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Audio&Games

Prediction 2013

– After big names like Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, Cliffy B, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Will Wright… Who’s next, Warren Spector? Miyamoto? Warren Spector just lost his job at Junction Point, he might retire.

– Miyamoto, maybe after limiting Wii U damages to Nintendo and an outstanding career.

– Smartphone games are going down. Over saturated market since mid 2009, better experience on tablets, developers can’t make a profit, bye.

– More big studios consolidation/death. Soon in the west we’ll be left with Acti, Ubi, EA. Japan will have Capcom and Square.

– Activision is going to take a financial toll from Blizzard’s panic: Diablo III, their future MMOs and WoW. And CoD is going down in sales and karma too.

– Social games are going down. Because Flash and browser games are horrible and people don’t want to annoy their friends anymore. Virality is so 2010.

– A lot of little niches and successes spread out across more devices than ever. Success randomness is high and freak us all out.

– Gaming on 15” or larger Win8 tablets could really open a world of possibilities. If they don’t cost an arm and don’t sport some shitty ass Intel Atoms.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Hell no

It is hard to read that stuff, over and over again.

I’m still in the process of swallowing what I read about Los Angeles and black people. I’m still learning how black lives don’t have any value in this world holy shit it hurts. I’m analyzing, I try to find escape roads, hope but all I can find at the end is anger. I see the system, its evolution. I see how I escaped it by being a lucky ass orphan.

No pressure at all.

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Me Myself&I

Quarantine

Cab sun

Back to Paris. The sun was here and it really helped. Today is hard. Re-figuring out how to do things, while wondering if the past four months really happened. Jet lag’s charm. You frown upon your own thoughts like “was that real?”. Yes it was, is.

Thermal shock, time zone shock, culture shock, personal shock, I kind of feel knocked out but also quarantined. I have a bit more than a dozen tracks I made on my laptop in LA to mix and finish on my big beast @ Chocobeam Sound Lab. I got some assets to create for my game prototype, quite a lot to experiment on.

Also.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Change8

Here’s my a bit over a week Windows 8 start menu. I use it on a 12” laptop with trackpad and mouse. It’s great. No, really.

It’s a lot of change too. I like change now. When I was a kid, I did not. I remember seeing Windows 3.1 and being like, “this is lame. What’s the point. Command line or GTFO”. I grew up and I no longer hate something right before really trying whatever I read hear see. In my experience the big changes with Win8 are:

– Focus on full screen

Very destabilizing for someone used to have 20+ tabs open and a dozen apps running front and back. I know it’s not healthy or that efficient. I know I procrastinate a lot with all these windows, one click away from a lot of distraction. The focus on full screen is just that, killing this procrastination of wandering between icons, browsing between apps. In Windows 8, you do what the app launched does and then you press the win key to go back to the start screen, open another and do something else. There’s an implacable efficiency, no “dead time” in the way you move around these tiles with information/full screen apps. Very weird but good. It feels less stressful. No “notification hamster” feeling.

– Horizontal scrolling

After years and years of reading lists like in our browsers, it is awkward. Lists are great to scan rapidly and I excel at that so when apps push for horizontal scrolling a lot, I’m no big fan. It might be better with a touch screen though. The interesting part is that I take more time to read this way and if I’m not in search mode it’s more pleasant, no doubt. Like reading a magazine. But when searching for immediate info, I’m too used to lists (I’m using ClassicRSS for a reason). No biggie though, there are apps for all tastes. I expect different apps to aim at trackpad/mouse and touch.

– Internet Explorer 10

I swear, I used Chrome from day one when it came out and never looked back (well, I did use another Chromium based one with no Google tracking). So many habits and shortcuts. Well IE 10 is good enough to make me want to open links in it. with the charm bar, sharing is easier and more fluid than ever. IE 10 is indeed fast and the rendering has something, not that Chrome’s rendering is bad but IE has a little something more, sharper. I’m still switching on/off with my desktop one but IE 10 is gaining on me. Proof is I installed some ad blocking rules and can’t wait for an AdBlock add-on. A webkit, non-tracking my ass browser in the store would be nice though. Let’s keep the competition on.

– Apps

They kind of replace web sites a lot. To search something on Wikipedia I was used to open a new tab and directly use Wikipedia’s search engine with a shortcut. Extremely efficient. Now I can go back to the start screen, click on the Wikipedia app and use win + q to search within. Not as fast but not slow, definitely more “natural”, less “program-y” I don’t know. With Reddit though, way better to use an app (dark theme, fetching faster than in one of way too many Chrome tabs). The look and feel in apps are usually awesome and slick. Sometimes it’s too much. There’s a lot of design work to be done in win 8 apps and it’s exciting. The so called modern UI is three years old now and still feels like the future more than anything I’ve seen around. So readable and clean.

There are some stupid things like not having a consistent “going back” esc button experience. It drives me crazy. Or the new file explorer with its weird arrow to go up the hierarchy, which does the same thing than clicking on the folder’s name but it made a lot of people happy because it’s “like XP”.

It must be really hard to make something to both attract people ready to change and get better workflows and people who don’t want to change, even if it was making their lives a little better/easier.

I think Microsoft did well looking at the challenge’s size. Also, Surface -even RT- makes a lot, a lot more sense to me now. I can’t wait for these Win8 20” tablets and my favorite audio apps on them. My almost carpal tunnel’d right wrist using the mouse would appreciate.

TL;DR: Get it while it’s cheap, at least for performance enhancements if learning new, cool ways to do things is like punching yourself in the crotch area.

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Me Myself&I

IDquake

Reading a book on black Los Angeles, seeing how segregation built up and created this city in detail. In East Hollywood, Latinos are a majority, followed by white people through gentrification. If in four years I’ve seen a dozen black people in Silver Lake, that would be the max.

