The ↵collecting-gamespace-toilets bug seems to spread. ↑Gamersgame ↑reports that fresh99 now carries an ↑according collection, too. Of course the mod-scene in general, and my tribe in particular can not stand back. Here’s an exclusive screen shot of a ↑Rogue-Ops toilet bowl out of a map by ↑[HP]—complete with high-tech toilet paper fluorescing greenish. Now that is style!
exclusive screenshot courtesy of [HP]—tnx man!
Local conflicts go online
by ↑Birgit Bräuchler
In contrast to conventional (mass)media the so called ‘new media’—among them the most prominent Internet—stand out due to criteria like interaction, multimediality, transcending location, and networking. Because of the named criteria the Internet is able to add a global dimension to local conflicts. This is exemplified by a case study on the Moluccan conflict, which took place from 1999 to 2002 in Eastern Indonesia—mainly between Christians and Muslims. It will be shown how local actors expanded the conflict into the Internet, and which strategies they put to use. During this conflict the Internet became an instrument, even a weapon encompassing a repertoire of means going far beyond those contemporarily in the focus, like e.g. cyberwars or flamewars. Questions of identity and differentiation seem to be as important as community building. But the presentation will not stop at proofing that with the Internet a new era of representing and carrying out conflicts has started. It will be made clear, that the Internet as tool and as field is a challenge for sociocultural anthropology. Established methods of research and theoretical concepts like identity, community, and conflict possibly are pivotal contributions to the social sciences’ research on the Internet—on the other hand those concepts have to be transformed and adapted accordingly.
↑Birgit Bräuchler’s dissertation “Cyberidentities at War: Der Molukkenkonflikt im Internet” (↵Bräuchler 2005) has just been published.
↑Nils Zurawski, giving a ↵presentation within the cyberanthropology panel as well, has written a ↑rave review [.pdf | 18KB] on it.
Now one can study game design in Germany: ↑Computervisualistik. Very interesting is the ↑bibliography acompanying the lecture ‘computergames’. Deutschlandfunk has an ↑Interview on Computervisualistik—↑published at Spiegel Online, too. [Everything in German.]
via entry at 2R
“The ↑Center for Internet Research and Media Integration (CIM) has been founded on July, 29 2005 at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. The objective is to support interdisciplinary research projects in the communication industries and their transformation through digital media especially through the internet.”
The better of yesterday’s and today’s time I spent in the ↵third space, in the unfathomable black void of MaxEd2’s viewport, representing the 3Dspace wherein maps are created. More precisely, I spent the time in front of the space, staring into it via the screen, and waited. If in gamemodding I am good for something at all then it’s mapping. There is quite a number of mappers in the community who are way better than me, but from the start on I developed a special knack with complex geometry. My signature skill, if you like. And my only modding-ability which deserves to be called a skill. Thankfully ↑StratonAce assigned me a a level for ↑Rogue-Ops which demands exactly that: a cathedral—as Strat has ↑made it public, I can repeat it here.
Now, a cathedral—mind that we are not dealing with some rotten church—per definition is a huge structure. In consequence, to guarantee fluent gameplay later on, optimizing the whole map is crucial. The polycount has to be watched closely, and every opportunity to spare polys has to be taken. “Less is more.” (↵Mies van der Rohe 1959)
Then, the cathedral as Strat had envisioned it, should consist of a plethora of gothic arches and windows. Arches ought to be curvy. ‘Small number of polygons’ plus ’rounded appearance demanded’ cries for ↑Gouraud shading. The latter in turn requires the to-be-smoothed polygons to belong to one mesh, so a ↑polygroup can be attached to them.
↑Joonas had indirectly challenged me by commenting in our team-only forum on a screenshot of an earlier build of my map: “Just mentioning that you asolutely should not union all that stuff together.” Back then I replied: “No, no, I won’t; I never intended to. I will only union or join those pieces which should be one piece to get optimal polygroup lightmap smoothing.” Then ↑[HP] jumped in: ” I dont agree with you Joonas, if he boolean all that stuff, renders will take much longer, but ↵GIS system will be more acurate! Because the system will treat that as one piece!”
