But the properties of float-representation have some ugly sideeffects for games. It doesn't matter you scale the borders of your game to 1.0f or to 1000000.0f. You will have the same resolution-distribution almost everywhere what is right in front of your feet, only very close things are treated with an extremely higher resolution. So when it comes to games I would prefer to get rid of the negative exponent and spend this bit to give the mantissa double the resolution.

Get rid of negative exponents? That means that values that would have used negative exponents would be subnormal instead and will be less accurate. Such values are really important, e.g. the components of normalised vectors. You'd get lower accuracy from vectors storing directions, dot products of those vectors, etc.

I'm sorry? Did you think you were expressing yourself well?

You're talking about shocks, assuming the monster was supposed to be terrifying and visceral response. This doesn't sound like you were judging it as psychological horror. It sounds like you're focussing too narrowly to see what's interesting about it.

Like, I think you're wrong to believe the monster was supposed to be terrifying. Actually, that scene implies the protagonist is already rather inured to facing monsters.

No, it's not like Buffy. It's psychological horror. You might not have found the monster terrifying, but what's more important is whether you found the unsettling dream atmosphere interesting.

I think you've got the wrong idea about what sort of horror it is supposed to be.

Using an existing 2D vector art package, it shouldn't especially hard to author both the collision shape and visuals. Possibly initially authored as smooth splines, then reduced to having straight edges. Then there are formats you can save as that aren't too hard to import to then use in a game.

The Japanese publishing office for Nippon Ichi probably commissioned that cover long after NIS America had already got their ugly one.

Looks like シノノコ's work (has previous Cave Story fanart on pixiv, also more good stuff here)

There are more downsides, like the fact that C# is what Java was 10 years ago. Which basically means compared to Java it's slower. Also C# has no "how-to" for code. Nearly every C# programm looks different. The only Code Convention is "type functions with a upper-case letter" (god knows why I should do that).

I did some stuff in C# and can tell that it's not a language you want to use for developing on an embedded system imho. It's like XNA for XBOX...

You're claiming C# is slower than Java on the Vita and Sony's Android devices? How would you even know that?

And code looking different really isn't something you should be bothered about.

Given that part of the point is being able to run on a variety of devices, so native binaries are out, C# seems like a good choice.

I think there's actually very little that could work well if you separated it out of the game.

The 32 cubes are very nearly all from exploring and using the basic actions. It's the anti-cubes that involve deciphering stuff like treasure maps, numbers, tetrominos, vibrations, etc. (and also a bit of harder platforming). Most of that is integrated: it wouldn't mean as much if you weren't coming across things in the game world and wondering what they mean. And even once you've deciphered some things and understand the standard solution, it's then used in a few variations that go beyond the standard and do involve the environment (e.g. the room where the platforms form the tetromino code).

The only puzzle that uses letters is an extra, not for any of the 64 cubes (and it's not the hard part of that puzzle).

I too initially thought it worked that other  way, but I actually think it's more natural the way it is, for an ancient number system. And there's a clue that shows you 3 sums that equal the same value, which should tell you if you've got it wrong.

Also I have the observatory item and there's no question mark next to it on the map, but it isn't gold. Seems like a glitch, but I'm not sure whether the glitch is the room not going gold or the question mark disappearing too early.

I guess the question mark disappearing early. There are two secrets in the observatory, an anti-cube and an item which doesn't show in the inventory.

I'd be really interested to hear - if anyone knows - if any reason has ever been given for the random 'holes' that you can't touch, the ones with stars in. Maybe I've just not come across the answer yet, but they seem totally superfluous to me, all they do is make me back out and re-enter an area in the hope that they go away; they're an irritation more than anything. Since they seem fairly random, I don't get the impression they're tied into the game at all...

