I've switched to moderated comments for the moment

Due to incessant comments about how awesome Dungeon of Dredmor is.

Seriously, you should stop praising the game that much.

(Oh, and the Binding of Isaac fan boys. Just crazy.)

Help me Internet. What's wrong with me?

I should care about games like Witcher 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Rage and one or more franchises coming out in the next couple of months...

But instead I'm interested in Overgrowth, Hawken, In Profundis, Lords of Uberdark, Blade Symphony and Desktop Dungeons. And by interested, I mean spending my hard earned dollars on. [1]

I mean, I've not even bought Red Orchestra 2, a game I loved the previous version of.

Please cure me of my passive aggressive affair with unreleased alpha indie games.

[1] Technically my wife's hard earned dollars. But I've always had to get approval from the financial controller, so the process is essentially unchanged...

Proceduralism: Part Seven (Education)

[You'll probably want to read the original article series that inspired this follow up, then start with parts one, two, three, four, five and six of this series.]

I was going to be talking about content, but I think there's an important point that is worth underlining now, especially seeing as the previous post ruffled a few feathers.

One of the key challenges about procedural content generation is that so much of it is 'intuitive'. Not intuitive in the sense that it is easy to understand, but intuitive in the sense that you have to use your intuition to figure out what works and what doesn't work.

You will sit for hours, watching your algorithms generate content over and over, tweaking the parameters until you are satisfied with the outcome. It is an incredibly powerful feeling, like being a god in some sense, in that you are literally creating (and destroying) worlds with the click of a button or invocation of the command line. Even the smallest change can butterfly into unintended consequences or beauty, and there are a surprising number of times where accidents turn into final implementation. My favourite is the erosion simulation from Tribal Trouble, where a thermal erosion algorithm failed to produce the desired results, until the sign was reversed on the equation being used - turning a sophisticated model into a nonsensical result which happened to look better.

I've coined what I call Doull's Law: 'Any time saved using procedural generation will be wasted watching the resulting screen saver', to try to capture at least the amount of time this takes, if not the power of this idea.

The consequence of this centrality of intuition, is that you have to be told the story of developing a PCG algorithm, instead of just seeing the final code, in order to understand what was done and why. Projects that describe the process of development like Project Frontier, Procedural World, rune | vision, Making Worlds, Procedural Planets, Dungeon League, Polygon Map Generation, Infinity: the Quest for Earth, L.o.V.E. and Spore and all the other creation stories are incredibly important: not just as beautiful repositories of code and images and ideas, but as foundational documents to their procedural worlds.

And I believe, fundamentally, why procedural generation has never become mainstream, is that it takes time, especially time spent coding, to develop this procedural literacy. If you look at, for instance, the Braving Procedural Generation thread on TIGsource, you see variations on the same, simple cellular automata cave generation over and over, because each person who falls in love with PCG has to go through the same learning process themselves to try to discover this intuition.

That is why I set up the PCG wiki [1]- to try to improve the overall literacy in this field. And the feedback to the survey I'm running at the moment has been incredibly positive, but almost everyone feels like they don't know enough to contribute back. My vision ultimately is to have an online PCG paintbox on the wiki, that'll let you explore cellular automata, and height maps, and fire propagation and so on, all in your browser so you can experience this feeling without coding - I just don't have time to create such a beast.

Back on track in part eight.

[1] That and I needed a bibliography of PCG.

[Edit to add: I know we'll have achieved that level of literacy when we start talking about a Cepero nave, or Young trees. At the moment all we have is Perlin noise, which is a bit high frequency for my liking :) ]

Privacy and Google Plus

I don't think the Google circles quite map onto the way that we operate as individuals with an expectation of privacy. Not to say that I don't think circles are a good but not great privacy mechanism from a technical and easy of use stand point, but I'm not so sure they quite fit the way people think about public and private spheres.

For a start, you should never have a real expectation of privacy about anything you say on the Internet. Copy & paste pretty much defeats any security mechanism you could potentially come up with (along with lo fi reproduction techniques like photographing the screen). If you don't want something you say reproduced and seen by everyone in public, you shouldn't be saying it on the Internet. In fact, with today's level of mobile phone use, you shouldn't be saying it at all, because at any point someone can press a button on their phone and record you (and there's plenty of software that'll immediately upload it to remote secure web storage so even confiscating the phone isn't enough).

