Pulsar: Lost Colony

I tried out Pulsar: Lost Colony. If you told me it was a beta or early access demo I’d tell you it had great potential.

It was launched 2 years ago.

The big hurt is that it’s meant to be played co-op by up-to 5 people filling the roles of the crew, and the stand-in AI is inferior, but it’s a lot more fundamental than that. Either the game is missing some critical layers of functionality needed to make FPS-style AI function or they were written horrifically wrong.

The AI falls off or thru pretty much anything and everything, if there is backtracking in the AIs planning, then its weighted on something stupid if at all.

Their state machine appears to lack logic for constraining the lifetime of a decision – so AI will run off the edge of a staircase and fall to its death still trying to reach the x/y it had in mind, and not using its jetpack to right itself.

I was growing tired of the friendly AIs having no cutoff on how many times they’d repeat the same plan and as a result getting stuck running into a pole or stuck on top of one surface with no connection to the surface they want to reach; many of the teleport destinations on away missions have some kind of covering over them, and if the AI lands on that, there it will stay. Your only recourse is to dismiss the AI and add a new one, and set it up again.

Then I realized that the /enemy/ AI is just as terrible. I have a hunch that part of the reason this FPS-based game has no crouch or lean is because they could barely deal with the basic AI they already have. If I had to guess, I’d imagine these guys were rookies going boldly but cavalierly into new territory for themselves, but also blindly not taking the time to do watch GDC or videos or any of the other ways they could have learned the many convergent ways in which different past studios have made these problems simpler and more manageable.

Each of the roles feels incredibly vacuous and shallow, of a depth I’d expect only in early access or beta. No little gimmicks for them to mess with to game a play thru any flair that you might have expected to be added before release never mind 2 years since.

The AI doesn’t have voice lines, so the AI crew gives the gaming a haunted feeling.

Lastly instead of any kind of tutorial there’s literally a manual. Literally a giant PDF file in-game that explains what the buttons in the game do without really actually telling you anything about what the game is or your role in it.

I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone but developers; it is a really nice, delightful framework for building a game, but balanced almost exactly by so many missed opportunities and so many what-not-tos.

Dyson Work Light

Saw a cool-looking desk lamp at Best Buy the other day and made the mistake of letting the Dyson vendor start talking to me about it.

It’s a work light.

That costs $599.

Because (a) the arm conducts heat away from the leds, you know how leds are infamous for burning out because of heat, right, well thanks to the arm these can last YEARS until you have to replace the entire unit because it’s special magic LED that will cost you more replace than a new worklight! (b) it has super-high-tech secret sensors that allow it to match the ambient light.

Or: It costs $599 because it has a special LED, designed to get really super hot, attached to a heat-conducting metal arm with a heat-pipe in it that will conduct that heat straight into your hand when you try and adjust the lamp – which you will do regularly because you can’t tell whether the light is on or not.

Frankly “can’t tell whether the light is on or not” is the opposite of what I look for in a lighting solution. And when the guy demod it for me, it really did match the ambient light so well that we both had to tilt our heads to look directly at the bulb to be able to tell it was on.

The guy took great pleasure in showing me how you could raise or lower the arm, how it rotated, and then nearly flipped out when I started to reach for it..
Not only can you not tell whether the light is on or not, you can’t point it where you want, and people keep breaking his floor models by trying to twist or pivot it. The mechanism on the stand looks exactly like the kind of mechanism that would allow you to tilt or twist the arm. The picture on the front of the box is even taken from a bizarre angle that makes it look like the lamp has had the head tilted upwards.

Actual:

But it was standing in-front of images like these:

And what I refer to as the “light comes out here” picture

But I think this actual Dyson promo picture sums it up

“The light from my phone is reflecting off the lamp”
“I can’t quite read whats on my phone, I’ll have to lean forward for a closer look”
“This posture looks totally natural”
“It’s a touch screen, that’s why I’m not looking at it”
“I’m calling 911 to report this thing, and not taking my eye off it”

Yep – if there’s one thing you want from a work-lamp, other than light, having it directly overhead of what you want to work on, right at eye level, that’s got to be right up there… I’d throw my money at the screen but it’s too dark in here to see my money or the screen…

What changed about the ‘net?

So “What changed in the last 15 years of the Internet?”

It’s not actually the Internet we’re talking about regulating. The truth is, in the USA, we’re talking about preventing Comcast and Charter.

On paper, Comcast’s internet subscribers passed their TV subscribers in 2015.

On paper.

Ghost of Clippy-past

Cortana has some great functionality crippled by an obsolete, out-of-date set of concerns generated, perhaps, by Windows 8. Cortana wouldn’t be terribly out of place in 2010, but today?

A few days ago, Windows bamboozled me. A little pop-up appeared (grr, and stole focus): “If you tell me which teams you like – or don’t – I can tell you how they are doing”. My third thought(*1) was “who is this message from?!”

