After years of doing sod all, finally stirred myself to go and finish hacking the FF7 world map format, with mostly successful results. Next step, use this as incentive to write an RPG world-map-style module for the DS.
Also (last week) finally went and bought a PS2 (now that, you know, they're selling for approximately nothing ... or around that) along with We Love Katamari and Ico. Games are required to keep me entertained until the Wii launches (now on Dec 8th, it would seem). Ico is unfeasibly beautiful; I didn't think the PS2 could produce anything that looked so good. Certainly the other games out for it fail to demonstrate any particular impressive visual things.
I just know I'm going to have to buy Shadow of the Colossus, but since that's somewhat newer, I have to try and postpone that until it falls in price...
Oddities:
-Version 0.04 of SylphAMP is out
-The Cutie Honey live action movie is hideously, hideously bad. And also hilarious.
-Magners is truly the thing to be drinking in hot weather.
-I hate my car. Or at least its old exhaust. The one that fell off. And, more annoyingly, required replacing the catalytic converter as well...
-I do not hate Range Murata's Robot; I do however mildly loath Amazon for being unable to send me volume one.
I have not fallen off the face of the planet. I will, however, be spending essentially every day this coming week away on business, and I was away all of last weekend, too, so progress beyond this point will be slow. Until next weekend.
Vague, unspecific hint about my next release: More 2D, less wifi.
Preliminary research results from the weekend;
Highest concentration of pure l33t : Sh15uya
Best sort-of-horror-although-not-entirely show : Higurashi no Naku Koro ni
Most inaccurate shooting : The South Korean military
Most absolutely standard mecha anime : Zegapain
Best tedious-speech-shortcutting : Firefly
Best coming-of-age melodrama also being a metaphor for the atomic bomb : X2
Best war scene involving lovers killing each other over whether or not the girl should dress as a maid in a cafe : School Rumble Nigakki
Most bacon cooked : A filthy gatecrasher
Most belongings left behind : bucko [1]
 The messiah delivereth unto us a bountiful blessing of beer... |
1) Here, have an IRC client for the DS. More or less.
2) Here, have a ratbastard of a Stepmania track. No charge.
As you can see, my bank holiday weekend was spent productively. Or at least spent.
So ... ebooks.
While Slashdot were coincidentally running an article on ebooks just this Friday, I was already looking at buying an ebook at that point. Not because I like to carry hundreds of books around on a portable device (although I would, if I had a good enough portable device), but because I'd just finished book 2 in a trilogy and I wanted to read book 3 now.
However, it seems that most publishers do not, unsurprisingly, appear to "get it". Specifically, I can buy most new paperbacks (usually from Amazon) for ~£5-6. This is not a lot. However, if I'm going to buy an ebook, I'm not going to pay that much. It's arguable which is more convenient (a book is a "nicer" item to have, but ebooks are rather more obviously transportable), but I'm well aware how much money (should have been) saved by not actually producing anything physical whatsoever.
Net result: £3 is about the absolute maximum I'd pay for an ebook and I'd want something good at that price. By something good I mean not DRMed. (I would, incidentally, be open to buying a DRMed ebook, but I'm getting less so I'd want to pay less. This seems obvious to me, but evidently not to the publishers.)
If I could have logged on to, say, Fictionwide (who do appear to mostly "get it") and bought a HTML copy of this book I wanted for $5 (~£3), I would have. As it is, we're talking $8.50 for a DRM copy and I'm just going to wait until next week and pick up a physical copy.
(One publisher who does appear to actually apply some intelligence to the whole ebook thing is Baen, who let you buy ~4 books being published this month for $15, and/or buy back issues of older books fairly cheaply. In a variety of formats including HTML. The only criticisms I have of Baen are;
a) Their web pages are hideously ugly, and
b) Their "Free Library" is a good (great?) idea, I do want to sample authors before I buy their works, but it helps if you put up good examples of an authors work. Rather than less impressive, put-you-off-buying examples. I'm looking at you, Holly Lisle. )
As it happens, if I wanted an ebook-reading device, I'd probably go for something along the lines of an MP3 video-playing device. The sort of thing Archos produces. I can and occasionally do read books on my DS, but it's hardly optimised for it. Realistically, though, the major selling point of ebooks to me is the instant delivery time, Amazon is cheap but has lead times ranging from "days" to literally "years", depending. If someone could sell ebooks to me for a few pounds in those "I want the sequel NOW" situations, then ... that person would be making money off me.
