int64.org

I finally convinced Soul that Absolute Zero needs a website, and we’ve been spending the past couple days filling it with content. If you’ve been interested at all in my past posts on the Left 4 Dead campaign, the website will have a lot more stuff including inside information, concept art, screenshots, and a new HD video we shot to show the progress of the map. I should be writing there for the campaign pretty regularly, so check it out!

I’ve gone to far too many events this past week. If I don’t put an end to this quick, I may become “normal”…

I took it to the next level tonight, though, by traveling into the future to see Green Day’s New Years Eve concert at LA Live. Well, sort-of. NBC was filming the concert with Carson Daly as the host. They gave us all new years hats and had us all count down from 30 as if the ball was dropping on New Years Eve. Apparently they’ll air this then. TV Magic!

After the count down, Green Day came on with a “Happy fucking New Year!” and rocked the stage for the rest of the night. Their performance was complete with explosions, fireworks, and a good mix between their newer stuff and the older stuff I was listening to on tape when I was eight years old (holy crap) in elementary school. Better yet, a friend I hadn’t seen in ages was down to visit family for the week, so I met her and her brothers there and caught up. Good times!

Just saw The Whigs live at the Troubadour — what a kick-ass show! The owner of my pizza place turned me on to these guys a year or so ago and I’ve been a big fan ever since.

Opening for them was The Dead Trees and The Features. I had heard of neither, but they both put on great sets of their own — I bought their CDs right after the show.

If you’ve never heard The Whigs before, they are giving out two songs from their upcoming CD “In The Dark” for free from their website.

Live around LA or here for the PDC? Like last year, Microsoft is hosting a party. This year it’s at the Conga Room at LA Live. It’s free, so if you’re in the area make sure you RSVP and come grab some drinks!

When I play Left 4 Dead I play versus — It’s just a lot more fun and challenging that way. Not enough players have the Absolute Zero campaign to get a challenging match going, so we made a video of it last night playing coop mode. It was the first time in a long while that I played coop, and I had a blast doing it thanks to the really fun map.

Our server normally takes away your medkits at the start of the match to make it more difficult, but after three tries on advanced we decided we needed them to complete the level. There was some room left so I included some amusing moments from our failed attempts at the end.

The map still isn’t finished yet, but it’s getting really close. A beta should be out very soon for everyone to play. As always, you can download the campaign from L4Dmaps.

I’ve recently started re-watching the entire Battlestar Galactica series from the beginning, and I’m finding it surprisingly awesome considering I already know how it plays out. A big part of what made BSG great is all the little interactions between the characters, and these are first things you forget. So, I’ve still got a lot to enjoy.

I watched The Plan on Blu-ray today. In it, you follow two Cavils while they plot and execute their plan to destroy humanity. It takes a lot of the memorable moments of suspense from the miniseries and season one — when you knew something was happening but weren’t given all the details, or when you suspected someone of being a Cylon, etc. — and expands them to show you what was really happening using a lot of old material is used to seamlessly transition into the Cylons’ point of view.

I’m really sad to say that the only part I liked about The Plan was Dean Stockwell’s frakkin’ amazing acting and Bear’s equally great score. The Plan has a lot of problems. First and foremost is that it’s literally a recap of the miniseries and season one — there’s no new story. If I had to guess, 25 to 50% of the scenes were actually old aired footage. Another problem is that all those great moments lost their suspense by being expanded. And the last major problem is that the new material focuses on the “bad” Cylons. This seems like a really great idea at first, but what I quickly realized is that the TV show never made us connect with them and as a result I had trouble caring at all about their scenes. Most of the time I was just hoping my favorite human characters or “good” Cylons would get on screen and give me all those little interactions I talked about.

Purely as a BSG geek, there was some interesting new information to learn. But bottom line? I was bored. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. I’m really sorry to say it too, because I and so many others were looking forward to it.

A new pair of videos is out, this time showcasing an ancient tomb in Soul’s Absolute Zero campaign for Left 4 Dead. The area’s design draws from a lot of ancient civilizations to create a unique yet familiar look that makes you imagine what it was like in its original state. Even though it’s not done yet, the architecture still looks pretty awesome!

During the making of the video we couldn’t stop playing around as hunters. The area quickly reminded me of some of the freestyle trick maps for Quake where there is no particular goal, only at lot of stuff to play with. We began making tricks more and more complex and were having so much fun that I recorded a few of them for the start of the video. Despite consisting of a mere three pounces, the middle jump was by far the hardest to pull off, requiring snap aim, timing, and air control all within a quick few seconds.

