Categories
Me Myself&I

Because we don’t live in cars

The thing is, owning a car is a thing of the past and owning a ready to be off the grid passive house is the future.

That’s why I never really quite get into excitement mode when I hear Elon Musk. Electric cars and battery charging stations, cool. But I don’t want to invest in that, only use them as a last resort in my life. I’d be much more interested in some kind of quick and fast public transportation system deployment based on monorails, owned and co-operated between cities and private companies (It happened but failed: Nobody Walks in L.A.: The Rise of Cars and the Monorails That Never Were). You know, trying to reach and help as many people as possible.

Annual energy cost in average Alaska home: $5,470. That (passive) house? 900 bucks. In one of the toughest climate in the world. It’s a small house of course in this hell you can’t do passive AND big. But it cost $169,500.

That’s two Tesla model S “lite” cars. The performance model is at $96,070 (sold $146,500 in Europe). It makes me daydream.

A passive house for a “normal” climate would probably cost around 80K, maybe less. And now it looks like something I would totally invest my money in. That’s pure Quality of Life right here. That’s saving money, forever.


Little passive boxes, little passive boxes, little passive boxes, little passive boxes.

What I’d like to see is a website where you would order your house, get it prefab, mounted in a week, finished in a month. Hemp insulation all the way, local farms and plants to grow and make houses in order to limit transportation.

Best part? All of that is possible right here right now, not in 2016 at best when finally Tesla cars get kind of affordable to start to make a difference. I am just saying.

One more thing I read on the internet.

Buildings have a lifespan of 50-100 years during which they continually consume energy and produce CO2 emissions.  If half of new commercial buildings were built to use 50% less energy, it would save over 6 million metric tons of CO2 annually for the life of the buildings—the equivalent of taking more than 1 million cars off the road every year.”

Boom.

Categories
Audio&Games

Please do care about input

Disclaimer: yes, I’m mad after hundreds of games ruined by that WASD, selfish thing.

 

Guys, games are about control. Input is core. Core.

How the fuck can you disregard keyboard issues when making a game so much?

How can you not integrate lefty features in first person view?

Don’t give me no BS, I know it’s totally doable and easily so.

Fuck your gamepad, I just want to play with my left hand on the left side of the keyboard and not on those stupid ass arrows, stuck in the right corner. WTF is wrong with you don’t you see that it sucks and that your game will suck? You don’t want to make a menu for custom controls, fine then freaking use keyboard positions instead of letters. I’ve seen it done, it works. PLEASE OH GOD FUCKING DO IT. Four lines of code what the hell it makes me mad at how BAD developers are at accessibility. If you think along the lines of “fuck those 75+ million of people with weird keyboards who can’t appreciate our game ha ha what a bunch of retards!” you are the worst.

It’s not even for me, it’s for your goddamn game that you should care. That people will get a good experience and spread the word about how cool your stuff is. Passing on that in a world of digital distribution and huge noise is moronic to say the least.

Another thing:

If you are a righty, this picture feels wrong. If you are a righty and mentally try to throw that grenade looking at that left arm, your brain gets confused and I bet you will not aim that good if at all. THAT’S ME IN YOUR STUPID RIGHTY-ONLY FPS WORLD.

Pretty much a DECADE that first person view games assume that we all are right handed, aiming with our right eye. Fuck that trend, fuck that roller coaster focus that pushes game designers to only think about players in terms of camera.

At first in FPS, weapons were in the middle of the screen if showing up. Then like everything based on Half-life engine you could switch to match your preference with the default being righty. I remember changing the settings. It changed everything. Accuracy -and that is, fun- reach that level of satisfaction where you don’t constantly think that “if only I could not be disturbed by this right hand BS”. Now there’s no choice, it’s righty and nothing else.

