Register One - I can't believe this title line was messed up for an entire year.

Panda Redux
Posted by on March 19, 2006 - anggh a.m.

More filler, this one all the way back from winter break (well, obviously?). This was a holiday card I had ready to go on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, I didn't have any of the other stuff I wanted to give out, so they've slowly trickled out over the last few months.

I've been sitting in my chair, staring at my monitors for pretty much the last four days straight. I'm going to sleep so my back can pretend to recover before I do the exact same thing for the next six days. At least tomorrow involves more Photoshop and fewer painfully small fonts. Then it's back to text for four or five days. Then spring break, where I plan to get 192 hours of sleep. Gotta work for it though.

Games!
Posted by on December 28, 2005 - viva a.m.

Oddly enough, I never talk about video games, though I do play them now and then (and that stopped being an understatement once college and the comic hit). So, now that I've got time, I have some thoughts about them, particularly on their graphics and the trend towards "realism" in games like Battlefield 2.

With the PS3 launch approaching and XBOX three-what-were-we-smoking-when-we-named-this-sixty already out, it's time to take a step back and look at where all this new expensive graphics technology is leading too. Today, gamers are bombarded with clips of all these fancy upcoming titles touting their soft shadows and displacement mapping, their motion blur and depth of field effects, their HDR Lighting and subsurface scattering, and the visuals are truly stunning. Now, this argument gets made every time a new generation of graphics engines breaks out into the open, but nonetheless, you can't look at these trailers and think, "Wow, how much left will there be to add in a few years?" New games are the driving force behind the graphics card companies, what would happen when games reach a level of detail where any more graphical bells and whistles become unnoticeable? One might be tempted to jump onto the "innovative gameplay" wagon, leaving the graphics card companies in limbo, but not me. I'm a forward thinker. I have vision. It's plain to see where games are going.

The trend for the future is determined by the single key issue shared universally by all gamers when they sit down to play a game. Whether be it Counter-strike, Civilization IV, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XVIII, Doom 7: Tech Demo's Revenge, Unreal Tournament 20073573: It Still Feel Like NERF, The Sims 3: Festival of Expansions, or Fantavision, there is one key concern: people better be damn pretty when we kill them.

Nothing says, "You're having fun!" like a screaming death. We'll have more blood, better looking blood, better sounding blood. When we shoot the person of tomorrow in the face, it will spew at least seventeen buckets' worth, and it won't be that pansy particle or sprite blood you get today. It will have have a viscosity determined by blood type, it will glob together and separate realistically, it will shine with glorious specular and subsurface scattering, and it will cast soft red shadows all over the distorted corpse behind it.

It would, however, be premature to stop at blood. When you shoot a soldier in Battlefield 9, he will not flop to the ground like some helpless fish. Granted, there will be blood by the boatload, we've made sure of that, but that's not all we can give. When the hot metal shards enter his body, he will twinge, grimace, and keel over in the appropriate manner based upon exactly what vital organs, tissues, and bones have been sundered. He will spasm in the damaged muscles, clutch where fluids leak from his body, and moan with the just right level of gurgling.

But we can do better, and this next step will be the culmination of all the technical advances in the gaming world: with our dedicated hardware of the future, each soldier spawned will have a history dynamically created for him, from the cradle to boot camp. With an exponential list of permutations, each corpse will have a truly unique life story: was he picked on as a kid, was he the prom king, what his first job in retail, who was the first girl he kissed, was she pretty, was he desperate, who was the second, who was the hundredth, who is waiting for him to come back, was there ever anyone at all, did his mother love him, did his father beat him, was he drafted, was he only enlisted in the Reserve for college tuition, did the war wreck his home and kill his family, did he plan to backpack across Europe with his friends and marry his girl when the war ended, all these factors and more will determine if our soldier calls for a medic, calls for his mother, or just sighs as he chokes on his river of blood.

