cclogg

"The decline soon after? That’s the Chomp search update followed by iOS 6 and the card app store layout. So sad."

Man, I do find that quite sad... the app store still has some major issues with regards to discoverability. It's funny because you'd think as the app store became more and more saturated, that they'd create more ways to deal with that, but many of the changes have actually made it worse lol :/

Yeah I suspect you are right about post-processing. Good to read your points though, thanks for the response!

Darn, looks like I can't edit my post anymore, and HN formatting screwed it up lol. First link is for 300, second one is for the sequel.

I guess it is quite subjective, but what makes the second one look better to you? For me the first one, whilst chalked with noise/grain, has a much better rendition of the skin-tone, along with detail in the highlights, and the depth of the reflection in her eyes. I guess it's hard to describe really, but that's kind of why I would side towards the first image.

I find it's still really noticeable in the skin tones and highlights. You can find lots of comparisons online; once you see film beside digital, the difference can be pretty huge. Some people in Hollywood still really care about it... one recent example: http://motion.kodak.com/motion/Publications/InCamera/Creatin... “It’s like we’ve forgotten how great film looks when you see it in comparison,” Alsobrook remarks. “We looked at each other, and it was a done deal. There was no question we were going to shoot film. It has a rich, creamy look to it that you just can’t get any other way.”

One instance where it's very obvious to me was 300 vs its sequel 300: Rise of an Empire. I tried to find 2 similar images: 300 http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/dvdreviews46/300_the_complete... 300 sequel http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTQwMTk3MTU3OV5BMl5Ban...

So basically I think digital is getting there but it still has a little ways to go in matching the perceived quality.

I think the truth is that if you're making a free game, you have to put an incredible amount of consideration into replay value and how to keep people playing for long periods (and then how to extract money from them :/ ).

Otherwise you make a paid game and hope an Apple-featuring makes you enough.

Last spring I went through a lot of different techniques including the one you mention about subdivision. Was working on tower defense path-finding so basically the challenge was to compute every waypoint-set's path at game-start and whenever a tower is built/sold.

I think I basically tried almost every A* trick available (rectangular symmetry reduction, HPA*, points of visibility, jump point search, etc) but ultimately I couldn't make it run fast enough on iOS for our max level size which was about 100x100. It also couldn't be multi-threaded because it needed to work with online code (synchronous tick engine)...

What ended up happening was I found a full C implementation of Jump Point Search, and it was incredibly fast! I had already moved several parts of my code to C in order to speed it up, but I guess using a higher level language like Objective-C is just way too slow to have instantaneous path-finding on a 100x100 grid. I think this was the code I found https://github.com/Bio2hazard/cJumpPointSearch

With iOS development I've typically had the interviews that you are seeking. I show them my apps over coffee and then I do a few hours (or a feature) of contract work (paid) for them and it usually works out and I continue onwards :)

I am not sure that this works for all situations though; maybe I've been lucky too... I tend to work for smaller startups.

Great read!

"In Angband, any monster that drops stuff can drop pretty much anything. Monsters have a level, and if they drop loot, it just randomly picks any item near the monsters level."

-> (RPG related) I felt like this was an issue with Diablo 3 compared to Diablo 2. You basically just had to mash around in D3 grinding the top-level monsters and hoping... whereas in Diablo 2 you could make conscious choices over where to farm if your goal was to find a certain item (albeit the drop chances were extremely low, so most people just did Meph runs or Baal runs and traded their way up). Here though the author is doing drops way more realistic than either of those games heh, so that's quite an awesome feat.

Itemization seems really tricky; analyzing Diablo 2 vs Diablo 3 can actually provide some interesting insight into how item systems affect gameplay etc... maybe those devs even tried doing it realistically at some point but found it didn't pan out gameplay-wise?

"From the old world of unprocessed rolls of C-41 sitting in a fridge 20 years ago"

Hey I still do that! :(

I wonder if my (or anyone's) film photos on Flickr are completely useless metadata-wise. Because they are all scanned so they just say "NORITSU KOKI EZ Controller". There seems to be a large portion of people (on Flickr) shooting film still but I wonder if it's only a small percentage overall.

I go through that quite a bit lol because I've made the conscious decision not to drink ever (I don't care to spend the money on it nor do I care for the taste). But my vice is drinking soda heh... darn sugar!

An iPad could be a good stepping stone. For me it was Nintendo as a kid that then got me into computer games, which then got me into making my own stuff, which then made me into a programmer today heh.

I find that I've gotten to a point too where my mind subconsciously blocks out ads, even the ones at the top of Google searches. I also don't believe I've ever clicked on a banner or display ad (purposely) since I've been on the internet. They just always feel scammy or not targeted well enough in my opinion. But that's also just the nature of the internet...

Yeah totally, having some experience with 3D motion tracking and green screens, I was thinking: wow, it's so smooth and so perfectly tracked, AND cuts between player/grass so well. I know how finicky it can be to key out elements, so it is quite amazing that whatever algorithm they have in play can do it so well (is there a jersey color that's close to grass color lol? Wonder what the edge cases are).

