Nachimir

, Rob and Ryan have been whipping each other with belts and there's blood all over the walls.

:tup: Thanks very much, saw that the other day and followed. Very efficient. Watching LEGO Batman review, "Views: 1"

Yeah me too. I had a character planned out, wrote jokes with some friends, had everything I needed to do it, but absolutely no time between the announcement of submissions and the deadline :-( Is it just me, or were submissions open for a really short amount of time?

Yeah, in my experience only the biggest have their own studios on site and can keep it running full time. Your second statement is true, but I don't think the first one is entirely accurate. Sound still largely relies on sampling, which isn't equivalent to the kind of sophistication we have in, say, lighting modeling and generation. I've met plenty of people working on better sound technology, but dynamic generation of sound, for instance, is still a very hard problem and most human ears can easily tell the difference between synthesis and a sample of something. When you're including multiple samples of stuff, and having to code systems to handle them, you're putting the workload and space requirements up a fair bit - more than many studios are willing, I'm sure. Better compression technology helps on the one hand with this. It may well be the lack of priority that has led to this shortfall in sound R&D compared to visuals or physics; perhaps we could do much better even with present tech.

Holy coincidence Batman. People are working on it, and have been constrained by many limitations - good audio can take up a lot of space, and take a lot of producing. I once expected that we should be able to make things that sound realistic just because we can sample, but there's a lot more to it than that, as I found out even by attempting to put ambient sound in a UT level. The expectation was kind of like expecting to be able to make photoreal games just because we can photograph things.

I don't think it's really an "uncanny valley" since we immediately recognise it as crap implementation rather than it being something creepy, but you're right about sound being tragically neglected in games, and at game development events too. GDC has an audio track, but outside of that I hardly ever see anything about it in print or schedules. Black Cat once hacked the Unreal engine for Thievery UT (Multiplayer thief, versus guards) to use pathnodes for sound propagation, and it kind of worked. Nonetheless, it also meant players using headphones with the volume up could easily detect even faint sounds and sometimes very easily find Thieves or avoid guards.

That thread is full of very high quality angst It could have done with a few mentions of Madeline McCann, Iraq and Barack Obama to calm it down; perhaps a few racist epithets too. Instead, the site owner changed the theme to 360 green for a while

I gather he moved to london recently.

Pricks! Even booking tickets in advance? I managed to get from Nottingham to London and back for £35 recently (Costs about £150 on the day). Norfolk, I wouldn't worry too much. The RPS thing will involve drinking games, and crowds at LGF events are generally friendly. Also, any of you not at the LGF but around the midlands should definitely check out GameCity in Nottingham, specifically the thing they're doing on Halloween. They haven't put this on the website yet for some reason, but it was in their emails recently: I'm going to miss it because of working on the LGF until Friday night

That didn't take long to sort out: ping. Book there for Rock Paper Shotgun, it's free. Google maps puts the pointer in the wrong place, but Beak Street is easily spottable just to the North West.

The expo will be until 10 that night. I think there's a chance Rock Paper Shotgun are also doing some kind of event in a pub that night, but I don't have details for it yet.

Me too. How did we never realise this before?

It absolutely certain that there will be new firmware that locks them out. It's also pretty much a certainty that someone will find a way to both bypass code checks and reflash it. Hmm, didn't realise that :/

Not announced. I'm not so sceptical of it. I'll be in no rush to buy one, but can see why people might go for it and that Nintendo might do some interesting things with it (That massive increase in research budget over the past few years will probably lead to something interesting... I hope). Also, bet it's less than a month before someone has pirated stuff running through the SD slot.

No. IIRC it used to trigger inline editing, but now doesn't for some reason.

Fucking hell it's worse than I thought, I'd only seen the McCain and Guliani figures before. I'm a bit torn. Deregulation is extremely necessary sometimes, but wasn't recently and the fuck ups perpetrated by the Bush administration (30:1 investment banking anyone?), IMO, make anyone supporting the republicans right now an utter fool. Knee jerk reaction is "no more money from me", but every penny I spend could be going to causes I don't agree with. Much of our taxes have gone on destabilising regions full of brown people and oil for the past seven years. The local shopkeeper you banter with might support the BNP/Nazi Front/Aryan separatists for all you know. I used to believe in boycotting, until I realised it basically doesn't make a significant difference unless you can get everybody to do it. It turns a section of the market invisible, making it irrelevant to whatever's boycotted. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't allow ethics to inform purchasing, but maintaining an ethical position on everything you buy is simply a route to madness, because one thing after another will simply add itself to the do not buy list. (PS Norfolk, I did actually enjoy Freakonomics, even if the post above reads like a I didn't )

Ah, should have been clearer. I read it a while back, but have forgotten a lot. I mostly just remember that the guy who studied drug dealing was incredibly naive, and the chapter on white/black sounding names had one interesting point (Shockingly, CVs with white sounding names got more interview offers from companies than identical CVs headed with black sounding names like DeShawn), but was otherwise weak. Now I remember, it was the theory that Roe vs. Wade caused a fall in crime wasn't it? I was shocked at Wright donating to McCain and Guiliani at first. It doesn't fit my concept of people who come from Montessori schools (or any alternative models like Steiner or Sudbury), but now I just think he's entitled to whatever he believes. I find it pretty normal to be disappointed in public figures, eventually, for something or other, so it doesn't really affect my reasons for fandom. I'm sure there's plenty I'd disagree with each and every one of my idols on. Will Wright is still a clever man and an interesting speaker. If I were him I'd want my money back though

Alas, that's when they're having the career fair so the expo is timed to go with it. There's all kinds of strange and frustrating timing this year, e.g. the LGF was timed to go with the BAFTAs, but then they moved to early next year (Didn't make sense to be handing BAFTA award to games that were yet to be released), and that makes the LGF clash with GameCity in Nottingham (which needs to be at half-term) when it really didn't need to, etc.

There are quite a few Americanisms I like, like cell phone instead of mobile phone. Faecetious?

? Wow. Jesus. That's the kind of thing I've only seen "articulated" on forums before. When Xenocide went into faster than light travel that works because people inside the ship think really hard about it, I gave up on him. Seems like his slow descent into madness might have been worth keeping tabs on though.

Oop, the final list: - Braid (PC) - Dangerous Highschool Girls In Trouble (PC) - Off Road Velociraptor Safari (PC) - Machinarium (PC) - Multiwinia (PC) - Plain Sight (PC) - Psychosomnium (PC) - Shift (PC) - War Twat (PC) - World of Goo (PC) I'm well chuffed to be doing stuff on this and to have squeezed an adventure game in there (Machinarium - I was only hoping for Samorost but they got a build of Machinarium done and it's double-plus:tup:) I'll be around on both days, though not constantly as we're running other events there.

What antics? I'm be interested to know.

Mecha, fantastic

Yes, really cheesy, but great I liked S2 as well. S1 got on my tits with the constant suspense, it just seemed like a meandering mess by the end with a few episodes that could just as well have not been in there. I also hated Sylar and wanted him dead for S1 and S2, because he was purely a psychopathic antagonist (hammy melodrama++). Now they're actually humanising him a bit; while he's still a psychopath, we're getting to see things from his point of view a bit more. Great stuff

Yes, watched that in HD a few weeks ago too and was pretty impressed. I loved the first one's take on the visuals, with fat bodies and spindly legs for everyone I've also been watching Heroes Season 3 so far. It's still very cheesy, but they've actually started making Sylar into a more interesting and likeable character. Episode 2 has an excellent scene near the beginning with Sylar, blue sky, happy pop music, and two FBI agents Thanks, hadn't heard of this but will look out for it.