So I've put my portfolio online, it's available at this place:
centreforexcrubulence.blogspot.com.au
Prospective admirers may now witness my programming aptitude. There are interactive demos and everything!
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
How to simply send simple instructions back to the User Interface thread in C#. SIMPLY.
After a few insane months where I had no time to give to this blog, I'm back with my first ever how-to. All of the non-programming readers, which to date has also been all of the readers, may decide to switch off at this point. Go ahead; I can't stop you, but let me preface the tutorial with a few reader-friendly notes. If you just came here for the answer, there are helpful headings that you can scroll down for.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Let the Stupid Rats Die. For Science. You Monster.
Clear-headedness under pressure. It's a skill that should come in handy if I ever find myself in a life-or-death situation where I need to keep my wits about me to survive. Am I driving a FWD, RWD or 4WD car? That will be key to knowing how to regain control of the vehicle and not slide off the cliff into the canyon below. Will water extinguish this fire, or cause an explosion? Should I put my hands out to stop my fall, attempt to roll with it or take the full force of the fall on my stomach so as protect my head?
That last one is a real situation I found myself in where I did indeed take the fall on my stomach. With a metal bar acting as the delivery system. I couldn't roll with the fall and putting my hands out would have catapulted me off a ledge and onto my head. The stomach option was very painful, but I take pride in the notion that it was actually the smart choice. The details mattered. In the best games, the details matter, because then my decisions have meaning, and I have a chance to develop this crucial survival trait that I may need some day.
That last one is a real situation I found myself in where I did indeed take the fall on my stomach. With a metal bar acting as the delivery system. I couldn't roll with the fall and putting my hands out would have catapulted me off a ledge and onto my head. The stomach option was very painful, but I take pride in the notion that it was actually the smart choice. The details mattered. In the best games, the details matter, because then my decisions have meaning, and I have a chance to develop this crucial survival trait that I may need some day.
Friday, April 1, 2011
A Narrow Window 2: Narrow Harder
This is expected to be read in the context of the post immediately preceding this one: A Narrow Window.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
A Narrow Window
The medium is always a limiting factor. Otherwise it would be not so much the medium as the actual, and that's decidedly not what computer games are.
I'm going to talk about the limitations of viewing the world through the narrow window that is the computer monitora. At first it seems like this is a trait that computer games have in common with film, but film has had many decades of experience to overcome this limitation with tricks that are invalid for a game, because they rely on absolute control over the camera. These tricks have made their way to computer games in the form of cutscenes, but as games develop and mature, I think we'll see less reliance on cut & pasting from that other medium.
In most computer games, control over the camera is given to the player, and that means a serious rethinking of its application. In a film, the camera is a tool for the creator, but in a game, the camera is a tool for the audience. How that tool can be used will have an enormous impact on the experience of the game.
Some games allow you to move the camera independently of the player avatar, some allow you to select first or third person views, some allow you to look through security cameras, at least one that I know of uses security cameras exclusively, some use only top-down views, and some allow you to view the world from any conceivable angle. The choice of viewpoint is important enough that First Person Shooter and Third Person Shooter are two separate genres, with very different playstyles. It’s clearly a big deal.
I'm going to talk about the limitations of viewing the world through the narrow window that is the computer monitora. At first it seems like this is a trait that computer games have in common with film, but film has had many decades of experience to overcome this limitation with tricks that are invalid for a game, because they rely on absolute control over the camera. These tricks have made their way to computer games in the form of cutscenes, but as games develop and mature, I think we'll see less reliance on cut & pasting from that other medium.
In most computer games, control over the camera is given to the player, and that means a serious rethinking of its application. In a film, the camera is a tool for the creator, but in a game, the camera is a tool for the audience. How that tool can be used will have an enormous impact on the experience of the game.
Some games allow you to move the camera independently of the player avatar, some allow you to select first or third person views, some allow you to look through security cameras, at least one that I know of uses security cameras exclusively, some use only top-down views, and some allow you to view the world from any conceivable angle. The choice of viewpoint is important enough that First Person Shooter and Third Person Shooter are two separate genres, with very different playstyles. It’s clearly a big deal.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Bad Reality
I was going to spend this post talking about Tetris, and the glories of the physics minutiae to be discovered therein, but then I got asked such a mind-meltingly st00pid question that I had to nip it in the bud before it became an infestation. My sister, who is so profoundly ignorant of computer gaming that she requires even the most basic and obvious elements to be spelt out ad nauseum, wants to know how realistic a computer game can be before it stops being fun.
That's an interesting question, and at first my smart-ass answer was, "It's the same as in film, or books, or any other media that attempts to mimic real-world things. If you're attempting to convey an experience, how much do you change reality for the sake of improving that experience?" But then I realised that that was way too Zen and glossed over all the points that the question was capable of raising, so I decided not to mention it but instead make a genuine attempt at an answer.
The question implies that realism is a problematic thing in and of itself, which is only partially true. Also, there are different kinds of reality warping, for different reasons: abstraction or omission to remove unnecessary detail and reduce scope; added convenience to prevent frustration; unavoidable technical limitations, both in terms of computing power and the limited interface; artistic license, otherwise known as stylisation; and of course, Bad Writing. Each of these points is capable of becoming their own post, as I've discovered from the 2,000-odd words that I cut out from the middle of this post, but the question my sister asked me was to do with Bad Writing, so I'm going to stick with that for now.
That's an interesting question, and at first my smart-ass answer was, "It's the same as in film, or books, or any other media that attempts to mimic real-world things. If you're attempting to convey an experience, how much do you change reality for the sake of improving that experience?" But then I realised that that was way too Zen and glossed over all the points that the question was capable of raising, so I decided not to mention it but instead make a genuine attempt at an answer.
The question implies that realism is a problematic thing in and of itself, which is only partially true. Also, there are different kinds of reality warping, for different reasons: abstraction or omission to remove unnecessary detail and reduce scope; added convenience to prevent frustration; unavoidable technical limitations, both in terms of computing power and the limited interface; artistic license, otherwise known as stylisation; and of course, Bad Writing. Each of these points is capable of becoming their own post, as I've discovered from the 2,000-odd words that I cut out from the middle of this post, but the question my sister asked me was to do with Bad Writing, so I'm going to stick with that for now.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Exercise Restraint
It's not a quality that's typically required when playing computer games, but restraint is occasionally important. Like when you're playing a stealth game, and you think, "Yeah, I can take out that thug who's just walked into the room, even though I haven't taken the time to think it through properly. What's the worst that could bangsplatohnoimdead?"
Or when you're playing a platformer and you just can't be bothered waiting 5 seconds for that moving platform to go away and come back again, so you take a chance and try jumping to reach it and fall to your death and no it wasn't really worth it because now you have to do the whole level again.
Okay, so maybe restraint is required a lot. In fact, it's probably required anywhere that there exists a risk that can be taken for little tangible reward beyond simple convenience. It's certainly not emphasised in many games that I've come across, not like it is in Test Drive Unlimited 2 (TDU21).
Or when you're playing a platformer and you just can't be bothered waiting 5 seconds for that moving platform to go away and come back again, so you take a chance and try jumping to reach it and fall to your death and no it wasn't really worth it because now you have to do the whole level again.
Okay, so maybe restraint is required a lot. In fact, it's probably required anywhere that there exists a risk that can be taken for little tangible reward beyond simple convenience. It's certainly not emphasised in many games that I've come across, not like it is in Test Drive Unlimited 2 (TDU21).
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