Idle Thumbs 219: Idiots Laughing

[elmuerte]

the lesson is: don't change your color pallete

[mikemariano]

When did THIS [brown thing] become hotter than THIS [pinky demon]?

[texashogride]

It strikes me that game developers would be better off targeting their games at dogs to avoid using colour at all.

[SecretAsianMan]

I enjoy that after the apocalypse, Chris has managed to create a really pretentious gated community.

 

I remember playing a game called Zerg Soccer when the first StarCraft was released.  I don't think it was quite the same as the strikers variant discussed but its the earliest version I can recall playing.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I enjoy that after the apocalypse, Chris has managed to create a really pretentious gated community.

 

I look forward to the update where there's an explosion of start up culture in his vault.

[Korax]

Re. the Cave Johnson soundalike in Portal Stories,

I believe the official plot summary refers to a "fake Cave Johnson" as being one of the central mysteries.

 

It's not really anything, though:

The personality core refers to "pretending to be Cave Johnson" at some point, despite the fact that fake Cave and the new core are voiced by completely different people.

The story also delves into fan fiction territory and makes it VERY CLEAR that the mod happens right before Portal 2.

 

I also thought Portal Stories was interesting at first, but the puzzle design starts to get unintuitively difficult. Parts of puzzles are completely obscured from your perception until you start to solve them, so you're inevitably going to be solving them the wrong way, and it's almost never a simple matter to just reset a room beyond loading a save - there was even one puzzle where I got to the exit without properly solving it and had no action available to me other than jumping into acid and dying. Even their autosaves aren't great, because they're mostly based around activating trigger volumes while assuming that you're in the middle of a correct solution when you do so (Oh, wait, you mean you didn't have the proper funnel/hard light bridge/cube juggling system set up when you pressed this button to see what would happen and it saved? Guess you'll just have to start the level over again).

[Jake]

It's not really anything, though:

The personality core refers to "pretending to be Cave Johnson" at some point, despite the fact that fake Cave and the new core are voiced by completely different people.

The story also delves into fan fiction territory and makes it VERY CLEAR that the mod happens right before Portal 2.

I also thought Portal Stories was interesting at first, but the puzzle design starts to get unintuitively difficult. Parts of puzzles are completely obscured from your perception until you start to solve them, so you're inevitably going to be solving them the wrong way, and it's almost never a simple matter to just reset a room beyond loading a save - there was even one puzzle where I got to the exit without properly solving it and had no action available to me other than jumping into acid and dying. Even their autosaves aren't great, because they're mostly based around activating trigger volumes while assuming that you're in the middle of a correct solution when you do so (Oh, wait, you mean you didn't have the proper funnel/hard light bridge/cube juggling system set up when you pressed this button to see what would happen and it saved? Guess you'll just have to start the level over again).

Well that's disappointing! I have been enjoying the early chambers as they've reminded me a lot of the final few chambers in Portal 1, but with the gels. They've walked the line of being obtuse but it so far has felt like its my fault for not understanding something. It's a bummer to hear it might slip over the edge later though.

[tberton]

Jake, did you ever play Portal 2 Co-op? I felt that those puzzles felt a bit more in the spirit of the original game. Also, you should really play Boxboy on the 3DS eshop. Better than any other game I've played, it captures Portal's feeling of a stripped down ruleset that still allows for creativity in puzzle solving. It's my current GOTY.cx

[Cleinhun]

The best portal mod I've played was the "flash version map pack" for portal 1. It was basically a 3d rework of the fan-made flash version of portal that was briefly popular. I remember it having the difficulty level I wanted from a portal game, which is to say harder that the normal game but not as obtuse or as precise as most portal mods seem to get. The plot was pretty fan fiction-y, but whatever.

[Vorlonesque]

Spaff's story about the 3 floppy disk Quake and the discussion that somebody probably did it with DOOM made me happy and excited...because I fucking did exactly that in high school!

