[@Peirog]

@Peirog: It's far-fetched to assume everything is genetically determined, therefore genetics must have no influence whatsoever?

Asperger's Syndrome causes children (and then adults) to become obsessed with particular types of activity.  Quite often they will become obsessed with computers and programming.  It's not that there's just as much chance they'll become obsessed with impressionist painting - it's that computer programming matches so closely the type of activity that appeals to a typical child with Asperger's.  Asperger's Syndrome is almost certainly genetically based (not found the genes responsible but it can be seen in family histories.)  So in that case I would say that a child born with Asperger's Syndrome is pre-programmed to enjoy certain types of activity.  It also just so happens to be four times more common in boys than girls.

@bento-smile: You may disagree that medication should be used to treat the majority of mental illness, but that doesn't change the fact that such medication does have an effect.  To take a flippant example: give someone an ecstasy pill and their behaviour will change dramatically for a few hours.  Give them a slow release ecstasy pill once a day for the rest of their lives and their behaviour will always be different.  That sounds a lot like changing their personality to me.

(This thread isn't about "what does Indie mean")

I think it would have helped if the article opened with a short argument for why we need more women in indie games development.  As Inane shows, it's not a generally accepted truth but the article treats it as if it were.  My brief argument would be that having a more varied population of producers (so long as they are given artistic freedom) tends to give you a more diverse and ultimately more interesting selection of works.  But that can certainly be debated.

It's a shame that the article doesn't listen to its own arguments.  The writer suggests a problem could be the lack of press publicity given to female developers, yet she misses the opportunity to end the article by naming and linking to a few.  Glad to see that the comments section is already doing a fairly good job at giving such links.

I found some areas of the article quite condescending.  "Maybe ... women don't know where to go for resources and community when it comes to indie games."  Because women can't use Google just like they can't read maps, right?  "Maybe it's because games are too technical..." and then goes on to suggest perceived 'easier' ways to make games so as not to tax the delicate female mind.  Yuck.

Enough of me criticising the article.  Why there are relatively few female indie developers is still an interesting question.

Making your own game is a process almost entirely gated by yourself.  If you have the means to spend a few hours a night on Facebook then you have the means to make a game: a computer, internet connection, and nothing keeping you from having quiet time alone with them both.  There's no blaming sexist recruitment policies for this one.

It's very easy to label developer communities as boys-only clubs where women are fawned over and made too uncomfortable to participate normally.  It certainly is in keeping with everyone's favourite combined stereotypes of programmers and gamers.  I've been active here for a little over a year, not a particularly frequent poster but I've certainly gained a great deal (and hopefully given some back too.)  Want to guess how many people know my gender?  I'm sure some people would feel that hiding in anonymity is a terrible solution but when you spend your time talking about For loops and motion blurs it really just doesn't come up, and doesn't matter.

There are real differences in the behaviour and preferences of males and females, and it cannot all be put down to what colour the nursery was painted.  Maybe just fewer women than men are interested in the processes that create games.  I almost wrote that most women aren't interested in making games, but it's worth keeping in mind that most men aren't interested in it either.

Haha yeah, there's so much misunderstanding over how vision works.

Shine a flash bulb in someone's face for any length of time and they'll perceive it.  There's no minimum length of time short of the physics of getting a reasonable amount of photons hitting the retina.  There's some much more complex issues around when a person will notice a more subtle stimulus, or comprehend a more detailed one.

An interesting result from experiments one of my professors was running:  If you show someone a small light flash, they'll notice it.  Show them the same small light flash followed about half a second later by a much larger one and they'll not recall perceiving the smaller one.  Or maybe it's more accurate to say they just don't perceive the small one at all.  It's like being blinded by a bright light, but going the wrong way through time.  (See also Benjamin Libet's experiments.)

Talk of a highest perceivable framerate is usually based on when a rapidly flashing light begins to be perceived as a continuous light, which has next to nothing to do with "people can't even notice if a game's running at over 60 fps."

Don't worry, real life does indeed blur.  Look out the side window of a moving car and nearby objects are a blur.  That is unless you have your eyes fixate on a point as it moves by; we have some seriously good auto-tracking.

