PTFSD, June 17, 2006

June 17, 2006
PTFSDUncategorized
3 Comments

Weight: 348.1. At one point this week, I weighed about 345, which was encouraging.

Grade: C. My original goal was to drink only water; I ended up changing that to “nothing caffeinated” and then I was able to fulfill the goal. It’s not just the caffeine from soft drinks that you miss, it’s the constant supply of sugar calories. Several times this week I got home from work and had to go straight to bed (I expected this, it happened last time). Next week will be better.

Goal for next week: Drink only water while I’m at work. Drink nothing caffeinated and nothing carbonated. I’m pretty sure I can fulfill this one.

Tom has actually been really good at keeping me on track. I would like to publicly thank him.

PTFSD, Update 1

June 12, 2006
PTFSDUncategorized
5 Comments

The PTFSD (Put That Freakin’ Sandwich Down) project starts today in earnest. I have decided that rather than posting my weight every day, I’ll post it every weekend with a summary of how well I followed my restrictions for the week.

I’m starting slow. Right now I’m just getting off caffeinated drinks. My goal this week is to drink only water. I have a good supply of Jolt Gum I can chew when I need a caffeine boost. Jolt Gum is actually excellent for getting off caffeine…the last time I dieted, I found that if I just naturally chewed a piece whenever I felt my energy level dipping, I ended up chewing less and less until finally I started going whole days without any caffeine at all. The people at Jolt would be appalled to see their gum used in this manner, I’m sure.

Here’s basically what I learned from the last time I dieted:

1. Everybody knows how to lose weight. Everybody. You lose weight when you take in fewer calories than you burn. It doesn’t matter if those calories are fat or carbs or textured vegetable protein, if you eat fewer than you burn, you will lose weight. If you eat more than you burn, you will gain weight. It is that simple. This means that no, Atkins and South Beach do not work (and if you have lost weight on those diets, it’s not because you restricted your carbohydrate intake, it’s because you ended up eating less than you burned). Heck, there’s good evidence that Atkins is actually harmful. Everybody knows this, but calorie counting, eating balanced meals and exercising is such a PITA that lots of people are willing to believe in these fad diets, at least in the short term.

2. Exercise doesn’t burn nearly as many calories as you think it does. An hour of strenuous exercise (say, playing tennis or soccer) only burns about 600 calories. That’s as much as one Big Mac. So if you are eating considerably more than you burn (and if you’re overweight, then you are), you cannot simply exercise your fat away. You must change your eating habits.

2A. This is not to say that exercise isn’t a good thing and won’t help you lose weight. Quite the opposite. Exercise and diet will provide much better weight loss than diet alone. But you must diet; you can’t simply exercise your weight off (unless you’re willing to spend just about every moment you’re not eating playing racquetball).

3. When the weight starts to come off, the stomach goes last. When I lost weight last time, my legs firmed up and started looking really nice, the weight came off my arms and under my chin, but I still had this enormous gut. This was disappointing. I just need to be prepared for that this time.

4. Calorie counting is annoying, but eventually you start to get a sense for how many calories foods have and you don’t have to count quite as rigorously any more.

5. The best source of protein is seafood. Seafood tends to have very little or no fat and has lots of yummy Omega-3 fatty acids. The next best sources are chicken and turkey, which are fattier but are still within acceptable boundaries. (Ground turkey is also very cheap.) Pork is next, and it’s okay since American pork tends to be very lean. Beef is the worst source of protein there is – it’s fatty and difficult to digest.

6. The best, most balanced meal consists of two parts carbohydrates, one part vegetables and one part protein. This means that a properly constructed sandwich is good for you. So is pizza. So are properly-constructed casseroles and pasta dishes.

7. Pickles are the dieter’s friend. They taste good. (Unless you hate pickles, in which case…um…well, I feel sorry for you.) And they only have about 10-15 calories each, so you can satisfy your munchies with them without blowing your diet.

Lazy Linkage

June 8, 2006
Cool PeopleGamesStar Revolution
0 Comment

Yes, it’s a cheap way to get a post up, but I found some interesting stuff I’d like to share:

Oblivion just got its first patch (ironically, a day after I beat it). Lots of players won’t be installing the patch, because if they do they won’t be able to do stuff like this.

Real Tekken. Little else to say.

Here’s a site with a bunch of connected stories about the design of both the hardware and software of the original Macintosh. It’s a great way to waste an afternoon. Start with “I’ll Be Your Best Friend” and just read them chronologically.

