I had great days on the Alpe di Siusi (Alp of Siusi) or SeiserAlm as those who live there call their home. It is a lovely and smooth plateau at around 1800m, braced by imposing Dolomite pikes. Sasso Piatto (“Flat Stone” a sort of understatement) bounds the East side, while Denti di Terra Rossa (“Red Soil Teeth”) bound the South Side and ends with the tooth shaped Sciliar pike.We had sun for nearly seven days and, despite of the warm winter, snow was enough to ski.
Alas, in order to appreciate great things, we have to compare them with the grey, dull industrial landscape of Castellanza, that’s why (I guess) I’m back home and at work.
The first interesting surprise hitting me at work has been the anticipation of the milestone I was working for. Our customer product has been selected for a design prize, so we are expected to deliver the working product earlier. Anyway we’re working hard, against time and hardware shortage to hit the milestone nonetheless.
At home, Santa (in the person of my wife) gave me a Xbox 360 and I started playing a not-so-Xmas-spirit game: Gears of War. I’m about the first boss and I should say that it’s great. From the technical viewpoint I think this is one of the first real next gen game. It runs on the Unreal 3 engine and the look is as detailed as awesome. The gameplay is based on taking cover, i.e. as soon as enemies are encountered you should take cover or you get badly shot. This is somewhat different from the classical shooter where the player drives a Rambo-like bullet-proof character (well, in Serious Sam, this was intended). The first boss is a chasing game play – run away from the monster, let him smash the doors for you and eventually take him off. Great.
While I was so fresh from the holidays and relaxed from Gears of War, I decided to update my notebook to the latest linux available. I gave a brief look to Sabayon Linux, only to discover that it behaves badly with the Toshiba touch pad and apparently has no support for my wireless adapter (I can’t believe that today distros still do not support the Centrino wireless adapter that is so widespread and at least two years old). So I turned to what I know quite well – Fedora Core 6.
I opted for the upgrade option instead of the install. Years ago I was used to upgrade, only to find that the system resulted in something that wasn’t completely new nor old and often was prone to glitches. A friend of mine suggested me to never upgrade, rather to backup the /home directory, install and restore it. This time I was so light from the holidays that I decided that an upgrade could do.
Well, I was wrong.
Yes I got a sort of FC6 tailored on my previous FC4 installation, and, yes, the wireless adapter sorta worked. But I could only browse the google website. No matter how I set the firewall/SELinux properties, there was no way to browse the rest of Internet. But this is another story.
Rainbow spectrum
You know you’re old when you’d like to start today blog entry with something like: “There was a time when 1k was your roof. Everything, well packed, had to fit in this size. When the ZX Spectrum arrived with the full glory of its 16k in the budget model and astonishing 48k in the advanced model, it was really a quantum leap.” I tried to avoid all this gone golden age crap even if those times were really great and exciting. As most geeks of my generation I learned computing the hard way on a Spectrum, then it came the Amiga, but it was the next quantum leap.
So, aside of meeting some old friends, I was quite intrigued when I heard about the retrocomputing fair held last week end in Varese.
The fair was small, just two crowded rooms, filled mainly with Spectrum derivatives and other Sir Sinclair creations. Being there with my wife I started searching the original Spectrum, the one with the blue gum-looking key buttons. This proved to be quite hard, there was just one (empty) case, at the end of the first room.
Looking at the device, after my explanation of what and why, my wife asked: “But, why computers were so small then and now are so large?”.
Look at the Speccy, it is maybe 25cm by 15cm (more likely some round number expressed in inches), all included but the power supply and the mass storage. Now look at your nearest PC, it is huge compared.
That’s damn a good question. If you think at it, it is not the mass storage – a 1Gb smart digital card is smaller than your thumb, my Palm Tungsten is smaller than the Spectrum and has 64Mbyte of RAM and a 400Mhz CPU. Therefore I’m sure we can build unbelievably powerful computer the size of the Spectrum, saving lot of space in our houses. So why?
I think it is just the way taken by the evolution. Our modern PCs are descendant from the first IBM PC which in turn was inspired by the Apple II. Both were large boxes, filled with empty space in order for people to spend their money filling them in. Adding memory, I/O, storage, and so on. So today you buy a PC that’s based on the same philosophy, even if just a small fraction of buyers will change anything inside, you can add memory, change your video card or upgrade your CPU.