Reasons given for not having left-handed options in games: it’s only 10% of the population. Time to implement lefty features: 10 minutes (instead of displaying the arm on the right you display it on the left, nothing else changes). Sure do NOT care, that could be so bad for you. Search on the internet for southpaw + new first person game. People are desperate and frustrated. WORSE, how does it make sense when you give me the option of watching around with my left thumb on a gamepad, with my weapon on the right? WEIRD, people it feels like controlling a crane! If you go left, do it all the way.

I’m glad Fender and other music instrument manufacturers never thought this way good god. It actually costs them tons of money to have a southpaw line compared to programmers. Lefties are part of this world, 10% of the population out there is left-handed. That’s a lot. 75+ million French/Belgium keyboards, that’s a lot.

Please make the keyboard and left handiness issues things of the past by adding the few extra lines of code for us. FIX THAT PROBLEM ONCE AND FOR ALL. You just need to care, all the way. I know, it’s hard.

Thanks.

Categories
Audio&Games

GDC Vault gems

Thank you GDC Vault for letting people watch these classic post mortem for free.

No thanks for putting them online, having them done YEARS TOO LATE. I really wish I had been watching these post mortem six or seven years ago, that would have been so valuable within the game development discussion.

X-COM! It’s the 5th iteration of a game made by two brothers. I never got to like it because of the art style and because I was young and into real time action games but I loved the concept and the game’s smartness.

They based X-COM as much as they could  on random procedural generators which is to me, what computer games should all have: it’s the thing we can’t get anywhere else. It’s what creates stories inside stories, it’s what multiplayer does when it works. I love the fact that old single player games were giving you simulations instead of roller-coasters. So, so, so much deeper. And made on machines that are ten times less powerful than flip phones today.

Fallout. A game that I quickly played, I was too busy with real time 3D (a year later Half Life was coming out) but I just loved the post apocalyptic settings. In the post mortem we learn that at first they wanted to go with fantasy but ultimately decided that it wouldn’t be smart as it would compete against other Interplay RPGs. So simple and ego-less I’ve never seen that in game development, really. The art of compromise. Also, look at that start. Almost cancelled twice too. Crazy crunch times. It didn’t look good for a game that is now considered a huge classic.

Myst is another post mortem that tells you the same thing: they didn’t know if they would ever finish that project, publishers were both and alternatively super supportive and terribly pressuring, crunch time, a strong link in the team (again, brothers) kept development going, budget exploded, luck, timing.

One thing I note too, they were all making their own tools and engines and I think we’re losing something here with middleware. Hard.

Why isn’t there some discussion on that? It’s connected to how we feel all games feel the same these days. I’d like veterans talk and speak their minds about that and solutions we could come up with.

Categories
Audio&Games Music

Music charts and me

It’s the best article on the state of music from that past decade and this paragraph explains it all:

Music is also contingent. The part of a song that is ‘‘musical’’ is totally up for grabs, and changes from society to society and age to age. The European tradition has tended to elevate melody, so we think of ‘‘writing a song’’ as ‘‘writing the melody.’’ Afro-Caribbean traditions stress rhythms, especially complex polyrhythms. To grossly oversimplify, a traditional European song with a different beat (but the same melody) can still be the same song. A traditional Afro-Caribbean song with a different melody (but the same rhythm) can still be the same song. The law of music – written by Europeans and people of European descent – recognizes strong claims to authorship for the melodist, but not the drummer. Conveniently (for businesses run in large part by Europeans and people of European descent), this has meant that the part of the music that Europeans value can’t be legally sampled or re-used without permission, but the part of the music characteristic of Afro-Caribbean performers can be treated as mere infrastructure by ‘‘white’’ acts. To be more blunt: the Beatles can take black American music’s rock-n-roll rhythms without permission, but DJ Danger Mouse can’t take the Beatles’ melodies from the White Album to make the illegal hip hop classic The Grey Album.

The melody. It’s all about the melody is you ask an extremely white field like game development. As long as you provide that European tradition of elevated melody, you are good. To cater to a white crowd if you don’t focus on melody, you are kind of screwed. Music appreciation comes with time, we learn how to appreciate it. It’s socially engineered.

