Impressive game. Lame storytelling. They should just stop trying to add stupid stories to games. When they do that It feels like “AWESOME!” and “are you mocking me?!” at the same time. Just give me the guns, point me in the direction of the bad guys and that’s it!

Having recently seen two supposed promising titles, “I’m legend” and “American Gangster”, I’m certain of the sad reality that the writers’ strike has caused. I don’t blame any of them, they claim what should be theirs, but, without a doubt, this is the worst Hollywood we have seen in decades, and all because movie scripts are pathetic or non existing. We can really notice how much value is the writer to good quality film entertainment.

Both movies lack proper management of dramatic tension. There isn’t a well achieved climax, dénouement simply comes and goes totally unnoticed. The credits appear and you take sometime before realizing that the movie has actually ended. It’s like bad sex, or even worse, because cinema is experienced individually, it would be like “bad masturbation”… something to be worried about.

Also, none of those movies has character development, not even bad character development, NONE AT ALL. Since the beginning of the movie till the end we do not find out anything about the characters, doing a documentary would have been more interesting. It really seems that Hollywood, lacking movie writers, when to look for game writers, because these movies actually look like the pathetic excuses for narratives we have to suffer to play a videogame (although there are exceptions, but is a general rule that game stories suck).

As a matter of fact, the most interesting movie I saw in 2007, turn out to be interesting because of the bizarre mixture of elements of videogames and Hollywood movies. The movie in question was called “Shoot ‘em up”, which is also the name of a genre of games that’s very similar to what the movie depicts. Beyond that interesting mixture of languages, the movie is nothing more than a B movie. The fact that this is the movie that caught my attention in the last year, says much about the poor quality of the contents displayed by Hollywood. Too much Tolkien-like fantasies, stupid horror movies, and second parts of already bad movies (and which is worst: second parts of already bad stupid horror movies).

To top it all, most people seems to not notice the difference. They come out of the cinema talking about how good such actor did his part, well… ¿did you actually come to see some poor devil play a mediocre part? ¿or did you come to enjoy some good fiction and drama? Sad as it is, there’s too much reality tv these days… maybe we forgot what makes good drama more entertaining than pseudo-realism.

PS: yeap, it’s actually saturday night and I’m spitting fire on a blog… you must understand that the spot of most importance, that’s usually occupied by an individual of the opposite sex, isn’t occupied at this particular moment, and trivial things such as “what a shitty movie!” makes its way to the top. *sighs*

How a real implementation of the MVC pattern should be:

1 – The user requests to see something.
2 – A controller handles the event.
3 – The controller decides which view is appropiate.
4 – The view access DIRECTLY the model to gather the resources needed to build the view.

Why should it be this way?
If the controller acts as a proxy between the model and the view, an important change in contents displayed is not possible without a change in the controller, which beats the whole point of having the system divided in independent subsystems.

Freaks-on-Rails: capisci?

Yeah, the title of the post was catchier in the spanish version… creativity shortage is on the weather forecast.

This is a special preview release of a small portion of something I’m working on. What’s included in this is something a fellow student needed, an uploader tool with progress bar without having to code any of it, and having total control over the design. They are a few classes in ActionScript 2.0 which, when used properly, can turn any movieclip into an uploader component, and still be able to modify the design afterwards without having to edit external skin or themes files.

They work a little different than usual Flash components, but this is done so that the designer still retains the ability to change the design at whim. The zip file containing the required .as files and an example .fla can be downloaded here:

http://www.martinalterisio.com.ar/imf/imf-uploader.zip

Shortly I’ll post a video in youtube, or similar, a video showing step by step how to make a movieclip that acts like uploader with a progress bar. Well, a video wasn’t the most adequate media after all, so here there is a slide presentation with as much steps required to setup an upload with just a bar representing how much of the file has been uploaded:

A little extract from code documentation on how to use the component:

How to use

If you want to show a progress bar, you have to include a movieclip which _xscale is 100 at completion. This movieclip has to be named `progressbar_mc`.

If you want a button which loads the system browser for selecting the uploaded file, include either a button or movieclip named `browse_bt`.

Also, you may call browse() on this component to activate the uploaded file selection.

If you want a button for canceling the upload, include a button or movieclip named `cancel_bt`.

Also, you may call cancel() to cancel the upload.