Speaking of RTS, I really miss the 90's/early-2000's. It was basically like a golden era of RTS's lol. But they don't really work on consoles (needed for AAA these days), and with mid-sized developers vanishing, the RTS genre has kind of slumped. Blizzard can still do it and maybe other companies here and there, but there's very little going on in that genre I feel now. The new freemium C&C will be interesting though for sure.

You'd think tablets/mobile would have an amazing plethora of RTS's, but it kind of seems like the simulation/Facebook games took over (Clash of Clans etc).

Whoa I did not know anything about this story until now ><

On a related note, I also just noticed that the "Arecibo Radio Observatory" was in Goldeneye!

Oh man, I've definitely felt this pain many times lol:

"The samples will be missing lots of implicit information such as how to install the necessary libraries and how to deal with missing dependencies and version conflicts. Transcribing and modifying the examples may lead to bugs that suck up time. It's not terrible, mostly thanks to sites like stackoverflow, but it's still a lot of unnecessary distractions from the task at hand."

So many times, the actual programming isn't tough, it's just getting all of the stuff around it setup that is hard.

Oh man yeah... UIWebView's have been left in the dust for a while now lol (and Apple probably has a reason for it unfortunately).

Haha, I wonder how many of us came here because we couldn't push or pull commits, so just taking a HN reading break... and boom the top post is about Github!

Okay wow the meta-joke on these games is getting to pretty intense levels lol. On a technical level though, I found this game extremely hard while using space-bar, but very easy with mouse clicks. It seems to jump differently or something.

That's really interesting to hear (I live in Vancouver too). I think it maybe also speaks to our North American culture of drive to work, stay at work, drive to home, stay at home... though I've heard that Vancouver is quite decent (compared to other North American cities) for having a downtown with actual people living there... similar to NY.

Yes, regarding the scanning, this is true... I will say though that I've tried photographing (digitally) my own negatives to see how similar it was to a drug-store scan, and it was pretty close color-wise.

However, I would have to disagree about skin tones unless you can provide some examples to sway me. I've googled a lot of comparisons and have yet to see one that looked as good. I find that the way digital captures just makes the skin look quite harsh, and reveals flaws. I personally think digital needs to make more changes to the sensor itself to really step up the quality. Foveon is an awesome example, but not fully there yet in my opinion.

Regarding no filters, I've been shooting on 35mm film for the last year and been really enjoying it, almost never have to color correct, and the photos look so damn good! (especially skin tones)

I just do develop + scan at the drug store, no prints lol.

Doesn't work for everyone though, as waiting a day for photos might not be ideal (but I enjoy the anticipation heh).

Haha oh man so true. This is why I've found it hard to really get into modern FPS's, especially the console ported ones... the perfection we tasted from HL1 is very tough to match.

In many RTS peer-2-peer games like Starcraft or Age of Empires, they use a lock-step model, which can stop the majority of cheating.

Every player uses a tick-engine (ie tick every 0.1s) that performs the same commands on the same ticks. When a player issues a command, such as "Build Unit X", it sends it to every other player to run a couple ticks ahead (how far ahead is based on average lag or whatever). If anyone performs differently, then a de-synchronization occurs and the game is over.

It's explained much better here http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3094/1500_archers_on_a... "Because the game's outcome depended on all of the users executing exactly the same simulation, it was extremely difficult to hack a client (or client communication stream) and cheat. Any simulation that ran differently was tagged as "out of sync" and the game stopped. Cheating to reveal information locally was still possible, but these few leaks were relatively easy to secure in subsequent patches and revisions. Security was a huge win. "

But let's say I want to 'go outside' in Tokyo or Dubai, without having the money to actually travel there...!

I wonder if someday we can get to the point where StreetView is a continuous flow... like instead of tapping the arrow and waiting for the next slide to load, you would just smoothly walk forward or backwards along a track using up/down arrow.

I guess it would be technically possible already, but Google would have to snap their images with much smaller distances, and make them load in much faster... space requirements would be huge lol.

Let's admit the truth to ourselves... we were already playing it when we read this post... :(

It's interesting to see this list though... the things that really tick with HN heh.

This is really cool but it actually brings up a question I've had for a while: Is Firefox super slow with graphics? This was incredibly jittery on Firefox for me (my main browser), so I downloaded Chrome quickly to test there... and it ran super smooth. It also ran smooth on my iPad 2.

I'm asking this because I was getting into HTML5 canvas recently, and noticed on Firefox that even a very simple canvas animation is laggy. What's the deal?

It really depends what type of game in my opinion (which sounds like your opinion too). I've found that RTS can get away with TCP. We used Apple's Game-Center matching for our iPad game (Stratosphere: Multiplayer Defense), and used "GKSendDataReliable" aka TCP.

It's real-time and works fine over 3G even... the real problem is having enough people online at once to even play multiplayer lol...

Oh yeah man I'm totally with you on that. My unproductive side takes over on those days: "Hmm could work on that project... na feeling a bit sleepy, how about some video games... just a bit..."

;)