2015

Posted on 22/11/2015 by Adam Lutton

Time for video games.

I’ve been playing stuff on and off recently. I occasionally hop back into Destiny to do my Dailies and whatever quests I feel like doing, and trying to grind to a high enough level so I can do the hard mode version of the King’s Fall raid.

I recently started Ryu ga Gotoku Zero (AKA, Yakuza Zero) and I’ve been enjoying it for the most part. Although it being completely in Japanese doesn’t help. At the same time, I’m not quite as drawn to the side material like gambling or pool like I previously have.

Kiryu’s new fighting styles are welcoming though, especially Rush which is an extremely fast paced fighting style, which is what I’ve been wanting more of since I played Akiyama in Yakuza 4.

Yakuza 5 should be out SOON (I hope).

Finally, I played Danganronpa Another Episode, which is a pretty damn cool game. As a shooter it works fine, the enemy variety and weapon mechanics make it worthwhile. The story is pretty weird. Unfortunately Junko doesn’t take over an AI or become some kind of transentient god; she’s not really in it at all. Instead, it’s just Komaru and Touko fighting their way through the city to make children stop killing adults. Which… Makes sense.

A friend of mine considers the story in those games to be nonsensical, and to some extent I agree with him. On the other hand, it doesn’t bother me that much. The amount of mind-fuckery is amusing, and the style the games have is just kinda awesome.

The ending cutscene was long though, holy fucking shit. I had to pause it at 2am after watching it unfold for the last hour, go to bed, wake up, and I still had about 40 more minutes to sit through plus an end boss. The game is still good though, worth playing.

That’s all. There’ll be a regular blog post within a week or so.

10/03/2015 – New 3DS Impressions and More.

Posted on 10/03/2015 by Adam Lutton

I’ll be short with my impressions of the New 3DS (Specifically the XL version). It’s a better handheld. The decreased load times, generally better performance, significantly improved 3D to the point it actually works, and a C-Stick.

That being said, the shitty ergonomic design that makes it difficult to hold for long periods remains, and frankly the improvements are not really enough of a justification to upgrade unless you really are in the market for a new one.

In my case, my old one went to my half-brother to replace his DS which was pretty much on its way out anyway.

In terms of games, getting to play Monster Hunter 4 at 60FPS is neat, but I don’t have much time for games these days.

I still prefer the Vita.

So that’s that.

In terms of life, I’m almost about to enter the part of the year where I go completely off the grid to complete coursework. And on that subject, a small rant.

The lack of documentation for building a music visualizer is mind-boggling. People have created them, made some really pretty ones, but nobody has really documented the low-level process of building one from scratch.

It’s taken me 7 months of hitting my head on a keyboard to finally reach a point where I understand exactly what it is doing from a processing standpoint. Something that I should have completed within the first month of this project. The problem is that my project is specifically focused on the data processing aspect of the audio. General audio APIs like FMOD or OpenAL don’t really give me what I want.

I’ll do a full write up on my project once Uni is finished, just so somebody somewhere doesn’t hit their head against a wall as hard as I did.

And finally, I’m entering Three Thing Game again. I’ll make a post about it after the event.

-Adam

Global Game Jam 2015 – Photo Dump and Thoughts

Posted on 27/01/2015 by Adam Lutton

COME ON AND SLAM, AND WELCOME TO GLOBAL GAME JAM!

So I travelled to Grimsby with Ed Brown for the 2015 Global Game Jam. This was the first time the event had been held there, and incidentally mine and Ed’s first time going there. It was held that the Grimsby Institute, which was actually quite a nice venue. It reminded me of “The Tech” in Omagh. Anyway, the theme this year was “What Do We Do Now?“.

Presentation before we began. Showing the theme.

After getting with a group of first years from the institute, we went about designing some ideas for what we wanted.

The whiteboard we stuck all our ideas to.

The “Yes” pile of ideas.

Originally, we sort of planned for a “What-if” scenario where the Y2K bug became real, and most computing equipment went completely haywire. The player played as an IT technician during the point when all the computing equipment was going nuts, and you had to navigate the environment. Later on, stealth mechanics, items, NPCs, and other environmental hazards would pop-up.

Writing some ideas.

The first level would have taken place in an office, and demonstrated some of the navigational mechanics the player has, as well as partly setting up the game world. The second level would act more as a set piece, showing the world around being thrown into a state of havoc. The third level that was planned was a underground level, showing more of the use of items and environment navigation.

First level design.

It was a very ambitious design, heavily relying on art. Thankfully we had 3 artists. The being said, the morning after, we abandoned the design in favour of something else.

The room we were stuck in for 48 hours.

Ed being Ed.

The new game was a more simplistic platformer that heavily relied on it’s art to standout. The reasoning for this decision was because we had 3 good artist, 1 sound guy, 1 good programmer (Ed), 2 not so good programmers (Including me), and 1 other person. The idea we originally came up with was quite taxing from both an art and programming standpoint, so changing it to something less crazy was probably for the best.