They're a sign of the problem you're trying to fix, aren't they? If there was no dangerous problem, why does Gomez need to collect the cubes? And there's a backstory to the world, told through the locations and pictograms. The black holes are tied in with that.

mainly this part:

That doesn't mean he's saying it was a bad idea to put Braid on XBLA.

jon blow talks negatively about console exclusivity in this interview: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/126427/Interview_Jonathan_Blow__Xbox_Live_Arcade_A_Pain_In_The_Ass_For_Indies.php -- he basically says it was a bad idea to make braid exclusive to microsoft, that he doesn't like when games do that, and that his next game won't do that

Where does he say it was a bad idea?

The intro is gentle and gives time for people to get a feel for the mechanic and enjoy the setting, but I don't see it hand holding.

My criticism would be that I think it's let down a bit by technical issues. I've had 3 crashes (the 360 reset completely, not the fake crash). Pushable blocks feel pretty glitchy. It's so easy to glitch out of a room that I thought it might have been an intentional part of the mechanics (but I've not seen it used and I'm at 187.5%). There's unpleasant chugs. Etc. It all adds up to detract from fantastic attention to detail in the rest of it, but it's a fantastic game and hopefully some stuff can be ironed out (I ought to send a bug report about the crashes...).

[huge]

@Ashkin: The main thing we use BigInteger for is to store big integers (the other stuff is just a bonus). But AS3 Number can store huge numbers and is much easier to use (because it is a primitive type rather than a class (I think?)). So in fact, Java programmers should be envious of Number

AS3's Number is the same as Java's double. It can't store as many different integer values as Java's long.

Not sure why it has to be 16bit ASM though - when it could have been Python/LUA/Basic/C#... 

I expect it's so it's practical to emulate everyone's ship computers persistently. It being fictionally some old system from '88 makes sense of why the RAM and clock rate would be low. By defining the computers in terms of a basic instruction set, you can make other languages compile for it rather than having to use ASM, so players could have choice about what they use. You probably wouldn't want the overhead of modern high level languages though.

Well, it depends what is the subscription fee. If it's like 10$ a month, and he have a million players, I would think that would more than cover the costs of the servers.
Also, even minecraft made him like several tens of millions dollars, so even without a subscription, profits from one time fees seems to be more than enough to cover the costs of the servers. I would think servers don't cost millions of dollars to upkeep.

Minecraft made millions by having loads of players. Server costs scale with players and with how long they play for. At what price do you know you cover the eventual mean cost per player? Does it make sense to make the initial price higher for everyone in order to be sure you've covered that potential future cost for the heaviest users? I'm not saying the price would just be for server costs (I actually don't think it's right to expect cost-plus pricing for a game), just pointing out the problem with this reasoning for a one time fee.

Games like Guild Wars with its one time fee and f2p MMOs make money from the stuff they sell on top of the basic game (or adverts). Which is a bit shit, really. I'd rather see more games where what you pay for is the value in being able to play the game itself.

Not that that idea hasn't been done before .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

It's different in that in Core War there's no wider context to give the software purpose beyond trying to kill the other program. 0x10c could potentially get quite close to representing the genuine fundamentals of cyberwarfare.

Yeah, like many, I'm not sure about the monthly sub either. But you never know, it might be really cheap.

Going back to the cpu, I was thinking earlier if it's going to be a fully emulated affair I wonder if people would be able to make and transmit viruses to other peoples ships.

And apparently you will be able to do that according to his twitter

And I won't stop viruses, the players will have to do that themselves.

So that's kinda cool. And by kinda I mean very. For some reason that prospect excites me.

A lot of people would presumably use software that other people had written. Part of the metagame would then be finding vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows that work against whatever software became commonplace or intentionally trying to proliferate software with backdoors.

Monthly fee makes me very sad.

Only for the multiplayer, where the physics and computer emulation would run persistently serverside. I don't think it's sensible to offer a service like that for a one time fee. If they did, they could end up having to shut the persistent world down while there are players who still want to play in it and have paid what was the price for doing so, or they'd be facing unbounded running costs without income that covers it.