Blue, green, air, simplicity.
Note the water on the right…
I’d live in this mothership forever.
I can’t stop looking at it since a week at least so I’m posting this stuff. Casa en Melides, Spain. Minimalism isn’t just for the sake of it, it’s great because it’s easy to pre-fab, better for the earth and easier to create perfect passive insulation with cubes and rectangles.
Anyway…
I don’t think the world’s leaders have begun to grasp the implications of unstoppable connectivity. Some people are calling this the Age of Behavior: What I do affects what you do, more directly than ever before.
NYT.
Our political vocabulary continues to sustain the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and the Liberal Party in Canada offer minor palliatives and a feel-your-pain language to mask the cruelty and goals of the corporate state. Neofeudalism will be cemented into place whether it is delivered by Democrats and the Liberals, who are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or by Republicans and the Conservatives, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour.
By my second working day in Haiti, I was finding it alarmingly difficult to get out of bed in the morning, already having rape nightmares and, worse, daymares. And that was before one of the upstanding pillars of the Haitian elite, who insisted he was a gentleman because he loses his erection if a woman starts to fight him off, started to stalk me. On the third day, one of my drivers cornered me in an abandoned building, and I had to talk him out of his threats to touch me. On the third night, I got very drunk. That night, and the next nine nights.
I just got back from a small ride around the Silver Lake reservoir after buying some groceries from Trader Joe’s. I guess I fit in with the population out there.
L.A. is great to ride. I don’t know why people think it’s not a city for bikes, IT IS THE BEST ONE. It’s pretty flat (I mean it’s not SF), it’s large (not like NYC) and it rains like 3 days a year. It’s a bike rider’s dream.
One can start a day riding from the beach and end up in snow covered mountains during the same ride. I’m not sure if there are many cities in the world that can make that claim.
It’s great. My best memory of E3 last year was my bike ride. 30 minutes to go DTLA, 1 minute to park, 1 minute to change shirt.
Now I think the brakeless trend is the stupidest shit ever. You can’t complain about cars and how people behave toward bikes if you ride fast and don’t give a damn about being unable to slow down like smart people do, by pressing more and more a lever. You can’t say streets are dangerous for riders if you completely forget about the rules of the road. I mean, seriously.
My problem with that is that it makes cars angry against ALL riders.
I rode Paris so many times. If you are brakeless there and that you go fast, you will die in a week period. Thinking that L.A. is rude because cars don’t pay attention is not true if I compare with France, there are a lot more brakeless riders in SoCal. Here in L.A. for what I rode for now, people are much more attentive of what’s going on around them. How many times I’ve been facing a car door in France, pretty much never here in Silver Lake (last year I was riding every day). People don’t want to get sued here. Even if they can’t see shit in their big ass SUVs, they don’t want any trouble. So if you’re alert –there is no place on this planet where you can afford to not focus on what’s going on on the road while biking- it’s pretty cool.
So to me the main message would be to push people to use their bikes, not to see riders as stupid ass kamikazes. They will stay in their cars if the main “bike culture” is about being suicidal you know?
Mark “The Hansolor” Adams.
Along with the huge Gil Scott-Heron a couple of weeks ago, Mark passed away in March. I didn’t know until recently and unexpectedly it made me cry.
I don’t know how many times I played his bass lines, somewhere in the thousands. I discovered Slave’s music in the early 2000s and just thought that this band was something I wanted to be part of. So amazingly hot and strong, innovative and crazy, their own sound… They introduced me to 80s boogie and Slave was the different tree hiding an immense forest of jewels.
The sad part is again with black music artists, this man died awfully early on (50 something?). Beaten up in a crack house or some shit.
I saw them live last year for the very first time though Mark wasn’t here (there are like three versions of Slave touring). I hoped for it.
Gil and Mark shared the same habit of doing cocaine, as Charlie Sheen or Lindsay Lohan and fucking thousands of artists. The only difference is that they printed deep grooves in music, shifted paradigms, marked eras and died considered as ghosts and drug addicts while these two white folks are supported in their behavior and will probably get specials on TV when they’ll pass away.
It’s shit like this. Fuck this world.
