I’m going to rant about 3D. In two different ways. Stick with me.

1) I think 3 D ruins some games. I remember when all games were 2D, then I remember the first isometric RTS games. (In fact arguably the first was ant attack). Moving the camera in isometric games was easy. When they introduced a limited 4-way rotate to the genre, that got darned confusing. Then came 3D. the first 3D RTS games sucked massively. Then we got mroe of them, and they sucked a bit less. In my limietd opinion the two that do it well are Total War and Company Of heroes. I think COH is better. Why? Neither game makes me waste half my gameplay moving the camera around.

I have a pal who has problems with 3D cameras. Real bad ones. he can’t play an FPS. He can kick my ass big time at CoH. He has tried Men of war, but literally prefers CoH because you can’t rotate the camera by default in CoH. I agree. Watch a video of Eve online and note how much time the player is fucking around with the camera. I played a 3D space RTS recently to try it out, and got sick of the 3D antics. I’m a human, not a bird. I percieve 3D but I’m not good at planning movement in it. I bet there are planets of bird people where Homeworld and Descent are the top 2 games.

BTW I *can* handle 3D in a game. I can kick ass at Call of Duty. I just don’t like a game to be all about the third dimension in terms of planning. Most mass market usable games operate in 2D. They use 3D graphics to draw an effectviely 2D world, with 2D gameplay. Descent and Homeworld were 3D, also flight sims. Not much else. Portal I guess?

2) When i said I perceive 3D, thats true. But it’s also a lie. I suffer from this. Stereo Blindness. It means two things:

• I can’t see through binoculars easily
• Avatar was dull.

Actually avatar was ok, but not earth shattering. I can see a vague slight 3dness to it every 20 minutes or so, but that’s it. I REALLY hope this isn’t the future of movies. If so, I’ll have to keep my money. Paying extra to have to wear dorky glasses to watch a movie in 2D is not my idea of progress. If people think we will all buy new TV’s for this, they are dead wrong. I went ot a demo at blitz games kindly given by the excellent oliver brothers on 3D gaming. Sadly, it looked 2D to me. Gutted. (On the other hand their engine is flipping awesome.)

Above all, I don’t like gimmicks driving artistic development. 3D might be good for the odd CGI film, but lets not default to it. It gets over-used and in the way. People with spears tend to point them self-conciously at the camera a lot. It makes film making even more expensive, and thus dumbed down and generic. (unobtainium? really?). Personally I would have taken every cent of the 3D budget and spent it on writers. Preferably Iain M Banks or Greg Bear, or anyone over the age of twelve, basically. I’m not convinced special effects or 3D have massively improved the long term quality of movies. In 50 years time will avatar be seen as a ‘must-see’ movie? I doubt it. Casablanca probably will still be, despite not even having color.

Sometimes it’s not all about the budget, or the tech.

So… I did patch 1.34, which had a bunch of minor stuff that was fairly urgent, and immediately everything went wrong. I’ve  moved to Windows 7 on 64 bit, and that meant a new PC, and thus nothing worked. I needed to install the Microsoft Directx sdk, which is fine, but the old version I used would not install on W7. That meant getting the new version, which took 2 days to download (grrr), but installed, so I could actually debug my games again….

But it also meant that when I recompiled the game for a patch, it got automatically tied to the latest d3dx dll, which is weird because I havent changed any graphics engine code at all. It seems Microsoft defaults to requiring the latest of everything. Cheers guys.

And here it gets annoying. Because the machines I test on all have the SDK installed, I had no idea that I was suddenly needing a new (not normally installed) DLL until I released the patch and got complaints. Eeek!. I’m 99.99% sure this is fixed now with 1.35. I couldnt get the stupid-ass directx redist installer to actually install the new files, so I just recompiled the game forcing it to use includes and libs from the older SDK.

What a pain!

In other news the ‘spot the feature’ is that missile trails are going above the ship that fired them. They never used to do that. Nobody even notices when I point it out. Bah. Also, multiple-rockets now split apart in a more convincing way now, and tons of really minor stuff is now fixed. Hurrah!

Here is a film you may like if you are a bit geeky and haven’t seen it:

Enigma (2001)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0157583/

What is it?
A low key drama / love story about code breakers fighting to break the German enigma code during World War II

Who is in it?
Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Tom Hollander, Matthew McFadyen, other people.

