My itch.io store, csanyk.itch.io, is now live.
Currently, I’m offering a 33% sale for my paid assets, through 8/31/16.
Category: Uncategorized
New GameMaker Community Forums now live (finally!)
Following up on my earlier posts on this subject, after long delays, the new GameMaker Community Forums is now live. The archive of the old GMC forums is still at its old url. YoYo Games are offering a 10% discount coupon as a token of appreciation to users who’ve put up with the lengthy downtime as the old forums were transitioned and the new forums took unexpectedly long to bring online. It’s good to have writable forums once again.
The Decline and Fall of the The Walking Dead
[Editor’s note: I started writing this post shortly after the last episode of season six aired, back in April… then promptly forgot about it, until season seven started last week. In light of the outpouring of fans and critics complaining about the season’s first episode, I decided to finish up and publish.]
I’m thinking about this season’s last episode of The Walking Dead. The big season ending cliffhanger in which we’re finally introduced to Negan, and he brutally beats (likely kills) one of the central cast members, and we’re left to wonder who until next season.
My feelings on the show are pretty mixed. I definitely like TWD, overall, and moreover, I am predisposed to like it. But I increasingly find myself wondering why as the show grinds on. Mainly, I think, it comes down to the characters that I’ve grown attached to: Glenn, Daryl, Carol being my favorites. They’re played by great actors, and viewers have grown very attached to them over six seasons. But what really hooked me was the strength of the writing in the first season, and the realism of the situations that the survivors faced, and the realism of their responses to it.
There was a serious external threat represented by the zombie outbreak and the collapse of civilization, but also internal struggles as people who probably would ordinarily never cooperate or interact with each other were thrust together by circumstances and forced to cooperate for a chance at survival. Disagreements and conflicts and strained loyalties. And the choices the characters made had real, life or death consequences. People died on the show, just about every episode, and they were often characters who you cared about.
But also, there were the pragmatic, immediate matters of survival at hand. What tactics work against zombies? What about a huge number of zombies? Forgetting about zombies, how do you do basic survival when civilization has collapsed — how do you eat? Stay warm? Take care of your health and hygeine?
As the show has worn on, though, these things that made it interesting have been replaced or receeded into irrelevance. It’s taken for granted that they know how to survive. They are shown foraging, farming, and scavenging, but we never really see them starving, or shivering, or too weak to go on. They’ve gotten competent with fighting and know anti-zombie tactics so well that zombies are no longer a threat unless the show decides to make a stealth zombie come out of nowhere for a deus ex machina kill. Death spares the central cast, making it tame and predictable.
[[PUT SOMETHING HERE ABOUT HOW THE SHOW AT ONE TIME GAVE A FALSE HOPE OF FIGURING OUT WHAT WAS CAUSING THE ZOMBIE OUTBREAK AND STOPPING IT]]
For a time, the series dangled some hope of answers and a resolution. We might find out what caused the zombie apocalypse. There might even be a way to cure it. But those hopes were blown up in a memorable episode a few years ago, and since then, apart from a false hope in the form of Eugene’s story that he needed to get to Washington, D.C., there really hasn’t been any sense of direction. The cast have not been on a quest to go anywhere or accomplish anything, it’s just been an endless sequence of running into people, running into zombies, running into people, running into zombies, and most everyone they run into ends up dying before too long, but the central cast had started to take on an aura of invincibility.
Encounters with the living follow a formula: Either the other group is brutal and threatening, cannot be trusted, ever, and must therefore be destroyed; or, the other group is soft and weak, cannot be relied on, and must be exploited until their inexplicably stable pocket of civilization is overrun by either zombies or stronger people. We pick up a few new cast members who have the potential of making it with the protagonist group, but these people are all marked for death, and the idea is that we’re supposed to start to develop feelings for them before the show rips them from us, usually in some meaningless, almost accidental incident that is there mostly for its shock or horror value, which due to the contrived and predictable nature of the setup, is always diminished and weaker than intended.