Every single possibility to say something bad about Microsoft, tech news jump on it. Every single possibility to say something good about GoogApple, tech news jump on it. The distortion is now too obvious. Apple does a bad thing with this tracking thing, denies it and what the press is doing promptly because they can’t argue against the fact that their favorite company is doing something wrong? Quickly demonstrating that MS does the same or that carriers do it anyway. Right. No journalist is going to say “hey to be fair and tell the truth, MS gets a single location and stores it outside the phone while Apple is getting every locations you’ve been to over a year and stores it in an non-encrypted file on your phone, even if you turn location services off, which is totally wrong”. That would just be too kind to Microsoft. Like you know, they have to pay for WinME/IE6/Vista forever.
Headlines are just misleading to a point that it’s outrageous for people working hard and doing good stuff at MS. I’d be mad seriously.
One example. You wouldn’t believe how many articles popped up in my rss folder about Windows phones getting bricked after the NoDo update especially on Samsung devices, how it was a total disaster etc. I have a Samsung and despite knowing that all of that was mostly FUD, I was clearly frowning.
Nothing happened.
The update went totally fine (oh yeah, they said March and it happened first week of April, that is so rude) battery life is great etc Turns out the update didn’t work on a small amount of Samsung phones (with a specific firmware, Samsung’s fault) for two main reasons: people would unplug the cable during the update, or they would have too much apps on their phone and the backup process would stop. Techcrunch is still saying and I quote “The Windows Phone 7 update situation has been a nightmare from the start”. Which is a full blatant lie. It’s been better that what I had to deal with my Android phone. Much better. People complain about this BS in comment sections but the damage is done. It’s ridiculous.
I had to wait months and months with Android, with fake dates and reports and lies, it wasn’t great at all on Google/HTC side for the same stupid update thing. It sucked, hard. People are insanely unfair and crazy toward MS, even people buying their product (get a life guys if you’re so disappointed that you don’t have the last phone’s update right right now). You have to give credit when credit is due and MS delivered two updates to my Samsung phone in three months, flawlessly, in France. And I don’t even feel I needed these because the Windows Phone OS was already very good which wasn’t the case when I had my Android stuck on 1.6 .
As for developers, the religious wars and others personal fights always make me think WTFGUYS. Developers, designers, programmers, you shouldn’t care about who’s side you’re on if you realize that you need to be early in the game, on the market, would it be iPhone Android or Windows phone or the Kindle or anything. You’re the one winning if you can provide polished services/products to any interesting platform or a lot of them. Ignoring a platform without knowing what’s going on on it and what it can do for you is simply unprofessional. The platform meta-game is all about being in the first pack if you haven’t figure that out yet (Ngmoco, ready almost on day one for the Apple Appstore). You have to be in the first wave with good stuff, you will be the first to make money and the first to have control and power against the platform (who is all the time, trying to kill you or make you its milky cow, it’s the game).
You see, it’s just a user/developer experience of someone who was really excited about Android after making a game on iOS. Then I saw the excellent Windows Metro UI and simply wanted to try it out because well, I don’t discriminate (and I had a deal with my carrier). They got it right man, so right that a review wondered how competition was going to make something sleeker, classier and simpler than the Windows phone UX and after months of use, I wonder too. It’s the best mobile experience I ever had. I know, it’s weird to write/read this but if you haven’t tried it you can’t tell about the integration’s tightness and attention to details Microsoft did. They did a really good job, didn’t copy competition and tech news are trying to not talk about it because it’s the bad Seattle giant, the company responsible for Clippy’s birth. MS is good in the long run (the first Xbox? That seemed so dumb. .NET is almost ten years old. Remember Kinect? Fuck I was so wrong on this one, even Linux 3.0 has drivers for it) and with this polished product that is Windows Phone, the best they ever put out IMO, I don’t see why tech news would spend their entire time shitting on it. It doesn’t make sense. Oh sure, it drives traffic and views on articles. Sigh.
Of course MS screws up too. Who doesn’t? MobileMe, Kin, iTunes software, Google Wave, Google Buzz, Zune player etc
Bottom line is, big companies are all trying and doing the same things, nasty or not, your favorite tech company included (Microsoft buys companies, you realize that Apple bought the company that does their perfect trackpad? You guys realize Google bought the company who built Android?). All of these companies with campuses and buses to drive people to their desks. You either don’t support any of them because you think “they’re evil” or you just get over it and treat everybody the same way. Especially you, not-so-tight-ready-to-sell-your-mom media.
