Category: Uncategorized

Yes its true. Prepare to have your minds explode. Positech Games is not on discord. We have no discord server/channel. None. There may be people discussing our games on discord in unofficial servers, we do not no, or to be honest…care. Why?

Its because there are just TOO MANY different places on social media that an indie game developer needs to keep track of. When an indie dev has 8 employees and one of them is the dedicated marketing/social media/PR person, perhaps, maybe, just perhaps, there is some value in having a discord server where that person can be constantly replying to people and talking about the game… but even then I seriously doubt the ROI on that.

Right now, our social media and online presence consists of the following list:

• My personal (cliffski) twitter account
• reddits for Democracy3 and 4, also some older games which we never check now.
• facebook pages for virtually every major game we made. (Only Democracy really checked now)
• Our amazing forums, hosted by discourse, but paid for on a business subscription by us.
• This blog
• The widely publicized email addresses for me, which means a LOT of spam.
• A keymailer account, that we barely check now (none of the key-requesters actually cover the game)
• The steam forums
• Steam curator connect
• My youtube channel (effectively positech games youtube channel)

Thats ENOUGH. In fact thats WAY too much. Some of that gets constant attention (my forums, youtube, twitter), some less so (facebook, reddit, steam stuff), some is all but abandoned (keymailer, curator connect).

My feeling is that if people really want to find you, then they will. I am a member of a tesla forum, but also follow a spacex reddit. Why the difference? well all the tesla chat seems to be on forums, all the spacex chat seems to be on reddit. I am not (and I suspect few people are) so massively invested in a single social media platform that I only communicate with people that one way.

To put this another way, I suspect if we just closed down our democracy3 and democracy 4 reddits, and the facebook pages, a fair chunk of those users would eventually find their way to our forums or this blog, or my twitter account. I decide NOT to do that, because I really do not want to lose *any* existing followers/users, but the idea of possibly adding another split in the ‘fanbase’ to yet another format is not appealing.

When you think about it, I could also be trying to promote my games through instagram and tiktok and twitch too. Why not?

Its worth thinking about how many different forums you can possibly cope with communicating with your players when you have to also remember that you *need to also work on making the actual game too*. How much bandwidth do you really have? enough for 5 social media channels? 10? 20? Do not kid yourself that you can cope with all of them, as the number is only going to go up in the future, you need to pick your battles.

Plus…sometimes an entire social media platform turns evil (remember Facebook suddenly deciding to charge you money to message your own page followers? or that time they they totally banned me from ever advertising on Facebook because…I dunno, I make games about politics? (yes really)). And even when they do not turn evil, then can turn stupid, like completely deleting the entire online presence of the terraria devs for no reason and with no warning (yes really), or maybe just realizing they suck and giving up (remember google plus!).

My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay. I had just bought LOTR 4K and can't finish it. My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.

— Redigit? (@Demilogic) February 8, 2021

I still maintain the best possible platform for an indie developer to communicate with players is their own forum. It can be hosted elsewhere, but NOT for free (they *will* either go bust or change the terms later…). You have NO SAY what the rules or membership of the steam forums are like. You have no real control or ownership of your Facebook or reddit pages, or your YouTube channel. It can all disappear at the whim of someone in silicon valley.

And so… discord, a company with no real business model whatsoever, and entirely funded by venture capitalists who will want to monetize (track/exploit) all the users soon… forgive me if I don’t get all excited about leaping into the setting up, promoting and running of a discord server. There are plenty of other more productive uses of my time.

Long ago, before netflix, twitch, steam, social media, broadband or even Tony Blair, I worked in a boatyard nailing boats together. They were smallish rowing boats. This was hard work, as was building wooden bridges. here is a bridge I helped build.

And here is a boat I probably helped restore/build etc.

To be honest, it was stupidly hard work (often involving lying on the floor while holding a lead weight above your head as someone hammers it.), and not exactly well paid or with great prospects. However, at the end of the day, something got built. You could point at it, and say ‘we made that’, and there was great satisfaction in that.

