Monthly Archives: December 2009

Complain, But Even Better, Fix

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Pick the right things to think and talk about. Complain, but complain well. Work hard to make sure that the right people can hear and understand your complaints. And actually, if you’re going to put in so much effort, try to think if there is any way that you yourself can fix it.

Some things, you just can’t fix. Never say never, sure, but those things might take tremendous amount of time and effort to even find out that they weren’t fixable from the beginning. Even worse, you find out that they weren’t even problems. Draw the line, cut your losses, and wait for technology to catch up to your vision. And do something else in the meanwhile.

The world is filled with problems; tackle the ones that are are within your ability to fix. Or just beyond them, so you can stretch further. Don’t go stretching too far: But remember, the further you reach, the more you might be able to fix.

Complain, but even better, Fix.

I’m trying harder to complain less on the blog, but fix more in my projects. Less talk, more code.

When Did They Make iTunes Connect Suck So Much Less?

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While traipsing around the iPhone dev site… I realized that the iTunes Connect has improved tremendously. Does this mean that I’ll be heading back into iPhone development? Not so fast.

But I would definitely love to make a game on the iPhone, put all those lovely game design principles I’ve been gleaning from all these unposted blog posts…

If I did any sort of iPhone development, it’ll probably be a game. I wouldn’t know where to begin developing one…

Avatar

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But the script, if not really all that Shrek-ish, is more like Disney’s Pocahontas and Lion King thrown into a blender with Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers and something swept off the floor from one of the Star Trek franchises. The science is hokum, the level of human technology is wildly inconsistent, and the characters make life-and-death decisions for no good reason but the plot arc. And for all of the depictions of warfare and massacres, all of the formulaic gestures of risk and self-sacrifice, there wasn’t a single moment here that moved me half as much as the drowning scene in The Abyss.

Greg Egan, Avatar Review

He left out Fern Gully, Dances with Wolves, and Lawrence of Arabia. Yes, you’re not really seeing this movie for an amazing plot line. But I can’t just ignore such an integral part of what makes a movie, a movie. This is the reason why I give this one three out of four “strategically-clothed-almost-nude blue aliens”.

This movie could use a few edits to tighten it up, but then again… you’d be missing out of the near 3 hours of awesome visuals.

And I don’t think I have to remind you that this movie has to be seen in IMAX 3D. I probably won’t be seeing it again, although maybe just to see how much information I would miss seeing it on a what feels like an already outdated LCD screen.

This, being my first experience with a stereoscopic 3D movie, let alone an IMAX 3D movie, there was a bit of newness to the movie. I’m not all too sure how other 3D movies are, but I have a feeling Avatar has now set the bar in non-gimmicky 3D. I didn’t see too many things being thrown into my face just to prove that it can be done, but some of the more subtle things, like a water droplet forming in the first shot of the film to the dirt being kicked up in the wake of a Na’vi running, adds so much to an already lush visual buffet.

It wasn’t a horrendously bad movie, it’s just that it felt a lot like a tech demo of what is to come in the world of cinema. The techniques and technology used in this film will become the new foundation of the next generation of computer generated graphics, not only in movies, but in all of visual arts. (Video games? Yes, please.)

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie yet, stop reading here. You’re going to want to see this movie in theaters before time runs out. I mean it. Give your money to James Cameron now.

Plot Holes, Logic Flaws, & WTFs

I know there are more, but I forgot some of them.

Going AWOL from a battle should warrant some kind of discipline. But nope, our heroine Michelle Rodriguez (who seems to be pretty much casted in the same role in every movie she’s in… SWAT, The Fast and The Furious…) runs around serving steaks and taking names. And after that, I love the Na’vi sided humans fly free, nary a chase.

So you have an armada of helicopter-esque hovercrafts coming at you, with what seems to be an incredible weak point in their propulsion system… and all you’ve got are floating rocks and trees… I really thought they were going to pull an Ewok and think smart. Later, a missile is used to jam up the spinning blades of one unlucky aircraft.

I guess by diving with the flying creatures, the arrow gain such a force that it goes through what seemed to be arrow-proof cockpit windows.

I think there’s a clothing requirement near the magical Ewya tree. If you get shot, and you need some heals, you gotta get clothed in this magical tree leaf dress or something.

And, this: Unobtainium. GG.

Saturday Night Live: “The Good Ol’ Days”

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I have a huge love for comedies, especially sketch comedies. Saturday Night Live (and MadTV, yes… I was a MadTV fan) has been a favorite of mine for as long as I can remember liking sketch comedies on television.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying this: Saturday Night Live has become less funny and relevant. The more talented and experienced cast members have moved on to other shows and movies, and the new members that have joined haven’t really proved themselves yet. I do enjoy the political sketches (which is why I watch The Daily Show religiously), but the rest of the show could just be replaced with Digital Shorts. But even the Digital Shorts are becoming hit-or-miss, with the majority of them being misses.