I never really have been a melody guy and felt bad about it for a long time. Growing up in a white world, I felt that I was wrong, except that I wasn’t. I’ve always preferred harmonies and rhythm. I always loved the call and response that are all so anchored in black music. Jazz, funk soul and hip hop are almost all about everything but the melody. They’re all about playing with silence and performance, that movement. Fun. In my opinion it’s deeper and more interesting to connect these with gameplay instead of an upbeat locked melody but I diverge.

It’s interesting to see what Cory describes -differences of taste between black and white- show up in billboards. First thing first, you can’t survive if you only sell music to a black crowd. Music sells to white people, and this is where it gets weird when you think that NWA, Ice T or Whitney Houston aside of their talent own their financial success to that world they were not invited to (and they made it because they were not that black: NWA wouldn’t exist without that Jewish dude Jerry Heller and Ice and Whitney own a lot to their light skins). It’s fucked up. Social considerations aside, let’s stay on musical taste and see how it shows up in billboards:

Parliament’s singles performances. “US” charts are white people and “US R&B” are black people. First observation George Clinton’s band reached gold when white people put them in the top 20. Look at how the two songs in the white top 20, “Tear The Roof Off The Sucker (Give Up The Funk)” and “Flashlight” are the easiest grooves and the most melodic leads. And yes, hearing Aqua Boogie the first time I was blown away and loved it so much, huge claps, psychedelic and jam-ish, super nasty and unique bass line and #1 for black people when it came out and #89 for white folks. Not surprised.

For a couple of years though there was no distinction between black and white music charts.

From November 30, 1963, to January 23, 1965, there was no Billboard R&B singles charts. The chart was discontinued in late 1963 when Billboard determined it unnecessary because that there was so much crossover of titles between the R&B and pop charts in light of the rise of Motown.[2] The chart was reinstated in early 1965 when differences in musical tastes of the two audiences, caused in part by the British Invasion in 1964, were deemed sufficient to revive it.

So for merely two years, music wasn’t racial. The 60s man, even music is telling us that we missed an opportunity to go further and unify more. Instead we chose to separate ourselves as audiences -less in Europe but still- and I don’t think it was only a British Invasion thing -they all “stole” black music to make their rock n roll-. Socially, that interracial stuff going on in the streets of Philly, Chicago or LA scared the shit out of a lot of white people. Sad.

Today, things are pretty much still the same. The more Kanye caters to white people with weird noisy artsy stuff, the more black people are like “nigga where my beat at?” but the bigger he gets. If you ask black people about Radiohead they’ll be like “who?”, if you ask white people about Usher they’ll be like “ewww”. I’m not making this up, there’s a real backlash against black music, always has been despite its success. “Is it really possible that Michael Jackson, arguably the most influential artist of the 20th century, merited less than half the coverage of Bono, Bruce Springsteen, and Madonna?” asks the Atlantic.

Music is still massively race-ish. As a composer and musician it’s uh, interesting. Music is a universal language and by marketing the hell out of it, by racial division and lack of will it’s not anymore. But it still is and always be.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Furry chords

Releasing this, reading that. It stresses me out. We failed at creating a real Europe, we failed at not fucking Africa more and now everyone is paying it. But fuck.

It’s hard to be black. The way Paul says it man, it comes from down there and I feel that shit so hard. So much BS to deal with, so much awkwardness, humor and music to handle all of that. That 8 billionth time an old lady freaks out thinking I’m going to snatch her damn purse because I walk fast, even faster under the rain. That eight billionth time for some reason, it’s more painful.

The hardest part is to stay calm. Stay smart.

 

I like those chords. Written with that Los Angeles sunset orange and violet light around. I could do a completely different track with them. I wanted to punch away with this one.

Categories
Audio&Games

Same old one

Except for some game developers and game journalists, no one cares about having a "pure" game machine. Actually, the opposite.