It’s simple:
-If you live only by Apple standards and still think about MS circa 2000, you’re missing out.
-If you live only by Google standards and still think about MS circa 2000, you’re missing out.
-If you live by mixing, trying things out, making your own opinion, avoiding walled garden because they overall inherently suck, you’re right.
-If you are living like Richard Stallman, mad props and you can say that I’m stupid and sold to capitalism.
-If you’re not like Richard and try to give lessons to people using MS products while using another big brand or worshipping it like a bitch, you certainly need to get off your ponycorn.
So…
2010-2011, when the game industry exploded. Again.
The Wii went down, hard. Guitar Hero died, the 3DS? Who really cares about this 3D fad. I can’t track the numbers of AAA games with bad to abysmal sales, cancelled projects and people laid off. The Wii2 has been announced and nobody really cares either.
Apple’s market is more than tough (huge competition, prices too low) and for some reason success is always based on birds. Android doesn’t generate as much money and is a development pain in the ass.
In 2008 I couldn’t imagine that three years later game development would look this way.
Future exciting games? Spyparty, The Witness. I can’t wait for these two and I admire the amount of sharing Chris and Jonathan are doing, along with great game designers like Daniel Cook. I mean these guys are sharing so much information and knowledge and being open about their development, it’s so great. It’s inspiring. It makes me want to play their games. L.A. Noire? 3D actors and missions annoy me. Six years of development for that, now you see how it doesn’t really make sense financially. Portal 2? Well I could have played this one but I didn’t because I know it’s a good game (and I don’t have a machine to run it, that’s true) but it is still a sequel and I can’t just get excited over a sequel anymore.
Still reading Gamejournos to persuade myself to not care about big computer game news websites.
I’m really happy to see success stories online, onSteam (yes, it’s a word now). Platform agnosticism is gaining traction. Frozen Synapse is out. Terraria sold 200K in nine days (Terraria Vs Minecraft). Of course word of mouth is better on a network like Steam or Facebook –automatic status driving attention- but we can think about making games that connect to Twitter/FB/IM accounts out of walled garden too. It’s up to us.
I see a trend where indie games are finally, giving up the 8bit-nostalgia-hardcore-nerd aesthetic. As one would say, ‘bout time.
You guys -women-, you work so much. You do so much. And yet you don’t get any damn respect.
Watched national French news all weekend. The woman who is fighting something terrible doesn’t exist at all. It was all about how DSK was doing and how France was relieved that he wasn’t in prison anymore. Not a single word for the presumed victim. I’m not even talking about these "intellectuals" known as stupid ass rich white men sharing their retarded opinion but holy fuck, I just want to hurt them so bad.
I just read about Mr. Schwarzenegger follow-up and it’s insane too. I don’t even get how you can live with all that shit in your head, everyday. How to sleep. It means you cranked up the “I don’t give a shit about respect” fader to the max, 11. The respect toward women is inexistent. That makes me think about Michelle, from bin Laden’s night on Twitter.
I can’t say I’m proud to be a man these days. I spent two days in the countryside with women doing everything, running life basically. I just picked up some strawberries, sat at the table. 2 hours from Paris and a woman is great if she cooks and can breed, like 200 years ago. For the rest if she’s too smart or ambitious, she’s just a bitch and nobody will want her and she will die alone and stuff. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t change one bit. It’s terrible. You are so getting fucked guys I mean you need a fucking war. Starting with yourselves. This French woman who regretted to not sue DSK for sexual abuse isn’t going to testify in NYC.
Bitch grow a pair and do what you have to do: tell the fucking truth and help your sister from another mother. You opened your mouth saying what this man did. Now it is on and you can’t just say “no, thanks”. When it’s time to act, it’s time to act, goddamn. Way too much women can’t do what you refuse to do.
I think this will happen
If countries with maximum freedom cannot apply justice correctly and show the respect women deserve, we’re screwed.
I put a track on the internet and guess what, only women bought it. W.R.E.A.M (Women Rule Everything Around Me).
