Amiga Computer Graphics Archive ✶

A lovely UI touch of this website is the color palette including animated color cycling appearing when hovering the mouse cursor above an image. Favorite image so far: Jim Sachs’ Amiga Lagoon.

From the About page:

This site is dedicated to great pixel graphics made with the Commodore Amiga from 1985 to 1995. An uncountable number of graphics were made during this time period, but there are quite a number of noteworthy images that, I believe, shouldn’t gather dust on some harddrive, hidden in some extra level inside a game that never gets played or on a PD collection disk that is almost unknown. I want to make these graphics accessible again from the comfort of your own internet browser by showcasing them on this site.

Lessons in Game Design ✶

A talk by SimCity creator Will Wright.

Noclip ✶

Crowd-funded video game documentaries. See also: Half-Life 25th anniversary documentary.

Sunday, 26 November 2023

No BS Games ✶

I don’t play games on mobile phones, but if I did, I’d look for them on this website.

Zero-K ✶

Free real time strategy game with solo, PvE or PvP game modes. Available on Steam.

Saturday, 25 November 2023

♫ Sign of the Cross ✶

Iron Maiden live in Rock in Rio, 2015. The changes of tempo in this…drummer’s a beast.

Friday, 24 November 2023

Flight of Nova

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Catching up to Becca Station, 185km up, moving at 7800m/s.

I watched the trailer of Flight of Nova on its Steam page. The ambient music and sound effects layered with the visuals made me play the free demo and buy the game shortly after.

After completing several of the training missions and burning lots of fuel to catch up and dock to orbiting space stations a smile has remained on my face, especially since the game has some damage modelling, which is always good for highlights.

HyperTextHero Flight of Nova streams on Twitch

This is a slow-burn video game for patient cargo delivery sim drivers who love audio, atmospheres, and orbital mechanics. A sort of 3D Kerbal Space Program focused on flight.

It’s a pleasure to find flight and particularly space flight simulators I had never heard about like Flight of Nova. Here’s my wishlist for this Early Access game:

  • Controls to zoom in and out the view, like in DCS, IL-2, and MSFS.
  • A more detailed tutorial about reaching things in orbit.
  • Missions to disable rogue drones, perhaps with an improvised offensive weapon.
  • Eventual surface vehicles like buggies to get to difficult-to-reach cargo and rescue missions.
  • Cooperative multiplayer in some form.
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Wednesday, 22 November 2023

Development of GTA San Andreas (2003–2004) ✶

Developer Obbe Vermeij started a blog about his time at Rockstar North, with posts like this one about GTA’s moon.

Sunday, 19 November 2023

Watch Dogs: Legion Crash - Event ID 0 from source nvlddmkm cannot be found ✶

Watch Dogs: Legion keeps crashing when enemy drones are searching for you, especially when taking control of one.

To reproduce, cause some trouble and then hijack one of the riot control drones that’s after you, and use it to shoot at other enemies.

Eventually the game crashes.

Update 2023-11-29: The FIX: Crashes stopped when I turned off raytracing and DLSS in the graphics quality settings. I managed to continue the game.

Update 2023-11-27: More evidence of a problem with the drones in the game and Nvidia’s drivers causing a crash.

Update 2023-11-20: The game still crashes, so this does not fix it :( I’m updating my ticket with Ubisoft support to let them know.

**The fix**, from user SamS_98 in the above Microsoft Support link:

Open the NVIDIA control panel (usually located next to the clock in your system tray, bottom right)

Click on “Help” in the top row and click “Debug mode”

What this does, it downclocks your card to the founders edition specs. You would have to enable this every time after a reboot.

The reasoning I have found for this is that ever since one of the driver/windows updates, most games are unable to handle the factory OC cards and will crash after a while. Sometimes 5 minutes, sometimes 1 hour.

Saturday, 18 November 2023

Death by A.I. ✶

Multiplayer text party game where you choose a scenario and, with 60 seconds to respond, type in your strategy to survive, and the A.I. tells you what happens.