So basically they are building -Sony, Valve and Nintendo included- that living room PC, that living room computer that does it all, because the market is asking for it: no one likes to have four boxes, 15 cables, a remote dying from switching input everyday and different UI/UX between each machine, which is the current situation for a lot of people.

Under this light, I think the Xbox One is technically strong with a software layer/integration with mobile and tablets that competition doesn’t really have and is extremely complex to build.

For the rest, well I don’t care. I told you thousands of time that proprietary, closed platforms should be avoided as much as possible. This is where to me I’d rather have people buy Win8 licenses and stay hardware and distribution free because when a company owns the hardware, software and distribution you really are in a different position that we game developers -outside the 0.1% studios which can tackle that kind of game production- don’t want to be in again amirite? I mean if we ever learn from our mistakes, musician mistakes, directors mistakes etc. That’s a lot of facts now.

As creators we want to be on top, not below. There’s another thing.

Legacy.

This is Tera: City of Skulls, a 1986 French RPG DOS game from Loriciel running on Windows 8, flawlessly. I’m so used to that level of backward compatibility I don’t know how you do, guys. It’s fucking fantastic.

As time passes by the ability to have a real memory, a real library of our gaming past is more and more awesome and it will become more and more important as population ages especially with inter-generational links around computer game culture, especially with hundreds, thousands of dollars spent on game downloads you can’t transfer. It’s not just about legacy, it’s about having your mind at ease knowing that you will not get screwed, maybe ever. People are searching for solutions when they see that all of their 60 bucks games will not run on MS and Sony’s next boxes. The backlash’s started. 

Which is why you should -no offense to console companies- stay the fuck away of these consoles. Games are everywhere and the most diverse, thriving, stable place to play is still a Windows PC. Or Steam, if you prefer to call it this way but it’s not just Steam, though.

Categories
Audio&Games

HeteroComputer

As for competing with Intel, if you look where Intel is going in terms of GPU investment and the selection of an APU by Sony [for the Playstation 4], all that reflects the fact that heterogeneous system architectures [google it, folks] are the future.

RPS interview with some AMD dude.

It is the future and always has been. It’s probably the most consistent trend in home computers that for some reason, no journalist is paying attention to (except RPS).

The heterogeneous system took the fuck over every single homogeneous system in the past thirty years.

How many soldiers down? C64, Atari ST, Amiga, consoles… I can play, emulate all of them on my inexpensive Windows laptop and when I upgrade it, even more things will run from 1986 DOS RPG to the last AAA with few to no friction. Just ten years ago, Windows as a dev platform was crazy complicated. At that time laptops barely did any 3D now a 500$ one can do Crysis in 1080p. Hardware is still not homogenous but it is powerful enough so that even the least powerful  can deal with games that need big teams to be made. That’s a big shift.

Of course heterogeneous wins. It brings choice and freedom. If you look at the game market on Windows, it’s thriving and the humble store will make even more viable. So many things, so many different games, just subscribe to RPS and Freeindiegam.es and witness this great, unique diversity. Even Metal Gear Solid is coming to Windows! Absolutely unthinkable ten years ago. That’s a big shift.

People are not stupid, they know they kind of get fucked with a small Ouya, it’s just that the price is not so bad so why not? That’s not a good sale argument though. And they know that to do media center stuff, consoles are definitely not easier (this video file doesn’t work on my ps3 why?).

Developers whine in heterogeneous environments but closed systems are far from perfect either and barely make sense financially for manufacturers now that we’re talking in billions of transistors. The risk is ridiculous.

So bring it on AMD, embrace diversity and put those good APUs you have in all tablets and computers of all sizes and all brands. That’d be sweet as hell.

Categories
Audio&Games

Director of Audiography

It’s one of the best moment with my job.

“Wow, now my game is alive!”

Yes before sound came in your game, your interactive software was dead. Before audio came in, your game wasn’t really existing on its own. Like if it was all black and white and with sound I just made it colorful and vibrant. *snaps fingers*

It’s great to see people’s faces illuminating with the medium that really triggers the “it’s really finished!” feeling, sound. It probably comes from that baby moment when s/he cries and that we finally know that everything is all right now. Maybe.