I saw a nice couple of slides about how Media Molecule handled motion blur in Little Big Planet (PPT slides via Bungie.net)  They used the rendered image of the current frame and the previous frame composited together and blurred dependent upon a screenspace representation of the velocities of the objects in both frames.  I'm not doing a good job of explaining that.

Anyway!  The basic way to do motion blur is to smear the rendered image of the current frame, with the magnitude and direction of that smear at each pixel dependent upon the velocity of a point on whatever object lies under that pixel.  However this produces artefacts both with the creation of perceivable borders on blurred objects (see a random Crysis screenshot,) and problems with end-on views of rotating objects as the smear lines follow the straight lines of instantaneous velocity even though the motion is actually circular.  Media Molecule added information from the previous frame in a smart way and improved on both issues quite significantly.

Simply there isn't much to give feedback on.  Usually games posted in Feedback are finished or at least nearly.

Is the game fun?  Well no.  It's a single screen with no purpose, two enemies I have no reason to fight, and a test NPC.  No offence meant, but of course it isn't fun.  The graphics are pretty okay, only obvious feedback I could give is the small trees are overly tiled.  How to make it more fun is just too big a question this early on:  Give it a story, give it progression, give it more meaningful interaction, give it Facebook integration, make it into a first-person shooter, who knows!

The engine seems to work fine though, which is what you should be looking to test at this stage.  What's important is if the performance is already struggling; and your "shit for responces" already includes some important feedback on that.

Your sense of entitlement and bitching at other threads being more popular is not at all attractive.  I am terrible at keeping track of people, but even I've noticed that you have a tendency for unwarranted negativity in your messages.  Just be cool and remember it's a community rather than a gathering of work colleagues: no one here is obliged to help you, but you can help them anyway.


Incidentally when I have time to go trawling through the Feedback forum I tend to start a couple of pages in and look for stuff with few responses.  That bumping up usually leads to a couple more posts from others getting another chance to see it too.

I'm afraid it crashes on startup for me too.  Just pops up a standard "Bo has stopped working" window as soon as I launch it.

Windows 7 64-bit

Any file embedded using the [Embed(...)] thing will be just stuck into the .SWF and downloaded along with the rest of it.  The "octet-stream" just means that you'd like the file to be treated as a generic bundle of bytes.  If you don't specify a mimeType, Flash will try to recognise what type of file it is and treat it correctly: treating PNGs as images, MP3s as sound, TTFs as fonts.

It is possible to dynamically load and stream stuff from external sources - it's what the YouTube player does all the time.  But it's usually not needed and can make distributing a finished game more tricky.

Really great to see such nicely made tutorials!

Salt, which part of "more people didn't vote Tory than did" is it that you're arguing against when you say my maths is wonky?

Much as Oddball also said, you could substitute the name of any single party in that sentence and it'd still be true.  On the basis of that statement you go on to argue against the Tories being in power, or at least expressing incredulity about it.  If you consistently apply your argument then you'd be against any other party being in power too.

Ultimately the Conservatives got the most votes and won the most seats.  It would be a quite odd democracy if that means they didn't get power.

I'd wager good money the decisive issue in the negotiations was that Labour wouldn't come to the party on electoral reform.

I'd doubt that, as Labour (or at least Gordon Brown - I know a few older party members were against it) stated before the election that they'd hold a referendum on electoral reform.  Which is exactly what the Conservatives ended up agreeing to in order to get the Liberals to join them.

RobF, your maths doesn't work out.  You're right that:
Lab + Lib > Con
but it's also true:
Con + Lib > Lab
and most importantly:
Con > Lab

What would really not make sense is if the party that got the most votes (which sadly was the Conservatives) didn't end up being intimately involved in running the country.  Before the election the Liberal Democrats said they'd first try to form a coalition with whoever got the most seats, which is what they did.

My hope is that preferential voting will get put into place sharpish, and more people will start to actually vote for who they want to win.

