I’ve been trying to work out a good CPU-accelerated version the my suggestive contours algorithm during the last few weeks, and after working through some technical difficulties, I managed to compute and draw regular contour lines this afternoon:

Hard to see? I know,  it looks craptastic.

But after an afternoon of reading tutorials, bulletin boards and newsgroups, I know why. And I think it’s going to help me write a better thesis, so this delightful saturday wasn’t completely wasted. Conclusions behind the cut.

The last few months my jaw dropped to the floor so many times reading about and experiencing the new DRM systems deployed by game publishers I think it’s going to stay there forever. A couple of tales straight out of the hell a paying customer has to go through to get his/her game working follow behind the break.

Game companies need to understand that once pirated copies are, by all means, easier to activate, use and get support on compared to their legal counterparts, it’s time to pause and reflect, instead of shoveling yet another inherently flawed activation procedure on the pile. (Update: Tsk, tsk. It’s like they do it on purpose.) (Update 2: A nice article on SavyGamer)

In the second semester of this year, I’ll have to apply the suggestive contours algorithm I’ve implemented in an interesting way, in order to have some experimental results upon which I can base my thesis. A report on what I found out behind the cut.

A couple of weeks ago I purchased Borderlands, but only recently I found some time to install and run it. The hours that followed were a frustrating journey into performance issues, bad port quality and a first-hand experience on how having consoles as a primary market, in the end, backfires on us all.

I picked up GTA4 yesterday. A bit reluctant, because I read about the horrible installation/validation process.

We’re now roughly a year after its release date, and because I’m a terrible sucker for bargain bins when it comes to PC games, I’ll analyze what has been fixed and what not in the process: the road to Liberty City.

More behind the cut

Via the excellent Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

There’s been a lot of fuzz about a recently a new service called OnLive (also see Rock, Paper, Shotgun article) which claims to be able to stream high-end videogames to subscriber’s systems, thus eliminating the need for a ‘tricked out system’ and the need to upgrade every year/month.

Update: Good article up at Eurogamer.

There’s a lot of scepsis about their claims, because input latency + connection latency + server latency are a lot of hurdles to take. Gamespot video behind the cut. Oh, and it’s from the guy who brought us Quicktime.

Time for a quick post about a Half-Life 2 mod which kept my attention over the last few years. It was one of the first total conversions released for the Source engine, and they recently released version 1.2 over Steam: Dystopia.