There are certainly areas where you have an expectation of privacy. For instance, you have a reasonable expectation your ISP isn't going to divulge your preference in pornography (along with the people who wrote your web browser and operating system). And you can certainly start suing people after the fact should information which needs to remain private is leaked. But, despite attempts to have super injunctions, you can't sue someone before the fact to prevent a juicy secret being released, and doing so is a big red flag for people who look for that sort of thing.

So Facebook's hard to use privacy controls and hidden and ambiguous relevancy filters are actually a better reflection of the state of control of your personal information than Google's deceptively easy to use system of circles, which create a false sense of security about how far what you say can be shared.

And that's ignoring the fact that circles are in some sense the wrong way around. I only want to hear about your interest in game design, not see photographs of your cats. But occasionally I might, because it may make me more likely to think of you as a real person as opposed to an anonymous stream of text on the Internet.

(This post brought to you by the Charles Stross school of blogging).

An apology

Just a quick update to people who've already read the previous post on procedural generation that I've amended the article to include an apology about some ill-judged generalisations I made in haste.

Miguel Cepero wrote an article in response to this post, and quite rightly points out that I made a number of statements which were not especially nice things to say, specifically when his and Shamus Young's project should not be judged as they have not been released. I would like to apologise for this.

Curation

I've been puttering about, updating parts of the PCG wiki and putting together a short survey to try to figure out why there's not more of a community involved in updating it (One observation: I was forgetting to approve membership requests. Sorry to anyone who applied and was waiting).

Coincidentally, I listened to a Moving Pixel podcast where the chaps from Critical Distance discuss the same problem I've been having: how to turn a list of interesting links into something with more structure and 'authority' (A word I'm wary of). At the moment, the PCG wiki is basically a big bunch of external links with a bit of structure, and I don't see myself having the time to do more than keep it vaguely up to date (Along with tricks like aggregating RSS feeds from various blog posts to make it look like it's being updated more frequently than it is).

[Edit to add: Craig Perko's Google plus comment on the same issue.]

So in one way, the wiki is no more useful than the Delicious procedural tag RSS feed.

And the wiki structure isn't quite right for what it needs to be. So I'm going to sketch out an idea and see if you have any suggestions as to whether anything else fits the bill.

Firstly, I need a tool, like Delicious, which does simple link aggregation, but in a way that is domain specific, so I and other wiki users can tag it with words like 'article', 'blog post' and so on, but also 'noise', 'maze', 'caves' which don't bring up every single 'blog post' in existence by someone using the same tool. Other than copy and paste, the wiki falls down here.

Then I need to be able to keep related links together on the same page. The way the Internet works at the moment, a blog post may spark follow up posts on Metafilter, reddit, various web forums and so on, which all make sense to group together, but will include their own original content.

Then it needs wiki style authoring over the top, along with discussion groups, rating systems similar to stack overflow and so on.

I can kind of hack this with the wiki currently, by having every 'external link' actually be another wiki page in front of the external link, but this is still missing Delicious style link tagging and is horribly clumsy.

This excludes all the problems with the current wiki (and wikis in general) having data handling (should year released = 1997 be metadata or tags?), dynamic templating and etc.

Going full time

I'm stopping work for the next 6 months to look after our twin daughters. I'm not yet sure what this will mean for the blog or Unangband development: given that I was spending over 20 hours a week commuting, I hope to have some more free time but that may not end up being the case.

If opportunity permits, I'd also like to do something a little more 'experimental'.

You'll undoubtedly see some kind of change over the next few weeks. That should be indicative of whether things have changed for the better (from your point of view) or whether being a full time dad is in fact full time.

Dear Dan

You've got everyone around here hot under the collar with your think piece on game criticism - not because it is inaccurate, but because you've stumbled across a truth that most people don't like to talk about ("most game criticism isn't very good"). The problem is that you've completely misattributed the cause ("game criticism isn't written by game developers").

Roger Ebert is a great film critic not because as you point out he made films. He's a great film critic because he's been able to devote a large proportion of his life to learning, thinking and writing about film. He's been able to do that, because there is enough of a financial reward for him to do so - there's enough money to be made being a film critic - not just for Roger Ebert, but for hundreds of wannabe film critics around at the start of his career who could justify devoting their every waking moment to film criticism.