The goal would be to provide a toolset a game audio designer could use to:
-Make him able to be free and creative by using his/her standard sequencer software and export midi/soundbanks/scripts in a convenient and efficient way to the game.
-Minimize the programmer’s work who would spend NO time on things he/she shouldn’t do like fixing sound fxs volume issues (remember, I am not talking about triple A business) and spend more time on better things like polishing.
The tools are a mess. Some tools do some extent of the job, some did it perfectly but are now dead, some survive but are dying… We’re almost there. And yet so far!
First there’s the MOD file (.s3m, .xm, .it). Yes, it’s MIDI data + samples/synths. It’s not crazily supported but Irrklang does as well as well as the ubiquitous Fmod.
Where it’s so weird is that it’s only for playback purpose: no way to interact at the lib level with channels and parameters of MIDI data! Why would you absolutely just play a mod file instead of any pcm stream, I don’t know.
To add to the mess there is the tracker, the most annoying and unnatural way to create music. I don’t want to argue about the fact that it can do great music, it does. But we shouldn’t have to deal with the tracker if we want something with MIDI + samples/synths. Like it or not, we don’t have to enter music on computer keyboard in hexadecimal anymore.
So because the MOD file while supported is definitely depreciated, because the tools are awful, it’s pretty much useless for game development.
OpenAL? No MIDI, bye. OpenSL? Just started for mobile, there’s MIDI, there’s a mapping of its data –I like to read SLMIDIMuteSoloIt– but there’s no designer tools (and what the fuck these profiles mean? 3D Audio for games? On mobile? Please). SDL? No MIDI.
There’s the BASS audio lib that is supporting the playback and manipulation of MIDI files and real-time events through soundfonts, it’s cross-platform but I’ve never been able to see a game using it. People use BASS to build their own little tracker or MIDI player. Soundfonts are pretty much dead too.
The Miles Sound System seems to do everything right according to this page… But it’s 4000$ so I never tried it.
That’s it. No widely available tool to help you create sound interactivity with MIDI. Microsoft had this amazing thing called DirectMusic Producer but they killed it when they shut down the MIDI part of Windows with Vista’s brand new audio stack. They did that to simplify APIs I guess and also because nobody wanted to use MIDI (I’ll get to that in part 3) but man, that was annoying to witness.
Since then, it’s all about 3D. I never really got this obsession with 3D audio. There’s way too much tools for it compared to the number of people or games actually using this feature (FPS and hardcore gamers, and? Who is playing with a nice 5.1 setup? People spent like crazy for their big ass TV and thought “fuck it” for the audio gear, for what I saw).
Main tools and audio engines like Fmod and Wwise are providing designer tools aiming for “volume” features, things helping to manage huge amount of streams and sound fxs, localization files etc. Which is fine but it’s now a very small part of the game development market! Teams, projects are shrinking heavily (for the best) these days.
My handwriting sucks, I know
I tried to get more specific about file formats.
The sequencer of your choice export data in .mid (ubiquitous format), the soundbank for the sampler is provided either with dls (industry standard and there are tools to edit them) or sfz (Cakewalk’s take on soundbanks), the advantage of sfz being that it’s highly flexible and completely free. Plus, you just need a text editor to change things, I know programmers would be really happy with that :-) I use this format all the time and it’s really nice.
Then, .mid/.dls/.sfz are mixed together and controlled by scripts. I’d go for Python in terms of readability but all of them would probably work perfectly. The output would be a Fmod-like pair of files separating data/content. It could almost be only done ala command line style!
I added a door in the synth/filter part of the engine so that if someone wants to throw in their own filters or synths they have already coded, they can (VST format).
Also overall, the GPU could be used to take care of heavy processing synthesis systems or shit like that.
I see many advantages with this MIDI game audio engine:
-A strong personality and interactivity: the game audio designer set up a “band” and makes it play –in every way- with the game.
-High scalability: the .mid can be reused with minimum efforts on any platform, only the “band” needs re-design. It’s the fun part, it’s like changing textures in an environment. You can have samples in 24bits 192KHz if you want or minimize to 8bits 16KHz for a small game on a phone, no problem.
