I’m reminded of the time, probably 20 years ago, when some viral game was making the rounds. It was designed such that the controls, even the goals, weren’t obvious, but as it turned out, it didn’t respond to my Mac’s trackpad because I used tap to click and the game didn’t recognize my taps.
So, as far as I could tell, the game was utterly pointless. The developer replied to me apologetically on Twitter but I never went back to give it another shot.
Chiming in with another "bad input ruins a game" story: Alpha Protocol (2010), PC port.
There was a "hacking" minigame, and it was mandatory to solve it as part of the introductory tutorial levels. I think the original console version used left+right thumbsticks, and on PC that meant a half-keyboard half-mouse setup. There were some serious sensitivity/dead-zone issues, but that wasn't the main blocker.
IIRC the problem was that if you had remapped any keys in the options (as I had before starting) the new choices didn't apply during the minigame... except they still influenced the on-screen instructions! So I was stuck constantly failing this minigame because it was waiting for me to press some arbitrary (stock) key to progress, while telling me I needed to press a different (remapped) key that kept having no effect.
Anywho, I think I realized it some other week/month after wiping/reinstalling in frustration. Thereafter I prioritized tools/upgrades that let me skip the badly ported minigame.
Sitting in a Jeep with no doors, no top, no windows has revealed to me just how common cannabis is in my state, even not yet legalized. Hate the smell.
Probably not visually, you could poke a hole in it and see if there is liquid inside. X-ray imaging may be sufficient to differentiate from conventional cell designs.
There's was also a really smooth game where you had spaceships flying around and shooting with a lot of inertia.. would you know what that was? I was most impressed with the smoothness of it considering we were all on networked terminals on a shared 10mbit network.
I always found it odd that perspective had to be "discovered" by artists, but a little digging online turned up this interesting, detailed look at its history.
It's a lot less about being discovered, or invented, and a lot more about the idea of using it at all. The Renaissance was a massive change in culture. Before that, art was a tool used in rituals or storytelling rather than something to be enjoyed on its own. There was more emphasis on reproducing things as they actually were than how they looked from a particular vantage point.
Artists are still struggling with the fact that human perception arises from binocular vision. Two distinct retinal inputs are integrated by distributed neural processes into a single, coherent 3D experience. This integration is neither a simple planar stitching nor a direct representation of the world, but an active construction shaped by neural computation and subjective awareness.
It is quite likely that artists in earlier periods struggled with this as well, and were less concerned with adhering strictly to a photographic or geometrically exact perspective, as we are. The adoption of the camera obscura probably influenced things a lot.
Even ignoring binocular vision it's very unintuitive to "draw what you see" because of this. Our brain usually interprets our environment as objects, 3d shapes, and things. Turning that off and trying to grab a literal image from it is difficult
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