 

I ended up taking a computer typing/business class in high school because there was nothing else to select in that slot when I was making up my schedule (I had everything I needed that year and everything I would have wanted for that time slot was already full of students).  Every day we had to complete a couple documents or spreadsheets and most of us would be finished with 30-45 minutes left in the class period and we could play games during that time.  We had no hard drives in the new 486 DX/66 machines the school got, but they had 8 megs of RAM and were networked via an IPX network.  The rule was that any game you could run off a floppy disk was fine, but we couldn't put games on the server that had all the business apps on it.  When class started they had shareware versions of Scorched Earth and Wolf3d and a shitload of other things.  I spent a month pouring over DOS manuals and playing with shit to figure out a way to get DOOM...and I eventually figured something out.

 

I had to use 4 disks.  The first disk was a boot disk; this would install of the needed network drivers and anything else that we needed to play DOOM and only that stuff.  For some reason some of the stuff wouldn't work properly if loaded in the config.sys or autoexec.bat at boot, so they had to be started manually.  I created a .bat file to do all that, and gave it the name CRAP.bat or something (I think it might have been my last name or something, or it may have just been crap or whatever named popped into my head).  It also setup the ramdrive in MS DOS.  I'll link the Wikipedia article about it below, but the TLDR explanation is that a ramdrive is like a virtual hard drive that exists in RAM and you can allocate a certain amount of RAM to it.  With 8 megabytes of RAM I had just enough to allocate around 4 megs to just the shareware .wad file (but not enough for anything else while still having enough actual RAM left over to run DOOM).  This is where the 2nd and 3rd disks come into play.  I couldn't use the standard DOOM shareware install program to put the .wad file into the ramdrive for obvious reasons (it wasn't meant to do that and couldn't), so I used Winzip to compress and span the .wad file for DOOM1 shareware across two floppy drives and included winzip and a batch file to run it with all the proper command line parameters on the first disk (because I needed other people who didn't know anything about computers or DOS to be able to run this with only a few simple commands).  It would eventually ask for the second disk and finish up.  At this point the person going through this process needed to put in the 4th and final disk.  This disk contained doom.exe, the config file, the setup.exe, and other odds and ends needed to run DOOM.  It also contained 3 .bat files to run DOOM with the proper command line options to start a deathmatch game using the .wad file on the RAM drive with either 2, 3, or 4 players.  I think I also included a .bat file to start a single player session as well, but its been around 19 years since I did all of this so I can't remember precisely (this is all based on my hazy recollections of stuff I did about 19 years ago so I imagine I have some details wrong).

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_drive

 

Initially we only played it during my class period as I had all of the floppies (originally there were 4 sets, and one game would start, then another, and so on).  It was incredibly tricky getting the games setup because you had to coordinate 4 people installing the games and they had to all start the game at the same time.  If one person started early it fucked everything up, if one person fucked up their install you were going to have to start all over again unless it was easily fixed (and it never was).  With initially only enough sets of disks to setup one game at a time you had to either wait for people to finish getting the game installed and to get their game up and running before you could do the same, and generally we cycled disks so that the people who would start next would get the 2nd disk after the first group had the 3rd and so on.  Combine this with everyone being in a hurry (because the longer it took to get into a game the less time you had to play), everyone wanting to get to playing as soon as they could, and the whole process requiring insane group coordination; as you can guess this turned into a glorious cluster fuck more often than not.  People would steal disks before other people were finished and fuck things up so badly that no one would manage to get a game started that day, people would get confused as to who was getting what disk next, people would get the order mixed up, and everything else that could go wrong did. 

 

I eventually managed to scrounge up enough floppies to have extra sets of disks, which introduced the new problem of needing to coordinate when people started their games up, because if people started two games up at the same time it would get hosed up and you'd have to start all over.  Occasionally something would go wrong and you'd get out of sync issues or somebody got something wrong and you all loaded the game up and it wouldn't work for all four people and they had to start all over again.  And as the guy with the disks who came up with the way to get this to work I was the guy in charge of trying to make it go smoothly (and the game was really really popular in there, half of the people in there liked it and we usually had 4 games up and running by the end up the day every day which is about 16 people)...I had basically managed to end up doing tech support by accident and without any clue of how to do that, but it was an interesting experience.

