Interesting Kickstarter Catch-All

oilypenguin wrote:

Seriously, I hope he (or she) finds what they're looking for but that shouldn't be at the expense of people who still want to live in society and already supported them. If this person really wants to bring about social change, then they first need to be able to be trusted.

This strikes me as a very selfish act.

Ah the risks of kickstarter.

This is also the person who caused controversy by claiming to have faked suffering from depression and implying that most artists were just pretending to be depressed, and then said the post was a sarcastic joke. (The post just before that was a first-hand account of being run over by a ghost train, and it kinda of fit the sarcastic black humor, so it was sort of plausible but in very poor taste.) The Kickstarter was supposed to have shipped two years ago, so this trouble has been building for a while. It's impossible to tell at this distance, but it looks like a meltdown by someone who already had emotional problems with money.

Gremlin wrote:
Hypatian wrote:

Well. That's... a very interesting way to guarantee that nobody will trust you ever again.

No, no: in his last update he explains that the problem is clearly capitalism. And he's given up money and has stopped paying his rent.

Beginning to wonder if this isn't the manifestation of some kind of serious mental illness. Not to excuse the guy from his actions or anything, but some of that rant sounded more like the sort of thing you read on the side of a van rather than just some really stressed and selfish dude.

tanstaafl wrote:

John Campbell Burns Comics Rather Than Sending Them To Donors
The whole article is a major exercise in "WTF?"

Part of that is due to the "writing":

Many creator owned series that might take a battering in the direct market and found funding and a financial sense of independence that they might have otherwise failed to get and it has led to greater diversity, choice and business plans available.

OMGOMG M.A.V. - Modular Assault Vehicle was funded! YAY! Sooooo can't wait to play this. It's like someone took Heavy Gear and added a Legoesque element to it. MUST HAVE NOW PLZ.

Heyo. Here to pimp a project put up by a friend of mine.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/861784276/lords-of-tyberis-0

It's a strategy game with it's roots in Diplomacy, Risk, and Game of Thrones. Up until about a year ago the game was actually run as a GoT forum game, but they wanted to move out of someone else's IP and set up a system to remove the need to a GM/rules keeper. Jarret has been funding development on pocket change and spare time, but he's trying to make the move to full active production. So, y'know, we'd appreciate it if you gave it a look.

Do you remember your frog fractions? If not, click and enjoy. If so, maybe you would like to look at the kickstarter for Frog Fractions 2.

Proven Lands looks pretty interesting.

Explore a unique, vast and beautiful science-fiction sandbox roguelike, procedurally generated and studded with an AI storyteller.

Board with Life Season 2 is only a few hundred away from another stretch goal. So if you like 'em and haven't donated yet please do!

Zudz wrote:

Heyo. Here to pimp a project put up by a friend of mine.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/861784276/lords-of-tyberis-0

It's a strategy game with it's roots in Diplomacy, Risk, and Game of Thrones. Up until about a year ago the game was actually run as a GoT forum game, but they wanted to move out of someone else's IP and set up a system to remove the need to a GM/rules keeper. Jarret has been funding development on pocket change and spare time, but he's trying to make the move to full active production. So, y'know, we'd appreciate it if you gave it a look.

All of this sounds good, but I guarantee the KS will likely go nowhere as the video needs to be reworked. He's reading off to the side of a screen and seems to have done most of this in exceptionally long takes that need to be tightened up. Then there's text on screen you're supposed to read while he's still talking. Makez my brainz hurtz. Video goes out of sync with audio for a small portion. Talking about the "small player base" is bad in a pitch. And so on.

Lots of talking, but little showing. Show the game, show the backstory. If they're been playing this for a while now then there's got to be something WE can play now.

I am not trying to crap on the KS, but after viewing their previous attempt and the amount of money they're asking for I don't think it will get any traction. What is all this money for? What do they need help with? Your pitch video needs to answer all these questions and with brevity. I want to play this game. I do. But the pitch doesn't inspire confidence.

Pro Wrestling X is trying to recreate the AKI pro wrestling games for N64. Yes, please.

Table Titans Volume 1

Scott Kurtz and Co are planning to bring together Season 1 of Table Titans into a physical book, and the extras are pretty bad-ass.

Pono ... pretentious music player? This one comes from Neil Young.

The thing about that Pono rig is simply this.... high bitrate WAVs aren't actually better. In some ways, they're worse, as most DACs are not as accurate replaying a 96 or 192KHz file as they are replaying a 44KHz one.

