Half Life – Escape from Reality

We have oh so many reasons to worship at the gilded feet of ATi and Nvidia at the moment – their continual graphics development has lead to some extremely immerse and consuming games of late, with the promise of still more to come as the Silicon wars heat up. Although many have heralded the start of ‘real life’ or (’VR’ in the 1990s) quality computer graphics as just being ‘around the corner’ in practice we are nowhere near. (Ask anyone who does Ray Tracing about their render times).

Despite significant leaps of late, GPU hardware presently lacks the horsepower to pull this feat off and as a result, game engines utilise trickeries which enhance the final rendered images on our screens. HDR/ Bloom to simulate ranges of lighting, AA / bump/parallax mapping to give flat textures the impression of having three dimensions, film grain and post processing (to name just a few) are all examples of ways in which we are catapulted into the darkest realms of the minds of game developers.

And you know what – it works. It works because the vast majority of games are not based on real life and there is a good reason for this – they would probably be slow paced and/or boring. It is much easier to transport a player into a gritty or glossy world and tell a story where the developer has complete control over the experience – and it is fun. Although please don’t get me started on recoil-less rifles, enemies who can take so much fire to put down you would expect them to look like apple cores, ‘unlimited’ ammo vehicles and some of the other ‘realistic’ travesties that have occurred in recent games.

I would write more on this topic, but I should veer back onto the point. Short films inspired by games are not new, however upto now they were normally poorly voiced over clip shows rendered in the originating game engine. However this is different- I discovered recently; well actually it was back in February so sue me , Escape from City 17.

I can already see the 60 Watt bulbs illuminating above your heads, but for those of you on energy saving varieties, City 17 is the fictional setting of Half Life 2. The fan movie really serves as an advert from ‘The Purchase Brothers’ and it is fantastically put together considering their tiny budget. It blends the oppressive Orwellian City 17 with real life environments seamlessly resulting in a fantastic short video which I highly recommend.

At the rate Valve are working, Half Life 3 Episode 2 may look just like this… probably not worth ordering a bunch of 4870s or 295 GTXs in anticipation though.

Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare 2 Full Trailer !

The COD 4.2 full trailer has been released and boy does it look good! I can’t wait to get my hands on this (although the preorder price of £45 is crazy!!!), for now – let me direct you with all haste to the Infinity Ward COD 4 MW 2 webste

26/05/09 Update: now hosted on youtube as well, so enjoy the embedded goodness

Another brief glimpse at COD4.2 : Modern Warfare 2

Infinity Ward have released another awesome (but short) trailer giving us salivating fans a brief glimpse of their newest offering. Put mildly, it looks very impressive and I can’t wait to get my hands on the finished article. Lots of people complained that CoD4: Modern Warfare was too short and very scripted – I disagree.

Well that is to say that I actually do agree, but disagree that these points detracted from the game. It seems that most FPS games coming out at the moment are set in an ‘open world’ with ’sandbox’ missions and ‘complete freedom’. Unfortunately, that does not immediately equal a recipe for success, ignoring for a moment that if everyone does the same thing things get boring, look at FarCry 2! There is a lot to be said for a well paced linear (yes I feel a bit dirty saying it) action game that tells a story well. COD4 does that and boy does it do it well. I actually liked the scripted enemy spawn mechanic because it prevented the player from lingering at a safe distance picking off enemies and forced them into the midst of the foray. This coupled with the open level designs the break neck gameplay mechanics and Veteran mode (oh yes baby ) made me really enjoy COD4.

However I conceed the point about the length of the game – I completed it on Veteran in under 15 hours which is a bit too short really. This was more than made up for by the multiplayer (over 140 hours and counting) but sometimes it is nice to engage with a story. I don’t feel COD4 offered much in the way of single player replay factor.

Anyway, even if Infinity Ward kept the same graphics and same dynamics and just gave us another 15-20 hours of well thought out story driven gameplay I will be happy. Hopefully they will do much better than though…

Take a look at the trailer, lets hope this is ingame or engine rendered at least. Not long to go now !!

COD4.2 : Modern Warfare 2 Trailer!

25/05/09 Update 2: Full version of the Modern Warfare 2 trailer can be found here – and boy does it look good.

22/05/09 Update: New trailer here.

The new Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 trailer looks absolutely stunning, although it gives little away. Disappointingly the gun firing in the trailer sounds like the MP7 from Half Life 2, hopefully it is just a stock sound used for the trailer.

