I'm learning JavaScript! I mean, I already wrote some crap in it
before, but now I'm learning enough to write something substantial.
Like a (non-Perlenspiel) game.
One of the things you need for a game is a game loop. In large games
these are increasingly tricky affairs spread out over multiple threads
and designed to optimize memory access patterns. In JavaScript, you
can't do that, but you can at least implement the basics correctly.
The canonical tutorial on this stuff is deWiTTERS Game Loop which
goes over several implementation strategies. Only one of those
implementations, "Constant Game Speed independent of Variable FPS," is
worth pursuing. (To know why, read the article.) So how to do it in
JavaScript?
This post used to be a lot longer and full of bad advice. Here is good
advice: Use only requestAnimationFrame. Just do everything the
deWitters article says inside of requestAnimationFrame. After more
testing I've discovered browsers' schedulers are basically awful,
unreliable, and this is the only way to make a main loop appropriate
for a game. If you are targeting one specific version of one browser
on one platform, you can maybe manage a better loop with the
setInterval-based method I had described before, but if you're doing
that you're better off writing a native application in the first
place.
A bit over a hundred years ago,
California was all set to build a great-looking bike highway. Unfortunately
they built car highways instead and pretty much doomed good urban
planning, air quality, international politics, etc. More alternate
history stories should pick events like this as divergence points,
rather than boring crap like who won wars.
California continues its century-plus history of bad decisions through
to today, as documented in
a beautiful letter from Robert Meister to Daphne Koller about
Coursera's state lobbying efforts to delegitimize and destroy public
education:
I will know my course has been successful when my students
understand Coursera’s business model behind offering free higher
education globally (along with the promise of greater social
equality) as an exciting venture capital investment opportunity
through which to increase privately-held wealth and lock in
existing educational hierarchies.
Relatedly (I promise) bees are still dying for unknown reasons:
Rising food prices led farmers to plant crops in fields previously
considered marginal or set aside as grasslands. Honeybees forage in
those grasslands, and can’t get the nutrition they need from
flowering crops alone.
This is a positive feedback loop, since without bees fruits don't get
pollinated and food gets even more expensive. If this was, say, a
college education, or health care, the solution is obvious:
large-scale private pollination efforts. If you want fruit, you'd
better spend your lunch hour pollinating that garden to earn a fruit
certificate to exchange for a shitty melon. (Hah hah, just kidding,
who gets a lunch hour anymore?)
Shane Carruth has released his new film, Upstream Color, as a $20
DRM-free download. His previous film Primer is one of my
favorites. I don't feel quite as good about Upstream Color, but I
still recommend it.
Someone (an adult) reviewed
every Goosebumps book. Eight-year-old-me is
jealous. Today-me hopes the reviewer is still okay.
Here is a version of Astroids that is also a security hole
and the author, Michal Zalewski,
explaining how it works. This attack is oblique,
involves multiple levels of the platform stack, and the information
immediately leaked is not usually thought of as a security problem by
those under attack. This also describes things like cache timing
attacks or the BEAST and CRIME TLS attacks. The biggest challenge
facing computer security right now isn't even just plugging all the
holes, but explaining to laypeople and novice programmers what kinds
of things are risks and threats.
God of Blades came out for personal computers (a while ago, and I
missed it). I'd previously played it on iOS. Satisfying slow-paced
hack-and-slash with an underused aesthetic. A bourbon to Devil May
Cry's wine. (Bayonetta's tequila? God of War's jello shots?)
Porpentine's essay, 7 Thoughts on Women in Games had a
line that I thought was a critical takeaway for any kind of
activism, because it succinctly sums up what's broken about the
hyper-libertarianism in so many parts of the Internet today:
Communities aren’t “just friends”. Sure, they’re often groups of
friends based around a common interest, but when a community of
friends overlaps or encompasses technical resources, they must take
responsibility.
I wanted a nice experience using Emacs for Mac OS X. By "nice" I
mean:
- Emacs runs in server mode. It's started like other OS X software
by Launch Services.
- I can connect to it with graphical or terminal-based clients easily.
- Graphical clients use Cocoa and not X11.