With any luck, we'll have the first generation of NVIDIA and ATI dedicated Death Cards by Spring 2007, with $200 entry level cards for the enthusiast and $750 cards available to the hardcore, able to pump out four times as many viscosity calculations per cycle, eight times if linked via SLI. By 2008, every game from GTA 3: Antarctica to Harry the Hippo's Arithmetic Adventure will require a Death Accelerator to play. Game developers will devote entire teams to dynamic death effects, with bold innovations from Id Software putting organ matter and upside-down skulls in the blood, and unparalleled customizability from Epic Games allowing you to create your own blood, though there will be an initial rush to clone the blood from Counter-strike by 90% of the modding population, most of which will never see their first alpha. Valve will still be working on Team Fortress 2, but rest assured, it will have lots of blood, streams of blood, your own blood at the edge of your vision, out of focus and glowing with blown out HDR lighting. So when you look at those XBOX 360 and PS3 screenshots, realize that you haven't seen anything yet, and that you'll just have to wait until the technology catches up.

(Wow, that was pretty long. I was testing out a keyboard as I wrote. Hey, Logitech, what are you thinking?)

184. Video: Edith and I are up late ~~studying for midterms~~ watching crazy German music videos from the 90s. I'll miss college.

183. Video: Edith, the darling lass pictured above, will be performing this later this semester. I'm not sure what the protocol is when you find out your girlfriend is a zombie, but I guess I'm glad to have advanced warning that she'll be eating my brains at some point.

182. Video: Women in Western Art. Pretty niftay.

181. Comic: Copper is updating again! Glee!

180. Japanese Insanity Guitar Bear Pink Japan: WHAT?WHAT?WHAT?WHAT?WHAT?WHAT?WHAT?WHAT?WHAT?WHAT?WHAT?WHAT?WHAT?

179. Video: Pac Man invasion. Old, I guess, but still required viewing.

178. Comic: Piled Higher and Deeper: So awesome! Also makes me not want to go to gradschool. Though, it worked out for my dad anyway, so who knows.

177. Artist: JF Bruckner: Oh yeah, jfb is awesome too! Right, right, more artists and comics, I forget so easily...

176. Comic: Copper: Copper is my favorite webcomic. Every strip is inspiringly beautiful and bursting with imagination, but beyond that, they consistently resonate with profundity without screaming "Look at ME, aren't I profound!?" I tried to write a lot more corny praise, but just go read all of them instead, you won't be sorry. I was hoping to wait for Kazu Kibuishi to get back to it so I could scream about its return, but it's been quite a while already, so I'll just link it again once that happens.

175. Artist: Mitsui. Life must be hard when you're this awesome. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

174. Comic: The Unfeasible Adventures of Beaver and Steve. I don't actually read this often, but the toaster knob makes me want to. That sentence will make no sense as soon as they update.

173. Humor: Kyle linked me to this, but I can't imagine why. P.S. Kyle sucks.

172. Comic: Socks. Okay, Socks is also amazing. I need to read through both these soon. Yargh.

171. Comic: Minus. Leo just linked me to minus, and it is aggggghjustgoreaditIcan'tthinkofwhattowriteitisamazing.

170. Flash Game: Fancy Pants. Fancy Pants!!! Made me want to drop everything and make an awesome speedy platformer with simple but incredibly smooth smooth animation with my roommates. Who knows what they'd do, but Kyle already agreed to it. Right Kyle? Study for your midterms to signify "yes."

169. Random: Revenge of Zoom Quilt.

168. Comic: Sinfest. How could you not know about Sinfest already? :|

167. Apps: doPdf. People keep asking how to write out pdfs. If you don't own Acrobat Pro, apparently this works.

166. Humor: Then Japan puts Berkeley to shame in the flash mob arena. But c'mon, it's Japan, it's probably weird when stuff like that doesn't happen.

165. Humor: Berkeley ninja flash mob battle royale round 1 fight.

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