Jake

Bespoke moratorium needed. A moratorium uniquely made and declared for the word bespoke.

Christ. We are the same forever.

I am confused by everything here. I didn't know people were updating the Idle Thumbs Wiki, I also don't know what Space Cop is doing there. Is this a reference to a previous episode we've forgotten about? Did that entry JUST get added because of this week?

Whoa, Brad never revealed either way! Maybe he's holding that content (aka the good stuff) for the Bombcast.

The episode was posted twice for about 2 minutes, sorry about that. No difference.

There is definitely traffic density and traffic density issues, and you can see it right on the road itself since all cars in your city are represented visually. No abstracted traffic copter alert mechanism needed. You can also reduce traffic jams, just not via one way streets. The solutions are to widen roads to allow more lanes (there are a number of road widths which support increasing densities of traffic, though it eventually maxes out) and/or provide alternate viable routes to decrease congestion. One way streets would be a cool additional way to solve congestion, but for the reasons the devs were talking about which Flynn quoted sounds like it's not an easy problem to solve on the simulation side. Here's a pretty cool example of SimCity traffic congestion modeling. The guy created an actual intersection in his hometown that is always gummed up in real life, and tried to use the SimCity beta to see if he could figure out what's causing the constant congestion. It's surely not accurate to real life, but it's a testament to the robustness of SimCity's traffic simulation that he could do what he did and so tangibly observe the results at all.

I think commuting can happen and buying/selling energy can also happen. If city to city loans can happen I'm golden.

The balances are definitely separate, because I took out bonds in one city and not others. I don't know how funds move from one to the other though. I feel the need to make a shitty high income industry, tourism and gambling city and use it to siphon funds to my financially impossible and irresponsible beautiful dream city.

Try re-downloading! It was pointing at an old download URL.

GameFly and a few other services were replicas of Netflix' old disc based model, where you paid a monthly fee and they would always mail you the next game in your queue when you returned the one you had. They tended to be flakier than Netflix though, with very few copies of some games so you'd end up with your second or third choice, and none of them seem to have adapted to any sort of streaming model. When OnLive was first announced I thought it was going to be a subscription service, which would have been pretty insane, but then it turned out to be another storefront to buy the games one at a time after all, which is a bummer. Who has the tremendous bandwidth required to support OnLive but doesn't have the hardware to buy and play the games natively? It seems like one could have justified the whole thing if it was a subscription on top of internet access, because then you could have mid to high range consumer DSL, a MacBook Air, and a 360 game pad and have access to every game, but once they start charging you quite a lot per title, the cost/benefit stopped making sense to me.

Idle Thumbs 91: The Clapper Hundreds of tanks surround the place, murderers around every turn. With no games in sight and nowhere to run, all hope was lost until we were saved by a trip to podcasting school by special guest Shawn Elliott. Games Discussed: The Ship, Neptune's Pride, Planetside 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Far Cry 3, Fez, Waking Mars, Mainichi, Miasmata Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

I don't know what quick base return is. Shit.

MMOs are like actual wars or public events... hopefully people are just documenting them well. I'm sure it's nearly impossible, but if developers would occasionally just run massive demo recordings of a full 24 hours of a server, it could be kind of incredible to study.

Pretty sure this thread is a day early? Everyone knows that, while similar to our own St Valentine's Day, Dishonored Valentines Day is a 36 hour cycle starting at what we call 6pm on February 15th (known to Dishonoreds as quarter-day eve'n).

As far as "I'm still not convinced that he's a bright mind," I don't know how you can think that, but of course you're welcome to your opinion. I think you can be in the right place at the right time to make money -- to do something right almost by accident -- but what you do after that is incredibly important, and Valve seems to do the correct "after that" thing time after time. Many many companies have found themselves in the place Valve found themselves in with Half Life's success in 1998, very few of them are around today, and none of them have Valve's continued success. Everything you read about Valve, from enthusiast press to employees to business analysis says that Newell is at the heart of it. Valve has talented people and a great company setup, but Newell enables that as well. Thinking that sort of thing happens by itself when you have money, or is "just what smart and talented people do," would be intensely hubristic.* I keep waiting for them to totally fuck it up but they clearly don't. I don't agree with every decision they make, and I definitely don't like all of their games, but to say that they got lucky or stumbled into success is, I think, not supported by the evidence history has provided over the last 15 years of their continued success. * Obviously Valve is far bigger than Gabe Newell, and I'm not intending to say "every good idea comes from Gabe," but I think it's very clear that he puts a lot of thought into every decision within the company that he is responsible for, and some of those decisions are very directly responsible for enabling the creative talent and high quality output that Valve is known for.

Forcing people to come to terms with the scale of world they have to interact with is weird, when it's anything other than "doors 2x taller than you, and guys you shoot." I imagine that if you force them into a room where they have to look around for little signs and stuff to get into the next room, they will be more inclined to consider items of that scale important later?

I'm watching it right now... It just has a long preroll I think.

Zero fucks given when I'm in gif form, apparently.

Sentinel is a sandwich line only, there's nowhere to sit. Murdoc has some good stuff on there.

Do you guys remember which episode had that "my my my my my my... video games" 80s pop song that someone sent in and we played? Also, do you remember what the song actually was/who it was by? Here let me help everyone out:

holy hell

It was somewhat deliberate. Episode two was supposed to get the crazy B-horror movie story out of the way quick, for people who like the stories in the comic about fishtanks full of living zombie heads and gladiator games and rape/torture/dismemberment and stuff. Episode two had some massive redesigning in it though, as the script was written to an earlier set of gameplay systems, and it switched leads half way through production as a result, which I think made it feel more apart than the original intent. It was always intended to be more of a direct to VHS horror story, and 4 was originally intended to be some sort of creepy mystery story, but I think they became a little more self contained than intended over time. Am I repeating myself? Sorry.

SpectreCollie said "Maxis" and you replaced it with "Will Wright," which is a pretty egregious mouth-putting-words-into. I don't think anything is built entirely in a bubble free of cultural or peer influence either, but I hardly think he was saying every innovation and iteration in the SimCity series sprang forth from the mind of one man. He even named specific team members on the SimCity 4/Spore team within Maxis who were responsible for certain systems. (Chuck was also on the development team at Maxis for SimCity 4, and on Idle Thumbs episode 9, not talking about SimCity!)

Oh hell yes that Double Dribble slam dunk. Jesus Christ.

My beautiful view!