Diablo 3 Nonsense

A while back Blizzard announced Diablo 3 by way of a series of splash pages, with their usual jovial shroud of misdirection. Blizzard has also trickled out a few handfuls of screen shots and a game-play movie... and that's were the trouble started. Shortly after this meager bounty of carefully selected D3 information was released, a community of ... how shall I say this gently ... fucking morons with pirated copies of Photoshop and way too god-damned much time on their fucking greasy hands started imagining new rules for how Diablo is supposed to look.

Now we get to listen to people whine: "It need to be grittier and darker", "It's too bright", "Why are there so many colors?", "It's not even Diablo anymore!"

I love the visual style of Diablo 3 -- at least, based on the insignificantly tiny snippet of imagery we've seen so far. I had my fill of games that looked like mud in a barrel stirred vigorously when I played the original Quake. The addition of things like colors and, heaven forbid, a rainbow, doesn't make it "not Diablo" -- it just makes it Diablo with more then a cramped 256 color pallet.

An aside to this bullshit, is that, as far as I can tell, no one has actually done any work to demonstrate their ideas of what the Diablo 3 artistic style should be. Instead, people have taken screenshots and fiddled with the color balance, added a little noise, maybe even messed with that lighting filter... I don't see any from-scratch mock-ups or original paintings. People are happy to bitch and moan, and to sign petitions (no, really), and complain endlessly, but I guess putting together a dungeon's worth of sample art is a bit too hard. Why don't we see an outpouring of community-made, fully-rigged and animated 3D models? Where are the meticulously grimy sample textures? The carefully crafted 3D tiles that snap together neatly to create the "properly gothic" labyrinths?

Perhaps all the "fans" really want is a little tweaking, a little filter-esque nudge, and that's why all this sample working isn't being furiously developed. If that's the case, I have a suggestion for Blizzard:

Just-in-time pixel shader plugin support.

Here's how it works: render the game to a texture, rather than the screen (it's certainly possible this is already being done, for other effects purposes). Let "the fans" plugin a pixel shader that the engine uses to render this texture to the screen (this rendering process is not, by itself, innovative, but I think the idea of letting jackasses plug their own pixel shader in might be fairly original). The great news is, you should be able to emulate most of the Photoshop-ish effects in a single pixel shader. I for one can't wait to see the repositories of "gothic filters" that creep up all over the net, with hundreds of little pixel shaders that make things just a bit darker, or a little blurry, or add lots of noise to the screen so it looks "more evil".

Here's my contribution (I think it's perfect for the people who think the game just isn't dark enough in general):

float4 d3FilterShader() : COLOR
{
    // Should be nice and dark now
    return float4(0, 0, 0, 255);
}

Put that in your elongated, pseudo-realistic, gothic, fantasy, halfing's-leaf pipe and shove it up your ass!

CuteGod Prototype Release

The truth is, I'm probably too busy to be working on prototypes of nifty games, but don't worry: I haven't let that stop me!

I've been able to add a number of features to the CuteGod prototype:

• Recognition of ground patterns
• Houses (automatically generated when patterns are completed)
• A nifty "pattern holder sidebar-thing"
• Sounds, which I think really spiffied the whole thing up
• Some flashy sparkling stars for effect (and more importantly, a framework for future special effects)

Here's a quick screen shot:

And, happy days for you no doubt, here's a link to download the prototype.

If you want to give it a try you'll need Microsoft's .NET Framework 2.0, XNA Framework 1.0, and DirectX 9.0c.

If you do give it a try, I'd appreciate it if you can let me know if it worked or not (if not, please email me a copy of the log.txt file in the directory you installed the prototype in -- in fact, even if it does run it would be great to see the log file, so I can get a sense of what sort of machines it's working on).

Controls are very simple: click to pickup the highlighted block when your "hand" is empty, click to drop a block you're holding on top of the highlighted block, right-click and drag to pan the map around (be careful with this -- it's not my fault if you pan yourself into oblivion!).

The list of things that aren't done in this prototype goes on for about a mile, so don't expect any miracles or anything. That said, I do think it's already pretty fun to play around with.

Not dead, just still crazy busy

So, I'm still insanely busy, so the blog continues to suffer, but I'm determined not to let it fall completely off my radar. Here's a rundown of the employment changes since my last entry:

Internship with UW
Signed up and started today. Officially I'm a temporary employee, not an intern, but this is entirely good news as it turned into a freebie per-hour pay-raise for me. There's a lot of interesting work to be done here, and huge portions of it will ultimately be open-source, which is a nice ethical upshot.

Freelance Web Development
I'm still doing work for the small Utah company, at a fairly consistent pace.

The work from my past internship is also, only just now, picking up -- I'm not sure exactly what held things up, but I'm not really complaining.

.Net Developer
I've started in on this job, but I have to admit I'm seriously on the fence about it. All my issues and thoughts around this are at least one blog on their own, so I won't get into them now. Suffice to say, I'm not sure how long-lived the job will be, especially with so much other exciting work coming my way.

Squabs
I'm seriously impressed by the convenience of developing with XNA. XNA and Windows Forms (once they started playing well together) made building a basic level editor much easier than the Java alternative seemed like it was going to be.

Twitch
As much fun as I was having with Twitch, I've decided to table it for now so I can focus on Squabs a bit more in the little free development time I have. I'd still like to get a couple of screenshots on line at somepoint though, even if only for posterity.

Cute God
Something new (like I have time)! I read Lost Garden pretty regularly, and every once and a while the author posts some free artwork and suggests a game to design with it. The most recent of these "prototyping challenges" was CuteGod, which had such an interesting and straightforward concept behind it, I couldn't resist giving it a try.

So, after a few hours of coding, here's a screenshot of the 2D presentation of the playing area:


There seems to be a lot of discussion about an orthogonal 2D display not really being very intuitive, so I'll probably try implementing full-3D when I get a chance.

AJAX Ho!

I was playing Zelda Classic this weekend when a realization struck me...

Perhaps it came to me because of all my recent fiddling around with the Google maps API, 37 Signals' Basecamp and Backpack, the Dojo Toolkit, and all other manner of Ajax goodness.

Perhaps I was just very bored and lulled into a strange state of super-consciousness by the endlessly looping Zelda theme.

Regardless, it occurred to me that there is no reason I couldn't play Zelda in a browser nowadays. PNGs would do a fine job of displaying sprites, and things like Google Maps have demonstrated that you could certainly scroll around a massive overworld map pretty smoothly, and JavaScript has really come of age lately with object-oriented-ness and all that jazz.

Ok, so the control scheme might be annoying, being that browsers so far don't seem to have very strong joystick / gamepad support.

I bet there are still lots of games you could play in browser though. In fact, ironically, a modern rogue-like would be pretty nifty and is certainly suited for a heavy-weight server, light-weight client arrangement -- sort of getting back to the roots of it all, really.

Perhaps with the addition of fully-functional SVG (we're not quite there yet) the wave of "Web 2.0" JavaScript-ness and Ajax-iousity will finally pound the first chinks into the armor of the mighty giant Flash...?

I guess we'll have to wait and see.