There is simply not enough time and reward for being a game critic for us to have the same quality of game criticism at the moment. Partly this is because (computer) game design is in its relative infancy, but mostly because of unique challenges of making money writing criticism, especially in the game industry, at this point in time.

You may have noticed that the mainstream press is having a hard time remaining financially viable in the age of the Internet. Academia has also been under sustained assault for some 30 years with funding (in the United States) at a low point since the 1970s. These two avenues are the traditional methods for critics to learn their skills while being able to put food on the table - and neither of which are in the healthiest state at the moment.

Not only this, but the specialist gaming press is under direct attack by the largest game publishers. And, unlike film, the challenge of game reviews require that games be reviewed as a product, as well as a piece of art - Mr Ebert is unlikely to have to respool a film when he goes to watch it - which means that the game press is dependent on game publishers in a way that film, art, literature and so on are not. Not to mention the logistics of reviewing a product in a timely fashion which could potentially be played for hundreds of hours.

You may think I'm conflating reviews with criticism. I'm not. But one way you start developing critical skills is by reviewing games, lots of games, and the specialist game press is the only avenue which will pay you a living wage to do so - and potentially not for very much longer.

The economic reality of trying to be a game critic is also why a large number of the recent leading lights in game criticism have decided to change the field they write in or started working for the tabloids of the game industry or been co-opted by the industry as developers, publicists, designers.

So what's wrong with your vision of game developers being the only people to write about games?

I'll take one example: the Playdom piece you linked to about redesigning a social game makes a reference in passing to 'whales' or high spending customers. Let's make the hypothetical assumption for the moment that whales are in fact problem gam(bl)ers. I'm picking this example because I've written to you before on the cross over of gaming and gambling addiction. Not that there is anything in the article to suggest this is the case.

A game developer will never reveal that whales are problem gamers, because he is bound by confidentiality agreements between him and his customers as well as commercial interests to keep exploiting - that is making money - for the company, and should this inconvenient fact be revealed, he is opening the company up to the possibility of litigation or legislation.

A game journalist may act on an anonymous tip off however, and end up writing a piece on games which makes the analogy between watching a 'whale' playing Farmville and visiting a local casino and sitting next to the customers at a slot machines.

An academic may get funding for a study which begins to establish a link between playing social games and problem gambling, which warrants further study.

The actions of the journalist and the academic may result in real change: for instance, the FBI deciding there is no difference between putting $10 on a hand of cards, and buying a virtual chest; while a game critic merely makes a persuasive case for change. But a game critic has a chance of changing someone's view of the world, whereas the type of writing you're asking for can only change someone's view of how they design games.

I do hope there is a positive outcome from what you've written: the game critical community not just looking towards developers to make gaming's Citizen Kane, but figuring out themselves how to make gaming's Roger Ebert. But there is a lot of work to be done to make such a beast, and you can help more by pressuring publishers to give free and unhindered access to games journalists, than criticising game critics for not being you.

Blog2blog

When I first started blogging, I ended up engaged in some conversations with fellow bloggers that never really went anywhere because the blog to blog format didn't really accomodate two way communication very easily. Facebook's walls are the perfect mechanism for this, but I don't want to have to friend everyone or make my profile public to have these conversations read more widely.

I'm sure there's a half-way house out there for this...

Latex, interrupted

I'm not finding a huge amount of time to program at the moment, but plenty of time to write - it's easier when you're building information with sentences instead of data structures if you get frequently interrupted.

And, man, LaTex generates some pretty documentation. But it looks like I've incorrectly chosen to use ctable instead of threeparttable and longtable, and I'm about 30 pages in (28 pages of which are tables).

Guess I'm going to have to learn Perl to reparse the stuff I'm written.

Can't get away from needing to invest time in knowing the tools to know which tool I should be investing time in...

Procedural voyeurs

In lieu of anything interesting to say[1], I'll just point you in the direction of a couple of PCG blogs I have been enjoying: nullpointer, and Procedural World. Feel free to mention more in the comments.

[1] The closest I've come to being 'interesting' of late is realizing my fractured schedule was ideal for Facebook gaming, and signing up for Brenda Braithwaite's Ravenwood Fair. I got as close as opening the game once - but was luckily saved at the last minute by the fact it refused to sync correctly. Close call.