I can only hope someone at Infinity Ward paid attention to my tweeted suggestions, above all I would love the ability to select custom weapon loadouts (via unlocks) when (re)playing the single player campaign. Still, we shall have to see -  Roll on 11/10/09

Twitterlarity

Hello all! Gosh it has been a little while since I was here, so please bear with me whilst I clean the cobwebs and shoo the feral wildlife out.

The more keen eyed of you will have noticed my twitter feed (on the right of this page) receiving a lot more attention from me than my weblog and the reason for that is fairly simple, it is much easier to microblog and post little snippets than for write full articles. I have never been a fan of just regurgitating content without at least adding commentary or (hopefully) extra insight, hence the reason I have veered so sharply away from doing so on here. But on twitter, by necessity, everything is μ‘d down which is both appealing and restricting. Plus also I can periodically reveal the quirkiness of my personality in 140 characters or less.

Irrespective, I have been tweeting a lot and noticing more and more how popular Twitter has become. Take a look at this snippet from my stats showing just how much the traffic has grown to my post instructing on the embedding of twitter into wordpress.

Twitter is more than a microblogging facility, but there are a number of different ways in which it can be used. I use twitter as an almost light version of facebook despite the fact that I know (or follow) less than an order of magnitude fewer people than on facebook.

Whilst I am on the subject of facebook, I can’t stand the new layout! Now I know facebook has a history of changing things and the public backlash is almost as predictable as the tides, however with the new ‘layout’ I believe is rather more than a stylistic change. It almost feels like there has been a paradigm shift within facebook to try to tap onto the twitter phenomenon and this I find both silly and uncomfortable. Both twitter and facebook serve two completely different purposes no amalgamation of functionality will make me think otherwise…

Speaking of which, I was just browsing through the recent wordpress news and found a new theme which appears to be the result of an extramarital indiscretion between Twitter and WordPress. I mean come on, has the whole world gone insane? Whatever next, Windows Live microblogging??? Oh… Again don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter, I just sneer at the less than subtle attempts by the other ‘major’ players to hump the leg of reinvention.

But enough of my rant. What else have I been upto in the last two months to warrant my silence you ask ? Well, not a huge amount really, my (now no longer that new) job has been keeping me busy both in terms of the work and the learning I am doing around the various subjects. It is both exciting and highly gratifying that the areas I am learning (and working in) are opening up new avenues and have precipitated a greater appreciation for the technologies I so love. Apart from that I have been gaming a lot in whatever spare time I can scrape together between one code block and one uninterrupted quantum of sleep. Recently I have played Mass Effect, Farcry 2, Doom 3, Supreme Commander Forged Alliance as well as a bit of Fallout 3 and I am looking forward to writing about each of these in turn, time permitting. I would also like to start writing about more technical matters (coding paradigms and JS / CSS / C++ code snippets) but given how widely that veers away from the rest of the content in my weblog, I may register a new website and do that there. I have some great ideas for domain names, just a case of figuring out the hosting and (*sigh*) if I have the time to maintain it.

Anyhoo, this has turned a little rambly. Comments / email / @KonradS follows welcome.

Directorate of Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Policy

There are two rather good sites for anyone interested in UK politics by mysociety.org (which is a third incidentally). They are WhatDoTheyKnow and TheyWorkForYou, the former providing a framework for making freedom of information requests to various ministries and the latter for keeping an eye on your (and other) MPs.

But this isn’t just shameless linkblogging, I found a rather amusing freedom of information request applied for by ‘Lewis’ to the Ministry of Defense. In his request, ‘Lewis’ asks about our nuclear missile codes as well as specifics about warhead capability.

[I would like to]  ask whether the UK has the launch codes for them, and if the british (?) do i request a
list of all the nuclear missles owned by our country …

Rather unsurprisingly, the reply was a little vague :

[ We ] strongly [are] against disclosure … as release would provide highly classified information to potentially malicious parties concerning the UK’s nuclear deterrent…

Surely everyone knows that the UK’s launch codes are printed on a cracker in Gordon Brown’s pocket.
This so that, if ever caught (or hungry), he could simply consume the codes at the tax payer’s expense.

So there you have it, a useful resource and an anecdote all in one post, what else would one want?

For reference, full reply from the ministry of defense.

Quincying and you…

It seems the much anticipated Playstation Home has, rather then revolutionise the game lobby experience, spawned a rather strange behavioural trend. Apparently all the male avatars gang up on the female avatars pestering them with their attentions… somewhere in the distance, the strained cry of “WOMAN” punctuates the silence followed by a left 4 dead style mobbing. Well, I guess that is what happens when you let pimply love starved socially inept geeks loose on the Internet… but I digress.