Home computers, luckily, didn’t disappear, they left they legacy to game consoles. In fact, it is here that you find the same strive for compactness (look at the slim PS2!), the same standardization in the hardware, the same fast boot time… they even connect to the TV set like 20 years ago!
What is missing from the current generation of video game console is the chance for everyone to program them. I mean to legally programming them, allowed by their manufacturers. Actually console manufacturers fear the piracy that could arise from letting everyone program their hardware. The PSP case is emblematic. You can do your own PSP home-brew development by downgrading the firmware to v1.0. This is easily achieved on v1.5, somewhat achievable on later releases of the software. Anyway every time you do this you risk to turn your precious handheld into an useless brick. Sony, rather than finding a constructive way to deal with the hobbyist community, choose the destructive path of having all the retail games and demo that update the firmware to the latest version, basically having everyone to chose between having only home-brew (or pirated) software or only original software.
This will go on until someone will make an hardware modchip that will allow users to have both a development firmware and the original one. It is just a matter of time, it is a lost battle for Sony.
I acknowledge that the business model of nowadays console manufacturer is pretty different from the old home computer manufacturers, but I wonder what could happen if the same effort gone into preventing users to run their software on their hardware would have gone into creating constructive ways for discouraging piracy while empowering the home-brew community.
Raiding tombs … again
The first Tomb Raider shook the videogame world, but I was on another world – no PS1 and not playing any videogames (sort of Max dark-age). So overbreasted Miss Videogame just marginally hit my interest. Then it came a time when I started playing on PC and I got a bonus copy of “Tomb Raider III”. I started playing it with my wife… Lara’s moves were rather clumsy, puzzles not always so intuitive and micrometric precision was required for jumps. All these factors and an overall technical obsolescence let me lose my interest around the 3rd map. The second encounter in tombs came for work reason. I was chosen to be the lead programmer for Tomb Rider – The Prophecy the GameBoy Advance Game. The idea of working with this subject was really amazing, unfortunately the project was on a such aggressive schedule that it bit. 3 months to modify engine and implement the game, while another game was ongoing.
At last I played through all the game and I enjoyed it. Despite some repetitiveness caused by the shrunk time.
Fast forward about one month ago. I had a buying impulse I couldn’t repress, so I was choosing among a bunch of XBox titles, and Lara blinked her eye from the cover. I had read some positive review so it could have been a good choice. So I get out of the shop with my brand new copy of “Tomb Raider – Legends”
The game is nonetheless good. From the technical point of view is quite strong, even if you would expect a better implementation of the character shadow. I think it is better to have no shadow rather than a wrong one, it just breaks the suspension of disbelief.
Puzzles are quite easy (I got stuck just once), the jumping, grasping is quite forgiving and often delivers a good cool-factor.
Scenarios are intriguing and the story, at least from what I have heard, should be entertaining. In fact the dialogs among characters were unbelievably soft, I barely could hear. I don’t know if it is just my TV set becoming too old, or the Italian translation that had some problem.
Beware of the spoil
What is disappointing to me is that the game is very short, I spent about 10 hours and that means that a good player could get through in half the time. No comparison with the endless Serious Sam I played before.
The other really disappointing part is that there is no ending. Just defeat the last boss and you get some hints that the story is not over that there is still something to do (don’t ask me what I couldn’t hear) and … credits.
It is even worse than Halo 2. At least with Halo the ending offers a good satisfaction to the player, the story is not over, but this chapter is well closed.
It seems much like the developers ran out of money or time and were forced to put an end and shipping as the game was.
Anyone interested in a second hand copy? 🙂 Well, it’s not that bad, I would rate it 6.5/10, for sure I don’t want to replay it, there’s no sense in playing it again just for searching all the hidden objects (3-4 per map) that just allows you to see new dresses for Lara or weapon power-up.
When the times get tough…
…the tough get going. Yesterday, after a long kill-every-moving-thing-alien-or-not session I finished Serious Sam for XBox.Ehy that’s a great game. It’s not technically outstanding, surely not by today standards, but it has real genius in the gameplay and the character. It is continuously joking over the shoot-em-up genre and the tough hero stereotype.
