Ah, the Blizzard Cinematics Team! With each of their game releases, they push the envelope of computer game cinematic animation; they're right up there with Square. The latest cinematic to be released is from their upcoming game World of Warcraft.
A year after closed alpha-testing began, the actual game is finally hitting the shelves as a very polished, complete, and remarkably rich online world. The final stress test is currently ongoing, and the free open beta will be starting up when that's done. So join in and get a peek! The final game will be available on November 23rd! Unfortunately it's a monthly fee, but for those of you who enjoy this type of game (and it does take a certain kind of person)... holy crap, there's a lot to see and do, with relatively little of the spirit-crushing grinding that other games have. It reminds me of the old LucasArts adventure games, where they went out of their way to ensure that your experience was less about failure and more about fun. Way to go, Blizzard!
Implementation-wise, there's a lot to appreciate...
The World has a great sense of continuity in its visual design and presentation. Sure, it's a little cartoony, but it's the good kind of cartoony: the colors are rich and harmonious, the character designs are infused with attitude, and the environment is astonishing in its sheer yumminess. As you walk around the world, you will be struck by how every hill, rock, and tree seems to be a real part of the world. The buildings and cities are large and impressive, not just stacks of blocks. It's the first game I've played in a while that had such a powerful sense of place...other games feel like bad theater sets by comparison. Other games that evoked that sense of place in me are DOOM3, Half life, and Grand Theft Auto, but those are all rather dark environments. WoW feels like pure fantasy, Disneyland when you're still a kid exploring all the nooks and crannies on an extended 3 day vacation.
The collector's edition of the game will have an "Art of World of Warcraft" 200+ page hardcover book! I am thinking of getting it just for the book. Having seen the game evolve from its initial closed Alpha to the current incarnation, I'm sure it's going to be amazing. Entire cities have fallen and rerisen during Alpha and Beta, redone from the ground up.
There are few things of particular note that I think give WoW that extra sense of immersion:
The Color palette across the entire world is wonderfully balanced...head and shoulders above the screenshots I've seen from EQ2 and the limited exposure I've had to Lineage II. While the individual models are nice, they have different color casts compared to the environment, so the visual meshing isn't very good. It looks like bad film compositing. Secondly, the use of shading in WoW is exceptional in that they don't just "add black" to get darker tones...they use a nice painterly hue. The result is more vibrant.
Just about everywhere you stand in the world looks good...there is very little of that "endless flatness" that kills the sense of world in other games. In any direction you look in WoW, you see some place that looks enticing enough to visit. The way that large mountains are hazily visible through the atmosphere is a nice touch. Large structures provide contrast to smaller ones. The sense of architectural scale is phenomenal. It's awesome.
The best text engine I've ever seen in a game! Great kerning and font work throughout the game make this game feel very polished compared to, say, Lineage II's horrible text presentation. Labels over NPCs and Characters also smoothly scale in size relative to how close they are to you; it's a small thing, but it preserves the sense of three-dimensionality in the world. A side effect is that you can use it as a relative gauge of size/distance for monsters that reuse scaled-up models.
The UI's polish is very high in general. Everything stays in its place, and on top of that it's customizeable and extendable through the Lua language. Very neat.
So far, I've only made comments on the visuals. I'm less qualified to compare gameplay between other MMORPGs, but I can report I had fun. About six weeks ago I got too busy to keep up my characters, and stopped playing, but it certainly was an entertaining diversion for 10 months.
Saw it tonight. Wow. This is movie making.
Was reading up on it, and a few cool things:
* Brad Bird, the director, was the creator/director of The Iron Giant. Which was fabulous. I'm glad he's teamed up with Pixar! Thank the powers that be! The Iron Giant was totally screwed by the distributors.
* Sarah Vowell, who is heard sometimes on Ira Glass' This American Life on NPR, is the voice of Ivy!
A couple days ago I started receiving SPAM via the email addresses registered with Macromedia. I use a separate service and email address for every commercial contact, so I can track how my personal information is being sold.
Since 1998, there has been only one company that appeared to release my information to spammers: the old Napster. Either an employee swiped the mailing list, staff posted the name somewhere online, or they liquidated the list to the highest bidder. Bah.
In November 2004, the second email address to escape is the one I used to register with Macromedia. I am pretty irked. I did send an email to their Privacy department, but have yet to receive any kind of acknowledgement. Fortunately I can shut down that email address. Not sure how it got out though.
An honorable mention for "most annoying" has to go to Aladdin Systems, makers of the otherwise fine Stuffit archiving utility. In recent years they have become a much more aggressive marketing-oriented company, and it's actually turned me off from using their product. I have been noticing more marketing junk email from their "trusted affiliates" through DigitalRiver, their software delivery provider. I don't seem to get these offers from other companies that use DR, so I'm assuming it's Aladdin pushing the envelope yet again.
Cornell University's Web Communications Team kept a blog about their site development, which is an interesting exposition of "why decisions are made a certain way". It's an interesting read, for those of you who are interested in seeing how the production process goes from the PM's perspective.
A lot of missteps can occur early in the project cycle when the client is (1) misunderstood by the developers or (2) vague about their goals. This leads to a lot of "the client doesn't know what they want" grousing by the literal-minded developers, who would prefer to get everything handed to them as a technical spec. On the client's side, they're confronted by what seems to be a passive-aggressive wall of defiance, because developers don't know how to translate other people's concepts into technical implementation. Hence the need for Project Managers who are fluent in both clientspeak (itself with many dialects) and developerspeak. I like how this blog not only illuminates the decision making process in a large organization, but also includes the raw, unfiltered reactions from people outside the process. It's a neat microcosm of the media development process, from the social interaction perspective.