Just recently Strat has bugged me to show off screenies of my map’s progress. When I had done so in the internal forum he interspersed some encouragement: “Now, get it lighted properly. ;-) he he” So I immediately flew through the whole structure and did a quick revision of it. Trying to determine what could be unioned without creating more and/or more complex polygons. The conclusion was astounding and it came back to my mind: “As one piece!” It definitely is in the nature of my cathedral’s geometry, that for getting “optimal polygroup lightmap smoothing” almost the whole thing should be one piece. More than one time I’ve tried similar operations in MaxEd1 and it crashed on me so fast and often I hardly could follow. But this is MaxEd2, far more stable they say … the hell—no risk, no fun.
So I humbled myself and again practiced the ↑Zen of MaxEd … calm-mindedly staring onto the screen, not moving anything, be it a toe, or be it thoughts, patiently waiting for the computer to finish calculating the new volume’n’vertices. With the whole structure growing, the booleans got more and more complex. The last one took roughly 1h 30min. Infinite patience required. As a Zen-archer doesn’t look away from the bull’s eye until the arrow has hit it (although he knew two years before that the arrow will hit it right in the middle), the master-booleanist doesn’t look away from the screen until the new mesh is created. No occasional blinking allowed. Finally the last operation was finished succesfully. Ctrl+S.
The machine’s main cooler fan suddenly sprang up to one zillion rounds per minute, emitting a sound I never before heard coming out of a computer. By bad chance at this very moment a tiny fly hovered right above the main air-induct. She immediately was sucked in. Inside she for sure instantaneously became deep-fried. A millisecond later the system shutted down. Deepest black void possible on a screen. ↑Satori. I fried two eggs in the touchpad’s recess, then packed the machine into my rucksack, went home, and to bed. Till sleep’s black void came mercifully I wondered where that tiny fly now was, and if retracing the threedimensional path she took at break-neck speed through the laptop’s inner architecture would be a case of reverse engineering and thereby breach of copyright law. Apart from that: Although my laptop is a high-end machine, I now definitely need a godbox. ↑Endo, please could you e-mail me the specs of that mean machine right outta hell, your employer furnished you with? In order that I can have a similar one built for me.
Today morning the laptop was cool and crisp again. I fired it up, everything worked perfectly, and the final result of the previous day’s boolean orgy safely resided on the HDD. Meanwhile I made several backups and deposited them on servers scattered all over the globe. Redundancy is your friend. Now let’s see if the dramatic lighting will work out better. Just a second … it just struck me that with one more boolean … if you are looking for me, I am back at staring into the black void, a kind of exploded cathedral beautifully floating in its midst.
EDIT: It’s one piece now! All vertices perfectly welded. At a conference I once attended, Open-Source evangelist ↑Bruce Perens preached: “The computer gives you absolute justice. Either it compiles, or not.” Now I wonder if my piece will export.
“The source code to Quake III Arena is ↑now online under the GNU General Public License—free to be hacked, spindled, bent, folded and mutilated. Let the meta-fragging begin!”
via entry at boingboing
sex’n’crime anyone—or just crime?
When I rode the tramway to work this morning at some stopover a girl entered the streetcar carrying two life-size cardboard figures depicting the cover-girl of ↑Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA:SA). By chance she took the seat directly opposite to me. As she was quite striking I asked her if GTA:SA was retracted from the shelves in Germany now, too. “Oh no,” she said, “they just changed some scenes …” I answered that I knew that there was a ↑patch released, suppressing the ↑hot-coffee mod, which she quoted by: “Ah, is there?” From her posture I deduced that she didn’t know shit about hot coffee and tried to steer the conversation in a slightly other direction: “Well, I thought it was banned from the shops and you had the good sense to grab the cardboards for home improvement.” In reply she explained to me that she is working for some public-relations agency doing PR for them. ‘Them’ being Take Two Germany in that case. By careful further questioning I tried to gain a picture of how the matter was discussed at her agency. But she was reluctant to give out any information on it—maybe she suspected me to be some counter-insurgent from the morality-department. Me of all people. Anyway—I know that most of you already are fed up to the brim with the affair, but it just perfectly illustrates a point substantially related to my project. And during the chain of events a part of the modding-community itself spoke out.