If you want to show a text with information on the upload, include a textfield named `progress_field`

The information on this textfield can be customized changing the property `formatProgress`.

If you want to change appearance during upload, have a frame label named `uploading` and another `normal` for each state of the component.

Component Properties

url: where to upload the file

description: text used to describe which files to browse

extension: the extension(s) of files to look for separate with semicolons (;)

formatProgress: a format for how information is shown in `progress_field` (see below)

Special strings used in `formatProgress`

{bytesLoaded} – replaced with the bytes uploaded

{bytesTotal} - replaced with the total bytes of the file.

{kbytesLoaded} – replaced with the kilobytes uploaded.

{kbytesTotal} – replaced with the total kilobytes of the file.

{name} – replaced with the name of the file.

Events

error: any error that may have happened and made the upload fail. Check the `message` property of the event, using arguments[0].message if inside an on() handler.

cancel: user cancelled the upload either by canceling the browse, before the upload even started, or pressed the cancel button, or the cancel function was called, during upload.

start: the user accepted the upload.

complete: the upload finished.

I forgot to translate 3 posts from the spanish version. Even if this is not a good excuse as I want it to be, I haven’t had any time at all (yes! you damn teachers, I blame you!). Anyway, there was an article about another article on EA success on videogame marketing, another short one that refers to an article on using failure as part of the game design rather than a terminal condition from which the player cannot continue, and one that I would really like to translate, which was about videogames as a form of art, a recurring subject, in which my opinion really matters nothing at all, but nothing stops me from saying it anyway (unless tomorrow they decide that freedom of speech should be completely banned).

These are the 3 posts in their spanish version:

http://mundogris.wordpress.com/2007/04/22/electronics-arts-una-empresa-construida-gracias-a-la-buena-experiencia-de-promocionar-videojuegos/

http://mundogris.wordpress.com/2007/04/22/la-vida-te-da-revancha-los-videojuegos-tambien-deberian-darte-revancha/

http://mundogris.wordpress.com/2007/04/22/la-cruzada-por-el-octavo-arte/

http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2007/01/08/01288.html

According to these Genome Project scientists, someone did create us, but, as a good old surgeon, they forgot the scalpel inside our dna, which seems to have some extra data that won’t be used.

We mock this situation between friends and collegues in a forum about programming (in spanish):

http://foros.3dgames.com.ar/showthread.php?t=379664

I’ll translate the post of the steps of the Human Project explained through pictures (courtesy of a fellow alien coder):

User Request
What did the project leader understood
System analist’s design
The programmer’s view
External consultant’s recommendation
Project’s documentation
Project’s budget
Prototype (picture of Menem, ex-president of Argentina. Replace with any monkey-like president of your country)
Alpha version
Beta version
Debugging
Production
Operational support
What the user actually needed

http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/336/procedural_content_.php

One of the most boring things when working on a retail videogame must be, base on what those who made this kind of games say, creating the game content. Mapping the whole virtual world where a game takes place must be very boring and repetitive task and has a very large economic and time cost.

What the article before proposes is most interesting: generate this contents through algorithms. Similar to how programs make fractal graphics, there can be programs to generate worlds rich in content without paying to the 3d or 2d artist, and not having to wait for months to be complete.

I ask myself if it would be possible to apply this idea to other aspects of a game, such as generating elements more directly involved in the gameplay, for example, in an rpg, generate items that change in qualities and benefits, mobs that vary in difficulty and capabilities, npcs, skills, etc… I imagine something that looks the same way as how genetic algorithms are “grown” to achieve better results. In the same line of thinking, interactive game content could evolutionary evolve. Although this would also mean a lose in control over this elements and over the game balance.

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/call_for_a_blog_1.html

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/draft_bloggers_1.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6502643.stm

Or should I say; do we need someone like Tim O’Reilly to impose a code of conduct on us?

If it is a code of conduct, why doesn’t it speaks more about human relationship, how to behave so not to offend the other, and why does it speak so much about identifying those comments who should be prohibited/erased, and mark people that posts such comments?

This isn’t a code of conduct! It’s an excuse for opinion control.