For actual listening of stereo music, CD quality is essentially perfect, and will never be substantially improved on. For any signal that's 20KHz or under, a well-engineered (ie, competent) CD player will reproduce the original waveform exactly. This is true for any playback device that's properly engineered; a 44.1Khz, 16-bit file can cover basically anything that humans can hear. It's a case of getting it in one; they engineered the format so well that it will never really be better.

The primary use for higher bit depths is for mixing; a 24-bit signal has 256 times as much dynamic range as a 16-bit signal, so it lets audio engineers mix many layers of sound into a signal, while keeping the mathematical errors down in the bottom few bits: they drop away when the music is mixed down to 16-bit. So that's really useful for mastering. But, for actual playback? The very best resolution that even the most scarily expensive DACs and ADCs can manage is about 20 bits, so the extra 4 bits can't be reproduced on anything we can make, anyway, and regular 16 bits is enough to cover the range from the background sound of a very quiet room up to being within fifty feet or so of a jet engine. How much better do you need than that?

High bit rates, on the other hand, like 96KHz and 192Khz, aren't really of very much use at all. They allow the playback device to reproduce sounds up to half their sampling rate, but there's not a human on the planet that can hear 48 or 96KHz sounds. Honestly, even a 15KHz limit will cover everyone over about 35, where 20KHz covers almost all kids. There are some asthmatic children that can hear above 20Khz, but they lose it by their late teens or early 20s. I was one of those, and I can assure you: even if you could hear the sound up there, you wouldn't want to, as it's just nasty and annoying. Imagine mosquito hums shifted upward a couple of octaves... nothing up there really sounds good.

The tl;dr version: CD engineers got it in one. As long as you're good with two channels of music, that's all you will ever need, unless and until humans evolve better hearing. For multichannel formats, like remastered quadraphonic recordings, FLAC can be really nice, but each channel still only needs to be 44.1KHz/16bit for perfect reproduction.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that bigger numbers are better. In sound, at least, they aren't. This is a solved problem, and it will never be solved better. The only thing that can actually be added is more channels, and this device isn't doing that.

A likely story.

Malor sells CD players, guys.

I laughed when I realized they were selling a FLAC audio player for $400.

I first heard about this Pono thing via Dan's Data -- the first post about it is here, there's a reply to the responses it got here, and they're both fun reading.

If you haven't heard about Heart&Slash, their kickstarter is nearing it's end, but it looks like a really fun game. Sort of a brawler/rougelike with a story about a robot. They have a playable alpha/demo on the kickstarter page (which I haven't had a chance to take a swing at yet) but it looks to be a fun game. It looks to be the first main project for Juan Raigada and his new group aheartfulofgames.

JillSammich wrote:

A likely story.

Malor sells CD players, guys. :P

Heh, well, CD format, anyway. 44.1/16bit foreva!

I didn't understand how this worked, completely, until a couple years ago, when there was a good Ars Technica article explaining it. What I THOUGHT was happening was that digital music was just sampling the loudness of something, X times per second, and then playing it back that way, moving from discrete volume to discrete volume, like stairsteps. So I figured that more stairsteps would make the sound better, like finer resolution works with pixels.

That was correct for the digitization part; they do sample X times per second. But playback produces a smooth waveform, not a jagged one.... the playback device is, in essence, solving simple equations to produce smooth voltage curves between sample points. If the original sound is too jagged for the curve to be correctly reproduced, that means the original signal had frequencies that were too high to sample.... above the Nyquist limit, half the sampling rate. If you're sampling at 44.1Khz, you can reproduce only up to 22.05KHz, and there's some aliasing right near the limit, where things don't come out quite right. So they add a filter that screens out signals above 20KHz, so the part of the signal that's not quite perfect is masked away from the final output.

It's really kind of amazing. Math rocks.

Anyway: if this unit has a good DAC, it could sound wonderful. But you can get good DACs for a lot less than that, these days. My Squeezebox 2 and 3, for instance, both sound absolutely glorious, and they use Burr-Brown DACs that cost $5. And my current motherboard sounds outstanding, too. Motherboards with great sound chips cost $250 and up, usually, but you're getting a heck of a lot more than just a DAC.

For a long time, an awful lot of computer DACs, and computer music in general, were horrible. But things are way better now. You just don't have to spend a ton of money to get great sound anymore. Any given device can still screw it up; the first-gen iPhone, for instance, sounded terrible. But if you just check around a little, you can usually spot the duds without too much trouble.

So, the much-maligned Godus just released their '2.0' version, claiming it to be much better.