Good game

I've just been interviewed by ABC2's Good Game. Thanks to Ben Abraham for the shout out.

More details to come.

My Pyro Life (part two)

Valve has a habit of deleting old posts from the TF2 forums, so I'm preserving a thread I started here for posterity. You can see the original thread here.

Reliability vs. Opportunity

A mistake a lot of people make when talking about weapon balance is the difference between reliability vs. opportunity, and these are concepts which apply particularly to Pyros. An opportunistic weapon is 'Last week I was in situation x with weapon y and I did z to get a kill.'. A reliable weapon is 'Every time I get into situation x with weapon y and I do z to get a kill.' I'm wary that a lot of balance discussions around the pyro degenerate into lists of 'no he can't do this' vs. 'yes he can'. What I want to hear are arguments of the form 'yes he can every time', not just yes he can.

An example: A Pyro is a reliable spy checker, because he can set alight a spy every time with his flamethrower, even if that Spy is cloaked or invisible. A Pyro is an opportunistic rocket reflector, because he cannot reflect rockets every time. But note you can modify this statement to say 'A Pyro is a reliable reflector of long range rockets, because he can reflect rockets fired from a distance every time'. So it is possible that situational use can turn an opportunistic weapon into a reliable weapon (e.g. airblasts for environmental kills on the bottom bridge of Double Cross). The problem with situational use is that it makes weapons map dependent.

Hitscan weapons are intrinsically more reliable than projectile weapons, because they only take into account player skill - whereas a projectile weapon is dependent on predictive factors which are only partially under the control of the player. Note that this is not always the case: assuming perfect accuracy, the Soldier's Rocket Launcher is reliable at inflicting some damage up to x HU away from the soldier for an enemy moving at 100% speed: the limiting factor is the speed of the rocket times the width of an enemies's hitbox / the target's maximum movement speed (300 HU per second). The Soldier is also able to convert near misses into reliable damage by bouncing enemies into a predictable kinetic path, which he can follow up with one or more additional rockets for reliable damage.

Juggling enemies is a clear example where skill can be used to escalate the payoff of a particular weapon in a reliable fashion. The Sniper Rifle is another example: by aiming for a smaller, harder to hit target, the Sniper can triple the damage this already reliable hit scan weapon can produce. The additional damage that the Sniper Rifle does with a headshot doesn't make the Sniper rifle more reliable, but it is a payoff for increasing your skill level with that weapon, and through increased skill you can make headshots more reliably.

The Pyro feels underpowered and frustrating, because many of the Pyro weapons are opportunistic not reliable, and I've tried to with the testable side grades file to modify the designs to make them more reliable.

Quote:

Pyro starts with 200 health instead of 175 health. Degreaser -25 health

Valve have tried buffing the health of the Pyro previously, with the +50 health bonus for using the Backburner. I'm suggesting a less severe buff, but increasing the survival rate of the Pyro - particularly the Backburner Pyro - is high on my list of requirements. Since I'm balancing these changes against the Degreaser - Shotgun - Axtinguisher Pyro, the complement to increasing the Pyro health is nerfing this bonus on the Degreaser. It also helps distinguish the Flamethrower from the Degreaser more clearly (more health & afterburn against faster weapon switches).

My main motivation for the 200 hp is that complex, and at the moment overly one-sided, balance between the Soldier and Pyro. At the moment, the Soldier dominates with rockets, and without the Degreaser, the Soldier will have the initiative on switching to Shotgun. To compensate, I feel that the Pyro must clearly dominate Shotgun vs. Shotgun. With 175 hp, this is too close to call, with your superiority speed and maneuverability, balanced against the Soldier's superior hit points. Yes, the Soldier will have lost hp rocket jumping, but you will have lost some by being edged or with mistimed reflects. Starting with 200 hp is an attempt to push the Pyro towards dominating this phase of the encounter.

Another approach suggested recently was giving the Pyro innate explosive resistance. I've toyed with this idea before, but decided you want to encourage Soldiers to try to kill you with an opportunistic rocket, precisely so that you can get the chance to use reflects. If every Soldier switches to Shotgun when they see you, you will lose this, in favour of a Shotgun fight you are less likely to win than with the hp buff I've proposed.

