TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Supreme Commander All Czars

Sometimes winning isn’t enough. Sometimes 50 of the largest unit in the game, the Czar, is not enough. Those times, 51 Czars will generally do it.

Death beams are cool, but Czars are so huge that they can do even more damage by just falling on you. And you can manually suicide them to make that happen.

Supreme Commander

Another trailer of this has just been released, mixing some new game footage with an interview with Chris Taylor. Taylor’s one of those virtuoso game designers: all zeal and vision; and it’s always a pleasure to hear him talk. He has Quentin Tarrantino’s characteristic spluttering urgency in trying to describe all the cool things he wants to tell you about as quickly as he’s thinking of them. I got an absolutely wonderful but almost entirely useless interview with him at a party in Beverly Hills a few weeks before E3, in which he spent around half the time trying to explain the hydraulics of the system by which the leader of the Cybrans – a brain in a jar – could move around his tank of preservative by thought alone. I guess a brain in a jar does everything by thought alone. But it was as hard as ever not to share his enthusiasm.

The other reason you should watch this is that I’m still convinced it’s going to be the best thing ever. Chris says it’s hard to go back to limited-zoom RTS’s after being able to back all the way up to see the full map in SupCom – he’s putting it lightly. I’ve had a headache (manifested in my middle finger) from banging my cranium against that glass ceiling ever since first seeing the game. I’m a particular fan of the long-game, in general – I play out every important phase of DEFCON in real-time, much to the ennui of my opponents, and I’m always straining against the interface of a game to put my plans into action. That’s been most of the challenge of the RTS for a long time – synchronising assaults, tending to the progress of your base and telling it what to build next, exploring the map click-by-click with your forward groups. All three of those things can be defined from moment one here, which is a brave move. What if those were the fun? DEFCON succeeds by doing the opposite – automating less, forcing you be a frontline general by doing everything yourself. But SupCom’s usability enhancements are doing something equally appealing: promoting you. A Supreme Commander cares not for caretaking work. The interface between you and the game world is now a lieutenant in your army: you tell it what you need doing, and it takes care of the particulars. It flatters you somewhat by assuming you have higher things on your mind, grander schemes.

I came late to Total Annihilation, only playing it properly when it was already ancient. What’s almost as striking as its brilliance is how little it has influenced since – the RTS took nothing from its sublime formula, ignored every innovation except its least interesting one: 3D terrain. Playing it now is like uncovering an alien artifact that fell to Earth long ago – you can’t ignore how old it is, but that doesn’t explain how it can be so far in advance of everything we’ve done so far.

Structurally Superfluous

My editor, earlier tonight: “I really like that Valve can just do whatever the fuck they want.” And that was before this:

Or this:

And this:

I can’t believe these character movies are getting better. The facial animation reflects the voice and mentality in all of them so exquisitely, and never more so than in this one. It just makes me melt. And I love that he’s playing guitar with giant rubber gloves.

They’re planning to do all nine eventually, and retrofit them into the game as character bios in class selection. I’m sort of dreading the Sniper, because he’s my favourite class but a (knowing) travesty of an Australian. But I can’t wait for the Pyro. Everything he does is inherently funny, even burning people to death.

As for me, I like that the most professional company in the industry can be so wildly unprofessional when they feel like it, or just when it’s funny.

Steel Yourself

The grand Team Fortress 2 update goes live tomorrow night, and there’ll be more details on what it contains tonight and tomorrow. I doubt the new community map, cp_steel, will be top of your trying-out priority list, but I hope you’ll get to it eventually. It’s an intriguing, ever-changing map, in a player-driven way rather than a random way like Hydro. It’s no less puzzling than Hydro though (I’m hoping some extra signposts are added in the ‘official’ version), so this clear, simple diagram by Ankich should make everything apparent right away.

In theory:

In practise:

Wait, wait, that diagram is actually helpful. Obviously you need to see it full size. An awesome Valve-style video explains the basics when you first play the map, but what you really need to know is how to play it well. How many of the map-changing points should you try for until you make a dash for the final, game-winning one?

I’ve been playing it whenever I can, and I’m really enjoying it so far. At the moment it feels weighted towards the attackers: we had a perfect round on Blu this lunchtime, where it went into overtime as we were capping C, we got shot off C, all our progress towards capturing C was undone, and just as it hit zero a cheeky Scout lept on E: the only cap that matters. We couldn’t even hold that consistently, but I kept as many of them as I could busy at C and eventually our forces at E won out, and we won with zero seconds on the clock.

Then the teams switched and we got destroyed. So I think we were actually sucking on offense, it’s just an offense-friendly map. But blasting Scouts off that final cap in the middle of a chasm feels like what the Soldier was born to do, so defense is still fun.

Steam Quirks For Developers

Talking to people at GDC and Rezzed, especially people just starting in game dev, made me realise I’ve accumulated a load of non-obvious knowledge about how Steam works and how best to use it. Info like this tends to get passed around between established devs, at events and in closed circles, but newer devs and those excluded from these groups don’t get access to it.

