Nuclear Monster

  • Landfall, the makers of some other silly games, have put out their latest “April fools joke” called Totally Accurate Battlegrounds. As you can see from the trailer, it’s a less-than-serious take on the Battle Royale genre of games. I’ve put in a very little bit of time on the game and it definitely feels incomplete, but also like exactly what I need as someone who is a bit bored after a few hundred hours in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ oh-so-serious murder simulator.

    A FAQ on Landfall’s site explains a bit more about why they decided to make Totally Accurate Battlegrounds:

    TABG is an April Fools joke, we’ve done one every year since 2016. We’ve previously combined one of our games with another genre or game. The first year we made Supertruck, a mix between the game Superhot and Clustertruck. Last year we made TABZ which is a mix between TABS and DAY-Z. We spend an enormous amount of lunch breaks and nights playing battle royale games, this is an homage to a genre we love.

    Despite their initial promise to not update this game at all, the developers at Landfall have been working on patches for TABG. Which is good, because I couldn’t join a multiplayer server at all a few days ago. Today I checked in again and was able to join servers.

    Totally Accurate Battlegrounds is temporarily free for the next few hours on Windows on Steam, it’ll be $5 after that. The developers have stated they a macOS version is unlikely and that they have no plans for other platforms.

  • Neo geo international

    SNK recently announced their Neo Geo Mini, their take on the miniaturized home console designs from Nintendo, but styled like their classic arcade platform from the 90’s instead of the home console version of the Neo Geo. This video has some more details on it.

    The mini Neo Geo home arcade console looks very small with a 3.5” LCD and a compact 4-button layout that doesn’t match the arcade but might be more appropriate for the smaller size of this device. Around the back there’s an HDMI-output, a headphone jack, and the port for USB power. Each side has a USB port for a controller, but it looks like a deep port, so might be difficult to connect. The colors don’t match the red and black cabinet we had in the US, but there are two versions of the Neo Geo Mini. One matches the colors of the original Japanese cabinet, and another (pictured above) is what we’ll get with the International version.

    Pad

    There’s also a wired Neo Geo Mini Pad gamepad to go with it, styled after the Neo Geo CD’s gamepad, it’ll be sold separately in black and white. I don’t think it looks as nice as the original pad, but it could be good.

    The Neo Geo Mini will have 40 games, but 14 will only be different between the Japanese and International versions. The Japanese version has more fighting games, and the international version has more action games. Each game will be based on the home version, so it’ll have more options than the arcade ROM. Like most modern mini consoles, the Neo Geo Mini will be able to save and load the game’s state to some internal storage in order to get around the limited continues of the versions of these games released for the home system. You’ll access the system menu by hitting start and select at the same time. I think most SNES and NES Classic Edition owners wish they had that feature instead of having to reset the console to access those features.

    If you hook up the Mini to a TV with an HDMI cable you’ll be able to adjust the resolution and aspect ratio.

    As far as a release date and price, it’s promised to be out this summer in Japan first and there isn’t a date yet for the international version of the Neo Geo Mini. There’s no price yet.

    Here’s the game lineup for both versions of the console:

    Neo Geo Mini (Japan)

    • The King of Fighters ’94
    • The King of Fighters ‘95
    • The King of Fighters ‘96
    • The King of Fighters ‘97
    • The King of Fighters ‘98
    • The King of Fighters ‘99
    • The King of Fighters 2000
    • The King of Fighters 2001
    • The King of Fighters 2002
    • The King of Fighters 2003
    • Samurai Shodown II
    • Samurai Shodown IV
    • Samurai Shodown V Special
    • Fatal Fury Special
    • Real Bout Fatal Fury
    • Real Bout Fatal Fury 2
    • Garou: Mark of the Wolves
    • World Heroes Perfect
    • Kizuna Encounter
    • Art of Fighting
    • The Last Blade
    • The Last Blade 2
    • Ninja Master’s
    • Aggressors of Dark Kombat
    • Metal Slug
    • Metal Slug 2
    • Metal Slug 3
    • King of the Monsters 2
    • Sengoku 3
    • Shock Troopers 2nd Squad
    • Top Hunter Roddy & Cathy
    • Ninja Commando
    • Burning Fight
    • Cyber-Lip
    • Alpha Mission II
    • Twinkle Star Sprites
    • Blazing Star
    • Top Player’s Golf
    • Super Sidekicks
    • Puzzled