 

Word spread and at some point people who had that class during other time period were approaching me wanting the disks so they could play.  I made the mistake of giving someone a set of disks for one game (about 16 disks maybe...I can't remember if we split them up between people in a single game in a staggered sort of way or not...so it could have been only 8 or maybe even 4).  I gave the guy detailed instructions verbally 2 or 3 times to make sure he understood how to do it and I think I even scribbled down some very basic instructions or notes.  That day I heard the teacher's lab was in shambles and chaos a class period or two before I got over there so I was dreading what they managed to do.  I didn't realize that in our class we had with my help become a well drilled well oiled improvised DOOM installing machine and that I had accidentally thrown these people into a complex hell we'd somehow mutually agreed they would unleash upon themselves without any supervision from the asshole (me) who came up with said complex hellish nightmare.  The teacher was unhappy with me when I came in thinking the machines were fucked and I looked at them and realized they were just all sitting at the DOOM text start-up screens so I power cycled them and all was well.  I then took the disks back (some of which were now missing the metal covers and were in sort of bad shape already) and decided that I needed to scrounge together more disks to make another set for people in other class periods to use.  I tried to further stream-line the process with these new sets of floppy disks (I can't remember how I did that or what I did, but I vaguely remember trying to make it easier and clearer and to remove potential pitfalls).  I then wrote up a detailed step by step process for booting up, installing the .wad, and running the game on notebook paper...I think I actually wrote up 4 sets of instructions in case more than one person needed to see them or a set got lost.  Things went more or less smoothly from that point on with the occasional hiccup.  I actually think this is probably what started me down the path that led me to being a software developer as my profession in a weird sort of way.

 

Sorry if that post was kind of long, I probably went into more detail than I needed to...but I fondly remember that period of time and it all just started rushing back to me as I typed it out.

 

Edit: and to make this way to long post slightly longer, I though I'd also add that I've also though about the notion of the new DOOM game trying to capture the look of the original two (especially the first).  DOOM had a a lot of bright varied colors in it, a lot of blues, reds, and greens...along with the usual greys and browns normally associated with id (but not an overpowering amount).  It also had this weird hexagon motif to a lot of things...and some other weird geometric patterns that would show up on things that I really associate with the look of that game.  I actually really like the look of the DOOM color palette version of the pic in the post above better...and I really imagine a game with a color palette closer to that along with some of the other weird visual touches from the original games could look really cool.  DOOM also had a weirdly normal everyday look to a lot of its stuff...there was something subdued about it; the chainsaw was just a chainsaw; the guns were just guns (nothing flashy, just a shotgun with some wood on it...everything seemed sort of toned down).  I can't quite pin it down, but there were these elements to the look and feel of DOOM that really gave it a unique character and nothing has really recaptured that in my mind.

[mrwynd]

I'm the Projectionist in the first Phantom Menace email! I hope the guy I stopped is a listener!

[Vorlonesque]

I'm the Projectionist in the first Phantom Menace email! I hope the guy I stopped is a listener!

What if that guy turns out to be the hat baron!?

 

Edit: I just realized that the guy who emailed about the hat economy wasn't "the hat baron" but rather wrote about various hat barons (and that there wasn't a singular hat baron).  That said, I now choose to believe that there is some mythical hat baron who is "THE hat baron" and he's some sort of criminal mastermind nemesis of TF2's equivalent of Sherlock Holmes...the Napoleon Bonaparte of Hat Crime if you will.

[juv3nal]

I'm the Projectionist in the first Phantom Menace email! I hope the guy I stopped is a listener!

 

Hi myrwynd

*seekrit gwj forum handshake*

[undermind9]

Spaff's story about the 3 floppy disk Quake and the discussion that somebody probably did it with DOOM made me happy and excited...because I fucking did exactly that in high school!

 

we had a little stronger machines when i was going through HS, there were different computer labs designated to different departments/sections of the school - general library, mixed math/english, business/consumer, foreign language and a science lab.  each had their own proficiency (general...had nice printers?) but language could do voice recording (to tape) - the science lab though was manned by a young guy (who didnt seem to care) and some of the better machines...also some reason you could install pretty much whatever you wanted to the machine, like a loose admin right

 

anyways, Starcraft was still fairly new and you could install the spawn copies and play across the lan with others.  There were several machines with these installed and just had to know where to sit.  It made hall passes out of a study hall to the science lab much more coveted.  On top of SC i think pretty much all machines had A.R.C. installed, mini lan party every lunch period.

 

Then the guy who ran the lab got canned mid-semester and everything re-imaged and locked down.  oh well

[Salacious Snake]

Spaff's story about the 3 floppy disk Quake and the discussion that somebody probably did it with DOOM made me happy and excited...because I fucking did exactly that in high school!

