata) and object data history are tracked separately which allows for renames and version specific meta-data. It's actually so simple i'm not quite sure it will support everything I need but every use-case i've tried to test so far has been solvable once I determined the correct query. I've still to get a few basic things like delete implemented but these are quite simple and the hardest part now is just deciding on application level decisions like namespaces and path conventions. Other application level functionality like merging is something for later consideration and doesn't need implementing at the db layer. I still need to learn some JE details too.

Initially the architecture will be somewhat naive but once I see how things start to fall out I want to move to a more advanced split-tier architecture based on messaging middleware. This is a long term plan though. I will aim for scalability and performance but am not aiming for "mega"-scalability as that is simply out of scope. Things like searching (lucene) and comments can be tacked on later. Being a personal server authentication/authorisation and other identity related security systems aren't an initial focus.

I've done the texinfo parsing a few times and my current effort is still some way from completion but i will probably just start with the basics and grow it organically as I need more features and only worry about completeness or exporting later on. I will start with processing everything live but resort static snapshots if it proves too burdensome for the server. Actually the revision tree provides the perfect mechanism for efficiently implementing incremental snapshots so it will probably just fall out of testing stuff anyway.

The why of the what

I was prompted to think about this again by the only request about jjmpeg source i've had and i'm also in the middle of a 2-week break. I've spent a couple of those break days poking around but so far it hasn't really gotten it's teeth into me so it will continue to be a slow burn (and i really do just want a short break).

Apart from setting up the hardware and deciding on some `simple' decisions i'm quite close to having something running.

manufactured culture

So I ended up watching a lot of game related E3 broadcasts and related again this year and I kinda wrote off a couple of days work by staying up till too late (it's winding down for this financial year so it's no problem) and here's a few random thoughts about it.

At a few points I was thinking "why am i doing this, i don't even care", but ahh well, you know how it is.

This was going to be a comment on some aspects of US culture but although it's mentioned in passing it's mostly just about games n shit.

For example I have almost no interest in Bethesda games almost entirely to the negative experience of Oblivion which I found unplayable and dull, yet I watched their conference live (4am or something?). I thought Doom looked pretty good and very Doomish although I never played more than a little bit of the original demo (about then is when i stopped playing games until getting a PS2), Fallout looked a bit clunky, but its unlikely i'll play either of them. I though the whole falloutshelter "we made a free-to-play mobile game that doesn't suck!" thing was pretty obnoxious as it seems its just as exploitative as any other game in getting people to spend money without realising they are, for nothing.

EA's was pretty cringeworthy. Apart from "Yarnie" Unravel which looked like a cool physics puzzle game with photorealistic setups. Need for speed looked pretty but the game itself was utterly attrocious. The best part is that I learnt of a new musical style "trap" which i can only guess means techno-rap, but whatever it's called it sounds like shit. But as is eluded to in the title of this post, apparently people like these sort of directed & manufactured experiences. There's no way I could play a game with such constant patronising encouragement, phrases such as "Doing great!" "You're nearly there!" - like the player is only 2 years old. I muted and ignored all the other sports stuff and I can't remember the rest.

Don't care about anything M$ or Nintendo so didn't bother. Apparently M$' big thing was backward compatibility which seems to be implemented using code translation (i.e. compilation of opcodes); which would have been a nice have on launch but even then would have been an investment they would never recoup (which duh, is why they didn't bother). But doing it now so late after launch just seems irresponsible to their shareholders. The WiiU was a failure from inception and that seems to be dying a silent death although the faithful haven't noticed yet (I was an Amiga guy so I know all about that).

The Dark Souls 3 trailer looks suitably bleak and terrifying although I haven't gone back to Demon's Souls since dying on some bridge for the 3rd time last time I gave it ago, so its probably not something i'll ever have the time to play.

I saw most of the Square E[e]nix one but i can't remember much. Apparently there was some odd flare-up on the internets over the use of 'apartheid' in the press conference which was born a combination of Americentrism, ignorance, and sheer stupidity (i.e. "hey look internet i'm so lazy i can't even be bothered to use a dictionary and just make up the meaning of words to suit my political agenda!"). But the word was used correctly in an appropriate context for the game, although the trademark of 'Mechanical Apartheid' (iirc) seems a little odd in the real world.

Sony.

Sony was sort of interesting in that it was the most impressive to fans but perhaps not the most interesting to me - they had so many bombastic announcements some of the smaller titles got missed. It was a real shame No Man's Sky release date announcement was apparently postponed which seemed to deflate Sean on stage visibly.