Because there’s not enough time to allow for meaningful character development at the pace the writers want the show to take, we mostly don’t get any. There’s hints of possibility that go unexplored as the main plot hurtles past at highway speed. In many ways it feels like what makes it to broadcast is the “digest version” of a larger, richer story that we’ll never get to see. I guess that’s why the book is always better than the screenplay production. Yet, it’s frustrating. And if they could simply choose to take the time, you know they could make the show 10 times better than it ends up being. Essentially every character’s arc is left unfinished, or truncated. This could be the tragedy that we crave if it’s in full development only to be cut short by an untimely, horrible death. But despite the cornucopia of death that the show loves to present to us, almost none of it seems to hit us that way — the recent death of the doctor character just as she’s starting to come into her own being one notable exception, but all the more glaring due to its singularity.
Also, the central characters are so safe that the show’s writers are forced to have them make stupid decisions for no apparent reason. Carol’s most recent apparent death wish and her decision to leave the group again, for no real good reason, being the latest example of this. But we see it again and again, and it feels like it’s only an excuse to put a central character in danger, only to have the show pull its punches and spare them from harm.
Now, with the Negan kills ????? cliffhanger, the show is promising us a bloody, brutal end to one of our favorite characters. I’ve admired The Walking Dead for its willingness to kill characters, as TV shows so seldom often do. It was far more interesting to watch TWD knowing that it would not pull punches and spare a character just because they were a fan favorite. But this cliffhanger, I think, is too much for me. It’s like the show is using the spectacle of execution as entertainment. Death on the show wasn’t for entertainment, at least not for me, it was there to illustrate that TWD was a different sort of show, where, just like in real life, death doesn’t play fair, and that made me feel like characters were really in peril whenever there was danger.
I haven’t watched the first episode of Season 7 still, and after reading a lot of people’s responses to it, I’m not sure that I want to.
The Vulnerable Android
Recently a story about a vulnerability affecting 95% of Android devices made the rounds. The vulnerability is particularly nasty, in that it can be exploited by sending a SMS message to the target, which in some cases need not even be read by the user, and which can be deleted immediately after the device has been compromised, leaving no visible trace to the user that they have been pwnd. If the thought of this isn’t enough to make you shit your pants, it’s probably because you’re not wearing any. Compounding the problem is the slowness with which cellular carriers typically roll out updates for the phones they sell.
It’s clear that it’s not a top priority for cell carriers to update the software on your handset. If it was, they’d do it in a more timely manner. Once they stop marketing a given model, it becomes increasingly unlikely that they will spend any money in support of it; it becomes their incentive to let your old phone go out of date so that you will have to buy a new handset.
This is clearly not in the interests of the consumer. The distribution model for software updates of the base firmware needs to change. It’s trivial to take app updates from Google Play, but not the Android firmware. For firmware updates, customers have to wait for the carrier to release an update, and then users have to go into the Android settings and find the “check for updates” feature and manually initiate the update, and that’s just crazy. Just as we do not look to our ISP to provide updates for our desktop PC, we should not be looking to our cell provider for these updates either. All devices should have the shortest possible update path — that is, get the update directly from the source of the software. Cell carriers are middle-men who provide packaging, bundling, and distribution, and they need to get out of the way, and let users get updates directly from the software maintainers.
This is especially important when it comes to critical security patches. Customers should not have to root their phone to gain this level of control over a device that they paid for and own.
Consumers should reject business models that call what they buy a “service” or “subscription” or “license” and insist on true ownership. I expect it’s too late for this to change, but that won’t stop me from advocating for it.
Since we do not yet live in this world, Android users need to take steps to mitigate vulnerabilities that they cannot patch.
It’s always a good idea to think about mitigation steps anyway, since it’s always possible for an unknown, undisclosed vulnerability to be present on a system, and so you should always assume that your device is vulnerable, and thus take steps to ensure that if it is compromised, you can accept the consequences of the event. It’s just a little more difficult to come up with mitigation strategies when the vulnerabilities are not known, but not impossible. All that you need to do is use your imagination to think of what could an attacker do with your phone if they got complete access to it, and ask yourself what you can do to minimize the harm and exposure of that.