I’m just guessing it’s from Cortana, if so it seems like the Cortana team is for some reason resurrecting the worst of Clippy… (*2)

Thanks to daily interaction with Google, Amazon, Facebook, Siri, etc, a modern user will interpret “Ask me anything” on a device differently than they would have in 2010.

If your plumber has to google every step of a basic repair job for you, you’re going to try another plumber next time. You don’t hire an accountant on the basis that they “know the URL for TurboTax”.

When someone says “ask me anything”, the response “you can look that up on the web” quickly becomes a contradiction of the original statement.

Eventually, it feels like they lied.

That’s the current presentation of Cortana.

VMwin

Still trying to rescue one of my virtual machines on my ESXi 5.5 blade that I erroneously upgraded to 5.5 virtual hardware (which prevents you from using the vSphere client to edit settings any more). I finally got an evaluation vCenter running, only to find: you can’t use vCenter to manage a free ESXi host. Even if you pay $6k for vCenter, it can’t manage a free vSphere host.

VMware: We’ll take your money, look – a dog!

I continue to be impressed at just how customer-hostile VMWare manage to be.

Step 1: Give all products vague and conflicting names (VMware vCenter Server requires VMware vSphere Client to access),
Step 2: Make every feature a product rather than having products with licensable features, because that was cool in 1995, damnit,
Step 3: Instead of hiring copy/technical writers for your web site, make instructional videos that are approximately related to something vaguely within a a page or two of of the link you clicked on.

I just watched what appeared to be the “omg you want this” promo for vCenter, and it was all about how the client is now web-based which can now do a search, and you can do other stuff while it searches and go back to the search. Seriously, the entire video was in the context of “sure, there’s other stuff to click, but look – we can go back to our search!”

What brought this on? I have an old SuperMicro server blade that hosts my Ubuntu apt-cache and Windows server, and I thought I’d try upgrading my ESXi from 5.0 to something newer. Even though the blade has stock e1000s, when I upgrade to 5.1 or 5.5, they kinda quit working, and you have to dig down into VMware forums to find a link that basically says “force it to reinstall the 5.0 drivers using magic shenanigans”.

Then I got shanghai’d with 5.5 – it’s still free but they’re cutting off access to the “vSphere Client” you use to manage it, and I upgraded the “virtual hardware” on one of my machines, It paused for a while so I went to click again, exactly as a dialog appeared with the “OK” button directly under my mouse.

This was presumably the dialog that was mean’t to warn me that upgrading the virtual hardware would lock me in to requiring vCenter Server to change settings on the server in future.

And now that server won’t boot because the mac address conflicts with something. So I wanted to install the vCenter Server trial, I think. So I follow the link that the old vSphere client provides and … I have no damn clue what this is that I’m installing.

The website is just a mess. It’s harder to shop for a specific product than it is to find a decent Windows 8 tablet (ka-ching).

Well played, VMware, well played. I’ve left your site feeling dazed and confused and with a strong desire to buy shares in Microsoft…

 

VS 2012: The one I probably won’t own

A long time ago, in a Grimsby far, far away, a young kid saves up enough money to buy a C compiler for his Atari ST. So the transition to Microsoft C was pretty natural for me. I’ve owned personal copies of each version of MSVC since C/C++ 7 in 1992, I still have my boxed VC6.

Based on my experience with the VS 2012 developer preview, beta and release candidate … Microsoft have killed everything in VS that made me choose to fire it up over Code::Blocks or KDE or VIM.

Windows gets viruses, but who lets them in?

Kind of interesting article linked from Slashdot, finds 37% of infections are via the Java JRE (I’m not surprised, Java is secure, not impenetrable, but average Java developers don’t understand the difference), 32% via Acrobat/Reader and 16% via Flash. 85% in we finally get to the usual suspect, MS Internet Explorer: 10%.

Of course, if you look at the other stats, it should be fairly clear that many of the infections are happening during browser usage, and they give a breakdown of browser exposure (to attacks: 66% IE, 21% ‘Fox, 8%  Chrome).

But next time we are mocking Windows security, remember: 85% of infections via Sun/Oracle and Adobe.

Secret reveal of Microsoft’s iTunes killer

Xhack: I finally hate Windows Live.

A few weeks ago, someone managed to get access to my Xbox Live gamertag, and charge nearly $130 to my account via Paypal. I might not have noticed except I saw the Paypal emails and knew for damn sure I hadn’t made any paypal payments in the last 7 days.

It took me a little work to find a billing history, but sure enough, my Xbox Live account had mad two big Microsoft-point buys and spent the resulting points on several games… All while I was nowhere near an Xbox.

Thanks to Microsoft’s “live” single-login concept, reporting this issue means my Xbox, Zune and Windows Phone are all kaput…