Seeing The Last Guardian at the start actually made tears start to swell in my eyes although they didn't break the surface. I'm not sure why really as although I do quite like ICO I only finished it once and couldn't even get past the first puzzle on the 'HD' version (pretty much the reason I got PS+ a couple of years ago). But the animation has such a believability to it i'm not surprised they couldn't get it running on the PS3 and the fact that it looks like a real living and breathing animal was quite mesmerising. On the shitty stream the graphics didn't look much better than I remembered from the PS3 version apart from some better textures but later I saw some better shots and the detail increase is significant.

I really couldn't give a shit about FF7 but maybe i'll play it if it gets modernised nicely (the PS1 game hasn't aged well, I bought it on PS3 ages ago but didn't get very far, but they probably can't modernise it without pissing some anal retard off) and I have no idea what Shenmue even is but apparently they have a following. I really think the whole kickstarter approach should have been far more transparent, but that's something for another day.

Star Wars (battlefront?) looks pretty authentically-good but i'm not really into Star Wars much myself and particularly not multiplayer games. I can see it selling absolutely gangbusters this xmas though.

Horizon - Zero Dawn however. Wow. And the more we find out the better it sounds. It looks fantastic, the lead character looks and moves amazingly, combat looks fluid and seamless, the world is interesting. And no fucking loading screens. The first time i saw it i wasn't a fan of the US accent of the actress (clearly chosen on purpose), but I suppose it's unavoidable in this day and age for something which is obviously going for massive mainstream appeal and the voiceover was just for the trailer anyway. Hmnm, wonder if we'll be able to play it with swedish or russian voice and english subtitles or something more fitting.

Guerrilla always seem to get a lot of undeserved fanboy hate but they are really a top-tier studio with amazing technology and art. It will be interesting to see where a fuck-ton of money and really talented and technically proficient team can take the RPG genre and how the competitors respond given that their usual jank-fests and silly mechanics (like, oh dear, when did 'romancing' become popular?) are going to look a bit pedestrian.

The main character - Aloy - is a pretty bold move for such a major title simply for being a woman (sadly). They are definitely leaving some money on the table due to this choice (sadly). She seems an excellent design though; visually distinct (attractive but not some bland k-pop model), lithe and athletic without being pornographic, strong and determined yet inexperienced and slightly nervous. Very noble 'PR' poses. A lot of effort was put into that reveal trailer to convey all this information and hopefully others noticed little details like her swallowing gulp just before leaping into the frey. It was a tiny and seemingly inconsequential detail which conveyed so much humanity in an entirely artificial character.

Dreams was just a bit too disturbing to me. Looked more like ``Nightmares'' and i thought even the polar bears were a bit creepy. The technology looks pretty groundbreaking in lots of ways though so it'll be something i'll keep an eye on and apparently a lot more is to be presented about the "platform" in Paris later this year.

Oh, I almost forgot Uncharted. Awesome, thrilling, and fun ride as ever; and great technical achievement to boot. I still haven't opened uncharted 3 ... although i really really intend to one day. Oh shit, I almost forgot again. So one of the big things about the uncharted demo was apart from actually being played live it had this really awesome car chase sequence that just seemed to go on forever - the amount of work for just a couple of minutes play just seemed astounding. People gushed (or disbelieved it wasn't a cut-scene). Not to downplay it in any way but it looked to me much like really excellent maze design. It appears as if you're making random heat of the moment decisions but in reality you're crossing a couple of connected areas which wrap around and always put you in the place you're supposed to go. I could definitely see how this was inspired by ICO although of course mazes go back to the very first computer games ever created and indeed maze games predate computers by some centuries (millennia?).

Morpheus finally has some real games but without a unit who can say what they're like. Battlezone looked nice though (Oh man would The Sentinal work well with it). I should really get hold of some sort of vr headset to play with it was the sort of thing I dreamt of when I was playing on the C64.

Smaller things

So with all these big things most small things got shunted out of the way. And unfortunately all the 'small independent media' I saw has fallen into the same trap as the 'msm' in that they only want to cover the biggest stories and pretty much ignored everything. So the only way to find out about most of them was the Sony show-floor live broadcasts and their PR pitch spots.

Some are out this year but like some of the big ones most are next year.

But there are some kinda strange games being made.