The story is pretentious – some aliens from Sirio are invading the Earth. You, as Serious Sam, have to defeat them. It not that you are under-numbered in the quest, after all they are all alone, but you have to collect some artifacts here and there in the humanity (o alienity) history, going back and forth the timeline, bringing your wealth of destruction and pain from ancient Egypt to Mayan, to middle age civilizations.
The game is, first of all, humorous. Starting from your weapon set, where you find the usual guns, grenade and rocket launchers, the less usual flame-thrower and chainsaw, the quite exotic cannon (yes one cannon you could find on a pirate galleon) and the exotic serious bomb – a comic-like spherical bomb that causes a pocket nuclear explosion. It is humorous in the gameplay with jokes and clever stuff everywhere. Hardly forgettable is the bouncing room where everyone (you and your enemies) keep bouncing.
It is humorous in odd things you find around. It is impossible to not laugh when you find the Secret Santa Claus.
Despite of this the gameplay is solid, somewhat cathartic in the shooting, never frustrating thanks to the nearly total lack of puzzle to solve and the big yellow flashing arrows clearly indicating what you ought to take or to do before advancing to the next level.
Well done Croteam.
Halo 2
According to the January Issue of Edge, 2004 has to be considered the best year for videogaming ever. Half Life 2 seemed to have reached so high mark that I doubted anything could come close. Anyway I had to reconsider this after starting playing Halo 2. First I have to say that I didn’t play Halo 1. Yes I know, at this point some friends from Redmond would start making some hostile screaming, but that is. I wasn’t able to overcome the frustration of playing an FPS with the analogue stick instead of the mouse (as FPS are meant to be played) in the first level.
I get back to Halo 2 thank to the suggestion of my friend Paggio who described it as a masterpiece (along with Prince of Persia 2). And I should add that some TV commercials made their job clearing up all my doubts.
Halo 2 is truly spectacular game, in the Hollywood sense. Be prepared for fast action, humor and great cut-scenes. Maybe it’s the first time I see some cut-scenes with a real movie taste, where huge, armored space ships moves and acts as you would expect and not like a detailed, but dummy and empty geometric model.
I really appreciate some clever tricks, for example most of the FPS available on console allows you to reverse the Y-axis of the analogue stick. The net result I got has always been I moved the stick the wrong direction and never understood which was my natural movement (of course the natural movement for this kind of game is the one of moving a mouse). Halo 2 avoids all this pain by an in-game trick. Right at the start of the first level you are given a new armored suite and a pal ask you to calibrate the new suite, by looking at the lit one from 4 lights cleverly placed up, down, left and right. In this way the program is able to detect your natural movement and configure consequently.
So you start playing. The saga is intriguing, maybe I’m loosing something since I can’t always play with a loud volume and I didn’t listen carefully to all dialogues. Anyway objectives are pretty clear.
Another smart move from bungie is the objective aid. After a while that the game detects the player is not making any progress in the right direction a voice comes to help. If the player is still wandering after a while, then a direction is graphically marked on the display hinting you the right door/direction to take to accomplish the goal.
I found this a very good compromise since it doesn’t spoil anything to the hardcore gamer, but helps first softly, then more decisively the “non professional” player saving her/him some frustration (or worse abandoning the game because too difficult).
From the gameplay point of view I think Halo 2 is good and robust, but lacking of ‘adventure’ taste. I.e. in Half Life 2 (the comparison is unavoidable) the player has to operate some traps in order to advance, providing an extra game play level other than just gunning everything alive (and not, when dealing with zombies). Halo 2 is a plain shooter, extra polished and very entertaining, but it is just that – combat evolved.
Talking about zombies I’ve found some … er… citations of Half Life 2. There are some levels with mutants … really really close to the one found by Gordon Freeman, there are even mutants carrying load of infecting blobs.
From the technical point of view Halo 2 is for sure a masterpiece, first of all it loads just once, after that all levels are streamed from the disc while playing. During the cut-scene the graphic engine enters a super detailed mode that for sure makes the XBox sweat, but the look is great. Halo 2 engine is taking the XBox hardware to its limits, you’ll notice in some occasions that the scene is … built, first undetailed models are shown and in a few frames all the wrapping arrives. Apart from this I never notice severe frame drop in the game play, despite the number of enemies, graphical effects or the huge dimension of the set.