In a suspiciously neat coincidence, I just stumbled on a blog post from someone writing a roguelike in Scheme:

http://thesnarky.com/2010/02/23/ray-casting-in-scheme/

Introduction to Scheme is the only programming course I ever took, but I can't remember anything other than the lecturer's awesome accent.

FGL probably has the most experience with the millions of portals:

Don't make the game window too big. To be accessible to the largest range of sponsors, use a screen resolution no larger than 640x480. If your game is larger than that, some websites won't be able to host your game. (The larger you get, the more sites will be affected.) In almost no circumstances should you go above 800x600 -- using a size larger than that will dramatically cut down on the number of potential sponsors.

They go on to say that you should keep above about 400x300 so you can fit a sponsor's logo/animation comfortably, or any 3rd party ads you want to use.

I just looked at a couple of site's embed code and they don't allow fullscreen.  As they're making their money from the adverts that'd be hidden by fullscreen, I doubt any would deliberately allow it.

That's pretty nifty!  The animations look surprisingly fluid, and make me wonder how much the limited animation in other games of the era is due to restricted art budgets rather than technical constraints.

I think the host guy in the videos talked a little about how he'd been obsessed with that particular game for a while, above his general interest in old/lost games.  He also mumbled a fair bit when asked if he'd release the ROM publicly.  Hopefully that's protecting himself from being seen endorsing "piracy" (anyone would have a hard time arguing that copying that ROM represents a lost retail sale) rather than him planning to keep it locked away.

Obsession might not be 'healthy' for the individual, but a lot less stuff would get achieved by humanity in general if there weren't some people getting obsessed by their particular area of interest.  Admittedly an old game obsession isn't going to uncover many fundamental laws of the universe or cure diseases, but it does mean we all get to see a neat game.

I know someone will know this:  Are there other games with a similar effect on fast moving elevator platforms where the character appears to get pinned down to it by the G-force?  I particularly liked that in the videos, along with the tumbling animations when the ape fell long distances.

Pretty sure there's also a European server, which is similar to the everywhere-else server but with more outrageous accents.

I believe a beta key can be used (once) on any of the servers, as there are tales of Europeans pre-ordering the game from the U.S. shops that are offering beta keys.

There must also be some way to play on non-native servers (likely using a second account and key) as there are tournaments that involve Europeans and Americans competing.  Tournaments while the game is still in beta, that's some good free marketing.

Fun stuff!

I played up to the level called "Two Timing" (I think) in the Complications level pack. Running very smoothly on Windows 7 64-bit.

I like that player movement it limited to the tile-grid of the map, as that makes the precise movements needed much easier to recognise.  I tend to get tired of puzzle-platformers as I find there's a conflict between knowing how to solve the puzzle and actually managing to carry out the movements in-game.  I didn't experience that when playing this, which was nice!

I found the two jump buttons felt quite natural, and fit in with the stronger emphasis on puzzle solving rather than freeform Mario-esque platforming.  The only time it felt odd was if I was stood directly below an orb I wanted to pick up, and had to first step to the side before jumping up to it.  But that's really not a serious problem.

It's maybe a little harsh how it handles starting again after game-over.  I was able to skip the first few levels but still had to replay several that I'd completed before.  Possibly allow the player to restart at any level they've reached before, with the knowledge that to get a high score they'll need to play through the whole pack in one go.  Then again it was quite nice doing the same levels again and this time being able to get some of the time bonus.

I'm just scrubbing around in Actionscript, but the way I make buttons-and-things from scratch is something like:

Code:

myStartButton = new FancyButton(startNewGame);

function startNewGame():void
{
   //do stuff
}

An instance of the FancyButton class will store a reference to the function passed to it when it's created, and make a call to that function when it detects that it's been clicked.  As Chris says, this way FancyButton doesn't need to know anything about the rest of the program, all it knows is how to detect that is has been clicked and that it should call that particular function when it is clicked.

Nice thing is you can use many FancyButtons for whatever you like, without having to go and fiddle with the FancyButton class itself.

