Jehar's comments

Jehar | 11 years ago | on: Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom (2010)

I'll happily agree that Painkiller has some more variation then SS, but on the whole it's much more focused with wave-based arenas. This isn't a knock against Painkiller at all, it's a favorite of mine - yet it's still a bit inaccurate to regard it as classical level design.

Jehar | 11 years ago | on: My Treadmill Desk

I'm interpreting this as pretty hardcore satire. Is anyone else picking up on that?

Jehar | 11 years ago | on: Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom (2010)

There is a critical gap between the sensibilities of Doom/Quake/Duke and Painkiller/Serious Sam: level flow. The latter camp is in varying degrees a series of rooms you get locked into as enemies spawn in waves. The former involves navigating a highly varied environment as you attract the attention of pre-existing enemies.

Sure, on the avatar scale, they play at a similar level. The environments are what really set the earlier generation apart, and in that respect very little approaches that sort of design.

Jehar | 11 years ago | on: RunPee – Because movie theaters don't have pause buttons

This leads to what strikes me as a potentially negative heuristic for determining what moments in a given film have worth. Summer flick drivel aside, would RunPee assign a high pee time to, say, Drive, which has a significant amount of mood-setting long shots without any dialogue or plot-relevant action?

Excuse me for probably taking this too far, but this app seems to imply that films are merely the sum of plot-related scenes, and that doesn't sit quite well with me. Would the app consider every establishing shot in Alien to be pee-able?

Jehar | 12 years ago | on: Scary Monster For Your Next FPS Game in Three.js

This is a neat implementation! I'd be happier to see some attribution in regards to the assets being used, however.

This was a custom player model made for Quake II multiplayer, and it is used by some players today.

Readme for the model: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/examples/mode...

The weapon models are actually the stock Quake II models/textures except in the case of the first one, which is the model included with the custom mesh. These are technically freely available through the Quake II CTF demo, but fair warning if you attempt to use these in your project.

Jehar | 12 years ago | on: Why Microsoft really patched XP

It has promise, but it irks me that trouble was went to to include the iconography, but they aren't interactive - only the labels are.

Jehar | 12 years ago | on: Gog.com giving away Dungeon Keeper for free

At risk of turning this into an echo chamber:

In-App Purchases become intrinsic mechanical elements of a player's experience of the game. This results in the design skewing towards encouraging "positive" events, namely making purchases. At this point, the mechanical goals of the game become abstracted, or even split - your game isn't about the mechanics of the puzzle anymore, it's about producing those positive events.

Jehar | 12 years ago | on: The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life

More to the point, it seems that the police must skew towards that attempted 0% risk, which is what starts snowballs like this.

I find it ironic that with all of the talk flying around about nothing being private, a facebook conversation that would potentially exonerate this guy can't be dredged up.

It's hard for me to crystallize my thoughts on what needs to happen here, because the details, have up until this article, been incredibly confusing and contradictory. At the last report, this conversation took place within League of Legends itself. Apparently that wasn't the case. What other details about the information the jury had access to do we not know?

Jehar | 12 years ago | on: The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life

Look into != jail for several months.

There are (supposedly) fairly well-defined use cases for probable cause and sufficient evidence to prosecute, and it seems these were all trampled over in this case.

In regards to the Judas Priest comments, I think that may have been some unintentional hyperbole/satire, pointing at the widely disproved profiling of school shooters. The Harris/Klebold case had a lot of cultural baggage of that type, most of which was fabricated by journalists. Citing them as fans of Marilyn Manson is one example; they possessed no Manson albums or memorabilia.

Jehar | 12 years ago | on: Tarkovsky Films Free Online (2010)

Can I attempt to clarify the perceived intention of Tarkovsky with his novel adaptation? I wouldn't frame the films as evidence that he didn't care about the source material or what it attempted to say. Rather, it seems to me that these films are his responses to the novels, or at least meditations on what the novels said to Tarkovsky.

Another factor is that film and literature are very different languages, and aiming for a 1:1 translation can often result in a work that is missing pieces that were only communicable in the original. If we acknowledge that any given novel will have aspects of it that are un-filmable (interior monologue, relative time dilation, for simple examples), then it is the job of the director to re-create the spirit of those aspects while making them work for his media. As a result, the director cannot help but inject his own views and thoughts into the work. Nobody embodies this more strongly to me than Tarkovsky, with Kubrick as a close second. In fact, King's own attempt (shudder) at filming The Shining may prove this point all by itself; it's apparent that King doesn't understand the medium he was attempting to use.

Jehar | 12 years ago | on: Microsoft paying YouTubers for Xbox One mentions

There's one key point that I haven't seen discussed here much. If this were a simple case of Microsoft contacting content producers directly and offering these things, then it'd be more acceptable. However, these are partners of Machinima, which has a relationship with YT and advertisers (fox, adotube, cbs, etc) to provide a revenue share to content producers. The fact that Machinima is mandating these terms to the content producers is what makes everything a bit shady, and poses several conflicts of interest for them.

Jehar | 12 years ago | on: Blue Eyes Logic Puzzle

That's a good point, but then the critical factor is that nobody knows how many people have blue eyes. More specifically, each person has to hold the possibility that n = observed persons with blue eyes + 1, which is himself.

Jehar | 12 years ago | on: Blue Eyes Logic Puzzle

This is the missing element from most explanations I see of this problem. We all look at the n cases from the POV of a blue-eyed person. An outside observer with brown eyes has the same level of information available to him, so it seems to me just as likely that after the first day, each person, regardless of eye color, could reason that nobody left the previous day, so the visitor must have been referring to me. So either eventually everyone dies, or they all realize the paradox and forgo the ritual.

Jehar | 12 years ago | on: Doom released 20 years ago today

This is a topic that essentially comes down to taste, but I'll attempt to outline the core appeal. You're right in saying that Wolf3D was mechanically simplistic when compared to the original - however, these choices were intentional. Carmack's engine provided a low-latency high-framerate simulation, albeit a relatively simple one. This was a fidelity in experience that was completely novel, so every decision was made to maximize the tactile feel of the moment-to-moment action. More complex gameplay elements were determined to be less of a priority if they a) technically slowed down the engine or b) kinetically slowed down the gameplay. This game was an appeal to the immediacy of the onscreen action, even moreso than the first-person perspective. Thankfully, this continued to be a core value for id, which is more than could be said for other shooters that offhandedly throw away input fidelity.

Jehar | 12 years ago | on: Why Dallas for Your Startup? This Infographic Will Help

Recent innovations in construction have provided residents with rather effective countermeasures to the weather.

But seriously, having moved here from a snowy/cold climate, I'm more than willing to trade an extra 20 degrees in the summer for an extra 20 degrees in the winter.

Jehar | 12 years ago | on: Little Brother

I found this to be an astute observation about Little Brother, but it's not something I'd apply to the genre as a whole, or even Doctorow. I was highly impressed by the characterization in Makers, which was only published a year later. Little Brother was written in haste[1] with an explicit focus on the ideological, at the expense of more human characters. I would urge anyone who felt the characterization in LB to be lacking to check out Makers.

[1]:http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/GunnLecture/Cory_Doctorow-Little_...

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