Month: June 2018

Nintendo E3

  • Daemon Ex Machina: Looks like recycled material from the bad Starfox and non-Metroid "Metroid" mecha games. Dire.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Cartoony JRPG with pretty art, music, and numbers all over the screen: I love you. I barely remember the first Xenoblade Chronicles game (Wii?), but I'm up for it.
  • Pokémon Let's Go: I've never poked a man and never will, except briefly in Go. The physical Pokéball Plus is a cute idea.
  • Super Mario Party: Video shows way more ethnically integrated families and friends than entirely plausible. It's Mario Party, pointless but fun little minigames, it'll be fine. Everyone should have one.
  • Fire Emblem Three Houses: Pretty, seems like there's more story than usual between the tactical battles, and bigger armies? Cool, tho I expect like all FE games it'll get dull fast, they never learned to build pressure on the player.
  • Fortnite: The message of the novel (one of my favorites, along with the manga & movie) Battle Royale by Koushun Takami is that totalitarianism thrives on cruelty, people will do almost anything to each other to survive… but resistance and hope through sacrifice is possible. The central message of all these Battle Royale ripoff games is that it's fun to just murder your friends and classmates and reinforce totalitarianism. So, you know, I'm not a fan of this bullshit.
  • Overcooked 2, Killer Queen Black, Hollow Knight: Ports of indie games, the kind of things worth playing. Nice.
  • Long string of games, but I will call out The World Ends With You, which I loved on iOS until Squenix stopped supporting it, and Apple's moved the platform so often you can't rely on it to stay playable. If Squenix gives me back my $20 I'll buy the game again, Switch would be a really good platform for it.
  • Super Smash DoucheBros Ultimate DX GameCube Elite Pro for Smashing Faces: I have never cared less about a game franchise than Smash, and this I cared about less than usual. But I'm sure it's super exciting to Smashbros. Samus & Ridley Amiibo might be nice to have, as an old Metroid fanboy.

Have I missed it or did they say nothing about Animal Crossing for Switch?

Sony E3

Catching up:

  • Japanese instruments: Not exactly my thing, I prefer WagakkiBand, but classier than anything else we'll see here.
  • The Last of Us Part II: Laster of Us: Little girl (ignoring first game's plot choice to sacrifice her and save the world) goes on a mass murder spree after dancing with her girlfriend. No sign of the clicker zombies. Just a psychopath chopping people's necks open. What the actual fuck is wrong with you?
  • Ghost of Tsushima: Very lovely natural world and samurai. And then it's just used for a bunch more murders. You can't go play a flute and drink and fish in a river, the dialogue is very obviously scripted and choiceless. All this tech wasted making another fucking fighting game?
  • Control: While it seems to have a lot of fighting, there's maybe some puzzles with your amazing psycho powers?
  • Resident Evil 2: When there are no more good ideas in Hell, remakes will walk the Earth. But at least shootin' zombies is OK.
  • Trover Saves the Universe: Fuck yeah Justin Roiland and some kinda silly platformer! First time I've been interested in anything here.
  • Kingdom Hearts III: Pirates of the Caribbean WTF, is Jack Sparrow a Disney Prince(ss) now? Toy Story? Why not the Incredible Hulk and Deadpool, Squenix? The first one was weird, but this is so mashed together I don't even know what it is.
  • Death Stranding: Weirdest fucking thing ever gets weirder (but also more boring? Lot of walking scenes) in each video. What if there is no game, just increasingly fucked-up videos as an art project/troll? Hey, Lindsay Wagner (Bionic Woman), awesome!
  • Spider-Man: New York's shittiest hero gets to fight shitty villains like the Shocker (two fingers and thumb), looks like an exact ripoff of Batman Arkham Asylum. Super shitty skintight texture suit like a 2001-era low-poly game.
  • Dreams: Cute little VR-based toy, like LittleBigPlanet. Probably even more penises. Huge points for not being a murder simulator.

Debugging a Flicker

Working on the game, and every time I mouse-click to move (finally adding that, it's been all keyboard up to now), the screen was flickering! This had never happened before. Literally 3 hours of debugging, adding voodoo CSS incantations like:

-webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;
-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0,0,0,0);

which did nothing…

Finally made a new test project with just the canvas code and a mouse handler. Still not flickering. Then I add random lines on the screen to see some content, need to find the canvas size to make those lines, and that flushes out the offending line:

1: canvasSize() {
2:  const canvas = $("canvas");
3:  const size = [canvas.offsetWidth, canvas.offsetHeight];
4:  canvas.width = size[0]; canvas.height = size[1];
5:  return size;
6: }

See it? Line 4 is reassigning the width & height of the element, based on the display width/height. Which has to be done during setup and on window resize, but blanks out the entire canvas.

SIGH. Split that out into setup, and the flicker goes away.

It's so impossible to know what's my fault and what's HTML/CSS/JS being weird.

At least I'm only fighting a single rendering engine here. I miss doing this stuff in UIKit/SpriteKit or OpenGL ("I made a triangle!"), but the former's sinking in the Swamp of Swift, and the latter's RIP deprecated, and I'm hardly going to chain myself further to Apple with Metal.

Microsoft Says They'll Support Atom

Re Microsoft Acquires Github,

reddit AMA with Nat Friedman:

Developers are really particular about their setup, and choosing an editor is one of the most personal decisions a developer makes. Languages change, jobs change, you often get a new computer or upgrade your OS, but you usually pick an editor and grow with it for years. The last thing I would want to do is take that decision away from Atom users.
Atom is a fantastic editor with a healthy community, adoring fans, excellent design, and a promising foray into real-time collaboration. At Microsoft, we already use every editor from Atom to VS Code to Sublime to Vim, and we want developers to use any editor they prefer with GitHub.
So we will continue to develop and support both Atom and VS Code going forward.

Obviously, trusting Microsoft is how you get left in the desert staked out over an anthill without your editor of choice, but it's a little better to at least hear the new puppet CEO of Github commit to it.

Learn2JS

I've updated the Learn2JS shell, which makes it easy to get started writing client-side Javascript.

  • Added eslint tags and an initial config, so you can check for errors while editing.
  • Switched from a Python web server to light-server on Node; even though the shell doesn't use Node directly, it seems more consistent.
  • Added Canvas class to simplify setting up and drawing on HTML canvas.

Any suggestions or feedback? I just use this myself to script things quickly, but I'm happy to enhance it into a better learning tool.