Sign in to follow this  
Jake

Idle Thumbs 149: A Divine Exodus of Snakes

Recommended Posts

Guys, I linked to both of those videos on the first page of this thread. I also linked to videos that didn't have a bunch of unnecessary, not-even-readable twitch chat on the margins! 

It's entirely readable if you maximize the video!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I found that discussion very perplexing in general. It seemed like Sean intuited rightly that games had competitive and even professional scenes before streaming blew up, but couldn't articulate how, and Chris' categorical statement that the money had to come from somewhere just stopped everyone cold. It hasn't been the case with video games for very long, but collective card games have a sufficiently high buy-in that tournaments more than pay for their prizes with the purchasing they stimulate.

 

Yeah, I think what Chris was getting at is that to be a professional player you need sponsorship deals and those only happen if their's a viewing audience, which is tough to generate if you're not streaming.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

On the topic of speedruns, Path of Exile is one game that is tuned for speed runs and rewards players for participating and wining events that happen daily.

 

As many of you guys mentioned, it is the combination of knowledge (which quests to do first, builds etc) and the on-the-run adaptation to RNG factors.  item drops, mobs with randomized stats, and of course randomized map layouts)

 

Players might get lucky for one event, but with the points being tallied up at the end of each season, only the best players come up top.

 

Would be interesting to see the team give it a shot and hear their comments....

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Unfortunately (fortunately?), those telepresence robots are doomed so long as they're more expensive than an intern carrying an iPad. 

 

And interns are free.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

What about Neil Young's PONO player which also will be using FLACs?  Mbe a Titanfall PONO crossover is inevitable!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Guys I kind of want the title of Idle Thumbs 150 to be Best Debut and haven't found a good place to express this preference.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I use Winamp at home and a Cowon J3 as my portable music player, both of which play FLAC, so FLAC is actually pretty much the default for me. It's weird to be reminded that it's considered to be somewhere in the same realm of relevancy as Ogg Vorbis for mosy people.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Less so for me, since due to licensing issues .ogg can be a good format for game resource files, whereas I kind of dislike FLAC as bloated and impractical and tend to avoid it as much as possible.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Less so for me, since due to licensing issues .ogg can be a good format for game resource files, whereas I kind of dislike FLAC as bloated and impractical and tend to avoid it as much as possible.

 

I mostly read about FLAC in the context of anime discussions, from the same people who carp about 1080p x264 Hi444PP 10-bit @ CRF16. From what I've seen and heard, there's not much difference in the esotericism of both.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

FLACs are lossless compression, that's why they're bigger. Best to think of them as the raw audio data in a kind of zip file. Vorbis (and MPEG-4) is lossy, which means the compression destroys a part of the audio to crunch it even smaller. If you convert a lossy audio clip to another lossy audio format, it'll degrade further. For game development, keep your raw audio in FLACs, and convert that to either Vorbis or MPEG-4 (assuming you don't need your own license for the codec) when it's time to ship.

 

For end-users, having Vorbis (.ogg) or MPEG-4 (.m4a) audio files are fine. You can keep FLACs around as a backup if you're really keen on chucking your CDs. You certainly don't need FLAC for anime unless you're explicitly doing archiving. MP3s are out of date at this point.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yeah I know about the whole lossless thing, It's just that, as you say, that's not really relevant to consumers. It only matters if you want to archive a master copy. Otherwise you're using a bigger file for nothing.

Anyway, I mostly use max quality VBR mp3 for my music stuff. Gets the job done.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Server storage isn't an issue - most devs I know just keep their raw audio in wav or aiff format, since most everything (including most engines) can play those to preview them, before compression occurs at build/test.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this