Joe Wintergreen

i want to be able to have a "table of contents" type list on the right hand side of my profile that shows all my posts with a certain tag. just the headings and it links the post. or not even a tag but just selected posts.

Dishonored rules, obviously. Here are some selected thoughts I have had about Dishonored.

• It is insane how well they migrated Dishonored 1's systems from UE3 to id tech for Dishonored 2. Everything feels the same, except D1's cool camera animations for locomotion didn't make it across, which is a bummer but a small one.

• Dishonored has some of the best level design around. I don't think they did anything crazy tools-wise except use brushes, which probably they were used to coming from Source. This was at a time where most people had switched to modular meshes, which, yeah, don't let you do level design. Folks think they do but they don't.

• It's interesting replaying the games (which I recently have been doing) having now known and worked with Raf Colantonio and some of the rest of the team. They make immersive sims the only way that really works - systems-first, "design" second, with a big leap of faith that your systems, once finished, are going to output a good time. Raf said once that they only "found the fun" on Dishonored like a few months before ship, which is wild but also just what has to happen, I think, to make an imsim.

• Dishonored's expansions are the best expansions there are. I always want this type of thing - an immediate followup from a dev who, having just shipped almost this exact thing, is now incredible at it. Everyone should always do this. The best Half-Life 1 chapter is Uplink, the standalone Half-Life demo Valve made right after they shipped Half-Life. It's better than anything in the main game. A friend at Valve at that time told me that a bunch of them, right after HL1, just wanted to roll straight onto HL2 on all the same tech, but there was a "fancy new technology" mandate from on high. I want to visit the parallel universe where they were permitted to do that, instead of condemned to dev hell for years.

• Dishonored impresses the hell out of me narratively for a lot of reasons, but my favourite is: It has a character who's basically the Gman, the Cigarette Smoking Man; famously a trope that if you attempt to resolve it you'll fuck it up and make the whole setting retroactively less interesting. In Death of the Outsider, they resolve it without fucking it up. Amazing.

one day i'm gonna write about all the ridiculous internal policies i've seen at game dev companies. the shit people think will make their staff more productive is often utterly insane

EDIT: I fucked up!!! goldsrc first used MILES for post-2001/pre-steam multiplayer voice chat since 1.1.0.8!!!! speex was steam-era!!!! my nostalgia was a couple years late, and that's probably because that's when micspam really took off. my speex recreation was WRONG, even though it was similarly fucked.

gravis pulled through, this is the 100% genuine and authentic reproduction, go here and scroll to the last post instead: https://cohost.org/cathoderaydude/post/4085453-i-reproduced-bobskun thanks @cathoderaydude and @isyourguy for getting it right.

original post:

like original retail WON half-life (well, honestly, a couple years of patching later, 1.1.0.8 from sept. 2001) voice chat used the speex MILES speech codec, it was really bad because it had to do two things: encode/decode on our 400mhz shitboxes that are already busy with crowbars and gluon guns, and send/receive it over a 33.6kbps link that is also trying to shout at us where all our snarks are presently located and going

BUT you could talk to people! with your mic! on the computer! while you shoot them and not have to stop to type!!! INNOVATION

rather quickly someone (who happened to be the garry newman who would then to go on to create garry's mod, go figure!!!) figured out how to pipe in a specifically rated/sampled wave file directly

he released it with the fucking most incredible sailor's hornpipe/popeye ass song possible and you really should hear it before what i'm gonna drop in the next post

THIS. THIS RIGHT HERE. is ALMOST what it sounded like when it was coming through, and it was overpowering most of the other audio, including the breaking up screams of two or more people shouting "TURN IT OFFFFF" while shotguns and explosions and rapid fire glocks and sentry guns and terrorists win is going off at the same time, with a few bonus pauses because of dropped UDP buffer simulated in

after getting a correction on the era's codec i'm terrified to hear it in the original MILES speech

and multiple people correct you