Shivoa

It has been a while since I blogged on GB. Or at all for that matter. How is it 2012 already?

I was going back over some DICE coverage (finally catching up with the talks this year I hadn't had time to check out) and walked right into this piece (30mins video feed) only hours after reading this post.

Unless I completely got the wrong end of the stick (but I think it was sold quite clearly in the talk), can you see how linear stories with psychological hooks (story arcs which create incomplete purchases from each bit of DLC you buy) to get people to keep buying the new DLC are being sold (by the EA guy) as a great driver of an open world environment. The real non-linear content comes from the emergent gameplay (with systemic game design) that has nothing to do with constantly trying to sell a person the next chunk of linear content for your world.

Building an open world with linear story (GTA, Elder Scrolls being two great examples) are narratively linear when you're writing the story (even if you can approach a lot of the content in the order of your choice). The non-linear content is the emergent activities, walking the earth or enjoying the city simulation. That is where the players craft new stories that the designer did not build and yet the guy from (DLC fans) EA gives a big talk about how getting a writing staff around to constantly pump out paid content with story arcs as episodic content is non-linear.

I'm starting to get a deep understanding of why EA moved off Steam and it wasn't just Origin was ready to release (EA have no issue sharing sales revenue with any other digital store, as long as those stores don't force them to offer the choice of buying DLC from that same storefront). They see the boxed game as a traditional revenue source for getting the game out the door and are happy to give away some of the money to distributors (digital and retail) because they just got a customer for that product 'platform'. The game (a platform to sell more piecemeal linear story) is their conduit to far more revenue generation by selling DLC to expand the experience. Boxed copies drop in value over time but by enforcing all DLC via Origin they can keep 100% of that new big revenue stream and avoid a traditional price depreciation. That's worth losing any sales through Steam for on PC. Mass Effect 2 is £5 retail but you have to pay £30 on top to get all the DLC (if you made the mistake of buying Me2 used then it's a £40 cost to buy all the DLC including the stuff that comes with the new copies) and complete the story and all that money goes direct to EA. Imagine if all that DLC was critical to your full understanding of the story arcs of the game and they all chained together so buying one meant a sunk cost pushing buying the next one to see that multi-DLC story arc blossom. It has nothing to do with emergent non-linear stories, non-linear is only true in the strictest sense that you can do a lot of content (especially with a Elder Scrolls style many-linear chain design) in an order of your choosing. Like reading 3 books about the same character at once and picking where you go for the next chapter as you flick between them.

This ties in to a longer conversation about the ethical issue with 'whales' (the F2P term) and how we move with episodic content without abusing the customer and creating a drop-fed, unhappy consumer who ends up leaving the industry and spending their money on DVDs, books, and other entertainment if we treat them like something to maximise our cash intake from. While a game and traditional expansions had a classic price depreciation to pick up a long tail and let gamers buy when they could afford it (limited only on peer pressure to consume the latest talking point game), are we shooting ourselves in the foot with 30-60 minutes DLC missions for the price of a classic release (say 36 months after game launch) of a full game (or even an indie title at launch)? Are we offering a suitable value and is there a problem when a game that you can buy for £5 with lots of content can grow to 125% of that total content only by buying £30 of additional DLC, especially if we start to look at tying that content into arcs and hooking into the desire to follow threads (as discussed in the video).

When we grow to a TV model and have masses of DLC, two games worth of quest chains (four 12 episode seasons of content? At £5 an episode that would be £240 of content sold bit by bit as DLC but two games new only costs £60) then how to we price fairly? If we try and take every penny today then we'll end up stripping the customer base for gaming. And why did the guy from EA decide to try and pas this off as a non-linear discussion? Was that just a lack of a good term for this episodic content without using that phrase (because episodic content is something associated with some mild failure stories of timetables and popularity) as he pushed DLC? Does the not technically fixed order way that Elder Scrolls does content make the dev think non-linear somehow?

Just my $0.02: if you're an audiophile and care about signal degradation then you'd be insane to waste money in any audio card for your PC with the small exception (as Vista/Win7 killed hardware support and so everyone ensured their software 3D audio stack was competent rather than building a whole new hardware accelerated only path to 3D audio, it is small) of accelerating the 3D sound calculations for those without the multi-core CPU to handle that computation.