So far so good, what isn’t so good? It happened a couple of time I found what I would call A-class bugs, falling forever below the ground, or missing the time to enter a door to find it closed and being blocked in an hangar. Anyway these problems are not so annoying, first they seldom happen, and the checkpoint save is very fine grained, so restarting from the last checkpoint won’t waste to much time.
Talking about checkpoints, it is a very natural way of saving, when you are done, you just select save & quit from the in-game menu, and the next time you’ll restart from the last checkpoint you reached. This is so natural and the save&quit happens so little, that a couple of times I forget about it and I had to replay quite large sections of the game.
Keeping on the comparison between Half Life 2 and Halo 2, in this game too you are provided, sometime, with a team of warriors helping you, what is different from HL2, is that now they are smart. First of all they never get into you preventing from doing what you intend to do. They are also smart enough to not ruining your stealth entrance in room. They keep themself quite always out of your line of fire.
Halo 2 is for sure a game to play, at least as much as Half Life 2 was. Maybe 2004 wasn’t the best year ever for videogames, but H2 and HL2 are two of the best games ever, my word.
Half Life 2 – completed
Everything in this finite world has an ending, but some things leave sensations that are going to stay with you if not forever at least for quite a long time.Half Life 2 is among these. I completed it in an addicted play and had a great fun, astonishment, and wonder. This game beyond its limits (a few) and its strong points (many) has been able to deliver thick emotions.
The way opened by HL2 is clear and straightforward, it is possible to have very immersive simulations, fun to play, with a good gameplay and story telling. The technology is not a limiting factor, as someone would like to put, but it is an enabling factor to reach new levels in the interactive entertainment.
About the story telling, I’m quite sure that HL2 has just one single story, you cannot really go out of the railway the authors put there, and there is just a single track. I haven’t found this limiting, instead I think that a clever railway system is able to deliver a better involvement in the player, being able to trigger the right emotion at the right time.
As I said before the italian dubbing is a real shame.
There are a couple of things missing (or maybe it’s just me) – the team of soldiers you get in the second half of the game is not always very intelligent. For Example I’ve been blocked by them under the fire of an automatic gun. They are quite fast to get out of your feet (with a silly sounding “mi scusi” that is “I beg your pardon” in italian), but they are too many times too close to your way. It happened more than once that I lost all the team as soon as I acquired it because they acted if not silly at least not in a very intelligent way.
Also in the second half of the game you keep finding ant-calling-spheres but anywhere I tried I hadn’t been able to gather lion-ants.
And third, I remember of some promo movies, where a soldier is hit by a tentacle just in front of the camera… well I hadn’t find this moment.
But these are just minor annoyances… I’m looking forward HL3 :-).
Half Life – Full entertainment
Playing half life 2 is an enjoyable experience. I really mean. I think this game is going to be the reference against which other games will be compared.The enemies AI is interesting. For example I found that a zombi after “understanding” he could not reach me directly, since I was on a high platform, grabbed a chair and threw it at me. What’s amazing is that the chair was one I took from another platform and fired it down into the square were the zombies were wandering.
Given this very polished game features it’s very surprising to discover quite a poor dubbing. Valve chose non-professional actors or gave them not enough information to do their work. You suppose that during a battle a comrade shouting: “watch out Mr. Freeman” would add an intensity and an emotion quite different from a pal asking for pop-corns in front of a TV screen. The latter is what you get in HL2… At least talking about the italian version. Also most of the actors aren’t italian for sure, altough very clear and understandable, their voices have foreign accent.
Anyway the game is really a great game. The more you go further in the story, the more you can appreciate the rythm and pace of the sequence.
Albeit this is the first release and I have applied no patches the game never crashed (sadly a rare case for PC games) and I got no severe bugs. Well done Valve!
How to eat up all your spare time – play Half Life 2
Some more book reviews have been added in the reading section – most notably the “C++ Standard Library”.Well Half Life 2, it took some 5 years and a huge amount of hype to be completed. Now it’s here and … I think it is really worth the wait. From the beginning it has all the feature of a masterpiece – an intriguing start, an addicting plot, an impressive art direction and implementation. When you start playing a bit a time, right at the beginning you are just following the trail, you’ll discover that there is a solid gameplay for you.