Everything marked ‘info’ was either learned by me first hand, or told to me by Valve at events with the express purpose of getting this kind of info out to developers, without request of confidentiality. I say this because I do also get told things confidentially – none of that is in here. Continued

Status Report

Gone dark lately because a) I have a lot to organise, b) I have a lot to play, c) the next thing I was going to post I’m not sure I should post, and d) the thing after that would be about Spore again, and quite big. So here’s something quick and self-indulgent: stats!

• The seven feeds to which I am the only current subscriber on Google Reader (update! Cross-checked with Graham and Google Reader gives slightly different subscriber figures to different people. Nice one, Google!):

  del.icio.us/gonnas (Graham’s public bookmarks – seldom updated, but always worthwhile)

  Upcoming releases for last.fm user Pentadact (Soundamus – much-needed idea, but get cluttered with so many re-releases and embarrassing people I only listened to that one time that I might unsubscribe)

  James Comments (also three times more active than any other feed I’m subscribed to)

  roBurky (fairly infrequent, but all good stuff so far)

  1Fort Screenshot Gallery (I think more of Chris Livingston’s army of fans would be subscribed to his screenshots if they were aware it was possible)

  Comments on your photos (because Flickr’s homepage says “NEW comments!” even when I read them a week ago)

  Zeno’s London (my cousin’s blog, a literary agent and a great writer. It was great while it lasted, but he recently procreated so all content will likely be replaced with baby photos from now on)

• Among James readers – the only demographic I have stats on – Chrome is close to overtaking Internet Explorer. Already more people use it than Opera and Safari put together. Meanwhile, Firefox is as dominant among James readers as IE is among the internet at large: a huge 70% share.
   
• Eight people read James on their iPhones. One person reads it on his PS3. I applaud him.
   
• By a very narrow margin, most people reading this sentence have never been here before. ‘Sup?
   
• I have forty-three nearly-finished posts in my drafts folder.
   
• We’re coming up to three thousand comments. It’s hard for me to contemplate that without part of my brain prolapsing.

Status

James was taken offline last week by my hosts, BlueHost, because something was spamming my database of posts incredibly rapidly with incredibly demanding data requests. It was using up so much CPU on the server that it was slowing down every other site it hosts.

I was in New York meeting a nervous walrus at the time, so I couldn’t do much about it. Now that I’m back I’ve looked into it, done some maintenance, taken some precautions, and asked them to put it back online. The upshot is that it seems to be fixed for the time being, but I’m going to have to keep a very close eye on it for a while. If it goes down again, I’ll post updates on Twitter here.

If you’re interested in the technical specifics, here’s what I found:

• A few lines of malicious code have found their way back into my source code, despite my having changed my password and kept up to date with the latest WordPress updates since that last happened. I’ve removed them and changed my password again, to something ridiculous. Not sure if there’s anything I can do beyond that.
• One visitor, presumably robotic, immediately started loading the same page dozens of times a second within a few minutes of James going back up. I’ve banned its IP, but I don’t know how to prevent that kind of thing in general, or why it would cause slow SQL database queries.
• Something was accessing parts of the database that aren’t supposed to be public. After careful investigation I discovered that, on this occasion, it was myself: when I accessed the database directly to do some maintenance, it was taking 6 seconds or so just to display or select the tables. Further back, there are still calls to these private tables that I can’t explain. I choose to ignore both these problems.

Thanks for sticking around.

State Of Things

I’d just like to say, this comments thing has been awesome. Thanks to everyone who’s added words to this page – they’ve been consistently clever and well-spelt. I knew you were all awesome, of course – I looked at my stats very carefully before deciding to have comments on the main page. According to the percentage of you using Firefox, James readers are approximately 1800% cooler than the general populace.

To celebrate I have worked out how to make Firefox realise I have an RSS feed, so that little orange broadcast icon should appear down the bottom. You can add it at as a Live Bookmark, or cram this link into a feed reader. You can even feed that feed to your personal Google page.

I am excited. We are about to get hit by a tsunami of amazingness, and I don’t see it stopping before the end of the year. Next month sees the return of Lost and The OC – the two most addictive programmes ever – and finishes off with the release of Serenity, the film of the third-best series ever, and a pretty much guaranteed entry into my elitist top films list. October is FEAR month, and given that I’ve now played the bizarrely early demo through about thirty-six times, I see myself getting lost in that pretty hard. Somewhere in that interim Hitman: Blood Money and Call Of Duty 2 are both due, but take that with a pinch of salt until you hear it from someone who knows anything. Contracts left a bitter taste in my mouth, so excitement over Blood Money is running low, and Call Of Duty 2’s promise is basically that it’ll put you through living hell, but both are bound to be an experience. I feel like I am owed Dreamfall fairly soon, but I don’t know where that’s coming from.

Let’s hope all that happens before mid-November, because in all probability subsequent events will be rendered irrelevant. I will not be playing other games for a few months. For the purposes of that claim, ‘reality’ counts as a game. I am waiting, of course, longing for sweet, sweet Oblivion. Which has Wonder Woman in it.