On 7th June 2005 the PC-version of GTA:SA hit the shelves—the long awaited newest installment of the GTA-series. After having been away for five years the playable character Carl “CJ” Johnson returns to his hometown to find the members of his family, as well as those of his old gang, being at odds with each other. In an ambience of drugs, sex, crime, and violence CJ starts out to get things straight again. Meaning to restore family, gang, hood’n’life. A free-roaming world and minigames make up most of the fascination with the ↑GTA-series. And GTA:SA is no exception. One of the minigames involves CJ having sex with girlfriends. In the original game the camera doesn’t catch the act, but stays away from the scene of the intercourse. Only moaning is to be heard, and slight shaking of the camera to be experienced.
Around mid-June 2005 a mod called ‘Hot Coffee’ was published on the Internet and the shit started to hit the fan. The mod—it actually is more of a tweak, or a patch—enables the player to enter the houses of sin and to a certain degree ‘control’ CJ’s sexual actions … infuriating, outrageous, scandalous, shocking—screenshots! And the politicians immediately jumped at it, Hillary Clinton head first—↵fatal feedback twisted and revisited. Steven Johnson wrote an ↑open letter to her at the LA Times:
I’d like to draw your attention to another game whose nonstop violence and hostility has captured the attention of millions of kids — a game that instills aggressive thoughts in the minds of its players, some of whom have gone on to commit real-world acts of violence and sexual assault after playing.
I’m talking, of course, about high school football.
In the digital realm Dave Kramer ↑commented the affair at gamestay:
The whole firestorm is ridiculous. Doesn’t everyone think it’s funny that all of these politicians are waving their arms in the air screaming about a little harmless simulated sex? I mean, the game is about killing rival gang members and lets you, within the first five minutes, drive over innocent pedestrians without penalty.
In defense against the ‘public outcry’ Rockstar (publisher of GTA:SA) first ↑blamed ‘hackers’ for the hidden ingame sex acts, then had to admit that the ↑sex scenes were built-in or forgotten, in any case never were meant to be unlocked. Finally Congressman Fred Upton [Representing Michigan’s 6th District] sprang into action and the U.S. House of Representatives called “for a federal inquiry to determine if Rockstar intentionally deceived the ↑Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) to avoid an Adults-Only rating. ↑[…]“ The ESRB rerated GTA:SA and attached an ‘Adults Only (18+)’ onto it. In Australia the ↑classification was revocated, meaning that the game cannot be legally sold, hired, advertised or exhibited in Australia anymore. In the U.S. e.g. WalMart and others took the game from the shelves and so on … but no strong reaction from Europe so far.
To illustrate that part of the story, and trying to lead up to my point, here’s ↑what Upton had written to the ↑Federal Trade Commission (FTC):
On 28th July 2005 Deborah Platt Majoras, ↑Chairman of the FTC replied, that the FTC meanwhile has issued the ‘FTC consumer alert’ ↑Video Games: Reading the Ratings on the Games People Play [which is a slightly augmented/commented version of the ESRB’s
↑Game Rating & Descriptor Guide] to help consumers decode and understand video game ratings:
… or less explicit. For instance both Max Payne (blood, violence) and Max Payne 2 (blood, intense violence, mature sexual themes, strong language) are rated ‘Mature (17+)’ by the ESRB. The spectrum of released MP-mods reaches from adding a lot more blood and gore—Wook went for lengths to achieve decapitation-by-lightsaber-stroke in ↵LS4, there are mods which literally drench the screen with blood, the latter even ↵triggering art—to things entirely different like ↑Sketchbook Sam. Per definitionem game-modification is about altering things, up to creating the never-seen-before. The quality of mods spans from crude technical exercises to artistic comments on, and interpretations of contemporary history and pop-/culture. In that game, ↵playing with taboos is a must.
