dice

I am a big BIG fan of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls and I consider Morrowind one of the best games ever made (my top 2 are Morrowind and Doom in no particular order). I have put in only a few hours into Starfield (so far), and I have to say I like it less and less. Primarily my complaints lie with all the loading scenes that break the illusion of an immersive, seamless galaxy to explore. It feels like Skyrim with even more disconnected regions.

In Morrowind you could walk from the wilderness into a city with no observable loading, the only loading screens were upon fast-travel (which was not necessary) or going indoors. As you leveled up, you could learn levitate spells that let you fly over seemingly insurmountable mountain ranges or water breathing spells that let you explore underwater. You could learn water walking and even walk across the ocean from the mainland to the new island included in the Bloodmoon expansion, if you were patient enough and didn't want to fast-travel via ship.

Oblivion did away with some of the crazier things (like Levitation and Water Walking), and added loading screens as you move into cities and this trend sadly continued into Skyrim. And yet, I still loved those games and devoured them, spending hours. Something about the ability to look at the horizon and say "I'm going to walk to there" was very captivating.

In Starfield, you get loading screen after loading screen, moving from location to location, outdoor to indoor, in and out of spaceships, launching from the surface, grav-jumping, etc. I know this criticism is not incredibly insightful or novel; many folks have already complained loudly about this online and contrasted it against the illusion of seamlessness in No Man's Sky. I know I'm just adding to the din, but I can't help myself, my disappointment is as vast as the regions in Starfield are not.

There are no enormous planets floating in endless space. You're just an ant hopping from leaf to pretty leaf trying to cross a river. I expected so much more.

I will give it a few more hours, but sadly it's been a dud for me so far. Anybody have a recommendation for a modern open world game that knows how to maintain the illusion?

§1376 · January 18, 2024 · Entertainment, Games, Microsoft · 1 comment ·


I want to believe. SVG as an image format.Grooveshark recently deployed an updated UI done in HTML5 instead of Flash. In a word, it's awesome. Scrolling is smoother. Text is fully selectable. I like being able to resize the UI (I don't think their previous Flash interface allowed zooming at all). I really hope Grooveshark can find a successful revenue model that will keep it alive. Read the rest of this entry ...

§969 · December 5, 2010 · Google, Microsoft, Software, Technology, Web · 7 comments ·


[clipart]Ok, after getting IE9 preview 3 installed last night, I was able to update my SVG scorechart. I'm pleased to say that I would now unequivocally classify IE9 as a browser that supports SVG. Supporting gradients, patterns, masking, clipping and more actually gained them quite a few points.

I'm also pleased to see that they support conditional processing (the <switch> element) so you can see at a rough glance what feature strings they claim to support by accessing this page I made years ago. Not a bad feature set for first time out! Kudos to the IE team!

And they support <canvas> too!

In my brief look at IE9 while running through the SVG tests, I would say their biggest areas to improve on before final release are text (especially text selection) and DOM. Though Alexis assures me that they do pass quite a number of SVG torture tests.

Hey, now that we have all major browsers supporting basic SVG rendering, it's really time to ramp up the effort on SVG Torture Tests to ensure DOM coverage and corner cases. We are looking for someone to lead this activity in the SVG Interest Group.

Oh, and I would love to have SVG-edit working in IE9.

§908 · June 24, 2010 · Microsoft, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · Comments Off on IE9: No longer failing · Tags: ,


[clipart]Nope!

I would love to tell you that I was able to install and test IE9 Platform 3 tonight. There seems to be a lot of good things in there (SVG improvements, canvas, audio, video) but the main problem is that it's built on the fragile Windows stack. That's not to say that other OS stacks aren't fragile, but this is just tonight's frustration. Read the rest of this entry ...

§904 · June 24, 2010 · Entertainment, Life, Microsoft, Technology, Windows · 3 comments · Tags: ,


[clipart]I came across the MIX 10k Coding Challenge on the weekend, and on a whim I decided to submit one of my old SVG demos to the contest. The 10k challenge's tagline is "What could you create for the Web if you had only 10 kilobytes of code?". The rules didn't explicitly say I could use pure SVG, they mention SVG/Canvas in the context of HTML5 only, but I thought I'd give it a shot. It's in the spirit of the contest, after all. At the very least it would encourage Microsoft to clarify the rules and at the very best it would be accepted and the rules updated to allow pure SVG applications. Looks like it was my lucky day. Read the rest of this entry ...

§551 · January 14, 2010 · JavaScript, Microsoft, Software, SVG, Technology, Tips, Web · 4 comments · Tags: , , , ,