-Efficiency: .mid are a few Kb, .dll are a few dozens of Kb and soundbanks are the size you want. Between the compression settings and what your “band” is, I’m sure an uncompressed 100 Mb soundbank –in RAM- would provide more than enough for a majority of games. Graphic cards have 1 Gb dedicated c
-Stability: editing scripts in a text editor or a free IDE is stable. Editing soundbanks in a text editor is stable. Exporting midi is trivial. Maintenance would be kept at the minimum, only the audio engine would need it. That’s huge!
Anyway, it’s just some thoughts.
Next time I’ll talk about the social-economics of the game audio engine.
There was something impalpable in the way game music and sounds were played through synthesizers and samples back in the 80s and 90s. Something that was telling you that the sound, melodies and beats were coming from the heart of the machine, something REAL was happening.
Now computer game music just feels detached or forced, especially with non AAA games. It doesn’t feel “natural”.
Let’s take the ubiquitous Mario on the NES. Los doggies (amazing music blog btw) deconstructed the sound of the game, music and sound effects. Here’s the example of the famous coin sound –2 notes-:
The B acts as an ornament to the E. Together, they form an interval of a Perfect Fourth. In relation to C Major, the tonal center of Mario, they are a Major 7th and a Major 3rd respectively. What kind of world has Major Thirds erupting out of reality? Oh yeah, our world has that. Major Thirds are found in car horns, bells, telephones, door bells, convenience stores, pop music, and every other kind of music. And now coins.
Not that Koji thought about it this way but he certainly made sure that sound fxs were matching the music tune, then iterated to hear in which interval it was sounding best. Yes, you can do that with non-MIDI game audio. It’s just so much more tricky, annoying and tedious in the work flow and production process to do so. Plus we need multi-platform support business wise so it’s even more complicated. I did it for SideFlip but it was painful and I could have done so much more with a MIDI engine.
It is frustrating because visual designers have such a wide array of rendering solutions and graphic output with great control over them. We don’t have shit. The analogy with graphics is that MIDI is vector-based, sampling is vector and bitmap-based and streams are full bitmaps. We only have access to the last one, which is not the best in every case, far from that actually.
When you think about sound, music and fxs as tones that you can control through an engine and manipulate with gameplay, MIDI is just the way to go. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time we need this functionality, it’s stable it has everything we need. We need an audio suite with an editor to create extremely interactive audio and awesome stuff.
Basically
Game audio designers feed the engine with MIDI, feed the sampler with uh, sample banks and/or adjust synths and filters through a few scripts and the final audio stream happens in RAM, in the game. The important thing is this:
This is where the fucking magic happens
We can control everything here. We can cut the bass line if the player is low in energy or add a clap on the snare when the player is doing great. We can accelerate music and sound fxs as the player moves faster, we can filter and sweep out a jump fx made with a synth to match the exact length of an analog action, we can send a note off if the combo is not perfect, we can make musical transitions, cuts and breaks to match the action… Things we can’t do or are so tedious with audio streams and one shot samples. Loop. Fade out/fade in. Cut the ambiance or music. Repeat. Streams are so limited.
This is how professional audio software like Reason are working, MIDI to computation to RAM. People associate synths and samples with bad quality because for some reason (ha ha) they think about it as the NES sound, the 8bit sound, the lame 90s Internet music (powered by 2 or 4Mb built-in soundbanks) and nothing else. They don’t know that a nice 64 Mb soundbank and a few synths can be used to make great music and soundscapes like Nintendo is doing since ages (people often can’t even tell the difference with streams since the Gamecube/Wii). They don’t know that computers are so powerful today that they can emulate with extreme accuracy a dozen if not dozens of complex synthesizers on the fly with real time input under 2ms without sweating. I mean, in ten years it is really ridiculous how much power we gain in audio rendering and computation (cheap ass netbooks ship with 1Gb of RAM and 24bits audio output).
This interactivity opportunity needs to be deployed into game development. Not in a back to the old school way, but more as a rebirth. After ten years making audio and music for computer games, I haven’t been convinced by the stream road we took, at all. In a lot of cases, especially for small and medium-sized games, a MIDI engine would stimulate the gameplay and make it more alive than a 2 channel soundtrack looping in the background with stock sound fxs. But yes it means you really need a musician/designer/scripter on that part of your game!