From the technical view point the game is astonishing. First of all you can run it on a box that is not bleeding edge technology. The box on which it’s running is a AMD Athlon 2000+, with 512M RAM and a GeForce 3 video card. Setting the resolution to 800×600 you get just some annoying jittering after the level loading.
Then there is the physics. There are environments with tens of objects you can manipulate and interact. The physical behaviour of solids is quite credible and there aren’t those odd trembling when objects collide.
I think I’m far from completing it (I’m not a fast player, and in this case I’m happy to be like this so that I can better taste and feel the experience), and the game is holding all its promises. The only way it can somewhat delude is by having a quick and easy ending… but I don’t think it’s the case.
Being so perfect there is some things you can easily forgive (or forget) on another game, but it is more difficult here. For example your body is transparent. When you look at detailed backdrops and then look down, you expect to have a body. Loading times are a bit slow and the initial loadings lack a progress bar.
But this is just minor annoyance. The worse thing of the game is the installation. First you need to be connected to internet and given the time I spent for installation on the workplace 2Mbit, I suggest to count 56k modems as “internet not available”. Also Valve decided to go on their own protocol and made it incompatible with existing ones. So you cannot hope for the usual HTTP proxy or NAT inside a firewall to connect for installation.
The (relativaly) good news is that after installing and registering the product you no longer need the internet connection. From my understanding this system purpouse is not just to try to keep piracy away, but to distribute (read sell) next products. For sure this could be done better, but has interesting potential.
LMX: Hoax, Fake or Fraud?
This is my last post about LMX AKA Lightmotion, on the other hand, their website is now down, and this could mean that these people won’t harm anyone at least in this way. All links you’ll find here are to Italian-only pages.
I did some investigation on Friday, starting from the email address contained in the DNS records for the domain lmfx.com. This address led to a bunch of messages on the provider forum. The most interesting message is the one in which the writer asks for a way to create a mailing list given a list of mail addresses in a text file. Sounds like a spammer wannabe? Note that this message was written on Jul, 7th, around the days when the lightmotion job offerings were posted around the world.
Another interesting post is found in the gameprog.it job offering site, where he looks for programmers and artists to create a video game. This post is quite old dating back to September 2002, but you can recognize the idea of working for him, in your spare time, while keeping your work. The other point is that in this post you find two other email addresses of him.
By googling the latest you get pointed to a first surprise – in December 2003, he is claiming that he is studying C++ at university and he is looking for a Visual Basic program that has to perform some suspicious operations of search and extraction.
The last post of notice is the request for a program again about strings search and extraction, but this time the author explicitly writes about extracting email addresses from web pages.
The author this time claims he is studying Java at university and he’s looking for a C++ implementation. Since some users of the forum doubted some spam intents, he declared that this request was for an Economy course assignment about how to speed up recruitment.
I’d like to stop here (otherwise it would seem personal bashing) leaving the conclusion to you.
Commotion for LightMotion
I’ve been busy for a while, this is why there are no updates. Anyway, I’d like to write a couple of lines (well… maybe something more) about the Light Motion affair. At the beginning of July in several computer graphics-related forums on the internet appeared a job offering from an unknown company LightMotion.
In the ads, LightMotion claimed to be a corporation with studios and partner studios everywhere in the world, with headquarters in a small town in Southern Italy (Minervino di Lecce). Going to their website you were welcome with an impressive portfolio of movie titles to which LightMotion pretended to have contributed either for CG, SFX, or other services.
As soon as we discovered this company site, here at UbiSoft, I started doing some investigation. If the company was as large as the site pretended to be, then the Internet should be full of references… hardly big things like this go unnoticed these days 🙂
But googling for references to LightMotion or key employees cited in the site yielded no results.
Then on RenderGlobal an Italian CG forum, a thread appeared on the topic, with people posing questions about LighMotion and its credibility. Soon a new user joined the forum claiming to be the LightMotion PR. In his first post he assured that the company was created in Italy, but in Italy just kept a small advertising studio. The real company HQ had to be in California. In closing of the message, he declared that the company was about to open some videogame development studios in Milan and that forum users could mail him an invitation to a conference in Milan for the event.