Quote:

Backburner On kill: Guaranteed criticals for 3 seconds +100% ammunition consumption

My first reaction to editing the items_games.txt was giving the Backburner back the air blast, but increasing the ammunition cost. I'm not alone in suggesting this, but testing with the Airburner pointed out one significant flaw with this design: you rarely run out of ammunition, because you rarely live long enough if you're on the front line air blasting back rockets. The other flaw is that the weapons merge into each other: the Flamethrower Pyro already plays like a gimped Degreaser Pyro, without giving the Backburner the only ability which distinguishes him.

Is it possible to make an intelligent play style for the Backburner? I think it is, and a mention in the Heavy forums of kill chaining using the KGB suggested the above change. The difference between a regular Backburner pyro and the buffed Backburner I've suggested, is how a beginning Pyro approaches the ambush. A regular BB relies on the opportunity of someone facing the wrong way when they approach, falling back on spamming the group so everyone is alight and the afterburn has some effect while they respawn. This buffed BB helps you focus on getting the next kill; because as soon as you do, you can reliably kill chain through the rest of the nearby enemies. In terms of balance, 3 seconds of guaranteed criticals is no more powerful than silent backstabs, and in a Medic - Heavy pair, the overhealed Heavy still has enough time to turn and kill you before you can take him out with the criticals the dead Medic gives you.

The +100% ammunition consumption is designed to discourage W+M1, and make the Backburner Pyro actually run the risk of running out of ammunition. But didn't I just state that ammunition consumption didn't apply to Backburner Pyros? It does with the critical buff. You will find you run the real risk of having to switch to your secondary, because you actually are capable of killing a cluster of multiple enemies in quick succession using your primary without getting killed in return.

Quote:

Flare Gun +50% burn damage. Minicrits become crits which means you crit against burning targets at all ranges.

My initial concept of buffing the base flare gun damage worked really well, with one important exception. I buffed the flare gun to 66% additonal damage, that is 50 base damage, 67 minicrit damage, 150 critical damage, and it didn't feel at all overpowering. You get flare hits on targets at long range infrequently enough that the critical damage feels like an appropriate reward, and the increase in spike damage from 90 hp to 150 isn't that noticeable because the vanilla flare gun takes out most of the low hp classes with that hit anyway - it is only soldiers and heavies who are at higher risk from the high base damage flare gun. More importantly, you start to get to useful DPS territory in the short and medium range, and the minicrit becomes a more meaningful spike, but mostly because the base damage is that much higher.

But there is one significant problem with a flare gun that does 50 hp base damage: it is feels too effective against sentries. But why? A 50 hp flare is less effective than a 90 hp rocket, and Soldiers can fire rockets more frequently and less accurately to take sentries out. But bumping the flare gun base damage brings the flaregun to within 30% of the effectiveness of rockets. [Edit: Removed text about ramp down. As several people have pointed out below, buildings are unaffected by rampdown].

Instead, I've tried to make the Flare gun at least justifiable, by bumping the afterburn damage and allowing crits against burning targets to apply at all ranges, so it is a useful alternative to a puff and sting axtinguisher or shotgun attack, while having longer range utility.

Quote:

Homewrecker +40% sentry damage resistance

What is so noticeable about this homewrecker buff, is that it is not actually as useful as it looks. Sure, you get effectively as many hit points against sentries as a heavy - the problem is that you don't have the damage output of a heavy at anything except point blank range, so taking down a sentry nest is much harder. The homewrecker buff is therefore to try to give you a bit more survivability in a situation where you end up with engineers aggressively using minisentries, or to rush a poorly positioned level 2/3 sentry and come off not quite as badly as you would otherwise have done.

tl;dr

These are design notes. They are notes about design for people who like reading.

My Pyro Life (part one)

Valve has a habit of deleting old posts from the TF2 forums, so I'm preserving a thread I started here for posterity. You can see the original thread here.

I'm a pub player, not a pro and one of those folks who are in love with the Pyro. I main Engineer/Spy/Pyro with a side of Medic, but of all of them, the Pyro is the most fun to play when I'm doing well...