- There's an icon on my dock to pop up a new graphical frame.
- There's a shell command I can type to open a new graphical frame.
- There's something I can type into Spotlight to open a new graphical frame.
- If the server is dead for some reason, there's a way to start it in
a small number of clicks.
- If the server is dead for some reason, as many as the above features
as possible still work.
- It's easy, but not the default, to start standalone (non-client)
Emacs instances as well.
You too can bring several hours and three separate scripting tools to
bear on this, or follow the simple (hah hah) instructions below.
First, install Emacs For Mac OS X. The Emacs that comes with OS X is
old and crusty, and the one at that site is new and Cocoa-ready and
Retina-enabled and so on. Put it in /Applications - if you put it
somewhere else, you'll need to correct all the other scripts I'm
mentioning in this post.
Emacs Server at Login
Open up the AppleScript Editor. If you're an Emacs user this probably
looks awful and confusing to you. Paste the following into it:
tell application "Terminal"
do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs --daemon"
end tell
Press ⌘K to compile it, then ⌘S and save it in
/Applications/Development. (This subfolder keeps your Applications
menu clean, and has an important effect on sort order later.) To give
it a nice icon, select the original Emacs.app; press ⌘I; click the
icon in the top-left; press ⌘C; select on your new Emacs Server.app
bundle; press ⌘I; click the icon in the top-left; press ⌘V.
Open up System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items and now
you can press the + button and choose Emacs Server.
The server is invisible until you first connect a client to it. Then
it will appear in the dock, as the regular Emacs.app.
New Frame Dock Icon
To make a dock icon that opens up a new Emacs frame - a client if the
server is available, a standalone instance otherwise - create the
following script in the AppleScript Editor and save it as an
Application named Emacs Client. in /Applications/Development.
tell application "Terminal"
try
do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient -c -n &"
tell application "Emacs" to activate
on error
do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs"
end try
end tell
Then drag this from the Applications folder to your dock. This will
also make it so typing emacs into Spotlight selects this as the
first item ("Development" sorts before "Emacs", "Client" sorts before
"Server").
If connected to the server, this opens up a new client frame each
click, by design. To just raise existing frames, click the other
Emacs icon on the dock, representing the running application.
Server-aware Shell Scripts
I put these in ~/local/bin. You'll need to add that to your $PATH
if you haven't already. First, two simple ones. These will start new
instances, not clients, but they're necessary to properly handle shell
arguments for fallbacks for clients. They're also nice to have if you
actually want to start a new instance.
Start a new Cocoa instance - emacsc:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$@"
Start a new terminal instance - emacst:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -nw "$@"
Now for something ma little ore complicated - ec, start a Cocoa
client or fall back to a new instance (via the above emacsc) if the
server is unavailable.
set -e
EMACSCLIENT=/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient
exec $EMACSCLIENT -c -a ~/local/bin/emacsc "$@"
Similarly, et, for a terminal client or new terminal instance.
set -e
EMACSCLIENT=/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient
exec $EMACSCLIENT -t -a ~/local/bin/emacst "$@"
Why are ec and et scripts instead of aliases? Many tools will fail
if $EDITOR does not resolve to an actual executable somewhere in
$PATH because they invoke the tool directly instead of invoking a
shell to run it.
Finally: Some aliases for ~/.bash_profile, to override the ancient
version of Emacs that Mac OS X comes with by default.
alias emacsclient="/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient"
alias emacs="ec"
export EDITOR="ec"
Activate Emacs on New Frames
If you start emacsc or ec from Terminal, Mac OS X doesn't realize
you probably want to switch focus to the Emacs session automatically.
There are also plenty of other ways you might start Emacs besides
typing a command into Terminal, and you probably want the new frames
focused then as well.
To do this, we can take advantage of the ns features in Emacs Lisp
and the frame-creation hooks. Add the following to your ~/.emacs or
some file it loads:
(when (featurep 'ns)
(defun ns-raise-emacs ()
"Raise Emacs."
(ns-do-applescript "tell application \"Emacs\" to activate"))
(defun ns-raise-emacs-with-frame (frame)
"Raise Emacs and select the provided frame."