Friday, 17 November 2023

Superalignment ✶

Reading the article on Geoffrey Hinton in The New Yorker’s A.I. issue, the A.I. drama of the day, Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons, and meeting Juno in Starfield makes me think a singularity may be near.

NieR: Automata

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2B and 9S in Nier: Automata.

HyperTextHero NieR Automata streams on Twitch

I’d spent time in the NieR: Automata’s hauntingly beautiful world before starting to broadcast gameplay on the internet.

The game began like a love letter to classic vertical and side scrolling shooters before smoothly changing to a third person view of the sensual 2B, moving, dreamlike, around the screen, and soon her lovestruck boy 9S.

Together with melancholy music and story, NieR’s world enveloped me, and I briefly returned to it, beginning once again in the stream of life. (A yellow leaf just fell away from the plant in the room I am writing this. There are fresh shoots and new green leaves on the top of the plant).

But work and death and continuing nomadic ways interrupted my playthrough, so a longing exists to return to this subtle, intelligent game, often kindled by thoughts on artificial intelligence, and I hope to reach at least one of its endings, if not all, some day, and keep writing about it.

It’s like the movie Groundhog Day.

Every moment is a new start, and you keep starting over and over again and trying to finish or to improve your navigation of a messy, random river that is life.

A piece of writing, a project, a trip to see friends is usually interrupted by life. And there’s never that perfect time for you to do the work. Perfection is a memory of the past.

We need to do things in between, simultaneously with all the mess, and keep starting over and over.

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Half-Life 25th Anniversary ✶

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the crowbar, then scroll up and click on squishy enemy and on the scientist for fun.

Half-Life is free on Steam right now.

Arma Reforger 1.0 ✶

Ongoing thoughts on Arma Reforger which just flew out of Early Access in a Huey air chopper.

On Game Length vs Fun Time ✶

I rarely finish games as I often prefer their beginnings, the early-game gameplay, to middle and late play.

In Elite, for example, I loved flying the small, more maneuverable ships, getting better weapons, larger cargo holds, and so on. And more credits made a big difference!

In the middle and later game the grind got grindy, and I played less, though this was also because of the amount of good video games that I want to try the beginning of.

Games that grab me and carry me to their endings have excellent mechanics that feel rewarding in moment-to-moment gameplay and an interesting story or feeling about their world.

The last ones I remember that I finished were Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and Noita.

David Attenborough Narrates Your Life ✶

😅 Source code is here.

Wednesday, 15 November 2023

Dejargonizer ✶

Useful to help one learn anything by making jargon, special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand, understandable.

Jfxr ✶

Browser-based tool to generate simple sound effects.

Monday, 13 November 2023

Vangelis Scoring Blade Runner ✶

Yes, I’m on a Blade Runner track lately.

Vangelis created the enormous spatial distance of the score by running his instruments through a Lexicon 224 digital reverberation sound processor. He used it by applying depths and spaces to his synthesisers and percussion, creating lush spaces to complement the film’s vast landscapes.

…

As a new filmed scene was played, and if Vangelis felt a strong connection to the moving images, he would create a composition straight away. Being lead by the moving pictures, he would record his creations without any prior rehearsals. Otherwise, if viewing the film scene induced no immediate reaction, Vangelis would not push himself to force the music out, instead he would work on some other tasks at the studio and come back to it later on.

…

Vangelis always prefers to use his first take whenever he can, even if the recording contains small mistakes, because he sees his first takes as more honest than rerecording the same music again.

…

Vangelis describes his approach to composing for film as spontaneous and instinctive. Preferring to let his spontaneity react to the images and not letting his thoughts interfere with his inspiration, he acts as a participant in the film by letting his instincts react to the scene and letting his music be driven by his first impression of the images. For Vangelis, the music in Blade Runner was an integral and inseparable part of the film, as the film testifies to the power of the music.

♫ Fragile Sensibility ✶

By Davecuy, pronounced Dave-Chooy. Via Futura_Light.