And I actually worked on Star Revolution last night. It’s slow, but it’s coming…maybe by this weekend, we’ll see.

Dissolution of Oblivion

June 5, 2006
Games
0 Comment

If you’re a regular to this site, you may be wondering, “Where the hell is my freakin’ combat prototype? I thought you said you were going to finish it last week!”

Um…yeah. About that…see, IplayedOblivionallweekendinstead.

BUT! I have now completed the main plotline and a good chunk of the side quests, so once I write this post about how awesome Oblivion is, it’ll be out of my system and I can get back to work. Really!

So, how awesome is Oblivion?

Truly awesome. If it’s not the best game I’ve ever played, it’s damn close and definitely the best I’ve played in years. Its only flaw is its levelling system, which at later levels just requires too much work…it’s almost as if the game punishes you for both powerlevelling and getting to level 20. I ended up fixing that problem with judicious use of the player.setav console command. Once I did that, Oblivion was pure, sweet RPG goodness flowing directly into my veins.

Okay, I have to stop writing stuff like that or I’ll just fire it up again and waste another evening. I still have over 20 unfinished quests…no, no, I’ll be strong.

So what was wrong with Oblivion? (Other than the levelling, which we’ve already covered?) Why, Oblivion, of course. The planes of Oblivion start off looking and playing really cool, but it quickly became clear that because those planes are meant to be closed, nothing can happen in them. No plot points or scripted sequences can happen in a plane of Oblivion because players might miss them. Thus they very quickly began to feel like busywork and I eventually started avoiding combat and just running straight to the Sigil Stone as fast as I could to get them over with. You don’t even get any decent loot in them…Daedric weapons can be pretty powerful, but they are also really, really heavy. Better to sell them to recharge my Mace of Shocking Woe, which is a glass mace I enchanted to do 35 points of shock damage on hit. That thing kills everything dead, I love it.

The other thing I wanted to mention was the ending. The ending has a serious plot twist in it that changes the Elder Scrolls universe forever (and no, I’m not going to tell what it is, no matter how you beg). I really, really liked the ending but I’ve heard tell that lots of other Elder Scrolls fans are pretty outraged. All I can say is…guys, grow up.

Overall, it’s the best $50 I’ve spent in a while, and I know I’ll be going back to it…after Star Revolution is finished.

Stressed Gamer

June 5, 2006
Cool People
0 Comment

To the left you will see a new link for my friend Tom Mauer’s website. Ryan and I have been telling him to get his own site for a while now, and he’s finally gotten smart and complied. Click the link to see his attempts to make a renderer that looks as if everything is colored with crayons!

Put That Freakin’ Sandwich Down!

May 31, 2006
PTFSDUncategorized
6 Comments

So I had to go to the doctor yesterday. It wasn’t anything major, just needed a prescription.

The nurse couldn’t weigh me on the normal scale because I was over 350.

This is the most I’ve ever weighed. I gained a lot while I was unemployed and now it’s time to get rid of it. And I’m going to be using this blog to help me. I’m going to post my weight every day. You guys will be able to see whether or not I’m following my diet; I won’t be able to hide it.

I’m sick of this. Being overweight affects every aspect of your life, because it drains away all of your energy. It gets in the way of everything you want to do.

Time to put this thing away once and for all.

The Final Fantasy

May 30, 2006
Games
2 Comments

We’ve got two Final Fantasy games coming out later this year: Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy XII.

Final Fantasy III is a remake of of the original Final Fantasy III for the Famicom. It was never released in the United States…probably for good reason. The first three Final Fantasy games all had the same plot: the Crystal chooses four young people to be heroes who then sally forth to defeat the Big Bad. The games differed in the name of the Big Bad, the world the heroes travelled through and the system by which the heroes gained in power, but plotwise the games were exactly the same…you even fought a lot of the same monsters in all three games.

(Historical aside: this was what made Final Fantasy IV such a revelation to gamers. With IV, all of a sudden you had heroes who already had names and personalities and actually said things. You didn’t start with your entire party intact; instead you recruited members into your party as the game progressed. And the game had a storyline beyond “kill the big bad”. FF IV set the tone for the Super Nintendo iterations of the series, which of course culminated in the superb FF VI.)

The new FF III is a complete remake being released on the Nintendo DS. It’ll have an expanded storyline and prenamed characters who speak, so it’ll be much more like a modern Final Fantasy game.

And I’ll be honest: I’m looking forward to the release of Final Fantasy III on the DS more than the release of Final Fantasy XII on the PS2. Why?