(with-selected-frame frame
(when (display-graphic-p)
(ns-raise-emacs))))
(add-hook 'after-make-frame-functions 'ns-raise-emacs-with-frame)
(when (display-graphic-p)
(ns-raise-emacs)))
Now anything that opens or selects a frame will also activate Emacs
for Finder. The featurep check means this is harmless to load on
non-OS X platforms, and ns-raise-emacs is not (interactive) for
reasons that will be self-evident if you think about them.
Remaining Issues
Launch Services is happy to start the Emacs Server instance but loses
track of it afterwards. This is mostly harmless but annoying.
The second Emacs icon on the dock (the one for the main Emacs.app
rather than your custom Emacs Client.app) behaves oddly when no
frames are visible. Its menu bar and context menu don't work, and you
can't start a new frame from it directly. This is likely an issue
because both Emacs and Finder assume any graphical application has at
least one main window / frame, even if it might not be visible.
(Thanks to Dan Gerrity for pointing out a typo in the original posted
emacst script, and Sean B. Palmer for Emacs Lisp improvements that
led to much simpler shell scripts.)
Candy Box is getting a lot of attention. I'm enjoying it. You
should probably go start playing it before you read on, because it's
kind of like Frog Fractions or Drop a Beat, Giuseppe! or
Dragon Drop (and if you're not sure what I'm talking about, go
play all those too).
I'm spending way more time with Candy Box that I expected. Even
after it opened up what I saw at first was an ordinary
energy-waiting-spending mechanism. These are common in F2P games but
lately they're found even in other styles of game, and I hate
them.
But for Candy Box this is another layer of trickery. If you're
really paying attention you get on an exponential feedback loop within
about an hour of play. There's the "opening up" after a few minutes,
but then also a second at that point, where you start to get
meaningful choices on intervals comparable to the time it takes to
make the choice. The candy energy becomes almost irrelevant (say, as
relevant as how many potions you have in a Final Fantasy game) as
you start to consider how you can use the potions and scrolls
available. Eventually you get the cauldron and navigable levels and
it's more like animation lockdowns than waiting for energy; the scales
are so short and there's so many near-term options at each juncture.
What really drew me in was the mechanism of the Wishing Well (although
a similar choice appears with smaller magnitude at other points in the
game). It gives you a one-time ability to gain items proportional to
the items you have. In a game where the decision space unlocks
gradually a one-time ability comes with worries that you might not
even know what's important. Between the exponential power curve and
granting this ability it becomes a game about patience rather than
just a game in which I must be patient.
When you have to wait two days and can pay $10 to remove that, it's
abusive or at least stressful in a bad way. But what is it when you
can wait an hour or two days or five days and then invoke an ability -
exactly once - to multiply your energy by eight? Then it becomes a
game of patience and suspicion. How long can I wait before invoking
this? I know if I do it after an hour I'll get to do this new
thing. I don't know, but suspect, if I wait a day it's going to open
up much more. I don't suspect, but might believe, that if I wait a
another day it's going to open even more.
So it's kind of a game of chicken, but against a static system: When
do I think the designer stopped implementing new things? Inevitably
the comparison, when would I stop adding new things? How much do I
think I don't know? It's constantly asking me that, and I think
that's an uncommon question in videogames.
Mike Joffe
deconstructs Super Princess Peach
and finds that, although it continues Nintendo's history of
problematic character design, it also has some unlikely subtext that
helped him resonate with Peach's character:
Bowser's giant vibrating phallus of emotion is too strong for other
men, but it leaves him irrational and emotive, allowing the
collected, in-control female hero to defeat him with her logical use
and understanding of her emotions.
An essay by Jordan Erica Webber in the latest issue of
Five out of Ten, Reflecting Reality, covers similar ground
but with a different conclusion while considering Patricia Tannis in
Borderlands 2. (There's other good stuff in the magazine too.)
Aniwey's Candy Box was pretty cool until I accidentally hit
backspace and lost a couple (critical) hours of progress.
High-resolution background art from Final Fantasy IX, cut
from the game (probably for size reasons). FFIX is the only one in
the series I've respected more as I age (and probably mature). I
would love to see these put into a re-release or hacked into the
existing game.