Fluid Audio Visualizer ✶

Dakd Jung:

Ferrofluid is a material first developed by NASA in the 1960s. It has been used for fuel transport in zero-gravity space, spacecraft, and sealing connections in space suits. In modern times, it is used as a damper for high-end speakers, a rotating shaft for motors, and gas sealing. The composition of the magnetic fluid is very fine iron particles and a surfactant coated on it , and base oil. It is a liquid magnetic substance that does not sink because it is so small that it is invisible to the naked eye and is evenly distributed in the base oil due to the surfactant component.

Via CDM.

Sunday, 12 November 2023

♫ Catch the Rainbow ✶

Good song to travel to, by Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore.

Saturday, 11 November 2023

Apple Vision Pro Update, Blade Runner 2049 ✶

John Gruber on the latest version of Apple’s Vision Pro VR headset:

The Vision Pro experience is highly dependent upon foveated rendering, which Wikipedia succinctly describes as “a rendering technique which uses an eye tracker integrated with a virtual reality headset to reduce the rendering workload by greatly reducing the image quality in the peripheral vision (outside of the zone gazed by the fovea).” Our retinas work like this too — we really only see crisply what falls on the maculas at the center of our retinas. Vision Pro really only renders at high resolution what we are directly staring at. The rest is lower-resolution, but that’s not a problem, because when you shift your gaze, Vision Pro is extraordinarily fast at updating the display.

Eyes, retinas, vision, computers, and so on.

I watched Blade Runner 2049 again last night. I like the film overall, but vastly prefer the final cut of the original. I feel 2049 could have been edited better, more tightly. The film brings to mind augmented and virtual reality, environmental post-apocalypse, life and death and creation.

Mere data makes a man. A and C and T and G. The alphabet of you. All from four symbols. I’m only two: One and zero.

Half as much but twice as elegant, sweetheart.

Open Broadcaster Software 30.0 ✶

Learning to use OBS has been a positive experience in my life which has helped me to keep in touch with old friends and make new ones around the world. Thank you to everyone who works on this free software. 💗

Thursday, 9 November 2023

The Color of Sound ✶

Sound and light share the fundamental nature of vibration. And, even though the sounds we can hear have a much lower frequency than light that is visible to us, there is a range of sound frequencies that have corresponding consonant colors. This page delves into consonant relationships between sound and color and and provides a tool to let you explore their relationship.

Ridley Scott Profile in The New Yorker ✶

Interesting profile of the director of Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, and Alien, who draws his own storyboards.

Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address Greetings to the Natural World (pdf) ✶

Found while reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s beautiful book, Braiding Sweetgrass, that I can recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in the natural world that gave birth to us all.

In Robin’s translation, the sentence under The Thunderers “We are thankful that they keep those evil things made by Okwiseres underground” is omitted, perhaps as a nod against fear (pp.112–113):

Now we turn to the west where our grandfathers the Thunder Beings live. With lightning and thundering voices they bring with them the water that renews life. We bring our minds together as one to send greetings and thanks to our Grandfathers, the Thunderers.

Suggested video game to play while reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Valheim, preferably with friends.

Here are other complementary books and video game pairings.

Wednesday, 8 November 2023

Drawing

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Pencil drawing.

I’ve always loved to draw, a natural thing for humans to do that is almost completely absent from most lives at childhood’s end.

My love for drawing was rekindled with the help of Milton Glaser, whom I was fortunate to work with when I lived in New York City.

This page is a placeholder to write more about drawing with whatever is at hand and publish links to drawing streams.

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Change Permissions of All Folders and Files Recursively ✶

You’re working on a website and images are not showing despite being in the proper place.

It’s probably a permissions problem, so here’s how to change folder and file permissions recursively to 0644 and 0755:

chmod -R u+rwX,go+rX,go-w /path/to/folder/containing/everything/you/want/changed

Tech Info on Alan Wake 2 Game Engine: Northlight ✶

Two things stood out:

Our marketing folks would say the characters are more responsive and lifelike than ever before; our internal dev notes described it as “the characters won’t bump or get stuck into objects in tight spaces”.

…

More realistic wind was on the must-have tech list for Alan Wake 2 - and that’s we have, wind that realistically affects physics, particles, and cloth.

Another game added to the to-play list.

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