Anyway, GitHub is not as great as people say it is. With Unity anyway.

Myself and Ed hadn’t really used it much, so we had no idea what to expect. But basically it broke down to this; Ed would do a thing, someone else would do something as well, Ed would commit it, other guy would get a fuckload of conflicts and try to merge, other guy loses hours of work.

Because of that, programming turned into a “one PC at a time” kind of deal. So Ed was really the only person working on it from a programming perspective. Actually, his laptop’s Internet would crap itself, so it he eventually started using other people’s PCs. In case you were wondering what I ended up working on, I programmed the Checkpoints within the level (Which I then rewrote with Ed sitting next to me), made the particle effects for the butterfly, and rigged the level.

Oh yeah, I guess I haven’t explained fully what the game is. The game was a platformer where the character would try to chase a butterfly through a continuous level, filled with enemies and devious platforming. The butterfly was meant to represent the characters dreams. I won’t spoil what happens, you can play it for yourself later.

Anyway, in the downtime; I re-familiarized myself with Unity by watching tutorials. Especially the new ones that covered 2D games. After a while, I became more confident in my ability to work and started to help out a bit, suggesting solutions to problems and such.

The people we were working with were alright. Other than the occasional loud noises and Nerf gun fights, things were mostly pleasant. People coming into the room and distracting us was a problem during the second night though.

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Our team. Ed and myself on the far right.

Somehow I managed to get some sleep, although it was the most uncomfortable thing in the world having to sleep on the floor underneath a desk. Not to mention the sporadic heating problems, whether it was either too hot or too cold.

Anyway, back to the game.

The art was great, my checkpoints mostly worked, and it played fine.

There were a handful of issues, like most games made in 48 hours.

The collision detection on level objects was not correct, meaning the player would be left running or sliding on surfaces meant to be straight.
Checkpointing would break and the player was left floating between some objects if they died in a specific spot.
Enemies would get stuck on terrain.
Touch controls did not work that well.
There are missing aspects from the game, such as enemies, more platforming pieces, and events.

All things considered though, I’m relatively happy with what we made, and I had fun at the event. Eating food, bantering, designing things. Was fun.

And guess what, we won a thing:

Woo! We won a thing!

And then Ed (After being awake for about 30 something hours) drove me home. Which was fun because we were both tired and the GPS would occasionally point us in the wrong direction.

This is the second time I have stayed for the entirety of a jam, and the first time I stayed for the whole of a GGJ.

Our team’s page can be found here: http://globalgamejam.org/2015/games/painted-wings

Additionally, here’s Ed’s Blog and here’s an article about the jam.

For those wondering whether you should go to one of these things, I’d recommend it. But I’d also recommend bringing a sleeping bag.

-Adam

ADMAN’s Den – 09/08/2014: Life with a 144Hz Monitor, WiiU & PS4 thoughts.

Posted on 09/08/2014 by Adam Lutton

144Hz

A monitor like this has been something I’ve wanted for about a year or so. Since hearing John Carmack’s Keynote at QuakeCon when he talked about the benefits of a 120Hz monitor and how it significantly improved response rate. Finally, I managed to find one for less than £200 from a well-known brand. It’s a AOC G2460FQ.

First problem with it, it comes with a HDMI cable, however the cable is not cable of doing anything over 60Hz. Secondly, I had to purchase a new DVI cable to actually get it working properly. Once both of those issues were taken care of, I noticed an immediate difference in moment from the mouse alone. It’s incredibly smooth. I have two monitors, and the other is my old main 60Hz monitor from Acer. So I notice the difference quite clearly. Mouse moment is significantly choppier and stiff by comparison.

As for games.. I haven’t really been playing anything that takes full effect of it yet. I was tempted to try GRID Autosport, but I didn’t feel like playing it. I did play a lot of Deus Ex Human Revolution, and I can certainly say it seems smoother in parts.

Other than that, with adjusted options, this monitor is on-par visual wise with my old main, which was already an excellent monitor in regards to the contrast ratio and colour output. I still think my old one looks shaper, but the colours are less vivid.

All in all, I really like this monitor. Maybe I should boot up Quake.

WiiU

Let me be honest, outside of Uni and the other crap I’ve been doing, the reason I put off giving my impressions of this thing for so long is because I haven’t had much to play on it outside of Wii games. I mean I fucking love the fact that it is backwards compatible, but still.

Although I should start off with that. It is basically a Wii when it comes to backward compatibility. Wait no, it is a Wii. It’s not emulating it, it is one. Anyway, any Wii game works and all the controller stuff works fine (Except GameCube stuff, but I don’t have any of that). Only thing I wish it would do is have some filtering options, better scaling, and maybe some AA. Other than that, everything looks fine.

