Sucess at last

I finally got back my PC yesterday and managed to get the internet working on it so I can put away the pda for now thank God. There is just one problem, I only have an allowance of 1GB which sucks so bad. I find myself watching my network meter to see how much data I’m sending/loading all the time. Anyways I suppose I should be grateful I have some internet at all.

So I was browsing today and what do I see, Blizzard announced Diablo III! I’m off the net for a few days and Blizard drops a bomb shell like this. This connection I’m on is the speed of dialup, so trying to browse and get all the info takes forever. I’ll get it all in the end though but let me just say the game looks amazing from what I’ve seen so far. I’m not surprised though I expect nothing less from Blizzard.

A few more days

It’s been over a week now since I last posted and it seems like a lifetime. Well I’m still alive I just don’t have any internet access…yet. I tried to transfer my old account to my new address but my service provider who I won’t give the name of, told me I would have to start a new 12 month contract, no thanks.

Anyways I have been trying to setup some internet access with my mobile service but that isn’t working out how I planned either with their service conveniently being down just when I decided to sign up. I plan to call them today and give them a piece of my mind as I am not pleased at all.

Aside from that I don’t even have my PC which was ok for the first few days, but after being so busy before and now literally having nothing to do, I feel like I am slowly losing my mind. I…need…to…program…something. That’s how I feel all the time which is quite interesting and I guess confirmed for me how much I enjoy coding. I have been attempting to entertain myself with TV and my PDA but that isn’t really working out but 2 more days and I should have my belongings again. Ah joy.

It’s really quite interesting to see how much I depended on the internet for everything and now not having it has made me feel cut off from the world. I wonder how I used to live without it a few years ago.

Moving house

This will be a quick entry as I’m moving house today and don’t know when I will have access to the net or my computer yet. It’s been a hectic few days packing all my worldly possesions but I’m glad it’s over now as I hate packing/unpacking but it has to be done.

Graphics vs Gameplay

I was lying in bed yesterday and thinking about which I prefer in a game. For me personally it comes down to gameplay simply because that is what keeps you coming back for more time and time again. I guess that’s why I have no problem firing up some of my favourite retro titles every now and then like many others and why Nintendo’s Virtual Console has done so well up to this point.

In the early days of gaming having realistic graphics wasn’t an option and while there were games that pushed the bar in terms of graphics, it was the gameplay that kept you entertained. Which brings me to the point of why I play games at all; simply to have fun. Give me a game with great graphics but if the gameplay isn’t solid then I will no doubt lose interest relatively quickly. I believe a balance has to be struck, yes have the nice graphics but don’t sacrifice the gameplay because of it.

I believe many developers fall into the trap of thinking if their game doesn’t look amazing, that it won’t sell and perhaps devoting less time developing the core gameplay. Too many times have I picked up a game that looked interesting and it had all the graphical bells and whistles, but the gameplay wasn’t worth 2 cents. Who is to blame for this? I fear too many consumers let the poor gameplay slide because they have the nice graphics and that’s why I partly blame them, but then everyone wants different things from their gaming experience I suppose. That is however a whole other topic for debating.

This is a more prominent argument now that we are in the ‘next generation’ where everything is supposed to look better. This in itself I find interesting as most associate next gen to visuals but I believe a true next gen experience should encompass more than just graphics. Where is the next gen gameplay? that’s what I want to know. While many see Nintendo’s effort with the Wii as gimmicky, I think it is more of a leap in gaming than what the 360 or PS3 are doing. Now don’t get me wrong I’m not saying those consoles aren’t good but what are they really doing that’s making your gaming experience different aside from having better looking games?

I find it interesting to listen to people when they classify what a good game is and why they think it is good. More often than not it’s usually because of the game’s visuals. I believe if a developer can pull off the graphics + gameplay then by all means and kudos to them. I’ve been considered harsh when it comes to judging games as I am not easily won over by graphics alone, so if that’s all there is to a game then it probably won’t deserve any of my time. I don’t have time to waste on poor controls and sloppy gameplay especially if it’s not fun regardless of how it looks.

When you get down to it, gaming essentially should be an enjoyable interactive experience. A combination of graphics, gameplay, story (if appropriate), sound and controls which should compliment each other to form a nice balance.

Geometry wars clone – update

I thought I would post a little update on this project I’m working on. I had initially decided to just tidy the code of the old version I programmed a while back but I just couldn’t stop there, I wanted to improve on my previous attempt.

Now and then I refer to the old code and I find myself thinking ‘was I really this bad at programming? ‘ It’s really quite interesting comparing how I would approach a problem now compared to back then, experience is definitely a good teacher as the saying goes.

Anyways I decided a major improvement would be to add some multi-threading since everything in the old version ran on the single main thread. I did a bit of multi-threading programming for a project last semester and wrote a little threading class so I thought it would be handy to stick that into this project. At the moment I have only implemented 1 additional thread which I use to update the game. This way all of the movement/collision detection and other calculations aren’t done on the main rendering thread allowing it to just render the graphics alone. I don’t want to go thread crazy so I will add them when I think I really need them to avoid having to perform too much synchronization.

As the aim of the original project was to simulate the AI of green enemies there wasn’t any variety of baddies at all which made it kinda boring so I also decided to include some more enemies to mix it up a little. I whipped up an enemy class and enemy manager class to handle the multiple enemies’ routines and separated everything nicely into classes, it’s so much more manageable now compared to my old hack fest of a project that the original was.

Umm lets see what else have worked on. Ah I made a small change to the game world and altered it from 2D into 3D nothing major but you will see when it’s released, I don’t want to give away too much right now. Aside from that I’ve been trying to optimize the code as much as I can to see how many enemies I can get onscreen at once with all the particle effects etc but I seem to have run into a hitch. When I deploy the project in release mode, all I get is a white screen. I suspect that it has something to do with the recent overclocking of my GPU but I won’t go off topic rambling about my overclocking woes.

So far the project is going well and is stable plus it feels good to be able to work on a project and not worry about deadlines for a change. I can’t say when I will be done but I will quote Blizzard and say ‘it’s done when it’s done.’