If you have a smartphone, it’s not much of a stretch to say that You are your phone. Your entire life is in there. Your contacts, photos, web browsing history, your saved passwords, access to your email accounts where you receive password reset requests for all your other accounts. An compromised device also compromises two-factor authentication. If you use two-factor authentication, one of the two “factors” involved is a 1-time key that is sent to your phone via SMS. This, plus your password, are the two “factors” that are supposed to be a more secure form of authenticating than just using a password alone. But if your phone is compromised, and the 1-time key is sent to your phone, and therefore shared with the attacker who pwnd your phone, two-factor authentication is no longer effective at protecting you. And if the attacker can read your password reset request emails, and use them to gain control over your other accounts, that’s a very serious liability. Once your attacker has access to all your accounts, they can deny you access to them, and start impersonating you.
To mitigate these risks, I recommend the following:
- Stop treating the google account associated with your android devices as your “home” or “primary” account. Keep the minimum information and stuff in the account that you need in order to make the phone useful for you, and have that account be a “throwaway” account, which you can discontinue using if it gets compromised. I guess that probably means just using it for storing your contacts, and maybe for photos backups.
- Do not use the google account associated with your android devices as a point of contact for password resets. Create a secret email just for password resets, and use it only for that purpose. Don’t log into that account from your android device. Of course, most services will send you other mail to the account you use for password resets, so you’ll have a hard time using your password email only for that purpose, but limit your use as much as possible, so you do not become overly reliant on the account for other uses.
Do you have any other ideas for limiting the value of your compromised phone or tablet to an attacker? Comment below with your ideas.
Ouya that was
It was announced today that Razer has bought Ouya.
“Razer reportedly plans to continue supporting Ouya’s existing game service for a year.”
“Razer doesn’t seem to be interested in trying to continue Ouya’s original strategy.”
So what does this mean for the users? Razer will continue the Ouya service for another year, and then they are pulling the plug. After that, will an Ouya have any useful purpose? Will it boot? Probably. But you can bet that any updates there might have been for it will not be available any longer. Can users re-install games that they had purchased? It doesn’t sound like it.
Someone will hopefully come up with a solution, a way to back up your Ouya games and run them — at least those titles that do not depend on a live service that they must connect to in order to play at all. Any games that do require a server for the client to access, will probably cease to be playable. Which is a shame. Unless perhaps the services are spun off to some other organization, or released as a product that people can obtained and run on their own hardware. But that seems quite unlikely. What profit would there be in it? The industry has interest only in selling you new product — sorry, services; it’s not fair to call it a “product” anymore when you can’t own what you are paying for — and they have no incentive to compete against what they released a few years ago, even though there might well be a long-tail niche of fans, enthusiasts, and academics who have an interest in keeping it around for amusement or research.
This weekend, I attended the 2015 CCAG Show where gamers, fans, and collectors gathered to exhibit and trade vintage and recent video games, some approaching almost 40 years old. This celebration of living video game history has been going on for 10 years now, and was made possible by the love players have for these games, and the enduring survival of the physical medium into which they were encoded. Will there be anything like this for Games as a Service consoles and mobile devices? It seems very doubtful. Once the vendor no longer wants to support the product, they will shut it down, the lights will die, and the party is over, the attendees left standing around in the dark, shuffling to music that is no longer playing, wondering what it all meant, or if it even happened at all.
Historians such as Jason Scott, Henry Lowood, and others engaged in the struggle to preserve the history of the culture and industry of video games can do a great deal when it comes to archiving media and emulation of hardware, but when it comes to service-based business models, it becomes difficult if not impossible to envision how these things can be preserved so that future generations will be able to look back and see what was, and understand how we got here. The users only have access to the client side, and the service side is not only out of their reach, licensed for use but not owned, but it changes and evolves over time.
The ultimate laptop: retro modern ThinkPad
Lenovo started listening to years of ThinkPad fans griping yesterday.
Ars Technica picked up the story, and people are discussing it, really exited about the idea.
Yesterday I talked about what would make the perfect keyboard for my dream laptop.
Today I’ll talk about the features that I’d love to see on a new ThinkPad that harkens back to the best days of the product line.