    Neo Geo Mini (International)

    • The King of Fighters ‘95
    • The King of Fighters ‘97
    • The King of Fighters ‘98
    • The King of Fighters 2000
    • The King of Fighters 2002
    • Samurai Shodown II
    • Samurai Shodown IV
    • Samurai Shodown V Special
    • Fatal Fury Special
    • Real Bout Fatal Fury
    • Garou: Mark of the Wolves
    • World Heroes Perfect
    • Kizuna Encounter
    • Art of Fighting
    • The Last Blade 2
    • Ninja Master’s
    • Metal Slug
    • Metal Slug 2
    • Metal Slug X
    • Metal Slug 3
    • Metal Slug 4
    • Metal Slug 5
    • King of the Monsters
    • King of the Monsters 2
    • Sengoku 3
    • Shock Troopers
    • Shock Troopers 2nd Squad
    • Magician Lord
    • Blue’s Journey
    • Robo Army
    • Crossed Swords
    • Mutation Nation
    • 3 Count Bout
    • Blazing Star
    • Last Resort
    • Ghost Pilots
    • Top Player’s Golf
    • Super Sidekicks
    • Football Frenzy
    • Puzzled

    I’m not really interested in the Neo Geo Mini because I’m in the process of building a mini arcade cabinet myself, but if I were I’d be pretty disappointed to miss out on Japan-only games like Twinkle Star Sprites. Perhaps it’ll be as easy to hack and install your own games as the NES and SNES Classic Editions have been.

  • Erik Johnson:

    So we ended up going back to one of the principles in the forefront of our minds when we started Steam, and more recently as we worked on Steam Direct to open up the Store to many more developers: Valve shouldn’t be the ones deciding this. If you’re a player, we shouldn’t be choosing for you what content you can or can’t buy. If you’re a developer, we shouldn’t be choosing what content you’re allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make. Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable.

    With that principle in mind, we’ve decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling. Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see. We already have some tools, but they’re too hidden and not nearly comprehensive enough. We are going to enable you to override our recommendation algorithms and hide games containing the topics you’re not interested in. So if you don’t want to see anime games on your Store, you’ll be able to make that choice. If you want more options to control exactly what kinds of games your kids see when they browse the Store, you’ll be able to do that. And it’s not just players that need better tools either – developers who build controversial content shouldn’t have to deal with harassment because their game exists, and we’ll be building tools and options to support them too.

    The end result of this is that Valve is fine with making money from software that encourage sexual assault and other awful trash as long as it isn’t “trolling.” Whatever that means. This is bad.

    Valve needs to grow up and take responsibility for the software that they sell. This policy is the opposite of that.

  • Microsoft, today:

    Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced it has reached an agreement to acquire GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform where more than 28 million developers learn, share and collaborate to create the future. Together, the two companies will empower developers to achieve more at every stage of the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub, and bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.

    Yours truly, 3 years ago when Google’s Google Code code hosting service shut down:

    This is your continued reminder that Google, and start-ups funded by VC money, are not a safe place to store your work. Own your shit before GitHub starts inserting malware into downloads or sells out in some original and disruptive way. Get a domain, some shared hosting, maybe a Linux or BSD VPS if you’re rich. With git it is easy enough to move a project if you have cloned the project locally and have established a web presence that people can check for updates. At the very least, don’t make the GitHub page the public-facing home for your project.

    This kind of bullshit is why ioquake3.org exists and is the front-door for that project. Github has some great collaboration tools in their web front-end, and I’d guess there are developers out there that don’t even understand yet that there are other options for Git hosting.

    It’s a burden that hosting is expensive, but these kinds of sell-outs happen all the time, that’s why you have to give your project a real homepage and not rely on a third-party that doesn’t have a sustainable business model.

    I don’t know yet if we’re going to move ioquake3’s code off of Github, but at least people will still be able to find the project if we decide to do so.