On a side note, using a multiple-blog system as a way to facilitate client communication is itself an interesting idea. I've used intranets in this way in the past, laboriously updating HTML manually. It took hours, but the result was that I had a pretty good sense of project continuity. I'm not so sure that clients found it useful on a day-to-day basis, but perhaps it was reassuring. My big problem is I write too much, and it's tough to read on the screen. I'll have to think about this a bit more.
Cornell Update spotted on Digital Media Minute via Full as a Goog.
Buddy Sean asked me about choosing fonts for software development. "What is a good legible font for software? Where do you find out more information about this? Is there a developer kit you can buy or download?"
When it comes to software font use, you should look for fonts that are designed for the screen. They are heavily "hinted" to display well at various common sizes like 9pt through 14pt. An ordinary font purchased for print work will not look consistently good at small size in a GUI application. You want either a bitmapped screen font (somewhat rare these days), or a "new media" font designed for screen use in TrueType or OpenType format. Bitstream has an example of the difference.
Now you have two options:
Option 1. Use What's Already Installed
If you're designing for Windows software development, you can rely on the built-in high-quality screen fonts such as Arial, Tahoma, Georgia, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Courier New, and Times New Roman. Not all of them are installed depending on your version of Windows, so you may have to track down the original vendors. You can double-click the font list in the Windows Fonts Control Panel...Arial, for example, is licensed from AgfaMonotype.
The Microsoft Typography site has a listing of what fonts are included with what Microsoft products.
If you're designing for both Macintosh and Windows, many of the fonts above are already installed because Microsoft Internet Explorer for Mac has been installed by default in Mac OS 9 through Mac OS 10.3. For advanced users who have chosen not to install Internet Explorer, those fonts may not be available. It's also possible that Internet Explorer will go away from future versions of the Mac OS.
Option 2. License Fonts and Include with your Installer
You also have the option of licensing fonts for your applications, and including them as part of the install. I've not gone this route personally, but there are developer resources at AgfaMonotype. ...check out the ISV (Independent Software Developer) fonts. Another competitor is Bitstream, which offers similar solutions for developers.
Miscellania
If you're designing for internationalization, you need to look a little deeper into which fonts offer unicode support. This is the kind of thing that a developer needs to go after... in general, you'll lose typographic control because your options are limited in the other languages. Internationalization is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
I'm curious whether fonts optimized for Flash, are also suitable for general application development. A lot of these are designed to be precise at 5 to 12 pixels in height, which is really small on a modern screen. They might be OK for labeling, applications that "look cool" like games, or devices that run at 800x600 or smaller. Legibility would be difficult at higher resolutions.
There are also old font formats that are completely converted for screen use at a specific size...Mac users may remember "screen fonts". It's been a long time since I've seen any, but I know applications like Photoshop and specialized software like terminal emulators use them.
If you want to get extra fancy, there's a technology called Saffron you can license from Mitsubishi, that promises excellent legibility without a lot of hinting and kerning BS. The next version of Flash Player (version 8) apparently uses this. This is a more specialized application though, than your typical windows app. Would be interesting for games or bitmapped screen devices.
I was browsing through lileks.com after visiting the Gallery of Regrettable Food, which preserves stomach-churning food photography of the 50s and 60s. There's also a neat section on Money on the World...check out Brazil and Cuba! A country's money tends to be filled with interesting iconography and symbolism too, so that's well worth checking out from a graphic design perspective.
You can see a lot of their other projects as part of their Institute of Official Cheer. It's a good waste of an hour.
Back in my high school days, I found that I liked knowing the hoary details of low level computer operations: assembly language, instruction decoding, firmware and register manipulation.
One regret I've had, though, is not ever taking a Compilers course. That is, how to write a compiler for a language like C or C++. Unlike some of the fruitier "Learn to code in Pascal, LANGUAGE OF THE FUTURE" courses, writing a compiler is a marriage between expression of code in a high level language and implementation in nice spurts of machine code. While I have no great desire to write compilers for a living, I do wish I knew more about how they work. So I was bopping around the web today and came across Inger, an open-source compiler with an e-book. Cool. And also Open C++, an open-source C++ compiler project. The Internet rocks.
My desktop PC, used primarily for production, started making a funny fan noise a couple days ago. Today, it emited an alarm noise on powerup. This usually means something bad, so I had to diagnose the problem.
It turns out that the CPU cooling fan was worn out. It's only a year or so old, so it's kind of irking. Today's CPU's need active cooling fans, so when they poop out you have a few seconds to shut down before they melt down. Fortunately, my motherboard detects these anomalies and shuts down. So I went down to CompUSA and got a new one:
Behold!
This is an "enthusiast" CPU cooler, with an adjustable knob you can mount on your PC to control the fan speed. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work very well with the fan speed detection circuitry on my motherboard. For $14, it was one of the cheaper Athlon coolers, and it certainly looked neat. So far temperatures seem acceptable...not amazingly low, but at least my computer isn't beeping at me anymore.
I was giving the ViewLevel plugin a try, but at first it was "no dice."
The $user_level variable wasn't being set, or evaluated to 0. As it turned out, my WordPress URI settings were set back to the default "www.davidseah.com" address, but I usually login at "davidseah.com". The cookies are different in each case, so my user level wasn't being read. I must have accidentally reset it when explaining how it worked to someone setting up their own blog last week.
So it seems to work great. I can now implement some private posts for friends, without having EVERYONE be able to see them.
I think this is Lao & Harlan's Abyssinian Knock. The last cat picture!