I chanced on a great little article describing in detail the act of ‘Quincying’. In the infinite world of Ying, yang and Newton’s third law, the Internet has come up with a comical rebuke to this sort of behaviour. Simply take one part beautiful avatar, mix with a pinch of deviancy. Stir for twenty minutes and add a sprinkle of button mashing and what do you come up with?

The process if trivial, create  a beautiful avatar and glide along seductively where-ever other avatars roam. Human (and online geek) nature being what it is, you will have a nice gathering in no time at all. When you have their attention, suddenly change your avatar from striking blond or giant ogre and watch in amusement as your digital ‘peers’ recoil.

Full story and description here.

I am sure there is scope for a detailed sociological study somewhere here… oh well.

All you can eat Sectoid event

Valve have come up with a great promo for XCOM fans – ALL the games (including Interceptor and Enforcer) for £2.99 ! This is an incredible bargain as all five games separately are £2.99, not to mention that Valve have done some tinkering so you avoid all the DOSBox / 16bit emulation woes.

Unfortunately I already own all the originals (apart from Interceptor and Enforcer – but these are not true XCOM strategy games as far as I am concerned) – however if you missed one or two of them then now you have absolutely no excuse.

Steam offer.

From 007’s ‘Q’ Branch

Happy New Year to you all! I have a real New Years treat today, regular (or sporadic) readers will no doubt have noted the high regard I have for some old console games (particularly from my long lost gaming youth days.) Goldeneye is a game that stands out in particular not just for me, but many others. I randomly came across a lengthy piece by Martin Hollis, who was at the time, Head of Software for the Goldeneye (and later Perfect Dark) projects at Rare. His account of the frantic months and years of work which eventually culminated in these masterpieces make for fascinating reading.

So, in the specific case of GoldenEye, and with the benefit of hindsight, the gameplay model was Virtua Cop with a bit of Doom, plus some Mario 64. The theme or setting was (obviously) the Bond universe and particularly GoldenEye. Many of the visual effects and kinetic moments I took from Hard Boiled or other John Woo flicks. Especially, things exploding. Visually, there’s more to that than you might think.

His accounts of the lack of discernable direction or ‘game plan’ for many of the elements speak particularly loudly to me as I am myself now in software development. It is frankly amazing that the project was able to organically mature into the final product given how late in the day some design decisions were ultimately made.

I compiled a list of about 40 gadgets from various Bond films, most of which were modelled, and then Dave and Duncan tried to find levels where we could use them. This is backwards game design, but it worked very well. These models were the game design; there was very little written down on paper. And the models were researched and milked extensively.

Even more incredible was the lack of any real development hardware to properly test their work. Whilst architecturally similar, the SGI Onyx machine they did have was sufficiently different (and underpowered) to make the whole project akin to stumbling blinding along a dirt road at night. From my own coding experiences, it makes me a little edgy if I have been working on a large project (or piece of code) that can’t be compiled or tested until completed. In this situation it is far too easy to make a mistake which could cause untold hours of grief later on. The fact that this lack of ‘comfort zone’ for the majority of the Goldeneye project and not even having the concrete hardware capabilities of the Ultra 64 (later n64) platform until close to completion speaks to the commitment and, frankly, the nerve of the development and management team.

I mentioned we didn’t have an N64 or anything like one. The closest we had was an SGI Onyx or two. Thankfully, as it turned out, the N64 could render triangles much faster than the SGI Onyx. This was shocking as the list price of the Onyx was $250K dollars, and the N64 launched for about 1000th of this price. That’s progress. And it totally saved us, as several of the backgrounds rendered at about 2Hz (2 fps) on the Onyx, without even drawing enemies, objects, or Bond’s gun. My attitude was always, well, if it runs at all on the Onyx, we can probably get it to run at about 30Hz on the final hardware.

As you can no doubt tell from the gushing commentary I am very much in awe of this team’s accomplishment. I can’t recommend highly enough that you read the whole post for yourself.

AVG CTF problems

A few days ago AVG, which is a nice lightweight and free anti virus program, started giving me strange error messages when I tried to update my AV definitions. It was complaining that the “CTF control files” had been corrupted somehow, but offered neither explanation nor remedy. After realising it wasn’t going to go away by itself , I did some digging and found the “ctf” files it was complaining about. To save you time looking, the files can be found in :

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Avg8\update\download

Luckily this problem is very easy to fix, just delete the ctf files in that directory (but don’t touch the bin files as I believe these are the incremental AV definitions) and run a manual update.

I hope that helps anyone in a similar position.