In terms of actual WiiU games, I’ve only got 4:

Windwaker HD
Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate
Wonderful 101
Mario Kart 8

Windwaker looks pretty good and runs perfectly. Wonderful 101 has it’s charms and barely ever drops below 60FPS. Mario Kart 8 looks really good, but that’s probably more to do with the art style choice of the tracks than actual graphical ability. It does the job. No, it’s a fucking power-house, but the games I have look and run perfectly fine.

One thing I ended up doing on it was using it to watch stuff on YouTube and Amazon Instant Video, along with other things in the browser. The web browser is pretty fucking impressive, and is easily the best web browser I’ve used on a console. As for Amazon Instant Video, it woks, but the UI can be kind of choppy at times.

Frankly, that’s my one major complaint about the system, the load times on the menus for fucking dreadful. I’m sometimes sitting there for a good 10-20 seconds waiting for thing to load, and this is after all the patches. I know there’s one released super-recently which might improve it more, but I haven’t installed it yet.

On a final note, MiiVerse is a cool idea. Too bad no-one gives a damn about it.

Look at all these friends I don’t have.

Overall, it’s not a bad console to be honest. The things it does well are enough to justify it. Backwards compatibility are a good selling point seeing as you’ll probably want to check out the few JRPGs the Wii had. And the games it currently has work fine and are fun. It’s a good console. Also, the Pro Controller is pretty damn good and has an insane battery life.

PS4

Now that you’ve skipped ahead to the point you actually want to read, let me tell you about the PlayStation 4.

It’s shit.

Nah, just kidding. But there is more promised potential than it actually has features right now. Games wise, I’ve got MGSV Ground Zeroes and InFAMOUS Second Son on disc, and Resogun as a downloadable title. I have more download stuff, but it’s the only one I’ve played. Anyway, I’m satisfied with graphics improvement that the PS4 offers. It’s not amazing, but it is an improvement. What I’m most looking forward to is a heavier use of custom shaders to get some cool effects. However, the problem InFAMOUS and MGS have is draw distance. InFAMOUS has some really bad moments where the other end of a street can look untextured and blurry. I kind of expected it though.

Another thing I hope for is more photo modes like InFAMOUS, look at these:

I’m not sure how many people agree with me, but I think that shit looks cool. Which brings me on my next point, the Share button.

Now, people like me have use for this thing because I like taking pretty screenshots of games or recording interesting moments. And while the screenshot feature works as intended, I’ve been having issues with the video stuff. Basically, it isn’t saving any videos whenever I press the button for first time booting up the console, so whenever I need it to work, it doesn’t. I’m not sure if anyone else has this problem, but it annoys the shit out of me. Another thing, the quality when streaming from the console is awful, even with HD selected. Frankly, you should get a capture setup if you are actually serious about streaming. It’s not like those are terribly expensive anyway.

I mentioned before how much I like the PS4 controller from a comfort perspective, but actually using it with a PS4, still the best controller out there right now. I don’t like the materials on the sticks, but other than that. From a functionality stand point, CAN DEVELOPERS STOP USING THE TRACKPAD FOR BOTH START AND SELECT FUNCTIONALITY? Fucking Hell. Use the options button for the Pause Menu, and the trackpad button for what used to be known as the “Select screen”, or “Map screen”, or whatever the fuck games used it for. MGS has this problem. Whenever I try to get the pause menu, he pulls up the I-Droid shit. But pressing options is just pause, and no menu. Why would you do that? Holy shit.

Another thing, let me decide if I want sounds coming out my controller or not, don’t force them on by default. The only way to get around it in InFAMOUS is to stick headphones in. As for the lightbar, well I usually sit with my legs crossed, leaning back into the chair, so my legs block the light from the controller glaring the screen. Even still, the light from my window gives a more significant glare than the controller does.

Vita Remote Play works for the most part. I tried a little bit of InFAMOUS and it seemed to work fine, give or take 50ms or so of latency. You just have to be careful of the connection. I lost connection while using my Vita, and the game no longer registered regular controller input, the console then had a hard crash which required me to unplug it because it wouldn’t turn off via the switch.

Applications like the PSN Store and Amazon Instant Video are much smoother on the PS4 than they were on the PS3. Especially the former. Trying to use the store on PS3 is a nightmare. It’s slow and really unresponsive at times.

Miscellaneous things like friends lists, profile view, and trophy lists have been improved in various ways, mostly from a UI perspective.

Overall, there are a lot of things I still want, mostly MP3 support and custom backgrounds. But for what’s there now… It’s good, but I wouldn’t recommend buying one unless you really want to play something on it RIGHT NOW.

—

I would usually talk about anime stuff now, but it’s been so long since I did this type of blog that it would take a really long time. So instead here’s a link to my MAL account. It should give you an idea of what I’ve been watching lately. If there’s anything specific I feel like talking about, I might post about it.

Only anime related thing I feel like talking about in any sense is Monogatari. To which I say; I looking forward to Hana next week.

Later

-Adam