Code:

zoomButton = new FancyButton(zoomIn);
createZombieButton = new FancyButton(makeZombie);
closeWindowButton = new FancyButton(closeWindow);

function zoomIn():void
{
   zoomFactor++;
}

function makeZombie():void
{
   new Zombie();
}

function closeWindow():void
{
   myWindow.close();
}

Flash has a pre-made event handling system all built in that I absolutely should be using for simple stuff like this, but reinventing the wheel is so much more fun.

Yay, me too!



That includes: debugging a double-linked-list class, making a circular distortion shader, drawing a triangle because I always forget how to convert an angle and magnitude into a vector, avoidance behaviour in steering controlled agents, making a background parallax layer the right size, state flow for pooled particles, optimising the stored image size for a lighting system, planning the GUI for RPG creature creation, lots of squares.

I'm great at focusing on a single task.

Oddly Apple doesn't have a Flash-equivalent.

I think it ultimately comes down to Apple wanting to maintain control of what happens on their devices.  Both for the sake of perceived usability for their customers and profits for themselves.

Here's that thread which discusses the change to the Apple developer agreement that blocked the Flash-to-iPhone compiler thing.

The Flash beta on Android phones looks pretty sweet. (7:30 on has some neat 3D stuff)

That'd depend on what type of monitor it's displayed on.

I'm not big on hardware, but I'm fairly sure that TFT LCD monitors (probably the most common PC monitor these days) have a constant white backlight, with the displayed colour determined by what wavelengths of that light are allowed to pass through the liquid crystal layer.  So there'll be very little energy use difference between displaying light and dark images.  Many monitors especially on laptops do allow the user to manually dim the backlight which will save some energy.

If you're using a CRT, plasma, or OLED then yes I'd expect lots of white to require more energy.

I've a hunch that getting people to turn off and unplug their monitors (or even - gasp - the whole computer) when they're not using it is going to have a significantly larger impact on energy use.  Or silly little things like travelling less and insulating more.

I need to eat some Toblerone now. And it's expensive here. Thanks, guys.

40 years in the making, Toblerone's viral marketing strategy finally blossoms!
(I actually went and looked up when they started using the mountain logo.  What's wrong with me.)

The dead lion on a food item is creepy.  Apparently it's a reference to a story in the Old Testament where Samson kills a lion, and later finds some bees have built a hive full of honey in the carcass.  But a dead animal is not a great way to sell food (except meat I guess) and isn't the point of golden syrup that it's made from sugar cane and so is an alternative to honey?  Maybe they're trying to turn you off honey by associating it with rotting corpses.

The unit icon for mutalisks in Starcraft 2 looks like what Hollywood thinks raptors look like!  Kind of.  Helps if you're watching it on YouTube so its a little blurred out.

They don't generally refer to themselves as teabaggers.  I'd hazard a guess that anyone calling them teabaggers is showing their distaste of the movement, and implicitly displaying a distaste for scrotum.

The Tea Party movement is a populist United States protest movement that promotes fiscal conservatism. The movement emerged in 2009 through an ongoing series of Tea Party protests. These are partially in response to the 2009 stimulus package as well as the 2008 bailouts. In 2010 The Economist described the movement as "America's most vibrant political force."

In general, the Tea Party movement supports constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility and free markets. More specifically, the movement is anti-stimulus, anti-deficit and anti-bailout. Some demonstrators have also opposed federal support for the ailing automobile industry.

Isn't happening in my country, so I don't have much of an opinion.

..or the latest C&C game from EA.  EA.com's editor-in-chief's opinion of the system:

Welp. I've tried to be open-minded. But my 'net connection is finicky--and the constant disruption of my C&C4 SP game makes this unplayable.

(link)

With regard Ubi's stuff:  The fist Assassin's Creed game was pirated on PC over a month before it was released.  That had to hurt.

A brief search for Assassin's Creed 2 cracks found a few torrents claiming to be local versions of Ubisoft's servers, but all that I found had very varied comments as to whether they work.  I'm not curious enough to test them myself.  If nothing else, this system has succeeded in making pirating the game more of a hassle.  Probably less of a hassle than buying it though (if you have an imperfect internet connection.)