  • This wasn’t in the keynote, but Apple had some bad news buried in the “What’s New in macOS” section of their developer site for anyone who makes games or other software with the OpenGL graphics API :

    Deprecations and Removed APIs
    Periodically, Apple adds deprecation macros to APIs to indicate that those APIs should no longer be used in active development. When a deprecation occurs, it’s not an immediate end of life for the specified API. Instead, it is the beginning of a grace period for transitioning from that API and to newer and more modern replacements. Deprecated APIs typically remain present and usable in the system for a reasonable time past the release in which they were deprecated. However, active development on them ceases, and the APIs receive only minor changes to accommodate security patches or to fix other critical bugs. Deprecated APIs may be removed entirely from a future version of the operating system.

    As a developer, avoid using deprecated APIs in your code as soon as possible. At a minimum, new code you write should never use deprecated APIs. And if your existing code uses deprecated APIs, update that code as soon as possible.

    Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL
    Apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14. Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal. Similarly, apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks should now adopt Metal and Metal Performance Shaders.

    Metal is designed from the ground up to provide the best access to the modern GPUs on iOS, macOS, and tvOS devices. Metal avoids the overhead inherent in legacy technologies and exposes the latest graphics processing functionality. Unified support for graphics and compute in Metal lets your apps efficiently utilize the latest rendering techniques. For information about developing apps and games using Metal, see the developer documentation for Metal, Metal Performance Shaders, and MetalKit. For information about migrating OpenGL code to Metal, see Mixing Metal and OpenGL Rendering in a View.

    Apple is already requiring that apps get updated to be 64-bit, or they’ll stop working in a future update.

    As much as I loathe John Carmack today, and it certainly didn’t help that he decided to write this on Facebook, he recently wrote about how he persuaded Steve Jobs to support OpenGL on the Mac:

    I was brought in to talk about the needs of games in general, but I made it my mission to get Apple to adopt OpenGL as their 3D graphics API. I had a lot of arguments with Steve.

    Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn’t actually be good. “I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good.”

    It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions.

    But when I knew what I was talking about, I would stand my ground against anyone.

    When Steve did make up his mind, he was decisive about it. Dictates were made, companies were acquired, keynotes were scheduled, and the reality distortion field kicked in, making everything else that was previously considered into obviously terrible ideas.

    I consider this one of the biggest indirect impacts on the industry that I have had. OpenGL never seriously threatened D3D on PC, but it was critical at Apple, and that meant that it remained enough of a going concern to be the clear choice when mobile devices started getting GPUs. While long in the tooth now, it was so much better than what we would have gotten if half a dozen SoC vendors rolled their own API back at the dawn of the mobile age.

    While OpenGL isn’t going away immediately in macOS Mojave, when it is finally gone there will be many fewer games on macOS, it has been the only portable graphics API available for developers to bring their games to Linux and macOS, as well as other platforms, for decades.

    Without OpenGL on macOS the Mac and Linux will both suffer, as will new platforms. They’ll have a harder time getting games and other software when bigger platforms are locked to vendor-specific APIs like Metal instead of cross-platform ones like Vulkan and OpenGL.

    If I had to guess, I would hope that Valve will ship an intermediary layer to translate OpenGL calls for games on Steam, and hopefully they will make this software available for everyone else. There are already some other projects to translate OpenGL to platform-specific calls but it’s not going to be easy for games to support them. It’d be better if these projects had something to handle the translation on-the-fly. It’s also entirely possible that Valve will just give up on older games supporting modern versions of macOS after Apple fully deprecates OpenGL.

    I don’t envy anyone trying to support old software and write good OpenGL drivers like Apple has (even when they don’t update their OpenGL support for years), but the deprecation of OpenGL is a real “Fuck You” to game developers and players unlike any other. Games getting updated from 32-bit to 64-bit, as well as going through the process of having any kind of graphics portability layer added on top, seems unlikely. Thousands of games are going to be lost to time when OpenGL dies off. Competition with popular hardware and software platforms will be even more difficult. I understand the desire to get rid of technical debt, but this is bad.