You want your precise bit-stream to get as far into the system as possible with no changes. So there should be no DAC in the audio path inside your computer. Ideally you will use HDMI (and the sound card built into the GPU) to output an uncompressed multi-channel signal to your amp which is where you spend your money is owning a good DAC that then sends the analogue driver signal to the individual speakers over nice thick wires (not expensive, just thick, metal is incredible at having free electrons and that's what you need from speaker wire, unless you have coiled power cables or the like you need to pass over and you really shouldn't have your system set up like that if you care about audio and no shielding is perfect).

If you don't care about audio all that much (but still want to be able to hear if the car is going to overtake on your left or right rear through audio alone / know in which directions someone just got shot nearby then a TOSlink (optical) output from a Dolby HT compatible motherboard onboard sound is also a great solution. Dolby Digital 5.1 is good enough that we used it for movies (DTS is available for real-time encoding if you have a DTS Connect compatible audio chip, but I'm not sure any motherboards ship with one and the quality difference isn't that much) and the audio subsystem works out the per-channel audio for 3D as normal (or more accurately receives the per-channel signal the CPU computes) and compresses this with a real-time DD5.1 algorithm before shoving it down the cable. DD5.1 is a lossy compression system (like jpeg, ogg, mp3 etc) so you do lose fidelity over uncompressed audio at the conversion (like mp3 it is a compression system designed to strip out the data you cannot hear to save bandwidth so most people will never know) but it is digital so the path down the cable doesn't introduce noise/static/error. The amp decodes the signal back to a 6 channel audio and pushes that through the DAC. The advantage of this over 3 wires and analogue audio is you don't have to spend money on a discrete audio card to get a passable DAC on your computer, you're not using an analogue signal and so have to worry about what signal degradation is going on between the PC and amp in the wire, and you've only got one wire (yay) and that is carrying the most popular multi-channel encoded signal in the world so it forced you to buy an amp that can decode it (so your movies will also benefit from having the exact 0s and 1s of the DD5.1 stream on the disc transported as far as the DAC on the amp without any tampering/degradation).

I find a key thing to remember is there is no dice rolls in Frozen Synapse. When a dual happens (two people are capable of shooting each other at the same time) then there is pure (totally obscured - read the help files for some of the rules they use and check their forums for an exhaustive listing of the maths that decide the 'winner' who gets the first hit and so gets the kill) method to the outcome.

Once you get comfortable with the game you can turn the lights off (fog of war) and it becomes another huge leap to get good. So much depth, I just with they'd show the maths for duals so people would be able to see what they did wrong / how they could have won that engagement.

Bug with the new referencing/linking system on non-US keyboards:

The key detection is looking for the key number and not the actual ASCII representation that it translates to. This means I can type as many @ and # as I like on my UK keyboard (they're both near the enter key) into Parchment v2 and nothing pops up but if I try to use the quotation marks (shift-2) or pound symbol (shift-3 - this is the UK definition of pound, our currency, not the thing that Americans say when they actually mean hash; our language, our rules :D ) then I get the annoying pop-up and the letters get converted to the symbols that would be there on a US keyboard.

It seems like the system needs to be changed to detect the characters being entered into the text box rather than going to the source and detecting the keyboard presses, otherwise it'll have to have a new definition for every keyboard layout and be updated if ever a new layout is added etc.

Edit: I should say this is the same issue Chemin pointed out above. My platform is Chrome stable + Win7 x64. I would expect it to occur on all platforms with the same character detection code.

@Krakn3Dfx said:

Don't worry, EA's got you covered...at least for 18-24 months, and then they pull the servers on you, and you're screwed.

This.

Lovefilm = Netflix for the UK (only run by Amazon and with less streaming deals, something they're trying to fix and going as far as to drop Flash and use Silverlight for their website streaming system to let them sign more deals with DRM-happy studios. They had to send out a big sorry message to their MacOS and Linux customers about it recently).

If all the tools that require the executable to be just so (the unofficial patches and I think MGE all need the executable to be just so and load into the memory with predetermined offsets so the Steam DRM wrapper on the exe messes them up) haven't been updated then the way I got round that issue (in 2009 Steam was less of a force for collecting older games so most people weren't getting it though a deal on there and having to deal with the DRM'd executables, so I kinda expected all the stuff to have 'Steam exe edition's by now, unless some of the mods are great but no longer maintained) was by *ahem* less than legal methods of acquiring the original discs (which have on them the original executable, which can be patched up to the version needed by this modding process).