Thumper was some sort of rez-ish rhythm game with a beetle (!!) racing down a hot-wheels track and some very simple controls where you have to time presses and it creates the music beats. It started so slow on the first level that it looked boring as shit but the host on the show was mesmerised by the graphics so much he kept forgetting to talk so there must be something to it. I think that the end of level 'marker' (i didn't catch the context) was called "crack-head" really says it all; it's pretty much a game for having drug-induced trips to. The guy selling it seems to have had a bit too many mushrooms but he was trying pretty hard to sell it (sorry i'm being overly harsh here, it must be seriously nerve racking as hell trying to promote your baby). But it could have a bit of a cult following because technically it looks pretty competent.

Hellblade is being made by Ninja Theory as a 'low-budget triple-a title' but unfortunately although it looks like they're doing a fair job on the art and systems the subject matter pretty much guarantees it is going to be an abject failure commercially. Mental illness and entertainment don't really go hand in hand to me. It just seems such an odd decision to use serious mental illness as the basis for something so commercial as making games, this is the sort of art that needs patronage. If you know someone with serious mental illness you may not want to be reminded of it (one of my late cousins for example), and if you don't you may not want to face it. I don't know where the time and place is for such a thing but it just doesn't seem to be here to me, but I guess so long as it doesn't send them out of business they may have other goals in mind for their work which they will reach and be satisfied with; I hope so.

Divinity Original Sin (enhanced?) looks pretty neat. I think I saw something about it previously and my interest was piqued until i saw some of the menus and it just seemed way more complicated than I really wanted to bother with (i.e. too much a modern microsoft windows game). But I saw a more detailed playing and it looked pretty nice on console and reminds me of much older games so I might have to have a look when it comes out. It still looks pretty complicated and i'm not sure how well it will play solo but i'm inclined to try it out. I can't remember if i ever ended up playing Bulders Gate 2 on PS2 - I have the disk - I should check to see if i could be bothered with that sort of game again.

Relativity was a weird little puzzle game that I just chanced upon at random on the Sony stream. A sort of gravity puzzle game with a really nifty wrap-around thing going on. The aeshetic is really nice with a simple clean 'vector graphex' visuals which screams 'VR' although I think in VR you might end up falling off your chair. Anyway it looks very cool and the guy making it seems pretty switched on.

There were a few others of the stream i've seen so far but those were the ones that piqued my interest the most and I wouldn't mind seeing a bit more of The Tomorrow Children which has been expanded substantially from the alpha into a real game; although its not that far out and I might just buy it instead.

Update: One I did forget: I saw Mad Max somewhere, maybe Sony or Gametrailers or both. I don't think it's my type of game but it did look interesting for that type of game. Very mad max 2 look to it (from what i remember, it's not a tie in to the current one) although the colours in the demo bit could use a bit of a red (probably? not in australia?).

Gametrailers

Apart from the Sony stuff I watched an embarrassing amount of the gametrailers broadcasts. I tried a few other streams and the presenters or advertising was insufferable so they were pretty much the least-offensive left over. I don't really bother with reviews these days (if only because i rarely bother with games) but they also seem about the closest to objective in their reviews or at least the closest to my tastes. I didn't bother with giantbomb because they're just a bunch of arseholes, nor Geoff Keighly not because he isn't fairly likeable and a decent presenter, he's just too obviously licking arseholes and the advertising is a bit too irritating. I saw a couple from the "kinda funny" guys but they just are just "kinda not funny at all". One is too campy and obnoxious and the other is just a fuckwit, and every time an ad came on the recording reset to the start(?). Youtube streaming also pretty shit; it doesn't work at all on one of my machines and usually requires a login on the other (gotta get that identity tracking locked in and matched to your credit card), so i mostly used twitch which was fine for the most part.

Viewing the the GT broadcast was kind of like being outside of a room of people having inane conversations and passively listening through a window. But anyway I did learn some strange things about american culture which probably explains some other strange things i've seen about the inability of people to grasp No Man's Sky. This is where I saw some interesting stuff about Divinity and some of the other big games.

So firstly, grown men actually have significant emotional attachment and genuine love for Disney characters and cheap plastic dolls (aka 'action figures'). I've seen quite a bit of interest in games like kingdom hearts which I never understood for a game I thought was targeted at 7 year old kids. This probably also helps explain mario's popularity despite being so old and stale (and lots of tv shows for the same reason).

Secondly, for people who apparently follow these things closely they seemed remarkably clueless and misinformed about details or too easily miss something from a trailer (apparently their trade). Something can be right before their eyes and they just don't see it. They had a big argument about No Man's Sky and the GT VO had a heated argument repeatly saying 'well what do you do', or 'they haven't shown this before' when some of what he was complaining about was actually visible in the first Sony trailer, it just wasn't explicitly explained in intricate detail (things like mining, combat, economy, i.e. gameplay mechanics).