The bottom line is that like with California’s San-Andreas graben we are dealing here with a fracture zone, too. A culturally, and maybe a multiple one. In the end it’s all about the inability and/or unwillingness to understand the culturally alien or other. The latter in this case being the culture of computergames and gamemodding. Trying to help to correct that grievance, the GTA-modders at ↑illspirit published a ↑press release. Here’s a snippet:
Furthermore, the existence of such user modifications is as old as PC gaming itself. Many of the most popular PC games have had communities of fans who make and share content with each other dating back to bulletin board systems before the internet. So to look at what has been done to GTA:SA as something “new” is simply ridiculous. The concept of more mature modification such as Hot Coffee isn’t something new either. Name any PC game which features female characters, and chances are someone somewhere created and uploaded a patch to remove their clothes. Even family-friendly The Sims (which was rated Teen) by Electronic Arts had a cheatcode to remove the in-game censorship blur during scenes involving nudity (genderless, granted, but still 100% less clothes than the original Hot Coffee scenes) and adult situations. Scenes which shipped with the retail game, no less, and this was nearly half a decade ago, and have never been complained about. Yet this is all of a sudden a “new” problem which is to be blamed on Rockstar Games?
But not only the immediately concerned GTA:SA-modders talk about the game and the ‘scandal’. The members of ‘my tribe’ [the posse around Max Payne and Alan Wake] clearly are fed up with the whole politicized and morally overcharged discussion. When people from within the scene—actually playing the games and even laying hands on them, creatively building something new upon them—↑discuss GTA:SA it sounds completely different to the ‘public discourse’. Infinitely more professional in my opinion. Squarejawhero said:
GTA isn’t about realism, and shouldn’t be—it’s a big violent cartoon of a game. ↑[…]
For more information on the still developing story please refer to the extensive and seemingly regularly updated Wikipedia-entries ↑Hot Coffee mod and ↑Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Ah, I forgot—here’s some hot coffee …
Long before I encountered gamemodding I already had fallen in love with desktopmodding. The better part of which can more accordingly be called -tweaking, as most of this discipline’s alterations do not dig too deep. Instead they scratch the surface, sometimes very effectively, sometimes only on the level of cosmetic surgery. Above you can see the result of my very first attempt at customizing the looks and feel of the graphical interface—replacing the recycling bin by a big white telephone. I keep that toilet bowl since years, through time it migrated to every new machine of mine—though a lot of useful things were lost in these processes—and I still use it today. It may sound a little farfetched, but tweakers’ and modders’ favourite items and topoi are those which socially are declared forbidden, or sacred, which are a no-no—taboos. As the metaphor ‘restroom’ already proofs, toilets belong to said items, but are situated at the soft-gloved end of the ‘socially-sanctionized-things spectrum’. Besides playing with taboos, collecting is another passion of modding- and gaming-culture. So it’s little surprise that someone indeed started to collect ↑screenshots of gamespace-toilets.
In its ↑overview of Max Payne, Wikipedia has aptly put it: “The games’ stylish cinematography and choreography is combined with heavy film noir and pulp fiction influences in characters and dialogue.” In ↑Part I, Chapter Six: “Fear That Gives Men Wings” there even is a citation of ↑Pulp Fiction—one of the movie’s countless memorable moments is restaged … and a toilet is involved. When I—as Max Payne—for the first time entered that on first glance empty apartment and saw the orphaned submachine gun lying on the kitchen’s sideboard I immediately knew that behind the closed door there was a guy, pants down and missing his weapon. And I was right. Allusions, citations, ↵easter eggs—that is cyberculture.