At this point, many had already sent their CV and some started to ask for invitations. The answer to all these emails asked for a CV, a color picture of the applicant, and his/her identity card (or other document) photocopy.
If the site and the internet search made me suspicious, the ID card request triggered a lot of alarm bells. Why on earth they would need such a document for a CV submission or a conference invitation? More likely it could be about faking ID cards or other frauds I can’t imagine of.
Anyway, the forum was plenty of skeptical people, too. The street address reported on the site wasn’t precise and the PR attempted to produce some clarifications. Also, the lack of information was motivated as the company was renowned in its industry and didn’t need to advertise elsewhere. And the board of directors was composed of lawyers and accounts that didn’t want visibility. Nonetheless, in every post, the LightMotion PR required people to send them CVs and invitation requests.
As time passes, the forum grows hot. More and more people are interested, and many are skeptical or dubious about the company. LightMotion PR attempts again to clear things up, declaring that the site is somewhat ambiguous because it has been developed by an external studio, and that for movie contracts often they turn the deal to one of their associate and therefore it is the associate names to appear in the movie credits.
I decided to enter the arena by posting in the forum that ‘often’ is not ‘always’ and therefore should exist at least one movie with LightMotion cited in the credits.
A while after my post, the LightMotion site was replaced with a disclaimer page stating (in Italian) that the lmfx.com website was a part of a school project, without commercial purposes and it’s not a company website; they took no responsibility for names reported in the site and that someone was speculating on the school-project claiming the company was real.
At this point, a new user enters the forum and claims himself the LightMotion website author. He confirms basically what the replacement page declared. Anyway, he adds that the site may be restored online again with some precautions to avoid similar abuse in the future.
That’s not the end… still, many questions were opened, and doubts were still there. Who received the emails, why the replacement page was in Italian only, which school was involved, and so on. One thing that smelt badly from the beginning was that every piece of text coming from LightMotion had been typed with spaces before commas and dots. That’s quite an unusual mistake, it could be just a coincidence, but it was odd that many people sported that typing feature.
On Jul 15th the LightMotion PR user dropped the mask and claimed to be a 16-year-old boy just willing to challenge his ability and confirm the school-project nature of the website. Many apology messages follow from the two users (the website author and the 16-year-old boy). Forum users were quite upset by the story and many of them menaced legal actions against the two users.
The story is going to have another twist. The website author posted another message declaring that everything could be solved by turning LightMotion into a real company, with a web design studio and hiring one or two artists.
The story was really getting crazy! Not only because many questions weren’t still answered, but also because the two guys were pretending that the forum users should feel in debt with them because they were trying to settle the thing.
Shortly after, the forum moderators locked the discussion since it seemed no longer related to the forum topic. Also, the moderator confirmed that they tried to ban the user’s job offerings, and the LightMotion user insisted and menaced not to harm his business.
The story was not over yet.
The site was brought online again, again with no disclaimer or warning sign. Some coworkers who had sent their CVs were contacted via email from LightMotion. Another thread in renderglobal started with the objective of warning people about LMFX/LightMotion dubious activities. In this thread, you can also get a recording of a phone call made by one forum user pretending to be an ILM lawyer and asking to remove the ILM name from the site.
In another thread, this time started by someone in LightMotion, they claimed that now a company was constituted by the name of LightMotion, and now everything was legal, they were preparing a game concept to propose to a publisher, they were hiring artist (!), and that every defamatory message should be quit to avoid consequences.
When I started writing this I thought that this affair was over, but I got some news during the blog update. What is certain is that it is not a clear situation. Even if the site has been made by a boy as a joke, then converted into a real company with the help of his teacher, I won’t recommend anyone to join this company because of the lack of transparency and clear answers. The other relevant thing is that unfortunately, the Italian workforce is “hungry” for this kind of company. There are bright and great professionals in these advanced fields (Computer Graphics, Video Games, … ) but there aren’t opportunities for them to express their skills. Most of the time they are forced to work underpaid for some small and dull company.
If LightMotion were for real then I bet that they would have the chance to conveniently hire a lot of excellent people and to create CG and VG Dream Teams.