Quick Plot:
Tom Jericho is a code breaker based at Bletchley park, recalled to help break enigma again after the Germans mysteriously change the code mid-war. Interleaved with the code breakers attempts to break the code, is a love story between him and fellow Bletchley park worker Claire Rommelly, and a spy story based around a ‘mole’  feeding information to the Germans. There is little to zero action or spectacle. Only one bullet is fired as I recall. And the car chase may disappoint smokey and the bandit fans.

What’s Bad about it:
Some fairly cringeworthy romantic scenes and dialog. An annoyingly repetitive musical theme. A few fairly contrived and convenient plot devices. Some general purpose stereotyping of maths geeks.

What’s good about it:
It’s about the birth of computing AND fighting WW2. What’s not to like? Plus a great supporting cast, and a good script in places. Surprisingly historically accurate (glosses over alan turing though, presumably because they wanted a heterosexual love story). Also, it treats you like you are paying attention, and doesn’t break down the complexity of the core topic (encryption) to sub kindergarten levels like many Hollywood movies would.
The plot is complex enough to keep you guessing.

Best Scene:
Tom Jerichos explanation on how enigma works to the American General. This is the way all programmer should speak to their boss when asked that irritating question “How long will it take?”

Best Character:
Jeremy Northam was born to be the slimey, suspicious and sarcastic British Intelligence chief.

Best Quote:
“Given the circumstances, Miss Wallace, I think we might risk first names.”

Buy it or Rent it. It’s good :D

I’m working on both an expansion, and some UI improvements for Gratuitous Space Battles. I’ll blog on them when they are ready.

I just released patch 1.31 for Gratuitous Space Battles, which has a number of minor tweaks as well as hopefully a fix for startup freezing on some machines.

I did the first 3 new ships for the next expansion today, in terms of getting them working in the game. They look pretty cool. I also have the backdrops done, and the two new weapons. Its stil a few weeks of getting all the new ships done, and the balancing of the new ship designs and weapons. Then I need two really good balanced new missions. I’m pretty sure one will be small, one big, and one has a nice nebula, the other is simpler but with asteroids.

I havent decided if one will be a survival mode yet.  Survival mode is fun, and has high scores, but skirmishes make for more challenge options. I might run some stats to see how popular each mode seems to be.

It’s very common for people online to state (on the subject of games pricing) that
“If you dropped the price, you would sell way more and make tons more money”
It is not that simple. I’ve done a lot of tests, and found that the twenty – twenty four dollars price is right for my games. Lowering the price makes me less money.
But why oh why do the steam holiday sales work then? here is my best guess:

The sales == attention == increased visitors.

Getting tons of eyeballs on your game will mean more sales. This is just basic business. There were whole websites dedicated to promoting the steam sale, no wonder games in the sale sell tons more

Also, this is not the whole story. When you hear people say “I dropped the price of game X, and made twice the money”. That is NOT the whole story. For the whole story you need to know what happened to the sales a month after the price reverted to normal. You really need an A/B test in different universes looking at the lifetime sales of the game in both scenarios.
You basically can’t tell whether the 100 extra sales are the 100 people who would pay $5 for the game but never pay $20, or whether they are the people who hadn’t heard of the game and would have paid $20, or the people who keep meaning to one day get your game, and will eventually buy it for $20, but bought it in the sale to save money.
It’s the last last group I find interesting. I suspect the vast vast majority of Democracy 2 buyers are in that group. I sold 4 copies of that game this morning (it’s an oldish game now, so that’s good!), and it’s $19.95. People who have been waiting since I released it in December 2007 for me to offer it below $19 are still waiting, and I see no urgent reason to cut the price now. If you really like the idea of a complex and serious government-sim, Democracy 2 is your best choice. It’s a love it or hate it game, and not something people buy for $2 on a whim. The price reflects that, and likely always will.

Theres some interesting analysis by a fellow indie of his ‘pay what you want’ sale here. Notice that if he basically just told everyone paying under £1 to get stuffed, he would only have lost out £2.40. If just two percent of those cheap-buyers had raised their price to £1, he would be in profit. In other words, you can ignore the cheapest-paying 85% of your potential market, and hardly lose a penny.

In more fun-related news I’ve been getting decent nebula renders arranged for the next expansion, and working on improvements to the graphics in GSB. Better engine glow effects (you will hardly notice, but subtly, subconsciously you might), and optimising for maybe some better particle effects. Come monday morning I’ll be doing real work on new ship stuff.