Here’s another favorite from the pictures so far.
Jenny, Jim’s (Fazin/eth0) wife sits down and spanks us all in her first time playing Flatout. Towards the end of the match she’s playing (and winning) as she answers a call on her cell phone.
Beginner’s luck!
Click the picture to see the notes on my Flickr site.
The morning events started with Fusion Frenzy on X-Box and Flatout demolition derby style.
I’m proud to announce I won (well, tied with Fazin) the Fusion Frenzy event.
Good thing as I sucked seriously at Lastetron last night and started the morning with negative points.
The BFG event is off and running and we’re having a blast. We played Whirlyball & Lasertron last night.
Here’s a shot of the first winners for Whirlyball.
I’m excited to see that Quake IV will have Linux support via a client patch within a few weeks (the game went gold last week).
You have to love iD Software for doing the right thing – whether it’s Linux clients or GPL’ing the source of their games when they are done with them.
Though the PC Gamer review score of 70% is a little worrisome.
But it’s Raven and iD, and I love both studios for their quality work.
The RIAA has ordered a take down notice to RPG Films. RPG films is a machinima site that takes animation made from video game / video game engines to make short movies and films. Some of them included music video’s – which is where the RIAA had a problem.
How is this not fair use? There is no MP3 to download . Only the most sophisticated computer user could figure out how to seperate the audio from the video, and even then the quality would be awful – with a video file you’re trying to compress it down as far as you can to save your users’ bandwidth.
If anything, this probably helps promote more music you’ve never heard, that will spark you to find out who to make it and go buy it.
The RIAA just doesn’t get it.
More goodness via Alice:
Alice came across a picture of herself in Second Life with her avatar hanging on the wall, by a player named always_black.
She then links to a story he wrote and calls it the best piece of gaming writing I ever did read.
And I agree. Go read it.
Almost a month ago Icculus announced in his .plan file he was porting a game called Second Life to Linux, and included 3 screenshots.
Second Life is a fascinating experiement in the MMO genre. In some ways made for developers, it lets you own land, create and trade various items, all with a built in content creation tool. From the What Is page:
It is a palette for creative self-expression like nothing you have ever seen. Jump in, find a sandbox, and start building.
Icculus’ timing was amazing, as Cory Doctorow, Copyfighter, EFF employee, and sci-fi author, was having a book release party in the game.
Already available for Mac OS X and Windows, I’m anxiously awaiting the Linux port to try this out.
Plaguelands has a summary up of the recent MMO roundtable hosted by IBM. Game Developers participating included Geoff Heath, CEO, NCsoft Europe & Steven Reid, NCsoft Europe; Raph Koster, Sony; and Patty Fry, Global Executive, Online Games & DCC.
We’ll ignore the others and focus on some very, very interesting things Mr. Koster mentioned, I highly recommend you jump the link and just read his section.
A bit on pathfinding:
On the tech aspect, something I didn’t know Koster mentions is that 40% of the cpu processing is utilized on pathfinding. Yes, fuckin’ pathfinding. A fuckin’ decade, and almost half of the potential processing powers developers are allocated is used to fuckin’ pathfinding. And you know what? Pathfinding is a joke, it could use a lot of work.
And databases:
Koster also delves into some details about mmos and their databases. The runtime database and the static game database and explaining their differences and how and what needs to be done so developers will have the hardware that allows for more dynamisms, more impact, making that world a virtual living breathing world in itself that players can impact and not just some static sandbox. It’s funny when Raph talks about players having an impact on the world and how we are seeing somewhat of a reversal instead of progressing. Notice how games like WoW do not allow players to drop items on the ground? While this may save a lot of CS headaches, this is the type of simple impact on the persistent world.
Who thinks about these things? Everyone wants to be a developer or a producer, and never thinks about what the programmers have to go through. Fascinating.
Someone with way too much time on their hands has taken screenshots of toilets throughout the ages in video games.
Some classic examples (tons of FPS games available at the link too):