I definitely don’t miss the physical work, although I miss having very strong forearms and being super slim despite eating like a horse.

What I do miss, to an extent, is the fact that however hard I work, there is nothing *tangible* to show for it. I can point to stuff I bought with the money I made form doing the work, but thats not the same. The work I do rearranges some bits on a hard drive, which then get copied and put on hard drives around the world, but there is nothing to really SEE. I cannot grab a hold of my work and lift it up to the sky in that dramatic fashion people do with their first child in classic TV series ‘roots’.

sidebar: Did you know who played kunta kinte in roots? Here he is from the series:

Here he is older. Yes really. Amazeballs…

anyway…

I spent a lot of time reading about car manufacturing when I made my earlier strategy game, Production Line, about car factories. I also follow the progress of the electric car company Tesla, a lot, and have got sucked into reading about lithium ion battery manufacture as a result. I am now reading a book on solar farm financing, and solar panel manufacture, because thats the kind of person I am. And my conclusion from all this is…

Manufacturing is AWESOME.

We have gone through a big shift over my lifetime from a world where manufacturing was a big deal, and something people were excited to work in (my father worked in a factory, making various steel things), to a world where factory work is considered menial, and low paid and boring, and the smart people worked in offices…typing.

Now I know that there is more to computer programming than typing, and more to law and marketing than typing…but it still lacks that gritty sense of achievement you get from working somewhere where stuff is MADE.

Ultimately the real progress in society is not being made with an app. Uber is fucking useless unless someone makes cars. Deliveroo is useless unless someone is cooking pizzas. Facebook and Instagram are useless unless someone is making phones. Meanwhile, we all have to eat, need somewhere to live, need decent clothes and shoes, and a decent TV and we need power and heating…

I feel like society has lost respect for the admirable job of MAKING stuff. Real PHYSICAL stuff. We sit in our airconditioned offices looking down our noses at people who have to sweat for a living, or work somewhere with physical goods, without which our lives would be hellish. The scales have tipped too far and they need to tip back.

Besides which…manufacturing has moved on. Its not people working a lathe anymore. Here is a modern battery factory:

Someone had to design that, build it, maintain it, optimize it. This is AWESEOME. I would love to do this. I’m too old to re-train, but if a teenager asked me what industry they should aim for, I would be hard torn between tech (AI/programming) and manufacturing/logistics. I’m going to stick at programming for the rest of my working life, but I’m trying to get involved in another industry, one that actually makes things. I’m sick of just ‘investing’ in something built by someone else. Making things that other people want to invest in is the REAL hard bit, and I suspect the rewarding bit.

My wife has now firmly got me hooked on Korean drama series, or ‘kdramas‘ as we now call them apparently. On an average day, I’ll likely watch 2 or 3 TV shows, and almost certainly one of them will be Schitts Creek, Star Trek:TNG or some Korean drama. I think a lot about the appeal of this show and why I choose them, and not any of the more popular ‘trending’ TV right now.

Frankly, I think its a 2020 thing, or more a ‘the state of the world’ thing. Right now, a LOT of stuff is worrying. fake news, social media hell, the culture wars, the infighting in the USA, the looming catastrophic hell of climate change, coronavirus, and so on. There is, in other words, a lot of ‘real life drama’ and ‘real life misery’ in the world. We are surrounded by it, and can barely escape from it, thanks to twitter, smartphones and media everywhere.

I think its no surprise then, that for those of us who feel bombarded by such negativity (especially if you HAVE to keep vaguely in-tune with it due to making a contemporary political strategy game), and who have problems staying calm at the best of times, there is some appeal in the idea of escapist TV drama.

But the problem is, too much of modern TV is NOT escapist. Or its escapism into hell, or conflict, or fear, misery, death, suicide and culture wars. In other words, writers are trying to AMPLIFY the current anxiety in the world as entertainment, instead of offering a much needed temporary escape from it. Its very rare these days to find a TV show that does not have a bunch of content warnings about ‘suicide references, addiction, injury detail, drugs, explicit sex’ and so on.