Screen
- 15.4″ (but by all means, produce a full line of different sized ThinkPads with different screen sizes: 11″, 13″, 15″, 17″…)
- 16:10 aspect ratio — this is a MUST
- 10-bit IPS panel with at least up to 3K resolution
- glare-free matte surface, not glossy.
- not a touch screen (but I’m ok if it’s a configuration option at purchase)
Chassis
- Rugged, metal frame — aluminum, magnesium, or titanium
- Rubberized black paint finish
- Easy to work on. Repairing/replacing or upgrading the keyboard, RAM, and hard drive should be as easy as they were on the T61p.
- RAM slots sufficient to support at least 32GB of RAM
- Support ultrabay hard drive carrier
- Door/sliding cover for webcam for paranoid folks
- Sliding latch to securely hold lid closed
- Weight and thickness not primary concern, should not constrain design or compromise durability or features.
- Removable battery with sufficient capacity to run laptop for at least 12 hours of heavy, active use, on a charge — 18 hours would be even better. Yeah, a big bulky heavy battery. What good is the ultimate laptop if you can’t use it because it’s out of juice?
Ports
- Modern everything. HDMI-out or Display Port out instead of VGA. USB 3.0 slots (at least four of those).
- Gigabit ethernet (of course).
- Optional for SD card reader slot
- Full size slots, nothing proprietary or minimized for space
Mouse Double Click extension for GameMaker Studio provides double-click detection
Mouse Double Click is an Extension that provides two new GML functions, mouse_doubleclick_init() and mouse_check_doubleclick()
Written in pure GML, these new functions round out the built-in Mouse functions, allowing you to easily check for double-click events.
To use it, first call the mouse_doubleclick_init() function in the Create event for the object that will be handling click actions. This creates an instance variable used to perform timing checks for the double-click, like so:
//Create Event: mouse_doubleclick_init();
In a Step or Mouse event, call mouse_check_doubleclick(), passing in parameters for the mouse button to test for, and the doubleclick delay in microseconds (1/1,000,000th of a second).
//Mouse Event mouse_check_doubleclick(mb_left, 250000); //250000 microseconds = 1/4 of a second
mouse_check_doubleclick() will return true if there were two clicks within the duration specified by the second argument, and false if no double click is detected.
That’s all there is to it.
Tempest in a Teapot: IP Creator vs. IP Owner
ArsTechnica posted an article today about the current intellectual property holders of Atari being in communication with game developer Llamasoft (aka Jeff Minter), who programmed Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar in 1994, to suppress a game he recently released called TxK, which appears to be an update or sequel to Tempest 2000. (Tempest 2000 is itself a sequel of the Atari 1981 arcade smash hit Tempest, which was designed and programmed for Atari by Dave Theurer.)
On the face of it, it would appear that “Atari” has a pretty solid case. Very likely, Minter doesn’t own Tempest, Atari did (and the current owner of the Atari brand now does). Minter/Llamasoft almost certainly would have created Tempest 2000 as a work for hire, and the rights to it almost certainly were and are the exclusive domain of Atari. I don’t know the facts, I’m not a lawyer, but I am familiar with a bit of intellectual property laws, and to me it seems likely that unless Minter has a contract stating that he or Llamasoft is a part owner of the IP rights to Tempest 2000, unfortunately he probably doesn’t have much of a case should it come to a legal action against him for creating a game that is essentially Tempest 2000 for modern machines.
The thing is — and this is why I put “Atari” in quotes — the real Atari went out of business years ago, and the current company who owns their intellectual property isn’t the same company or the same people who created the games originally. This doesn’t change their legal standing with regard to ownership, unfortunately, and creates an interesting situation of the actual guy who created the game not having the rights to his own creation, aka John Fogerty syndrome.