 

Kickass story!

 

I used to join in on Quake deathmatches in high school during a computer science class that I wasn't even in. The teacher never seemed too worried about my presence; the thing that eventually gave us away was him seeing the game running in the reflection on a player's glasses. Quake was so goddamn good, even with software rendering and no sound, and a shitty school mouse.

[pkirkner]

Marathon Infinity was our high school LAN game of choice since we had Mac OS System 7 computer labs.

[wahwah]

Our school had a shortage of regular classrooms at one point, so we were moved into the computer lab full time.

I remember we played a lot of Half-Life Deathmatch and Starcraft during breaks and it was the only time where people came to school early out of their own free will. 

We enjoyed at least a few months of daily bite-size LAN parties until teachers found out.

[Brannigan]

My high school had this amazing security software that locked you out of installing stuff and looking at the hard drive...it could also be disabled through the autoexec.bat with no effort at all! We ended up installing quake 2 on all the PCs in the library.  I actually gave out disks that just turned off the security with a command so I didn't have to edit stuff all the time or teach people how to do it.  The staff eventually figured it out and deleted the game...and forgot to empty the recycling bin so we just moved the folder somewhere strange and they never caught on.  I wasted many hours fragging people as barney the purple dinosaur.  

[Claire Hosking]

I remember trying to hide a copy of Age of Empires II by putting it in some other program's read me folder and getting a personal interview with the IT teacher lady.

[SecretAsianMan]

In high school I was a teacher's aide to the school's computer class teacher and de facto IT guy.  It basically meant for one period out of the day I was an IT tech because he would send me out to take care of things he didn't want to himself (which was everything).  It also meant I had not only an IT login, but also the master password.  I remember installing StarCraft and having some great LAN games thanks to spawn installs.  I think we tried to get Tribes to work as well but the computers just couldn't run it well enough.

[Bjorn]

I feel so old.  The computers I learned on in school didn't have hard drives, we ran everything off dual floppies, one to run the program and one to save data to.  To be fair, those things were already outdated when I was using them, but it's all we had. 

 

And now I'm going to go stand in my lawn and wait for some disrespectful whippersnappers to wander by so I can yell at them. 

[Badfinger]

I feel so old.  The computers I learned on in school didn't have hard drives, we ran everything off dual floppies, one to run the program and one to save data to.  To be fair, those things were already outdated when I was using them, but it's all we had. 

 

And now I'm going to go stand in my lawn and wait for some disrespectful whippersnappers to wander by so I can yell at them. 

 

If you were really dedicated you would go to the corner store, bribe them to come by so you could do so, berate them for spending their time loitering at the soda counter, and then get to do it again when they're on your lawn.

 

If they don't show up, you get to have a rant for that too! It's wins all the way down.

[natellite]

Our illicit computer lab game of choice was Soldat, which for me is still so far removed from anything else I consider "gaming" that it occupies a dreamlike quality for me. Did Soldat ever really exist outside of that computer lab? We may never know.

[pkirkner]

I feel so old.  The computers I learned on in school didn't have hard drives, we ran everything off dual floppies, one to run the program and one to save data to.  To be fair, those things were already outdated when I was using them, but it's all we had. 

 

And now I'm going to go stand in my lawn and wait for some disrespectful whippersnappers to wander by so I can yell at them. 

 

My freshman year I took a typing / stenography course using typewriters. Sophomore year, we moved up to word processing on a DOS version of word perfect. All of this stuff was long obsolete when I was learning about it in the mid-to-late 90's, but it was good preparation for later having to wrap my head around cold war era hardware in the US military over the last decade.

[osmosisch]

Our illicit computer lab game of choice was Soldat, which for me is still so far removed from anything else I consider "gaming" that it occupies a dreamlike quality for me. Did Soldat ever really exist outside of that computer lab? We may never know.

I LANned it a bunch with my friends. Good times.

When I was in highschool Doom had just come out and no way were the computers at school good enough to run it. Best we could get entertainment-wise from those was sending each other dirty messages via Novell Netware.

Oh, and there was one PC with 'internet' access in a locked office that we could use to Gopher things. Pretty advanced.