And finally the haters and tabloids shut up. About a year to late.
No matter what the man was like personally he gave us a lot of really good music. Even if you didn’t like his music it’s beyond question that a lot of people did.
Let’s make a pact, we’ll try to remember people for what they did, not what the tabloids wrote?
I succumbed.
It might be the designer in me or it might be constant frustration in having a trough of computers that never, ever, work as intended (Windows 7 is pretty good though).
I bought a MacBook Pro 13″. The cheapest kind.
Unboxing, great. Installing, no? No installation needed? Add password to wLan and it’s updated and functioning already? Wow.
Migrating images and itunes library form pc to mac, this has got to cause problems.
iTunes… done. Worked first time. Synced with iPhone without a problem. Oh look, up pops iPhoto and it’s already categorized and sorted my images for me…
Well then, no more fuss I guess. Just a beatuiful responsive laptop to use. Guess this means I can get back to actually working on my computer instead of configuring it continuously…
Shit
Difficulty in games is always a hard balance to find. Since a game is a continuous loop of events you want each iteration to be a little harder to keep engaging the player while being simple and enough to overcome with the training the player got from the previous iteration. Simply put, developers want difficulty to work for everyone and smoothly ramp upwards as the game progresses.
This pacing of difficulty is really hard. And today’s titles mostly do this by hand and play testing, which works great for many titles but becomes increasingly hard as games become more complex. One of my closest friend, a developer for one of Sweden’s largest game development companies, has told me that a few of their titles actually have a form of adaptive difficulty level, but in my opinion the system he explained was very crude.
This is my suggestion, bear in mind that it is purely theoretical and not based on any single product though I will use the shooter genre as my general example:
Stop using levels and number of enemies as difficulty setting. These elements affect the players emotional response to situations and should be used as tools to do that. Nothing else.
Instead, use adaptive AI to make the difficulty adapt to the players performance. This system can be susceptible to breaking if it’s not made to be imperceptible, which is a problem, but not near as big of a problem as pacing issues in current titles.
Take a shooter, make enemies miss ratio increase as players health diminishes, at the same time make enemies hits do less damage. Make sure however that these changes are small, I predict that changes larger then around 10% will be noticeable by players. Change things as much as needed, but strive to make it unnoticeable. Even 10% makes a huge difference. So far so good, this level of adaptability is surely used in titles already.
Next, monitor how often and how much damage a player takes, compare that to the kills or percentage of damage the player does (the percentage where 100% is a kill, this way HP won’t affect the statistic). Use this data to restrict or increase the difficulty decrease. If a player scores a lot of kills and takes a lot of damage but does not die the difficulty might be good. If the player doesn’t do any real damage however the difficulty is probably quite tough.
If monitored for the last 10 to 30 minutes of game time the numbers should give you a general performance for the player, in any situation and however good they get. And if a player tries to fool the system by playing badly it won’t affect the balance for very long, the player that does very low damage for a half an hour might take less damage for a few minutes but the player wont win anything by playing this way and therefore has incentive not to try to cheat the system.
Of course, this adaptive system would also need balancing: how fast should it react? what statistics should be most important? Should it keep track across game sessions? But the point is you’d only have to balance this system once. It could then balance your entire game, from tutorial to boss fights without the developers needing to tweak levels. They could instead spend their time creating interesting situations.
Faster iPhone. That’s scary. Why not let me boost my iPhone CPU Apple? Sure, I might get worse battery life but at least I can use the same apps and play the same games as the iPhone 3GS users.
Revamped MacBook line. Oh yes, it’s better and cheaper. And I’m buying a 13″ MacBook Pro
Snow Leopard. Looks great, not much different just faster. Which is really what we wanted!
iPhone OS 3.0. Still awesome, but I’m a bit irritated with having to wait another 2 weeks to use it.
WWDC is today. In approximately 7h.
What do you think will happen? I sincerely hope for an Apple Tablet, basically a larger, more powerful, iPod Touch with a huge battery. But I don’t really think it will happen. Apple is working on it and when they can get price, performance and form factors together to really blast the market with tablets they will. I just think it’s to expensive today.
iPhone OS 3.0 will launch today however. Which brings a huge amount of updates to the iPhone and the App Store. Let’s see those landscape SMS’ and ad hoc multiplayer games flourish!
Sony finally released information about their new incarnation of the PSP. The PSP Go. Without UMD it will sell in paralell with the PSP 3000 while all new PSP titles will be available on UMD as well as digital download. It has 16GB internal memory and place for a memory card. It’s also about the size of an iPhone but with about the same size screen as the PSP 3000. I want one.
E3 is back and with a vengeance, it’s more news then ever and the quality of games has increased by an order of magnitude since the last E3.
The things I’ve found most interesting so far are:
Motion controlling for the future by Microsoft with project Natal and by Sony with the playstation motion controller.
Games of unsurpassed quality with Uncharted 2, Assasins Creed 2, modNation Racers and God of War 3.
Did I mention that Xbox 360 is adding applications for Twitter and Facebook as well as opening the renamed Zune Video Store in Europe? The Wii gets more peripherals and circa two games but honestly, who cares?
You’ve probably seen Microsoft’s new interface for the Xbox 360: Project Natal.
If you haven’t, project Natal is a 3d stereo-optic RGB camera with a microphone. So it sees depth, color and can hear. Coupled with the Xbox 360 it allegedly allows you to do full body motion capture in real time as well as facial recognition and voice recognition. If you have no idea what I’m talking about watch the video(s) for the quickest look at what it does.
If you do know about Natal, consider this:
Milo is probably scripted and pretty fake though surely the technology is possible just not Milo’s AI. As a gaming interface Natal might be hard to use with the normal games of today, this does however not mean that it wont sell well or be fun to use. It certainly will. But with less gamish games probably.
There is a seed I’d like to place with all of you though. Think about the iPhone, what it really does well is that it forces applications and games to use a very easy to use interface that looks good. Microsoft are trying to do the same with Microsoft Surface technology but it is very expensive and hard to implement…
And along comes Natal. Not only does it implicitly force the use of an easy interface, your body is quite probably the best interface you’ll ever use, but it’s also available for existing technology. And it doesn’t have to be very expensive.
This might be the interface that really leads us to ubiquitous computing. Typing still needs a keyboard, even on an iPhone, but navigation and normal use could be done by Natal.
Let’s hope it works.