Some recommendations after a week of playing Ludum Dare games:
I had planned to have more than videogame links here but between Ludum
Dare and me being completely disorganized I have forgotten them all.
I made a game called 123456789 for Ludum Dare 26.
It's a short web-based puzzle game. At first I didn't much like the
theme and wasn't going to do anything. (I prefer to view themes as
prompts for something the game should be about, not just a style for
the game to be in.) But my wife was playing Hyperdimension Neptunia
V all day so I had to do something other than Monster Hunter for a
change. It probably took about five hours to make playable and then
another two to add sound, playtest and make some interface tweaks.
I don't really like puzzle three but it's doing double-duty as a hint
for puzzle nine, which is inscrutable enough even with it. People are
having more trouble with puzzle six than I expected. Puzzle eight
is perfect.
The core mechanics and feel are inspired by Nemesis Factor, a toy
that felt like something you'd find in an abandoned Martian daycare
center. The form is inspired by
Anna Anthropy, Leon Arnott, and Liz Ryerson's Triad - a
quick riff on a theme and then it's over, no time wasted on a 255
board checklist or "infinite procedural levels!" no one will play.
Like my last completed Ludum Dare game it uses Perlenspiel and
should run properly in any modern-ish browser, including phones and
tablets (for which a secret button appears since you can't just press
Escape).
I put up the Lego stuff from my old
site. LDraw parts for Heroica
and a page about
X-Pod Play Off. Modified Heroica
rules are on hiatus for a while until I figure out the best way to
integrate stuff from Ilrion and plug a few new balance holes.
As far as I can tell Heroica is canceled, though. Lego needs to figure
out how to keep their (good) games around for more than a year and a
half. They've been scaling back the whole Games line and the only
mainstays seem to be Creationary (fine, but not very interesting)
and LEGO Champion (horrible, and yet still the only way to
get female microfigures who are not an unlicensed Cho Chang).
I'm playing a ton of Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. It's the first in
the series I've really dug into - I played through the first few
village quest levels of Freedom Unite but quit for various
reasons. Monster Hunter's a really big game, wide and deep, and my
thoughts about it - aside from "I like it, it's fun" - are vague and
meandering right now.
It slowly morphs between a couple different games, each one acting as
a tutorial for the next. There are a lot of moving parts and each one
feeds into the next one, and some of them feed back as well. You
gather and farm (literally, organizing agricultural production;
figuratively, performing repetitive actions) to get resources to build
tools to let you farm more effectively to hire and train assistants to
take on bigger challenges, and repeat. The change is slow, but when
you compare one star vs. five star vs. challenge quests, it's sort of
like proceeding from gomoku to
capture go to
proper go. (If you also had
to fell and cut lumber for the board and find shells and mine rock for
the stones.) Same parts, similar mechanisms, very different game. Each
step I have to pick up some new tactic or tool or I risk losing more
often.
This also means it's very slow - I've "beaten" it after around 50
hours, but that really just means I'm now doing high-rank quests. I
suspect that high-rank to G-rank is going to be another slow ramp up
to a new kind of game.
The size of the game also dominates online discussion. There's a lot
of explanation of what and how because there's a lot to learn (and
I don't want to downplay the friendly community) but not much critical
analysis of if and why.
I have a complicated relationship with physical violence in games. I
play a lot of horror games (and watch a lot of bloody horror films)
and that doesn't bug me; Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas doesn't bug
me; Hotline Miami bugs me in what I suspect is exactly the way it's
designed to; Saint's Row 3 was really troubling for me; I found
Grand Theft Auto 4 more or less unplayable. Intent, magnitude and
amount, fidelity, agency, a bunch of different (and non-orthogonal)
axes make it difficult for me to guess how I might react or tease out
what exactly bothers me.
Monster Hunter doesn't bother me. There's a fair amount of blood,
and everything about it is really brutal: the hits and knockdowns,
breaks and carves, bites and smashes. It knows it's toeing some kind
of line, and so when you attack the speaking
Lynians or the
cute Kelbi, it's careful
to show them retreating rather than dying.