It isn't. It's way, way worse. Well, okay, it's better if you're into tedium.

What a trainwreck of a 'game'. It's not a game at all. And, if you take it just as a toy, it's very, very boring, no fun to play with.

What the hell is wrong with Molyneux? Why would he think anyone would find it interesting to sit there, not able to do very much, for hours and hours?

I've got like four hours into the new version, and I still can't move more than one layer of dirt at a time. Seriously. And the new world is way more vertical than the old one, so digging out even small settlements is really painful. This is supposed to be a GOD game, and I'm not a god, I'm a dude with a tiny hoe. The ability to even squash things, one thing at a time, for a heck of a lot of belief, isn't unlocked for several hours.

What a disaster.

I actually kind of enjoyed the last version. I didn't think it was wonderful, but it was kinda okay, and I had a reasonably good time spreading my little settlements as far as the mechanics of the game would allow, at the time.

I really despise this version. I don't see any way in which it's better. Everything is much harder to do, so you get even less reward for time spent. It feels like it's got roots in mobile, where you're supposed to just play it for five minutes and then leave it alone for a day, but for a computer game, that model sucks.

Malor wrote:

This is supposed to be a GOD game, and I'm not a god, I'm a dude with a tiny hoe.

Made me laugh.

This iteration is certain proof, to me, that Molyneux is not writing games for us anymore. I don't know what his intended target is, but it's definitely not us.

God game, my butt.

I am convinced that for Molyneux, the games are incidental. He's switched his focus to trolling the Internet.

Or maybe performance art. The line between performance art and trolling is easy to blur.

Malor wrote:

This iteration is certain proof, to me, that Molyneux is not writing games for us anymore. I don't know what his intended target is, but it's definitely not us.

God game, my butt.

Maybe he is an atheist, trying to prove a point. His next God game will be a black screen, no exit, and it locks your computer.

Atras wrote:

Maybe he is an atheist, trying to prove a point. His next God game will be a black screen, no exit, and it locks your computer.

Molyneux will announce it as a black screen, but when it finally releases it will just turn half your screen light gray.

Atras wrote:

His next God game will be a black screen, no exit, and it locks your computer.

Hah! At this point, if he said a game did that, I'd worry that it would do permanent damage.

misplacedbravado wrote:

He's switched his focus to trolling the Internet.

You know, maybe. I dunno. In previous Molyneux iterations, I've thought to myself that he was shooting high, and then never quite realizing his goal. But this time... it's right there. The beta is done, and he says this version is way way better, so very super-extra better than the prior version a few months ago.... and it's worse. Like, way worse. It's not even close to being as much fun as what I bought in the Steam sale. This version is a stunningly boring exercise in doing nothing much for long periods of time.

I just do not know what is with that guy. Does he really LIKE playing Godus 2.0? I'm concluding that the man is simply a liar. He knows the games are sh*t, and he's trying to flog copies anyway. Well, either that, or he's a no-talent hack who's been living on the brilliance of the people he was working with, taking credit for the games THEY actually made.

In either case: I think it is now safe to completely ignore Peter Molyneux. He's either a liar or absolutely clueless, and it truly does not matter which.

Throwing this up here, it's already funded, but I think I'll throw them a little cash because I like the idea.

Basically teaching people how to RPG.

muttonchop wrote:
Atras wrote:

Maybe he is an atheist, trying to prove a point. His next God game will be a black screen, no exit, and it locks your computer.

Molyneux will announce it as a black screen, but when it finally releases it will just turn half your screen light gray.

Cathadan wrote:

Do you remember your frog fractions? If not, click and enjoy. If so, maybe you would like to look at the kickstarter for Frog Fractions 2.

so about that...the game may already be afoot.

it includes, among other things, a chunk of code in brainf*ck. omgwtfbbq

Ever want a standing desk, but didn't want to shell out a crap ton of money on extension arms, or custom fixed height/motorized adjustable desks?

The UpStanding Desk - Standing Desk Adapter

$25 gets you the plans for 1 of 4 configurations (single or double wide, short or tall), then the desks themselves start at $250+.

I've already made myself an adapter for my desk at work, but it's not adjustable, weighs more than 10 lbs, requires tools to assemble and disassemble, and doesn't breakdown flat. Which means I haven't brought it to my new job, and have been killing myself sitting for the last 4 weeks.

I'm hoping I can split the difference and use one of the various local hacker spaces bots to cut my own wood, and be out for under $150 including shop fees.