DS programming = nil, partly due to being away in London most of this week.
Progress in games = Some, have started replaying Skies of Arcadia, which came back into mind after a pub conversation. All the best ideas started as conversations in pubs.
With that in mind, have a system of classifying RPG sequels, from ... one end to the other, in the sense that the entries at each end are at least mutually exclusive if not actually diametrically opposed.
1) The Part II sequel
The sequel which is actually just the continuation of the original game and in fact is required to actually finish the story. The sort of game that everybody wishes had been included into the first one and probably will be at some point as a "Collectors Edition".
Classical example: Golden Sun 2, aka "It Was Obvious That GS1 Had No Closure".
2) The Actual sequel
A follow up game which is actually a sequel, ie. has at least some of the same characters, game mechanics, and so on, but is actually a new story. The sort of thing most RPG sequels claim to be, usually completely implausibly, since at the end of Game 1, the player(s) had defeated not only the Ancient, Threatening Evil, but also pretty much every other power group. In the entire world. However, in volume 2, a new Threatening Evil appears, probably without having even being mentioned in volume 1.
(In the worst cases, all the characters appear to lose all their abilities in the two years holiday they get between games.)
Classical example: Baldurs Gate II, which gets kudos for being a plausible sequel. Mainly because it wasn't a JRPG and hence BG1 didn't involve defeating everybody in the world, and was set only on one part of one continent, leaving actual scope for another game.
3) The Distant Cousin sequel
The game which is ostensibly set in the same world as the original, but without the same characters. Possibly hundreds and/or thousands of years earlier/later. This sidesteps the question of the Actual Sequel as to how the hell anything short of an alien invasion could provide a challenge for your character. However, it still allows for the important cheap recycling of scenery, game engine, and so on, although this is technically optional. Especially when the sequel is released generations of hardware later.
Classical example: Icewind Dale (it's Baldurs Gate! But ... with ice!)
4) The Not Really A Sequel
A game which is allegedly in the same series as the previous one, but without really sharing characters, locations, or many items/spells/game mechanics. Some might question how this is a sequel, but that is obviously being too picky.
Classical example: The entire Final Fantasy series, with the possible exception of FFX-2 (FFX sucked anyway) or FF:Tactics (I'm sure FFT and FFTA were at least set in Ivalice ... as is FF12, thinking about it.)
Discuss: Skies of Arcadia: What would be the best type of sequel, and what (assuming Sega bother to make any sequel at this point, although they were hinting at it a few years ago) would they actually be likely to make?
Progress this weekend on SylphDS was nil due to a mixture of family-related events and a hideous cold. The application of Lemsip and Cider appears to be curing this affliction, but DS programming isn't happening yet.
Cheesy anime viewing is, however, and Mai Otome is certainly as cheesy as they come. I'll reserve a review until after the stock finale episode though.
My prize debugging effort this weekend has consisted of the following:
if (((FValidmask[Position>>13] >> ((Position>>10)&7)) & 1) == 0) printf("Fuck!");
I appear to have reduced the number of fucks down to zero now, which is against normal logic a desirable outcome.
Anyway, progress on SylphDS this weekend:
-Proper network configuration screen for wifi
-Move 3D models over to read data from SylphFiles properly (and hence from network or whatever) ... also reduced their memory usage as a result.
-Fixed a hideous bug in the network code causing it to return random data when reads crossed certain boundaries. Mikmod appeared not to exhibit this bug since it reads an awful lot of data one byte at a time, which by definition never crosses any sort of boundary in the process of obtaining the data...
-Moved some of the 2D utilities like font drawing into proper classes, although not yet hooked them into the action manager
Alas, over here in Europe, the only Katamari we seem to get is
The slightly bad news is the original Katamari Damacy is better than We Love Katamari. The good n... (Anonymous Guest)2006-09-29 10:55:30