STARVATION Review

I was a little dubious about this one, solely because one character refers to the other as ‘kid’ – something I’m not yet sure people do in real life. But it’s one of the most interesting settings for a Machine of Death story – one of the few that has the courage to put the machine itself well into the background of the world, and tell a story that is affected by it, but not about it.

It’s about two soliders, stranded on an island, who both know how they will die. One is STARVATION, the other is HOMICIDE. So the entire scenario is overcast by both men endlessly reconjecturing about how their personal prophecy could come true.

That makes it very tense at times, particularly since my twist-happy brain likes to spend its downtime trying to pre-empt every eventuality. But I can honestly say the ending surprised me, and in a way that made me the story seem smarter than me.

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 from Amazon or Topatoco in the US, or in the UK for £11.50 with free shipping from The Book Depository. The whole thing is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

StarCraft 2: Single-Player

For about four years, everyone’s been scrambling to reinvent the RTS. Blizzard seemed like the only company sticking with the traditional mine-resources, build-buildings, mass-units structure – presumably because they didn’t dare undermine the professional scene that sprung up around the first StarCraft.

So they siphoned all their thick, sticky innovation into the single-player for StarCraft 2, where they can stick with the old high-level rules but make more interesting missions out of them.

In fact, they got a bit carried away. I’m used to high-budget strategy games giving me a lot of special-case missions, but StarCraft 2 never stops. I spent half the game waiting for a “Make a base, go kill theirs” mission that never came. Literally every single one is a custom showcase for one particular unit, an unusual objective, a pre-built base, no base at all, or revolves around a new rule they have to teach you on the fly.

At the risk of sounding like a tiny child, I don’t like it. I like to make my own bases. I like to choose the units I like, rather than have a whole mission structured to force me to appreciate one the game wants me to use. And I don’t like new rules.

Scripting a mission around a unique scenario always involves a degree of Bullshit: Bullshit you couldn’t have seen coming, Bullshit you’re forced to do, Bullshit to stop you taking shortcuts or being clever. Blizzard are so good, so big, rich and talented, that they’re able to avoid almost all the Bullshit that scripting causes on one, maybe two missions. The rest of the time, I’m punished for doing my own thing so much that I eventually learn to just play the way the mission designer wants me to. Use the unit he tells me to. Click what he tells me to click. It works, but it’s basically a waste of my time.

The zombie-frying mission is the one I’m thinking of as an example of pretty much Bullshit-free scripting. It does dictate certain aspects of the way you play, but the New Rule is easy to grasp and has a certain intuitive logic to it. And you can build whatever works for you: any effective army is effective here. Accordingly, it’s fun.

The other one I liked was the optional mission where you play as a female Ghost, separated from but supporting a larger army. Plenty of Bullshit, but the way it turned existing RTS mechanics into puzzle logic was interesting, and the mind-control ability has so many great applications. I’ve heard the alternative mission, with Utter Tosh, is good too, but his abilities seemed less exciting to me and I didn’t get anywhere with it.

I’m also a fan of the research system between missions, and the ability to postpone some missions for ages. But both are pretty minor bonuses. Two good missions, among thirty, isn’t enough to make me want to sit through the embarrassing cutscenes.

Starcraft 2

It’s a game from Blizzard, and yet it’s artistically uninteresting. I’m sure it’ll be wonderful, but why does it look so vapid and plastic? These might as well be sprites, they have no depth or character to them. In the original the Zerg looked sticky and disgusting. In this they look like a breakfast cereal.

Blizzard have never had the edge with tech, but their artists always wildly over-compenstated by giving everything wonderfully exaggerated character. Even with the primitive Warcraft 3 engine, they managed to make units look cool enough that you could zoom in on them for cutscenes, and watch them talk. And as you can see, you wouldn’t want to zoom in on these guys.

Anyway, excited nonetheless. Beww!

Star Wars VII (Spoiler Safe)

I enjoyed it a lot! It sounds like all my bigger-Star-Wars-fan friends did too, which is great. I’ll keep this spoiler-free and then let people who’ve seen it click the spoiler buttons for what I’m specifically talking about.

It alternates a bit between three different ways you could approach making a Star Wars sequel: Continued

Spot The Bug

My current task in Heat Signature is to tweak the airlocks so there’s room to put a closed door between you and the rest of the ship when you board. That way, you have as much time as you like to plan out your attack and wait till the guards are where you want them.

I needed the airlocks to clear 4 squares on the ship’s collision grid, to give you room to stand. But I hit a weird bug: some of them, maybe a third, did not clear. I checked the ‘clear grid’ function was executing on each of them, but still some of them ended up blocked. Continued

Spoiler Test

I’m hoping you can’t read this in RSS readers without hovering over it.

Spelunky Tips

Spelunky is now out on console box, and is awesome and everyone loves it. I’ve played both versions a ridiculous amount, and brother do I got some tips.

Lots of Spelunky’s mechanics are simple in principle but really, really, really hard to reliably master. When figuring out what route is worth taking, factor in the risk you might screw up and get hit by something. Continued