Diecast – Twenty Sided

Paul is back, and this week we answer a record-breaking TEN emails. Ten is not a lot of number, but it’s still more than we’ve ever done before.

Also, the ending music is several decibels lower now. I’ve been getting complaints about this. I suspect that people have been using my droning voice and banal observations to lull themselves to sleep, and then the end music was startling them awake again.

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Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
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00:19 Moving

03:57 Winamp & Skins

Like I said on the show, I really loved Winamp back in the day. These days Foobar2000 is my player of choice. It’s probably a better overall player, but Winamp has a certain nostalgic quality that’s hard to quantify.

08:36 Mailbag: Whale Hunting

Dear Diecast,

I hope you’re all doing well! I just stumbled upon a 2015 GDC Talk – “Don’t Call Them Whales: F2P Spenders and Virtual Value“.

It shares some interesting opinions and data. I found a couple of interesting points, and I was wondering if you could discuss some (or all) of them:

1. At around 16:23, right after sharing some interesting data, she tries to equate whales’ spending to some traditional hobbies. I’m still reeling at the sheer wrong-ness of that comparison. What’s your take on that segment of the talk?

2. At around 37:02, she tries to make the case that game demand is inelastic (i.e. their price doesn’t affect demand), and Steam Sales are successful only because they’re a “special event” (and increase sales only thanks to the increase in advertising the game has gotten). I think this goes counter to some of your articles that argue against some AAA publishers that never do sales. That part of the talk was conspicuously light on data… But do you think she’s right?

3. And I’m sorry for making this email even longer, but I just wanted to share how utterly disgusted I am at how at the end of the talk she pivots to talking about how the mainstream thinks games are for kids, and aren’t art, and that makes it OK to milk whales, and just how easy and low-ball the questions were… UGH!

Anyway, hope my email wasn’t too long (I tried, I really really did!).

Keep Being Awesome,

Lino

19:18 Mailbag: Cats or dogs?

Dear Diecast

Cats or dogs?

Here is some additional context for you.

21:18 Mailbag: Lesser-Known Favorites?

Dear Diecast!

I think Darek mentioned Gothic, obscure outside of central europe it seems, as an example of an RPG that was very important to him. That made me wonder: do you guys (and girls, if Heather or SoldierHawke cohosts due to Paul’s moving) have games that were seminal, or influenced your tastes but might be lesser known outside of hardcore fans of certain genres? And what stood out to you about them?

For me personally, those titles were, in no particular order: “Jagged Alliance 2”, which made me enjoy round based tactical games with strong RPG mechanics, “Strike Commander”, a Chris Roberts flight sim, which looked stunning for the time and made me interested in flying in general, and “Little Big Adventure” – or “Relentless: Twinsen’s Adventure” as it was called across the pond, which was the second ever game I bought on CD-Rom, which had a depth to the world that I hadn’t seen before in any other game.

Kind regards from winterly Austria
ColeusRattus

If you’re curious, this is the band I mentioned on the show. And this is what I said about Outcast back in 2007.

29:28 Mailbag: Starsiege Tribes

Dear Diecast,

Shamus has mentioned he likes the movement mechanics in the Spider-Man games, and I was wondering: Shamus, have you ever played an older multiplayer game called Starsiege Tribes? It has a movement mechanic called skiing, where due to the way the physics are programmed, you can gain a lot of momentum by repeatedly jumping while moving down a slope.

Combined with the jetpack mechanics skiing allows you to smoothly and swiftly traverse maps. It was such a big part of the experience that in Tribes 2 the developers made jumping to be repeated by default (in Tribes 1 you only jumped once per keypress) and mentioned it in the tutorial.

Vale,

-Tim

31:11 Mailbag: Installed Games

Dear Diecast,

Hope you’re doing well! I like to have very few games installed on my machine. In the past, I tried to have at most three games installed at a time. That way, I could make sure the games I did have were ones I played regularly. For a long time, having any more than three gave me feelings of anxiety, becauseI felt like I was neglecting all these great games I’ve got on my computer.

But in recent years, the number of games I have installed has jumped up significantly! Right now, I’ve got no less than ten (10!) games on my system! So, I wonder – how common is this? How many games do you have installed right now? Do you get the same (or a similar) kind of anxiety, likeI described above?

(And I almost dread to hear what Paul is going to answer: having all those kids run rampant on your computer must have turned it into some sort of Purgatory….)

Keep Being Awesome,

Lino

34:41 USB of Mystery

The universe is mocking me.

38:33 Mailbag: Modding for Playability

Dear Diecast,

Hi Shamus, Paul, and Ross (in particular),

Unity, because it uses Mono as one of its internal scripting engines, exports C# assemblies that prove to be relatively easy to decompile and edit. Tools like dnSpy make this trivial so long as you are comfortable with C#.

Because I am still using an upgraded albeit base-model Mac Mini from 2012 as my main computer, I often find myself struggling with performance with recent games, even if they offer extensive options for tweaking graphics. At least with some Unity games, the option has been open to me to dive into the assembly, analyze where untoggle-able graphics features might be present, and then make changes that will make the experience more playable. With 2018’s Battletech, I was able to remove most of the mandatory post-processing pipeline, and that made that game playable.