Well, because Final Fantasy XII is apparently some sort of action-adventure game set in a hybrid fantasy/sci-fi world with the name “Final Fantasy” on it. Square honestly doesn’t know what to do with this series so they are reinventing it with every new game with disastrous results.

Final Fantasy III, on the other hand, will be a true Final Fantasy game. And it will be the last one ever made.

I Live!

May 28, 2006
Star Revolution
2 Comments

I’ve been unwell with various badness for the last four days or so, which is why I haven’t been posting. I’m feeling much better now.

Star Revolution is coming slowly. The thing that is stopping me is that for the last three or so programming sessions I’ve been stomping bugs in my GUI system rather than writing new code, which is getting old fast. Hopefully I’ll get that debugged this weekend and if I push hard I might even finish the whole combat prototype. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Chunky Pixels, Part II

May 23, 2006
Game DesignGame ProgrammingGamesStar Revolution
4 Comments

First off, thanks for all the responses to my previous post on this subject! I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on the various ideas you guys gave me.

Dave and Wynne, the vector idea would be a really good one if the game was space-only, but since I want the player to be able to land on and walk around on planets, that kind of breaks down. So I’m looking for something else. Thanks for the idea anyway.

Now I am going to reveal something. I have already decided that after I finish Star Revolution, my next project is going to be Inaria II. It’s going to have a real 3D engine, using technologies I am developing for Star Revolution. And I had already decided that I wanted a specific look for Inaria II, a look I first saw in Exult.

Two pictures in this case will be worth a thousand words. Here’s Ultima VII at double-res (640×400). (Click each image to view it at full size.)

Ah, Ultima VII. The last truly great Ultima.

Now here’s the same scene (still at 640×400) with the HQ2X image filter applied to it:

Mmmmm.

When I first saw a version of this filter (called Scale2X) in Exult I was very attracted to it. It doesn’t make things look blurry like most filters do. The tone and composition of the scene are still very apparent, but the blockiness has been smoothed over. I especially liked what the filters did to the trees – they almost look like watercolors now.

And just for the record, here’s how Inaria I would have looked with the HQ2X filter applied to it:

Woohoo!

I had not intended to use this look for Star Revolution, and I hadn’t intended to get the look by using a filter but by composing my textures to provide the look…but the more I think about it, the more I feel that Star Revolution would benefit from the look. Hopefully I’ll get this darn combat prototype finished and can mock up some screenshots and you guys can see it for yourselves. I think it’ll give me the feeling I’m going for: high-resolution, but the world/universe almost looks like it’s made out of Lego blocks…I think that would be perfect.

I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen the HQ2X filter applied to a 3D scene before. This will be very interesting.

Chunky Pixels

May 22, 2006
Game DesignGame ProgrammingGamesStar Revolution
8 Comments

While I got a significant amount of work done on the combat prototype for Star Revolution over the weekend, it still isn’t quite ready. So in the meantime, I’m polling the audience!

When I wrote Inaria, I used a 512×384 video mode. This is kind of low-res, and I did it on purpose. I wanted the pixels to be a bit…chunky. I wanted you, the player, to be able to see individual pixels. I did this because I wanted to evoke a sense of the older RPGs that I was honoring.

And last night I was reading Masters of Doom again during compiles when I came across this passage:

Richard Garriott, a.k.a. Lord British, the son of an astronaut in Texas, spoke in Middle English and created the massively successful graphical role-playing series of Ultima games. As in Dungeons and Dragons, players chose to be wizards or elves, fighting dragons and building characters. The graphics were crude, with landscapes represented by blocky colored squares: a green block, ostensibly a tree; a brown one, a mountain. Players never saw their smudgy stick figure characters attacking monsters, they would just walk up to a dragon blip and wait for a text explanation of the results. But gamers overlooked the crudeness for what the games implied: a novelistic and participatory experience, a world.

Inaria is a pointer to a pointer. Its blocky graphics are trying to evoke a previous style of game which, in turn, tried to evoke a world rather than accurately represent one.

Is that even possible nowadays? Quake started us down the road from evocation to representation and we’ve been barrelling down it for years, but will we ever arrive? And if we do, will it be possible for small teams to make the trip, or will it necessitate 50-60 people for three and a half years? That’s what Oblivion required…

And here’s the question that is pertinent to me…can we ever go back? Does this sort of evocation still work? And will it work even on newer players who have never played a game in 320×200? Who don’t know what VGA is?

Basically, I’m asking this: Do you think Star Revolution in a lower resolution will evoke older space opera RPGs, or will it just look really stupid?