I started watching an HBO show (industry) about city traders. Kind of my thing, but in 2 episodes there has been one suicide, lots of abuse, and lots of frankly stupidly out of place and gratuitous sex and nudity. Thats fine, I’m not a moral crusader but…really? is it so necessary. I know what naked people look like, I know what sex is. You can easily imply that people had sex without us watching it. Its frankly not shocking, or edgy or artistic. Its just kinda tragic. The same is true in Game Of Thrones, or any other ‘gritty’ HBO/Netflix series that thinks its essential to have violence and sex in every drama.

For some reason, you get none of that in kdramas. Maybe Koreans are prudish, or the censors are. Who knows, but also who cares. I’ve got REALLY into a bunch of Korean dramas that are apparently romances, but the main characters don’t even kiss for fourteen episodes. One is about the military, but there has been so far, 2 scenes out of 10 episodes where someone fired a gun. One person has died. Just one. It was not explicit at all. And yet weirdly, it was still exciting and dramatic.

If HBO or Netflix made star trek:TNG now, then there would be multiple explicit scenes where we saw Picard and crusher having athletic zero-G sex. If Worf had to fight someone with his bat-leth there would be blood and limbs scattered all over the place. We would all be tired by now of seeing riker stark naked. Wesley would be snorting cocaine in every other scene…

And it wouldnt be any better a drama series at all.

KDramas, and older shows like TNG, or even family-rated shows like schitts creek, show that you don’t have to bombard people with sex and violence to entertain them. We live in an age where even the US president is accused of paying off porn-stars, where politicians are often caught taking hard drugs, where the media is packed with the salacious details of celebrities addictions and sex lives and so on. There is enough of this in our lives.

Its still ok for entertainment to be FUN. It doesn’t have to do ANYTHING else than entertain. You don’t have to be making statements about social-justice in every casting decision, and every scene. You can cast people of color in a role without them having to shoehorn in a race-relations plotline (even in space!). We are fine with just enjoying some escapism, munching some popcorn and watching fun things happens and hear people speaking witty dialog. You can have conflict without spraying blood and intestines at the viewer. People can fall for each other without us watching every sexual position in 4K.

Give me more kdramas and less ‘gritty, brutal re-imaginings’. if I want gritty and brutal I’ll watch CNN.

So…I am 99% sure I’ve fixed this, but it was a bug hell nightmare and worthy of a blog post. It also kept me coding till midnight last night, so I did probably 14 hours work yesterday. arrrghhh. no wonder I slept late this morning. Anyway…

Democracy 4 releases into steam early access on Tuesday, but we already have 3-4,000 players, and I had no showstopper bugs., Most noticeable the game was 32 bit, and only in English. Very recently we switched to 64 bit, and I guess some combination of that, and some people playing in different countries started me on a journey of bug tracking hell.

I got one bug report “game crashes on next turn, or if you change sound volume”. I tested my copy, worked fine. Tested on my laptop too, worked fine. Asked them to try and repro on another PC, arrogantly assuming user error. Then another customer reported the same thing, then a third. This is NOT GOOD. I asked for debug logs, which handily my engine does do, and are fairly comprehensive.

Nothing in the logs explained the actual crashes. Everything looked good. nothing was especially shocking except an error about failing to find a specific neuron (no name supplied). This could be just a typo, or a badly written mod. This *shouldnt* happen, but the game should recover. its not critical… but then why didnt MY copy give me the same error… weird?

I put together a new build of the game that outputs the NAME of the neuron it can’t find (should have done this anyway tbh), and I get back a log from a user where the missing neuron is called 0,00.

WUT?