How I play the pyro and how successfully depends on which map. The Pyro feels balanced on the Arena and KOTH maps where the smaller spaces that play to the strength of the Pyro and increased deadliness of afterburn - even with all the afterburn removal effects in play. Here I'll go Degreaser-Shotgun-Axtinguisher for the most part, and Degreaser-Shotgun-Powerjack if I'm feeling like a change.

The Pyro is great fun only on CTF and CP maps with lots of verticals or opportunities for environmental kills: Double Cross, Eqypt, Badlands. Maps like Well and Granary are playable, provided I'm getting my shotgun kills and reflects right, but I need to be playing with a pretty relaxed pub crowd before I'll consider it. I'll definitely skip Pyro on Well and Granary if there is any competent enemy engineering going on.

Yukon is a special case, as is Watchtower. These are the only maps where I'll switch to Flare Gun - because of the long gently curving corridors and slopes and lack of sniper nests - and I'll stay at mid range and use reflects to counter soldiers and work on picking targets off with flares.

On AD, PL, PLR maps, where there is a defined front to the game, playing a Pyro gets much more complicated. I've got three choices on these maps. Firstly, I can keep the Degreaser-Shotgun combo, stay near the front and harass and reflect. This is generally unsatisfying, because I'll achieve little, and tend to die in the spam. The other option, short of changing class, is to switch to Backburner-Shotgun-Homewrecker. This is an interesting combination: because it paradoxically forces you to hang back when the front is static or being pushed forward or back. You can't be effective on the front lines with a Backburner - you'll just die, so instead I hang back and spam shotgun and get lucky with the odd de-sap if an enemy spy manages to take out a friendly engineer.

What I'm waiting for is the front to either hit an ambush spot such as exiting the tunnel on Badwater, where the Backburner comes into play, or for the front to "break down": where we've either killed enough players (on defense) that most of them are heading back from respawn, or we've just captured a point and more paths have opened up (on attack). Whether the Backburner is more useful than the Degreaser in these open situations is debatable, but if I end up behind the enemy front after its reformed, then it is highly effective.

A key indicator on whether the Backburner can be useful is if you have more enemy heavies than soldiers on an AD, PL, PLR map. A heavy will kill you in 'open play' if you have the BB: his spin up time will finish you off before you can burn him with the flamethrower, unless you can hit him point blank from behind, but on these maps his attention should be on killing your compatriots in front of him, not you sneaking up behind him.

The Degreaser Pyro is IMO balanced with the map caveats I've given - you just won't get kills with your primary weapon, except for environmental kills, with the odd reflection thrown in. At the moment, there is no point switching to Flamethrower, and the loss of the airblast you get with the Backburner makes this weapon feel a lot more one dimensional and only suits certain maps or defensive positions as I've discussed.

Since the Polycount pack, I've also switched back to the Shotgun after an extended period of using the Flare Gun, and much like an ex-smoker, I feel the need to point out how inferior the Flare Gun is in almost all situations. The best possible situation to use the Flaregun - where you are consistently hitting burning opponents at long range with a shot every 2 seconds - does a maximum of 51 DPS including afterburn - that is, 20% worse than the short to medium range DPS of any other weapon except the L'Etranger. Sure, damage ramp down means you are doing more damage at this range than most other weapons and you'll end up occasionally getting lucky 2 shot kills on the 125 hp and 150 hp classes, but there is a class for fighting at long range which can one shot any of these classes a lot more reliably, and you give up the ability to be at all effective for the 2.3 seconds you need to rush a target from the edge of medium range to flame thrower distance (assuming they don't move).

I suspect people love the the Flare Gun is that it feels really effective - a chunky plastic design, and satisfying animation and sound fx - but since switching, I get two to three times the kills with a Shotgun than with flares on most maps. In fact, I'm almost Shotgun primary, flicking to the Degreaser only if someone gets in flame thower range, or I need to do a reflect.

I particularly have a problem with the decision to have the Flare Gun do minicrits to burning opponents at short to medium range. There are only three situations where a minicrit on a burning opponent helps you: if the extra 11 hp damage will allow you to kill someone in the next 2 seconds, if every possible target up to 120 HU further away is on already fire, or every nonburning enemy is standing next to a Pyro who can airblast the flames off. In any other situation, you are better off setting a new target on fire for for a minimum of 12 HP afterburn damage over the flare gun reload time, instead of 11 HP from the minicrit.