Even with these mixed feelings, I watch pretty regularly. On some weeks, I’ve seen them via an actual television (which let me see the f-bomb droppage in real time), but mostly I’ve caught them on Hulu.

As I’m writing this, I’m watching “SNL Presents: A Very Gilly Christmas” which aired this past Thursday in place of NBC’s comedy lineup. Gilly, a recurring character played by the talented Kristen Wiig, serves as a transition between the some of the better holiday sketches put on by SNL. (I really don’t like this recurring character, by the way.)

One of the main reasons I keep watching is the hope that the show will actually get better… Maybe even return to the good ol’ days when the show was hilarious from start to end.

But maybe this wasn’t the case. I wasn’t alive when SNL started, when the cast members were called “Not Ready for Prime-Time Players.” Really, the great sketches that I’ve come to love and respect have been passed through many filters of producers and critics. Maybe if I actually saw them all I would feel differently about the good ol’ days.

Nostalgia is such a strong force. And actually, I feel it already with the early 20th season of SNL, when I got introduced to the show back in middle school. It was around the time when I finally felt comfortable with the English language, as well as started to dive deeper into the American experience.

Oh those days… so much to write on those days…

Chrome/Chromium Bug – Copy X From Bottom

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Chrome:Chromium Bug - Copy X From Bottom

First load is okay. After reloading the page, I get a large chunk of HTML copied a second time. Notice that the highlighted section is what gets duplicated.

I think it’s somehow copying and pasting x characters from bottom. This makes very little sense, because no other website is having this issue in Chromium. Safari/Firefox loads this page just fine.

EDIT (2009/12/23): Looks like one of the newer build has fixed this. Hooray!

Comparisons Between Dante’s Inferno Demo, God Of War

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Since I have recently acquired a PS3, might as well make use of the exclusivity that it brings, starting with the demo for Dante’s Inferno. Xbox 360 owners won’t get it until the 24th.

A couple of notes while playing through the demo.

It could be that because I’m playing through the God of War: Collection, but this game feels amazingly similar to God of War.

The hack-and-slash combat, quick time events, lightning fast combat, the cinematic-style fixed camera angles, the button tips that pop up from time to time… all eerily similar to God of War.

Some of the button placements are 1 to 1.

  • Square = Light Attack
  • Triangle = Heavy Attack
  • X = Jump
  • Left Stick = Movement
  • Right Stick = Evade
  • Left Buttons = Flipped around
    • God of War was L1 for Block, L2 for Magic
Dante's Inferno - Controls

The meters, while similar, show a bit of evolution in the button mashing gameplay of God of War.

Dante's Inferno - The EXP Status

There are two trees of abilities, Unholy and Holy, that you can climb. As you reach a certain level, you unlock abilities by spending the souls (number shown in the center of the screen).

Dante's Inferno - Unholy and Holy Trees

And this is where it gets annoying. After grabbing an unfortunate or fortunate entity via R2, you either can tap Square to Punish or rapidly hit Circle to Absolve to gain EXP in either the Holy or Unholy tree, respectively. I know, the note actually doesn’t tell you that you have to do this, but there’s a distinction between Punishing and Absolving. Maybe it’s actually harder to absolve souls in RL? ;-)

Dante's Inferno - Punish and Absolve

I feel like this is a poor game mechanic. Rather than making the focus of the combat “killing stuff”, now you have to grab and punish/absolve over and over again. Isn’t the point of a hack-and-slash to get that exciting emotion as you plow through a massive number of enemies or take down a behemoth? Blah.

One random comment on Blocking: I like how blocking preempts all actions in Dante’s Inferno. It makes the game feel different, if not a bit easier at the beginning, because rather than thinking about how an enemy’s attack will affect the timing of your moves to react and block, you can just slam on the R2 when you see it coming. With God of War, I would get hit much more often because I was in the middle of a chain combo.

Verdict? I probably won’t go out of my way to play this game. It doesn’t seem like it’s offering anything that new, and I just played through both God of War I and II… I’m pretty much Kratos’d out. I guess there’s always God of War III…

Designing For The Singularity

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I’ve been designing for the oncoming Singularity. And this silliness needs to end.

Singularity

For all problems that I believe to be solvable by software, from the lowest level of hardware/software interaction to the highest level of user interface abstraction, it all had to fit into the confines of The One True System.

The schemas would be flawless, the interface pixel perfect.

I would write, the One True System, supposedly.

Well, I have a bit of confession to make.

My name is Josh Kim, and I am an over-designer.

The funny thing is, the path towards Singularity has already begun. The great developers are writing themselves out of their own jobs, in a way, and creating even newer jobs in the process, jobs that didn’t exist even a decade ago.

Instead of freaking out about how I’m writing an imperfect system, I am excited to have a say in the future, one line at a time. After all, nothing’s perfect.

And actually, born out of this human imperfection is probably how we’re going to end up with the Singularity, most likely some test case unforeseen and left uncovered.

Might as well I start the downfall of humanity and welcome the sentient overlords, one line of code at a time.