That sounds like a bug with a comma somewhere, as the equation Socialist,0.00+(2*x) for example must have a typo, so instead of the name ‘Socialist’ we are getting the value. Ha! a simple typo. But why am *I* not getting the bug? I do a windows search of the whole data folder looking for 0,00. I get two hits… neither file actually contains the string. Windows search is WORSE than useless. Weird…

So I change the code again to output the name of EVERY attempt to get a neuron by name so I can compare mine with the users, and see where in the code they were just before this goes wrong. This turns out to be no help, as its inside the Voter processing, which makes no sense… there is simply no way any string like that is being passed at this point in the code. this makes ZERO sense.

And then I notice it. I’d normally missit…but it was weird. REALLY weird. In the debug logs of the players:

PreCalcCoreSimulation time: 0,70 seconds

No big deal, this value will vary based on CPU, but on my PC it said this

PreCalcCoreSimulation time: 0.92 seconds

Yup. Mine has a period/full stop, theirs has a comma. No big deal, its debug logging, who cares. Maybe its even an artifact of copy/pasting the log to my forums… I check this…nope. I ask the player to verify thats really a comma in that log file, not a full stop, they confirm its a comma. How? HOW is this possible? I check the code:

char temp[256];
sprintf_s(temp, 256, "\n\nPreCalcCoreSimulation time: %.2f seconds\n\n", elapsed);
GetDebug()->DebugOut(temp);

This is simple stuff. I just used the very low level, very basic, very simple good old fashioned sprintf function to convert a value into a decimal number in a string. I do some googling and… what the actual fuck? apparently even good old c++, ignoring anything higher level, is looking up the regional settings, and deciding whether or not commas or periods are used in decimal strings. In english its full-stops (.). It is VERY VERY important to the structure of my code and engine that its full stops. When the majority of your data uses comma-separated values, you cant go messing around with the definition of a comma for fucks sake…

So theoretically easy fix, find the function that hacks in the ‘locale’ to be English for this app…and boom! No! it doesn’t work. Sure, I can use

setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "en-US")

to force the number format to be full-stops, and when I check that the locale really has been set…it has! and everything is fine but… once the game loads a new level, everything has gone haywire, all the values are wrong, all the policies are set to zero, and checking the locale returns what the PC has set it to (I temporarily changed mine to commas as a test). In other words….my setlocale is being overrriden.

Arggh. Now its late, I am tired, I am thirsty, but not enough to leave my desk and lose my concentration. I am very tired now. I spam the code with multiple checks to read the locale at every possible location to see where the hell it goes wrong… And eventually I find it. Its the text renderer, which does use some middleware, to convert fonts into vector graphcis, render them into memory and then paste them as strips to the screen, dynamically. Its all very clever and supports any language, any font size, its super l33t. It also has its own opinions about locales.

So now the game is fixed, by me setting the locale to the US the millisecond the game starts, and then the minute its rendered its first bit of text (and thus the middleware has overrriden me, it sets it AGAIN, to ensure no funny business. Everything now seems to work. Hurrah. I hate computers. I need sleep. Why the hell cant humans agree on what a decimal point looks like in 2020?

I read some stuff on twitter today (I wont bore you with the details) that is absolute crap. I guess 99% of the useless lies that I see each day on social media just fly past me, but I knew about this subject, and so I noticed it right away. To my dismay, it is heavily upvoted, liked, shared and cheered on, as always. The problem is, nobody wants to take the time to actually do any research whatsoever. The laziest of all seem to be so called journalists in the mainstream news.

One of the major problems behind this is the concept in news of an ‘angle’ or a ‘take’. The idea is that we have to have one of these in our news, otherwise we cannot understand what people are telling us. Telling us that a town was attacked in an air strike and X citizens died is apparently something our feeble brains cannot process, unless we see a picture of a child’s teddy bear in some rubble. I presume news desks have a folder on a shared drive called ‘kids toys in rubble’ that they have a shortcut to on their desktop, to save time. We simply don’t understand the impact of war otherwise, apparently. If a teddy bear is found, the air strike was unjustified. I guess that’s the theory?