Most notably, I followed the glowing recommendations for Gone Home from earlier episodes of the Diecast. What I found was a game that was atrociously slow, not only to get past the opening title cards, but to simply play and move around in. I spent some time tweaking graphics settings and found that the game seemed to simulate faster when the framerate was higher. I followed this into the assembly itself and discovered that indeed, the game did dictate a maximum deltaTime step, meaning that if your computer did not maintain the 30fps threshold, that everything — from how quickly the title card faded to how quickly your character moved — slowed down in proportion.

It took me several hours, but I did reshape Gone Home into a game that would be fun for me to play. I increased the character’s move speed, but had to eliminate the view bob (which was not actually toggleable) because it would result in my character jumping across hallways and through the ceiling. I removed mouse acceleration, and even turned off the game’s PVS Culling scheme because it did not de-cull objects fast enough to account for the increased movement speed (and it also seemed to offer no real performance benefit, given that Unity also does occlusion culling by itself). I finished the game in about an hour and enjoyed the experience enough to play it a second time to listen to the developer commentary.

How often have you come across a game that you wanted to enjoy, but couldn’t because there was some small problem with an obvious fix that you otherwise couldn’t make because the internals of the game were locked away? Have you ever had to resort to modding to make a game playable? What’s the furthest you’ve ever gone in order to make an overpowered game play on an underpowered computer?

Sincerely,

The Listener Previously, But Let’s Also Go With Currently, Known as ‘Brad.’

42:52 Mailbag: Remaster Wishlist

Hi!

Shamus, you mentioned a wish about remastering Thief Deadly Shadows. I have very good news for you — the mod called Thief DS Gold, which is a part of Sneaky Upgrade, a patch/mod pack for TDS. This is the mod, that stitches together levels in missions (though, not the City districts), with no fog gates.

So… Are there any other games that you wish that were modded or remastered in a similar fashion?

And since I’m talking Thief here. Did you play any Fan Missions for Thief games? And ever tried The Dark Mod?

Best regards, DeadlyDark

P.S. Say hi to Paul!

47:12 Mailbag: Forgotten Tech

Dear Diecast,

I hope this finds you well! I love learning about old technology, and I just watched this cool 5-minute documentary about the Halcyon – a failed 1980’s gaming console that was kind of like the progenitor of Amazon Alexa (link – https://youtu.be/dSMhZuKyGm0). And it made me wonder:

– Since you were alive back then (or at least Shamus was), do you remember seeing ads for it? If so, what did you think of it at the time?

– In that same vein, has there ever been a piece of technology you really liked, but which never caught on?

– What about the other way around? Was there ever a piece of tech where you thought “This’ll never get off the ground!”, yet it ended up being extremely popular? E.g. I was very sceptical about mobile games, but before I knew it, they were bigger than PC and consoles!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

Keep Being Awesome,

Lino

53:56 Mailbag: Single-player MMOs

Dear Diecast,

Never playing MMO game before, I decided to tip my toes into one – Star Wars: The Old Republic. To my suprise, I even liked it fine. Still, a lot of things were completly new to me: how the game handles its mechanics, world-building, loot system, social interactions etc. It’s all very illuminating to me – now I understand where lies a birthplace of things I don’t like in modern games. But what suprised me is that a lot of those things suddenly make sense in an MMO game – while being unsuitable for a single player experience.

The easiest and most obvious example for me to use would be Dragon Age: Inquisiton (since, like TOR, it was developed by BioWare). At the time of its premiere a lot of people were saying that it’s basically a Single Player MMO. But for me it was simply a bad game.

But playing an MMO game now, I have to agree with those statements – a lot of things that bothered me in DA: I are the same ones that are being used – sometimes even succesfully – in TOR (loot system, enemies placement, the general structure of the world, quests; heck, TOR has by far better quests and storylines that Inquisiton, what’s up with that?). Generally speaking, everything in Inquisition seem to be designed as if it really was an MMO.

So, I was wondering, why so many modern games (I guess mostly cRPGs) are so fond of using those mechanics, when they make sense in MMOs, but not in single players games? Is it because designers are more experienced with them? Or are they simply more effective at keeping players engaged for a long period of time? Maybe because it’s easier to make games like that if they are to be both Single- and Multiplayer experience?

I’d like to ask you to use your sick psychic powers to read designers’ minds and grant me with that knowledge.

Live long and prosper in the Force,

Darek

PS: Speaking of BioWare, apparently Anthem was cancelled. Any comments on that?

59:21 Mailbag: Tetra

Hey Shamus,

you mentioned that you really like Tinker’s mod for Minecraft and that’s why you’re not using 1.16 yet, I was wondering if you’ve checked out Tetra?

It’s a mod that adds tool customization and a few other miscellaneous things (finding geodes in stone that you can crack open to get various materials, underground ruins that contain technology, a bit like TES Dwemer stuff,…). It allows you to switch out the materials that your tools are made of, as well as the type of tool it is (for example you can make a tool with a pickaxe head on one side and an axe head on the other for easy mining through mineshafts).

It doesn’t work too well with tools and implements added by other mods, but it may still be worth checking out.

Vale,

-Tim