Next time I will talk about the tools we have now, the tools we need and the weird situation with programmers.
Though only 17% of young people told one recent poll that their country’s future was promising, a massive 83% said that they were satisfied with their own lives.
This is France! Four months I’m back and I can tell and feel the same: life’s pretty good here, when everything works nicely –public transportation, internet, sunny days etc- it’s damn nice. It’s just that if you want to think a bit about the future, if you’re working in the private sector, in a small company, doing jobs that are today important or will be the only jobs in a few years, I feel that the future here is horribly gloomy and I’m not the only one (1,5M French live outside France as of January 2011). I remember a few years ago having arguments with stupid ass high school teenagers telling me that we don’t need to reform the work market and all they could say was “yeah anyway, I’ll not work in France later”. But you’re heavily protesting reforms? Goddamn Crazy French.
Most strikingly, the French birth rate has risen to just over two babies per woman. By some estimates, France’s population will overtake Germany’s by 2037. The French, it seems, are persuaded by the ambient gloom that their country is doomed—yet even their own behaviour suggests that they think it may have a future.
Ha! To me it’s not thinking about the future, it’s thinking about yourself, being a woman in your 30s and being stuck. When you’re having kids you socially jump from being a young woman struggling with your life like everybody else to a MOTHER. All of sudden everything changes and you are now socially supported and busy for eighteen years. To me this birth rate is not an optimistic way of seeing the future, pretty much the opposite actually. It feels like this: screw you future society, I’m having kids and having the life my parents had but worse and I don’t care what my children will have to deal with. The worldwide problem with sustainability, pollution etc comes from the fact that population grows. If you think about the future, today, you don’t have children (adoption would be ok though). I know it hurts.
France’s start-up scene may be relatively new, but a fresh generation of faces has begun to graduate into the big league. They include such figures as Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet of Priceminister, Marc Simoncini of Meetic, and Xavier Niel of Iliad, who launched Free, a telecoms firm, from nothing to take on the established giants.
The interesting part is that France struggles so hard to export. All of these start-ups are focusing on France and it’s not enough to create a lot of jobs. Just think about California and how the giants there –Facebook Apple MS Google- are getting most of their cash out of the state, obviously. I don’t care how, we –as any country does too today- need that to get a real economic growth (the population grows too, remember?) . Germany is so hot because they export like crazy. Outside of the big old French companies which are definitely not creating jobs but more reducing them it’s not happening here. Facebook barely existed in 2004 in its own country of birth and six years later there are 20M of French people using it. Even in the world of internet we stay French and don’t go global immediately, which is kind of the great thing of the internet right? Why not benefit from that right away? With the insane amount of culture the French have about other cultures, it shouldn’t be difficult.
The French seem simultaneously to hold two conflicting views. When asked if they backed the strikes, a majority said yes. When asked in the same poll whether raising the retirement age was “responsible towards future generations”, 70% also said yes. In other words, the French temperamentally liked the idea of protest, not least as a way of snubbing Mr Sarkozy. But, at the same time, they knew that raising the retirement age to 62, when the Greeks were being told to stay at their desks till 65, was the reasonable thing to do.
It’s smart. If your message is confusing and noisy when things get real you can choose which side you back up and argue forever without being wrong “Oh yeah I was not against that…”. Right. That’s how we deal with problems in France. Yes, it totally sucks. But when we have to do something because we really have to it usually happens in no time: the debate has been done to death.
The young, who have become serial collectors of short-term contracts, pay the price by lacking the security that the insiders enjoy.
And then it gets complicated: people have sex and form couples with often one “insider” and the other being on this short-term contract diet. Trying to find a balance. So people don’t fight the system, they accommodate around it and at the end, they’re pretty happy even if they know that the all thing is definitely unfair and not getting better. And so a generation later problems are the same +1. The plan is to find a place in the French machine that will make you go without too much harm if possible, to retirement. The social positive value is not to fulfill something –it triggers indifference or jealousy- but to exploit it dare I say, abuse it. Then you’re doing the right thing.
Next year we redistribute political cards and it will be interesting to see what will happen. Still looks so gloomy though.