While the legalities are probably pretty clear cut, my sympathies are with Minter, who clearly is more of a creator of Tempest 2000 than the current holder of Atari’s intellectual properties could ever hope to be. And the game he has produced does look like a worthy update to a classic game that was loved well by the golden era gamers of the pre-crash arcade era. Being a Jaguar release, Tempest 2000 was not as widely played or appreciated as it should have been, and a modern update that can be enjoyed by more people ought to be welcomed by the market. But because of trademarks and copyright and “works for hire”, Atari’s ghost probably does have it within its legal rights to quash the game if that’s what it wants to do. Hopefully, they and Minter can come to a happier arrangement. It sucks that a company that is doing little or nothing with an old back catalog of games can prevent its original creators from coming out with new innovations that build on their own earlier works.
Personally, my feeling is that the actual-creators should always retain a right to produce new stuff. It should be legally impossible for a creator to sign away the right to produce new original or derivative works of any property they had a hand in creating, even if they’ve sold the rights to a previously-created work. If a publisher wants to commission a work and wholly own it, such that the creator is labor and is paid one time for the work, and has no future rights to the work itself, I still feel that the actual people who did the creative things ought to be able to say, “I’m the Creator of [X] and although it’s not an officially recognized part of the canonical [Publisher]-owned [X], here, world, have a new [X]-thing that I made, because I had some more ideas and I wanted to make them, and share them with (or sell them to) the world.
But, in the legal real world, it doesn’t work that way. It all comes down to who the owner is, and ownership can be transferred. There’s no permanent right residing with an original creator, and it all comes down to the terms under which a work was authored and published.
This harkens all the way back to the early days of Atari, the famous Activision split, where several of Atari’s best developers went to Atari President and CEO Ray Kassar, asking for recognition of authorship and to have their names attached to the games they were producing. Kassar refused, famously insulting his best creators by telling them they had no more to do with Atari’s success than the people who assembled the games and put them in boxes. They left in revolt and formed Activision, the first third-party developer of console games, and credited themselves on their own creations and paid themselves royalties.
And more recently, Konami just had a falling out with Metal Gear auteur Hideo Kojima, and are in the process of removing his name from his creations. So in the future, if Hideo Kojima wants to create something new, it can’t be in the Metal Gear universe, which is owned by Konami. And Konami can do whatever they want with Kojima’s creations, legally, even if it sucks or is completely contrary to the spirit that Kojima put into his works.
There has always been this clash between business and creator, really any time a creative enterprise is something larger than one person can realize — any thing that requires teamwork necessarily entails contracts, and contracts are ugly things that can trip up someone who doesn’t have expert legal counsel on retainer, and that’s almost always something too expensive for creative types who often struggle financially to afford. This sort of thing happens all the time to creators with their works, and it’s terrible.
What it comes down to is this: Creators create properties. That’s where the value is. Owners tend to the the ones who monetize properties. But owners’ interest in monetizing properties shouldn’t inhibit creators from creating more value. Because ultimately, it’s creations that are the thing we should encourage.
I hope that Minter and Atari are able to work something out that is mutually beneficial, and doesn’t result in the game being pulled from the market. Like Minter said, they should be hiring him.
Update 8/8/2017:
Atari and Minter have come to an agreement, and a new game Tempest 4000 has been announced for release sometime this year on console and PC platforms. It’s unclear at this time whether this is a re-packaging of Minter’s TkX, or if this is a new game. This is a happy ending.
Play Tech acquires YoYoGames
News broke today that YoYoGames has been bought by PlayTech.
I don’t know what this will mean for the future of GameMaker: Studio, but often when a company sells a property to another party, or is acquired, there’s a distinct change in direction, and this usually makes people who’ve been happy with the current direction unhappy. As someone who’s been happy with the current direction that YYG has been steering GM:S for the last four years, I’m therefore concerned. What will the future bring? I have no idea. I just hope that GameMaker remains in good hands.
What I love and hate about game jams
This weekend was the weekend of Global Game Jam 2015. All over the planet, more than 10,000 participants got to try their hand at making a game in 48 hours, on the theme “What do we do now?”
I thought about the theme, and tried to imagine a situation that would lead someone to say, “What do we do now?” and the first think that came to mind was being stranded. Quickly, I envisioned a space ship that encounters a systems failure while in transit, and becomes disabled in deep space, with the crew left to figure out what to do to get things back working again. (more…)