No Man's Sky

I'm not sure why it matters exactly but I was hoping to find out a bit more about No Man's Sky - and slowly bits and pieces are trickling out.

In earlier press we learnt that Sean spent some time in Australia in his childhood, but not only the typical Australian beachy experience but the full-blown outback which few of us locals have really experienced. This gives one a very different outlook on both scale and our position in the universe; the broadness of the horizon, personal isolation, and the spectacle of the milky way is something you can't experience in England or any city. The milky way is 'milkier' in the southern hemisphere to start with. I find cities pretty distateful to start with but i also found Boston somewhat claustrophobic when outdoors and I also found the 'personal space' distance a little too close for comfort in the US.

Like we did as kids he also got pirated games on his Commodore 64 with no instruction manuals and basically the first response to starting a game was just typed every key in turn and wrote down what they did. He surely must have played Mercenary which was one of the first ever 3D 'open world' adventure games, which is all the buz these days; and hopefully one that has a revival one day.

I'm really rambling here but what I'm getting at is that I can understand why he doesn't want to talk much about the mechanics of his game. Its not because they don't exist its because he wants people to learn for themselves because that learning experience is not only more enjoyable for him, it is also a much more fundamental to the purpose of play. The journey and learning process is always more interesting than the end.

On forums and broadcasts including gametrailers a constant refrain has been 'but what do you do!' 'tell me why i should play this game!' This is absurd. First, make up your own fucking mind; you're an adult. Secondly, what would you think of anyone who refused to watch a soap opera like Game of Thrones for the sole reason that they didn't know how it ended? You'd think they were a stupid idiot, and rightly so. (fwiw i have zero interest in shitty soap-operas like that, but if people do more power to them).

The other odd refrain that constantly comes up specifically about this game is 'but why would i want to [go to the centre of the galaxy]' (the main stated end-goal of the game). Umm, because that's the fucking game? I mean why do you want to get to the end of any game level? It likewise has no bearing on the real world and likewise has no true point - OUTSIDE OF THE MECHANICS OF THE GAME.

It is also clear that plenty of people have absolutely no idea of the scale of the game and that lots of mechanics used in many games just can't work at that scale. "I want to build a home base", "I want to kill everything" (ugh, bloody americans), "I want to team up with my pals". The last one is odd because sharing the "experience" is something anyone can and will be doing anyway; just external to the game itself via this new-fangled thing called the internet.

There was an interesting interview with Sean where he said one of the things that commonly happens within the first hour of the game is that people just keep get lost. They wander off into the wilds and then they realise they don't know where their ship is. With no constant GPS and minimap reminder people have forgotten how to use landmarks for navigation, particularly while in a game which adds even more design to stop you getting lost. And even so-called 'open world' games the actually game worlds are either so small or they are designed in such a way as to forcibly orient you in a way that prevents you getting lost. Living in cities this is a skill that isn't terribly necessary but one that could easily cost you your life in the outback or any other wild place.

Another interesting point he made was in regards to NPCs and quests in games. No Man's Sky has no fixed quests or job boards (it would simply be impossible to do this) but instead most things you do can earn you currency in a more organic way. i.e. there is no one-time quest from some old man to collect 3 wayward hens but if you discover 3 fish on a planet you still effectively earn the same result. That's not the interesting bit; the interesting bit is that the former is actually a horribly illusion-breaking mechanic that shouts 'this is a scripted game' and breaks the illusion of any sort of role playing; despite this being the primary job method by which all role playing games have operated for decades. Because of the scale of the game a job board would be impossible, but by needing for it to be removed a game system can be put in place instead which does a better job of maintaining the illusion of the game world.

Anyway, it's terribly sad to see the state of some vocal (minority?) people who shit on games like this for having no reason to play it (it's the game, fucknut), or driveclub for being too linear. The point of driveclub isn't to earn all the trophies (which seems to be the main reason some people play games), it's to have FUN driving an exotic car around a cool location. And why the FUCK would you want to drive in a city? What a horrible horrible waste of a car! But i digress.

Who knows, I may only play it for an hour anyway, but I really want to play No Man's Sky when I can.

Oh so another thing as an engineer I take away from these game shows is just the sheer scale of the software undertaking of some of these games. Wow. Makes me feel like a bit of a shit coder, or perhaps just that i could be doing something more interesting than I am as that was the sort of thing I played with more 25 years ago before working on 'desktop apps' (sigh).