In Paris, that would happen in four minutes. It’s heavy on my mind. It’s disturbing to me.

Even more so with the fact that I don’t experience segregation like history shows me how it exists and founded interracial relationship in the USA.

But when I get a flat tire on my bike, a pretty old white dude riding his bike on the other side of the street stops and asks me “need some tubes or anything?” That would never fucking happen in Paris.

It is so destabilizing. I feel like being in a dream, living things no black people live.

It’s 26°C today and in a week I go back to 0°C winter, my white family and its ethnocentrism.

Sometimes I’m proud of how I handle what I have to put up with.

Categories
Audio&Games

Audio confusion

Just to point out another thing going wrong with computer games. We build game audio with tools aiming this:

When people actually play using these:

or

or

It’s clear in 2013 that what audio enthusiasts were hoping to see as a multi-channel systems home invasion never happened and never will. Too annoying to set up. Too big. Too expensive. I think I’ve never seen a proper 5.1 system anywhere outside theaters and my crib in Paris.

It seems like game audio didn’t get the memo, new versions of new tools aim at surround systems and high end that almost doesn’t exist.

Good thing is, we don’t need crazy surround systems to make better game audio. The priority over highly technical stuff has hit a threshold, what we need now is way more diversity musically and sonically as well as more interactivity and responsiveness to what players do. Headphones, tablet speakers and soundbars are fine for that.

Categories
Audio&Games

Gunmes II

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that the cause of violence is ourselves in the first place.“ says a Gamasutra comment.

Exactly. That’s why the game industry needs to look at itself and deal -internally- with the fact that we build violent entertainment. Of course there’s no correlation with murders per se, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that we participate into that violent culture, and that we are the most efficient medium at it.

So everything goes wrong. Publishers and lobbies meet with the president when they shouldn’t have (hey US government, how about you meet with gun manufacturers and enforce some shit on them) game developers are not a majority to think that maybe we should think a bit more about the cultural impact we make with our games. Meanwhile, more tax dollars spent on useless “research” that is going to do nothing.

Frustrating.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Aaron S

Wow, a lot of articles about Aaron Swartz.

It’s weird that I just wrote an article about how using proprietary formats wasn’t so bad. Aaron helped writing the RSS 1.0 specs which I wish developers were building apps around instead of using Google’s Reader API which could be closed to developers anytime Google wants. We saw Twitter.

I feel like when they should use open, stable formats developers don’t and when they should probably help themselves with proprietary solutions, prefer to enter a world of pain by building these themselves.

At the end whatever you use to build apps and services, let the data flow. Monetize around but free access to information. It’s crucial.

Categories
Audio&Games

The VST case and why proprietary format is not necessarily a bad thing

Fender Jazz Bass
If you own a Jazz Bass, you’re pretty much set for life in the bass department.

You see, in the audio world we are used to things that last. Technologically once we achieve something, we don’t change it.

A hundred years ago a company invented the microphone, allowing us to record anything, we pretty much never changed it.

Thirty years ago a company invented MIDI, allowing us to control instruments via data, we pretty much never changed it.

Seventeen years ago a company invented the Virtual Studio Technology format (VST), allowing us to have perfect clones of real world instruments. Guess what? We pretty much never changed it.

The VST format is beautiful: you can download the SDK, can build whatever you want with it, distribute it as you want. If you sell your plugin, you need to pay Steinberg back. It is supported in every single audio app on Windows and others, completely and it happened really fast (we still have issues to create and modify Adobe’s PDFs in 2013 ffs). The ease of use is awesome: just drop a .dll in a folder and you’re done. Want to use another sequencer? Just redirect the plugin path to your VST folder.

Imagine if it had been like that with Max, Maya, Toshop, Flash since 2000. That’s right.

So that’s why to me going full open source open format is not so obvious: if companies are not acting like a bunch of dicks, things are smooth. After all, they are people too.

There’s a very nice thing about a format owned by a company or a consortium, its stability (3 versions of the VST format in almost 20 years). No fork, no weird stuff compromising and breaking apps legacy because someone just started to see the Light, none of that. The bad part with companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google or Apple is they break/close stuff and don’t give a shit (probably because they’re so big). That’s why a lot of people believe that we can’t trust companies to do it right.

But some like Steinberg or Flickr do, and we all benefit in the fairest ways possible. I wish Nintendo would share their 3D camera system in a SDK like Steinberg does with its VST interface. Game developers would spend time on more important stuff and know that moving the character around would be perfect on day one. Quality goes up. Nintendo gets royalties if the game sells. Developers and enthusiasts can use it for free. Everybody wins.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Fluid Angeles

I think it’s all about the flow. I love the flow.

The flow of the 24/7, delivery, consistency paradigm. The flow of these large streets where doing a U turn is a breeze. The flow of kilometers of square blocks of beautiful little houses and small buildings, empty spaces or ruins that are going to disappear soon. Present, future, past doesn’t matter. The flow of empty sidewalks, silent rad bikes and skateboard sounds. The flow of smiles and slow cars. The flow of the music I hear in public, last time was this while getting cash at my favorite ATM. By far not a perfect world but definitely more fluid. It feels so right to me. It definitely outweighs the bad, at least for now.

France’s everyday friction made me sick but now every time I go back it eats me up. Lefty black dude producing audio for games is by default frictional enough so if everyday things are too… Family and friends create this bubble where I’m cool but I feel frozen in time, not moving forward. It’s comforting but I like moving on. Or do I? Sometimes I don’t even know anymore.

It’s delicate.

I’ll have to take that plane again in a couple of weeks. It is so getting old.