I recently heard a BBC interview of 2 party-leadership candidates that touched on Universal Basic Income. I am not a UBI supporter myself (not in principle, but in practice…another topic…), but even I could get angry at the nonsense that the ‘journalist’ was saying. Apparently we are too stupid to understand the concept of ‘universal’ unless its described as ‘people like J K Rowling will get the money too!’. Oh the horror.

This is what you get when you have spent forty years trying to explain things in ‘olympic sized swimming pools’ or ‘length of london buses’ or ’round the earth X times’ instead of using miles or kilometers, which is the whole POINT of universal systems of measurement. Apparently we cannot understand actual data any more.

Do you know how long a london bus is? or how big an olympic sized swimming pool is? Me neither. (FWIW 11.23 meters long and 50 meters).

Once our media went from reporting facts and data, to enclosing it in ‘angles’ and ‘takes’ it was a very short trip in the days of clickbait to transform the story entirely, picking and choosing context to whip up as much anger as possible. The media salivates the minute anybody is killed at a protest, or if a police officer kills someone right now, because OMG this will drive people CRAZY. No facts are required, no context required, no analysis or data required. All that is needed is the race of each person involved, and hopefully some shaky-cam footage that we can edit in order to create as much outrage and as much anger (from both ‘sides’) as possible.

Everybody knows ‘where they stand’ on a number of big political issues. We all have our tribes, and our beliefs, but how much of it is emotion, and how much of it is based on data? You are pro or anti-brexit mostly based on emotion. You are pro or anti gun-rights mostly based on emotion, and when it comes to economics…OMG peoples grasp of the data is absolutely embarrassingly slight.

Here is a quick quiz to see how well the media has informed you on some random topics.

1. What percentage of US government spending goes on interest on the debt?
2. Whats the most common cause of death in the US and how many does it kill each year?
3. What percentage of US households earn over $100k per year?
4. How much does a US senator get paid?
5. What was the turnout at the last US presidential election?

I would be very surprised if anyone was close to all those answers ( I certainly was not). Here they are:

1. 7.8%
2. Heart disease: 647,457
3. 30.4%
4. $174,000
5. 55.5%

We discuss politics using memes instead of facts. We either think senators are out-of-touch super-rich, or underpaid considering the tough job they do…but how many know what they get paid? The national debt is no big deal, or catastrophic depending on your tribe, but how many know what it actually is? There is no room for subtlety, or context, but only room for deciding if a number is good or bad BEFORE you find out what it is.

Our news providers do a TERRIBLE job. They talk about how the pound has ‘fallen dramatically’ without showing us a chart, or that gold prices have ‘soared’ without showing us a chart. Unemployment is ‘plummeting’ or ‘soaring’, again, where is the chart? Its 2020, we can cope with pie charts and bar charts and stats and numbers on the TV, but we rarely actually see them. I hear daily, yes DAILY reports about the covid crisis in the UK, but when did you last look at actual CHARTS showing you deaths and cases. here are some (official government ones):

We are not idiots, we can look at charts and form our OWN opinions. Its about time we started telling ‘journalists’ that terms like ‘plummeting’ or ‘soaring’ or ‘steep’ or ‘brisk’ are great fun in poetry, but they should play no part in serious news reports to a literate population who can understand the concept of numbers and charts.

When it comes to national elections, we are BOMBARDED with infographic hell for hours and hours showing us polling results in the most ridiculously over-analyzed detail. Why the hell cant we get those same infographic people to show us what’s going on BETWEEN elections? Give us more DATA.

But no… want to see how bad its got? I’m writing this in wordpress, using the latest editor. Its marking down my headline as not being divisive enough. I’m not kidding, there is a score of 48/100 and ‘tips’ to make my content get more clicks. Basically be more divisive. check it out:

WordPress! Now with free hints on writing divisive clickbait to help tear society apart even more… /cries.