The Axtinguisher with the Degreaser will win you fights, but I'm finding myself more drawn to the Powerjack at the moment, because of the opportunity you get to chain kills against lighter classes while not having to find health to recover from the inevitable damage you sustain in close combat. The Homewrecker again is strictly defensive, or where your Engineers are having problems with incoming spies.

tl; dr

I play Pyro, but there's only 1 effective primary, and 1 map limited primary; 1 effective secondary and 1 map limited secondary; 2 effective melee weapons and 1 map limited melee weapon. My instinct is to try to balance the less useful weapons up.

The key to balancing games is making a change and playing with that change, then revising based on feedback - a model of game design that Valve have mastered. We as a community should be copying that process and adopting it - there's no point filling the forums with unlocks and arguments about relative power levels without any proof one way or the other that the idea is good. And a DPS chart isn't proof - in game testing and server logs are.

Luckily it is relatively simple to modify the weapons - done here by editing the items_game.txt file - and testing the changes by playing in offline mode. This means we can start to have this kind of discussion without relying on Valve giving us access to an open beta. It is not possible to test every kind of suggestion this way - advanced movement being an excellent example - and I'm limiting myself to not changing any other file at this stage; just to see if the process is worth doing and whether people on this forum find it at all useful. If it is not useful, and no one else feels like contributing to this effort, then I've not wasted a huge amount of time.

Unangband forked

Yesterday between 16:25 and 16:33. R-branch 2.51 kg. S-branch 2.34 kg. Mother and babies are all well.

[Edit: Apparently I was being too subtle...]

Forumutterings

There's been some recent argument against and for forums as a medium of exchange between developers and their communities.

I decided against forums (in a tied poll) specifically for Unangband, on the basis there is already a well developed Angband forum community and I didn't want to splinter that base. I'd similarly not have the time committment for moderating an Ascii Dreams forum, but feel free to comment, or head over to Temple of the Roguelike for general roguelike development forum-ness.

I do have some thoughts on the issue, based solely on my recent experience trying to shepherd some changes through the TF2 beta process, but I'll leave these for another time. Instead, I'll offer up the best response I've seen to some of the needless rage and anger on community forums, from Chris King, the lead designer of Victoria 2:

You know I had to go and look at the Civfanatics forum to see how they were taking this new and my God there are some bitter people there. My favourite was as long as Jon stays away from Paradox I’ll be happy. With that in mind I would like to make the following public offer.

Jon, if you are reading this and if you do have some free time, would like to be our special guest programmer on the Hearts of Iron 3 patch?

Source.

Just had a quick look at the votes so far...

And we have a tie for first place.

Over 500 people voted last year, so make yours count...

Rant mode on

As a loyal Mac customer, you have to put up with the digital equivalent of Steve Jobs urinating on you on a regular basis.

Case in point: I've just bought my wife an iPhone 4. I have always owned Mac laptops, instead of PC laptops but the last one I purchased, about 3 and a half years ago, is still running fine on Tiger.

The iPhone 4 cannot be used with Tiger. It can however be used with XP, which is the direct competitor's product, which has been around for 9 years, that is 5 years before OS X could run on Intel CPUs.

With my current iPhone 3G, I can't tether the phone in Tiger to use as a modem and I can't run Steam natively (but Wine runs absolutely fine and I was playing Counter Strike and Day of Defeat years before Steam play came out).

Cost to upgrade to the latest OS (were I interested in doing so): a third of the price of a new iPhone 4.

(Don't get me started on Linux. I'm still waiting for the operating system to actually do what an OS should: which is work flawlessly without me having to spend a single second thinking about it).

/rant off

Thrown away

By way of a John Carmack blog post, I am reminded again of some pithy words by Joel Spolsky which people working on the pyAngband project would well take heed of...

As for the lack of blogging, I am in the full force of a terrifying Team Fortress 2 addiction. All my spare time and money is currently being spent acquiring name tags for items to prove how unrelentingly clever I am. Think of it as a 40 character twitter for the first person shooter.

A more regular service should hopefully resume at some point.

Reference footage for Hajo's isometric snake art

We've had to step over this guy to get out of the house the last couple of days. Unfortunately, that probably means he's sick or injured.

[Edit: He's fine. WIRES came over and moved him to the back garden for us. Link to donate. We did.]