On the other hand audio is always and still treated at the very last second, on the very last amount of money left.

It’s a damn shame considering how happy people are when they get to like the audio and how it dramatically changes your relationship to the said game. Journey without music wouldn’t work as well, I will always remember how Triple Town on Facebook came out without sound and how people were like, “dude, it feels dead an stale where my sound fxs at?”

So you need a sound director in pre-production. You need as much iteration and collaboration with sound that you need for visuals and gameplay I know, it sounds fancy but it’s not. Whatever thing you’re crafting craft is a long process,  and I would add even more with audio! Because it’s invisible, because it’s about feel and flow more than visuals, things are not instantly obvious. Furthermore the sound director is going to help with consistency, give ideas that visual peeps or game designers don’t necessarily think of because, sound.

Don’t think about your game with layers in mind. Think about it in terms of blend of ingredients. Or like architecture, you’re building a house, shaping up walls and I have to be here to tell you that you need to punch holes there and there for electrical wires, before you can’t do it at all.

So I really like this Wikipedia entry, describing my job as it’s going on in India and Asia in the movie industry:

Director of Audiography is a technical role blending leadership, management and administrative skills with creative audiography ranging over pre-production, production and post-production – constrained only by the Director’s vision and the production’s schedule and budget.

I like this audiography term, as pompous as creative director but more scientific. Sound or audio director sound good too.

By production I mean everything about game design*features/budget, the rest is pretty explanatory. Also, it looks like the respiratory system and I like that. Nice analogy.

I’m really digging the impact of sound these days. The amount of memories, thoughts, feelings that sound triggers through a simple ringtone is amazing. Goose bumps.

No visuals can do that.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Tear the roof off the sucker

I just spent four days outside with simple tools like hammer, saw and my hands.

Happy mother's day!

It feels good to unplug from the digital world, still creating, and solving problems though. Confronting nature, physics’ laws, your body’s abilities. It’s great. Forgetting super high level discussions like game design crisis or what the future holds for Big Data in the world of deodorant, I needed that after weeks and weeks stuck on my machines.

Of course really happy to help my dad who’s trying everything to make it like he doesn’t need me even though he totally needs me: stamina, muscles. Also I have a good “estimation-eye”, give good advices and it’s funny to see him try to brute force shit at the end of the day and I’m rightfully like “you’re doing it wrong, son. We need to reduce the end of that plank”. Ha! But then I can’t stay to have dinner with them, I have to bounce to my world, switch back to English, internet and black music. I need that solitude buffer.

Anyhoo, back to my monitor I had this  “wow, it’s amazing how many things you can do with just ONE tool” moment, using my laptop and then I vegetated before going to sleep, pretty dead.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Cleveland’s real question

Forget about the horror of the abduction.

Forget about those sick fucks, make them disappear.

Forget about police not being so smart or this simple black man knowing something was up in this bitch.

I want to know how three young women can’t escape a house located a mile from where they’ve been kidnapped, for ten years when a 7 year old is capable of doing so. In a day.

I think at 14 I’d be ready to lose limbs to break away. I’d have shit to do, a life to live.

What kind of fucking uneducation these women got? I don’t get it. It’s almost like Louis CK’s skit.

“Of course, it’s insanely horrible and it should never happen ever ever ever to anyone….

But maybe, maybe if your survival skills and fighting spirit are that low, maybe you were the perfect candidate for a horrible news story.”

Just by respect for women who died rather than live hell, for those who fought back so hard that they finally escaped, for those going away from their own families raping them -talk about being REALLY hopeless-, for all these women I can’t just give these three all my empathy. Fuck no. I’m sorry.

The only end to nightmares like that is perverts knowing that if they kidnap a woman, they either get killed/their asses kicked or she will break away anyway and put them in jail where their buttholes will suffer. So they don’t even start.

Stopping them before they even try. Women need to be strong and there’s no way around it.