Allow me to add some other toilets not yet in the fine ↑gamespace-toilets collection. TheHunted, top-mapper of ↑New Dawn fame once showed me his rendition of a pissoir in ↵MP1-gamespace.
And as stylish like seen below will be the restrooms in the hard-worked on ↵MP2 ↵TC ↑Rogue-Ops. Besides myself being a proud member of the ↑Rogue-Ops team, there are good reasons to check out the website. With the gracious help of ADoomedMarine it has been completely overhauled, now is regularly updated and already features a lot of material on the project.
Staying in style, here is one of the most famous pre-release promotion pictures for ↵Doom3—surprisingly not yet in the collection. The screenshot has a clear message to teach: Be careful when planning to pay a visit to the restroom, as ↑Here There Be Tygers.
initially via entry at boingboing
In ye olde days of ↵MPHQ, multiplayer for Max Payne was an issue. First the possibility of making a mod comprising a multiplayer mode was seriously discussed in the forums. [Then the topic became a nuisance, and finally a running-gag played on ↵n00bs.] Quickly it became clear, that it was impossible to achieve for certain reasons: from the technical side lack of access to the source code was a powerful argument, the problems arising with ↑bullet time another. The essential knack lies in the very concept itself. A player going into bullet time gets the decisive advantage from it, because the gameworld around him/her slows down, but the player still can act—aiming the weapon has to be named here—in real time. Imagine a multiplayer game featuring bullet time. Say six players are together in one map. Every instance one of them goes into bullet time, in consequence the other five only can act in slow-motion. There will be no fluent gameplay possible anymore. Nobody would want to play a game like that. Dramaturgically it would be ideal if gameplay would not slow down for the other 5, but the actions of the bullet-timer would appear to them superhumanly fast. But then the gameserver would have to handle at least two time-lines and ultimately achieve the feat of looking into the future to be able to synchronize the actions inside and outside bullett time. Impossible! Impossible? Not quite, as it seems. The ↑NewScientist reports on Finnish researchers [who else?] ↑Jouni Smed, Henrik Niinisalo and ↑Harri Hakonen having developed a way to achieve the bullet time effect in real-time multiplayer-games. Like in ↑The Sting and in ↵IRC-black-magic, lag is the word of the hour:
In locally networked games, time delays can be as much as 10 milliseconds, while transatlantic games suffer a latency of around 60 milliseconds. However, the use of LPFs means players do not notice any time lag because events are ever so slightly slowed down until the game catches up with itself.
Using a test-bench game called ↑MaxMazeDemonstrator [download link there! | .zip | 80KB], Smed and colleagues found that they could also artificially introduce delays of up to a few seconds, allowing one player to slow down their environment and gain a strategic advantage, while game-time appeared normal to their opponent.
The three heroes have published a paper called “Realizing the bullet time effect in multiplayer games with local perception filters” (↵2004, ↵2005). The abstract reads:
Local perception filters exploit the limitations of human perception to reduce the effects of network latency in multiplayer computer games. Because they allow temporal distortions in the rendered view, they can be modified to realize the bullet time effect, where a player can get more reaction time by slowing down the surrounding game world. In this paper, we examine the concepts behind local perception filters and extend them to cover artificially increased delays. The presented methods are implemented in a testbench program, which is used to study the usability and limitations of the approach.
screenshots from MP2-mod project The Agents
Today I augmented the very first chapter of maxmod’s projected chapters, which is called ↵access—straightforwardedly worded: I beefed it up without adding much content, well there’s some new text, and now I am pimping it shamelessly. It may not have been a great idea to conceptualise the chapters right out of the mælstrom of my consciousness at an early stage of the project. But hey, online everything is easily to be changed and changed again. Everything at my website and weblog is to be understood as work-in-progress. With the aptly named chapter ↵access I attempt to tell my first encounter with gamemodding and those who now are ‘my cyberian tribe’. If you like, go there and have a look at it—there are pictures, too ;-) Feel free to ↵write a comment on ‘access’ here.
