"The decline soon after? That’s the Chomp search update followed by iOS 6 and the card app store layout. So sad."
Man, I do find that quite sad... the app store still has some major issues with regards to discoverability. It's funny because you'd think as the app store became more and more saturated, that they'd create more ways to deal with that, but many of the changes have actually made it worse lol :/
Darn, looks like I can't edit my post anymore, and HN formatting screwed it up lol. First link is for 300, second one is for the sequel.
I guess it is quite subjective, but what makes the second one look better to you? For me the first one, whilst chalked with noise/grain, has a much better rendition of the skin-tone, along with detail in the highlights, and the depth of the reflection in her eyes. I guess it's hard to describe really, but that's kind of why I would side towards the first image.
I find it's still really noticeable in the skin tones and highlights. You can find lots of comparisons online; once you see film beside digital, the difference can be pretty huge. Some people in Hollywood still really care about it... one recent example: http://motion.kodak.com/motion/Publications/InCamera/Creatin...
“It’s like we’ve forgotten how great film looks when you see it in comparison,” Alsobrook remarks. “We looked at each other, and it was a done deal. There was no question we were going to shoot film. It has a rich, creamy look to it that you just can’t get any other way.”
I think the truth is that if you're making a free game, you have to put an incredible amount of consideration into replay value and how to keep people playing for long periods (and then how to extract money from them :/ ).
Otherwise you make a paid game and hope an Apple-featuring makes you enough.
Last spring I went through a lot of different techniques including the one you mention about subdivision. Was working on tower defense path-finding so basically the challenge was to compute every waypoint-set's path at game-start and whenever a tower is built/sold.
I think I basically tried almost every A* trick available (rectangular symmetry reduction, HPA*, points of visibility, jump point search, etc) but ultimately I couldn't make it run fast enough on iOS for our max level size which was about 100x100. It also couldn't be multi-threaded because it needed to work with online code (synchronous tick engine)...
What ended up happening was I found a full C implementation of Jump Point Search, and it was incredibly fast! I had already moved several parts of my code to C in order to speed it up, but I guess using a higher level language like Objective-C is just way too slow to have instantaneous path-finding on a 100x100 grid. I think this was the code I found https://github.com/Bio2hazard/cJumpPointSearch
With iOS development I've typically had the interviews that you are seeking. I show them my apps over coffee and then I do a few hours (or a feature) of contract work (paid) for them and it usually works out and I continue onwards :)
I am not sure that this works for all situations though; maybe I've been lucky too... I tend to work for smaller startups.
"In Angband, any monster that drops stuff can drop pretty much anything. Monsters have a level, and if they drop loot, it just randomly picks any item near the monsters level."
-> (RPG related) I felt like this was an issue with Diablo 3 compared to Diablo 2. You basically just had to mash around in D3 grinding the top-level monsters and hoping... whereas in Diablo 2 you could make conscious choices over where to farm if your goal was to find a certain item (albeit the drop chances were extremely low, so most people just did Meph runs or Baal runs and traded their way up). Here though the author is doing drops way more realistic than either of those games heh, so that's quite an awesome feat.
Itemization seems really tricky; analyzing Diablo 2 vs Diablo 3 can actually provide some interesting insight into how item systems affect gameplay etc... maybe those devs even tried doing it realistically at some point but found it didn't pan out gameplay-wise?
"From the old world of unprocessed rolls of C-41 sitting in a fridge 20 years ago"
Hey I still do that! :(
I wonder if my (or anyone's) film photos on Flickr are completely useless metadata-wise. Because they are all scanned so they just say "NORITSU KOKI EZ Controller". There seems to be a large portion of people (on Flickr) shooting film still but I wonder if it's only a small percentage overall.
I go through that quite a bit lol because I've made the conscious decision not to drink ever (I don't care to spend the money on it nor do I care for the taste). But my vice is drinking soda heh... darn sugar!
An iPad could be a good stepping stone. For me it was Nintendo as a kid that then got me into computer games, which then got me into making my own stuff, which then made me into a programmer today heh.
I find that I've gotten to a point too where my mind subconsciously blocks out ads, even the ones at the top of Google searches. I also don't believe I've ever clicked on a banner or display ad (purposely) since I've been on the internet. They just always feel scammy or not targeted well enough in my opinion. But that's also just the nature of the internet...
Yeah totally, having some experience with 3D motion tracking and green screens, I was thinking: wow, it's so smooth and so perfectly tracked, AND cuts between player/grass so well. I know how finicky it can be to key out elements, so it is quite amazing that whatever algorithm they have in play can do it so well (is there a jersey color that's close to grass color lol? Wonder what the edge cases are).
Speaking of RTS, I really miss the 90's/early-2000's. It was basically like a golden era of RTS's lol. But they don't really work on consoles (needed for AAA these days), and with mid-sized developers vanishing, the RTS genre has kind of slumped. Blizzard can still do it and maybe other companies here and there, but there's very little going on in that genre I feel now. The new freemium C&C will be interesting though for sure.
You'd think tablets/mobile would have an amazing plethora of RTS's, but it kind of seems like the simulation/Facebook games took over (Clash of Clans etc).
Oh man, I've definitely felt this pain many times lol:
"The samples will be missing lots of implicit information such as how to install the necessary libraries and how to deal with missing dependencies and version conflicts. Transcribing and modifying the examples may lead to bugs that suck up time. It's not terrible, mostly thanks to sites like stackoverflow, but it's still a lot of unnecessary distractions from the task at hand."
So many times, the actual programming isn't tough, it's just getting all of the stuff around it setup that is hard.
Haha, I wonder how many of us came here because we couldn't push or pull commits, so just taking a HN reading break... and boom the top post is about Github!
Okay wow the meta-joke on these games is getting to pretty intense levels lol. On a technical level though, I found this game extremely hard while using space-bar, but very easy with mouse clicks. It seems to jump differently or something.
That's really interesting to hear (I live in Vancouver too). I think it maybe also speaks to our North American culture of drive to work, stay at work, drive to home, stay at home... though I've heard that Vancouver is quite decent (compared to other North American cities) for having a downtown with actual people living there... similar to NY.
Man, I do find that quite sad... the app store still has some major issues with regards to discoverability. It's funny because you'd think as the app store became more and more saturated, that they'd create more ways to deal with that, but many of the changes have actually made it worse lol :/