There's probably something to say about Monster Hunter and
ecology. I'm not smart enough to really dig in, but that won't stop me
from writing a bunch of crap.
First, it's a game that has an ecology in the normal sense. There are
fictional books styled as notes from
naturalists who have
studied the monsters. This offers an ecological interpretation of its
game mechanics: The research is a tool for players to learn how to
deal with (fight, avoid, steal from, etc.) monsters. Take this
description of Qurupeco, an early monster:
Bird Wyverns with unique plumage. Well known for using their
thoracic vocal organs to imitate others monsters calls, first
summoning them, then using the distraction to flee. Spits a
dangerous combustible body fluid.
We have the veneer of "real" natural history with a reference to the
genus "bird wyvern". This tells the player about its general shape and
behavior. It also offers an outline of how it interacts with other
monsters in the area and its unique behaviors. Every monster and many
other objects in the game have descriptions in this form.
But Monster Hunter isn't an ecological simulation in the sense of
e.g. SimCity where you take on the role of a transcendent planner
and explore ecological potentials. Instead it has an
ecology, and you - the player/character - are part of it, unable to
cause macro-level change on your own, and instead must prepare and
learn about it in order to survive and enable a series of micro-level
changes.
Second, the games' plots usually concern the relationship between
particular human settlements and the surrounding environment. Humans
in the world of Monster Hunter seem constantly at risk of extinction
through large-scale ecological disaster. In the case of 3 Ultimate,
a giant monster butting its head against the ocean floor nearby is
causing earthquakes.
Humans don't have any dominion over that space (e.g. the ocean floor),
they only mitigate, course-correct, survive. They also aren't very
interested in developing a dominion. By the end of the game your
village's interaction is broader, but it's not physically larger, and
it interacts with the larger space in the same way it did with the
smaller one. You can displace the cause of the quakes, but it comes
back, or creates a space for other problems - you achieve an
equilibrium, not ownership, control, or transcendence.
But it's also not a "primitive" society. There's global travel, money
and trade, advanced metalworking and steam power, domesticated
animals, division of labor, bureaucracy, books and scientific
research. Some aspects are tribal and agrarian, but most of the
culture is late-Enlightenment at the earliest.
Is it particularly good at any of this? Does it really put forward a
coherent viewpoint when considered over the course of all games /
quests? Can we learn anything about ecology from it? I've got no idea
so far.
My hypothesis - which like the previous ones, is too coarse - is
that we are going to have to slow down, reorient and regulate the
proliferation of monsters... Bruno Latour, "We Have Never Been
Modern"
One of the difficult things when Japanese make games for foreign
countries is the problems with faith. From the historical background
of Japan the interest in faith has been weak. It’s difficult to
understand the feeling of things such as making vows with a hand over
the Bible during the presidential inauguration; or how Islamic faith
views the absolute moral...
And it can’t just end there, so what’s OK and what’s bad needs to
be thought out, but there is no such rule existing.
Nigoro, developers of La-Mulana,
"Problem of Faith"
I'm an atheist and I don't necessarily agree with the choices they've
made in this instance. But I also see it's a difficult problem, and I
can't read their minds and see what they were trying to do in the
first place.
What I do know is that this kind of public discussion about how we use
cultural symbols - especially other's cultural symbols - is
desperately needed. In the West it really only happens among tiny
development teams, one or two people. So to read a reflection on it,
from a "large" independent studio whose native language is not
English, is a rare treasure.
The comments, unfortunately but expectedly, are horrible.
I played Nicole Brauer's The Guardian. It's a
Flash-based sidescroller and takes about 20 minutes. (I think? I took
a break in the middle.)
It suffers from some pacing problems. I hardly ever enjoy screens with
slowly appearing text.
What's cool is how the scale of the game - you're a single pixel -
changes how you parse the landscape. Shapes that would be irrelevant
details in other games take on an active role helping/hindering
you. The scale also changes the primary verb. It's mechanically
identical to "jump" but the sizes and angles involved make it feel
more like climbing.
(via Shawn Trautman's Discover Games)
«
Page 5 / 6
»