I own the thing on Steam, somewhere I have at least the base game on CD (lost to one of the many house moves that saw some games gets boxed away and probably in lost space with my parents if not totally lost), so I don't think there's anything morally at issue with looking for an ISO download (even if you actually only need a 10MB exe - it might be worth looking for maybe someone uploading to a file sharing service just the executable if you have limited bandwidth for downloading a full ISO set).

Obviously, caveat emptor, downloading unknown executables from the internet, especially a bit which is all about not exactly legal trade in information, can easily turn your machine into a bot or spam central so be careful and scan anything before you even think about running it.

It seems from this bug report that after I was having my issues (which were MGE+Steam exe based, I think the other exe patcher/unofficial mod already had a Steam version by that point) there was an update to the Steam executable to bring it more in line with the original offsets and so it fixed MGE to work (I'm not sure if the blog is pointing to needing a non-Steam edition because of outdated warnings about it not working - when the blog was written it definitely didn't work with the Steam edition - or if the warning is still accurate). Like with a lot of Elder Scrolls modding (with all the minefield of conflicts and so on) it might be a case of run it and see. I would hope that you could get 99% of the stuff working (including MGE, as Distant Worlds is kinda the big daddy of 'mods that make Morrowind feel like it wasn't made a decade ago') with the Steam edition.

Some kinda old (2009) screenshots of a rather old game, as Dave was playing Morrowind recently:

Gallery

There's a post on the Morrowind forums that lists the mods that made the game look a bit different to the foggy murk of the release version (although when the weather gets bad the fog will roll in, but without the obvious draw-distance issues seen in the original game).

Edit: the lovely thing about Distant World: if you can see it, chances are you can walk there. When bad weather comes in and you can't see those distant landmarks you may start to get a tad lost as you normally travel by the visible landmarks.

If I could give you one piece of advice (from when I last played Morrowind in 2009) it would be http://morrowind2009.wordpress.com/

Below are some screenshots and they basically show off 1) I wasn't using a texture update as good as the ones Dave installed for the recent video (I think mine were more faithful to the original textures and so lots looks rather muddy and boring, or maybe the packs I used were less faithful, it has been a few years) & 2) MGE with Distant Lands is something Dave missed out on, because Morrowind is all one seamless big world the fogging and draw distance isn't a hard limit for the game, so you can tell it to do more (for reference I had a Core2Duo and 8800GT when these screenshots were taken).

So beyond the MGE and Distant Lands (which also gives the water the newer shader with reflections rather than the rather iconic Morrowind water seen in Dave's playthough - since I took these shots I do know there was a big overhaul to that system so now the sea has proper wave undulations and it looks far better than the below show off) the other big ones are Better Bodies (like Dave, but these ones have underwear on, because I roll like that), Better Heads, and Better Clothes which are most notable in shot 2. The amusing leg / trouser joints in Dave's videos, those all get fixed by Better Clothes. And then there are lots of other things beyond textures and those main mods that illuminate windows (with Distant Lands you can see the villages for miles (assuming the weather doesn't hide it) so that becomes more important) and make the NPCs more active and locks their doors at night and millions of other things. Visit the link or maybe go looking for someone who has done a similar best of traversal (and checked the mods don't conflict with each other and break the game) more recently than the start of 2009 (although that website does receive updates to make sure the links still point to active locations for downloads, which is rather nice).

Edit: added notes to pics about where they are in relation to Dave's videos.

To make up for not including 1943 on the disc (which Sony told everyone would happen during their E3), the PS3 will get all expansions early. Which is an odd thing to say, as expansions are released as soon as they are ready. So either PS3 users get to buy expansions that have not been fully tested first, acting as beta testers for the content before it comes to other platforms, or EA have just announced that they're going to sit on completed PC/360 expansions and refuse to sell them because they fucked up the PS3 release bonus. EA's PC focussed FPS (ok, without mods and unofficial servers and a lot of the PC feel) everyone, all wrapped up in timed exclusive content for the PS3 to make you really feel the PC love.

*golf clap*