And what about anonymacy? Anonymacy is great! It’s the fual that feed the internauts into venturing beyond the stablishment. Ultimately is not a real anonymacy, on the contrary, it’s the freedom of the self beyond the social self, hidden behind a name, a family name, a race, a religion, a social security number, a credit card, etc. The individual free to be and express the way he wants. Don’t mess with our “anonymacy”. Don’t mess with our freedom of speech.

O’Reilly, please RTFRFC (Read The Fascinating RFC): RFC 1855 Netiquette

Why insist on reinventing the wheel with all geometrical forms possible? The one rounded-shaped works just fine.

Another article of those that were still on my “reading pending” folder.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070207/zenke_01.shtml

I was most surprised at this article because, inadvertedly, I think, SOE executives have been exploring the good side of RMT (Real Money Trading) on terms of gameplay. I suggest the reading of the full extent of the paper, which can be downloaded at the last page of the article.

Anyway, although the implementation of the Station Exchange has saved many players from bothersome grinding, I think that this is an structural problem of MMORPGs common design, and must be solved through a better design at the basis of the genre.

Usually oneself as a coder has to deal with problems where the informatic solution is obvious or almost obvious. I mean that usually one wanders in already well-known lands, where most of the systems have been studied so much that there doesn’t seem to be very much space for innovation. But not all problems waiting for us out there are as simple as they seem. What really happens is that those who look suspiciously easy to understand are those which are so complex in their solution. Many of those give headaches to the mathematics theorist, but we don’t have their capabilities but we do have the need to solve the same problems, at least we’ll try to do the best we can.

This problems are not that unusual as you may think, for example, suppose in an ecommerce we have shipping system that charges by the amount of boxes sent, and each item has a different volume. We wish to provide the client with the best possible configuration to minimize the shipping cost. It’s not as easy as it seems, isn’t it?

Take note that some of this problems are “bounded”, which means that even if we don’t know the solution, we know is between a finite amount of possibilities. Then, we could just check every possible configuration till we found one that solves the problem. This solution is known as “brute force”, and it’s not the most efficient, but it is a solution we can work out with our capabilities, and, most of the times, we don’t need that much efficiency.

Anyway, although we know a solution, sometimes is not that simple to put it into practice, and most of the times the result is not as nice as we would like. But, there is a technique that we can use to provide an elegant solution to this kind of problems: recursion.

Basically, with recursion we solve one step of the problem knowing that we can solve the problem with a smaller input, for example, we have a bag of coins with different values, and we want to obtain an exact sum of money using those coins. We will solve a problem having N coins, assuming that the solution for a bag of N-1 coins is known.

Therefore, if we take one coin from the bag, we known that the problem for the remaining coins can be solved. We have to use that to solve the problem considering the coin we took. We could check if there is an ammount of money requested in the bag without the coin, and if there is, we have a solution. If not, we have to consider the possibility that the coin we took was needed. We assume that coin was part of the solution, and recheck the bag for the ammount requested minus the value of the coin taken. If there is a solution, we just put the coin in it and we have a solution por the original ammount. If these cases fails, we can say that there isn’t a solution.

In pseudo-code:

function obtainAmmount(bag, ammount) when the bag has N coings
    coin <- bag.takeCoin()
    solution1 <- obtainAmmount(bag, ammount)
    if solution1 exists
        return solution1
    else
        solution2 <- obtainAmmount(bag, ammount - coin)
        if solution2 existe
            solution2.putCoin(coin)
            return solution2
        else
            return there is no solution

Now the solution for N coins uses the solution for N-1 coins, and this one uses the solution for N-2 coins, and so on. For the recursion to work, we have to find a solution that doesn’t depend on another. This one is called the “base case”, and it’s generally an instance of the problem that is trivial to solve. In the example the basic case would be the problem with an empty bag, for this problem there can be only one solution: an empty set when the ammount requested is zero.

In pseudo-code:

function obtainAmmount(bag, ammount) when there are no coins in the bag
    if ammount = 0
        return empty solution
    else
        return there is no solution

Finally we can combine these to get one complete solution:

function obtainAmmount(bag, ammount)
    if the bags has no coins
        apply base case
    else
        apply recursive case

That’s it. Observe that, for each coin, we check the possibility that it’s used in the solution or not, therefore, we’re actually going through each possible combination sequentially till we found one that fits the requirements. This happens in most recursions, so it’s a good guideline to know how many recursive calls are needed in the recursion case.