Valve’s original idea for Left 4 Dead was to make it a game of who survived the longest, not who survived. They didn’t go through with that idea, but it’s one that we’ve always liked. One of the first decisions Soul made when creating this campaign is that it would be much harder than Valve’s campaigns. Even experienced teams shouldn’t expect to survive without some really excellent strategy and teamwork. I know a lot of players seem to think that fun means winning and winning means never dying and finishing with a score of 8000 to 300, so this map might not appeal to all crowds. For people who enjoy a real challenge, I think this campaign will have a lot to offer.

If any mappers, modelers, or texture artists are out there, Soul could use your help! He’s chosen such a different art design that most of Left 4 Dead’s pre-made stuff isn’t going to work.

The first level of the map can currently be downloaded from L4Dmaps. This second level is about 80% of the way toward a basic beta version.

Dollhouse finished its first season with pretty poor ratings, with Fox deciding the only reason to keep it on air is DVD sales of Joss Whedon’s shows are always high. Fox did decide to trim some fat, though, choosing to cancel the more expensive Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles instead. The second season premiered a few weeks ago to even worse ratings, at the bottom of the charts with the second episode even being beat by reruns.

Apparently there is now real talk of cancelling Dollhouse mid-season. I can’t say I’m surprised. People have blamed the Friday night death slot, while others blame losing Terminator: TSCC as a lead in.

Myself, I just don’t think it’s a good show. I’m a huge fan of Joss’ other shows — Buffy, Angel, and Firefly were all frakkin’ fantastic, along with all of the comics. Dollhouse just doesn’t cut it, though. I really can see the potential for an interesting story, but it has thus far been taking the irritating Lost approach of only spending 5 minutes of every episode to advance the overall story. This might work in Lost, but with Dollhouse introducing new characters (though played by the same people) every week it becomes very hard to invest in.

Most fans agree that the DVD-only budget episode “Epitaph One” is the best in the whole last season, and that doesn’t do much of any help if it was only on DVD. I had hope that season 2 would quickly advance the storyline into something more like “Epitaph One”, but so far we’ve just had more wasted monster-of-the-week time. Terminator: TSCC was an incredible show, I think much better than Dollhouse, and it really saddens me to know it died for this. Unfortunately due to the way TV is filmed so far ahead of when it airs, there’s not much quick adjusting that can be done to save it either.

Should Dollhouse be saved? I think Joss would eventually be able to pick up the pieces to make it interesting, but I can’t help wonder if it would be best to just cut it now and let him move on to something new. Preferably with more Amy Acker hint hint.

Today’s the big launch day of Valve’s much anticipated Left 4 Dead update including the two-level campaign Crash Course… sigh.

I really wonder if Valve has a QA department. It seems to break in one of three ways — either it silently launches a local server (despite lobby settings), puts the server you connect to into a livelock requiring a manual restart, or makes each player connect to their own local IP. It’s not an isolated problem, with their forums being full of complaints. It makes me yearn for the days when patches weren’t forced down your throat by some crap like Steam.

It actually works in single-player, so I tried the new campaign there. It uses a Death Toll theme, looking a lot like the level where you start in the church. In what seems to be a storage area, you jump from room to room or walk down the alleys connecting the rooms. Each level is uninventive, looking like one big area instead of smaller ones that vary to keep it fresh. Every room and alley looks the same, just a random scattering of boxes and cars.

Really, there’s not much to left say about Crash Course. Given how short it is and how unfinished and monotonous it looks, I can’t imagine myself playing it much in versus. Much rather be playing Absolute Zero or Death Aboard. If versus actually worked, that is.

TV-on-PC users rejoice! CableCARD support is finally coming to PC expansion cards available through retail channels.

Windows has long used the Broadcast Driver Architecture (BDA) to communicate with TV tuner cards, but the folks in charge of CableCARD had a major problem with it: there’s no DRM support. Because of this they forbade selling any add-on cards alone, and any TV tuners you could buy would only work with analog or ClearQAM (unencrypted) channels, which typically means low-def or local channels only. The only way to get CableCARD support on a PC was to buy a full OEM setup that included the tuners.

One of the new features in Windows 7 is the new PBDA (Protected BDA) API which, you guessed it, supports DRM. With PBDA, WDDM, and HDCP, the signal can be protected from the tuner all the way to the monitor. Microsoft kept quiet and avoided acknowledging any questions about it during the test, but many testers speculated it would be part of a bigger push from Microsoft to open up CableCARD add-on support, and it turns out we were right. I wouldn’t be surprised to see announcements of new hardware from Hauppauge and other tuner manufacturers.

I watch a lot of TV — usually in the form of a small box in the corner of the screen while I’m coding, so I’ve got plenty of time. I currently have two Hauppauge HVR-2250 cards for a total of four tuners. This works great for my local channels like NBC and FOX but there are always some shows I like on cable channels, so I’ll be looking forward to some of the new hardware, like Ceton’s new 6-tuner CableCARD behemoth.