Epic

It's been too long since I've actually finished and published a post.
It seems like a weekly ritual that I must start typing something, my head swimming with awesome sounding sentences, only to realise that I have no idea how to tie the increasingly mundane sounding sentences together, and that my central idea is flawed and limited. And then I close the window and another draft is orphaned.

But enough of that, I want to talk about James Cameron's Avatar.
First off I'll say that I was pleasantly surprised by the film. I was well aware of the cliche storm (and in fact knew the entire plot) and was prepared for a long unnecessary film full of visuals that I would not care about. And I got all that I had expected: weak plot, stupid message, CG vistas.
But what I didn't expect was the level of quality. Everything may have been unoriginal but at least it was adequately done. For instance I initially groaned when there was a voice over at the start, but it had both an in universe reason (instead of say some all seeing disembodied voice) and was present through out the entire film (none of that very beginning and then very end when the audience has forgotten crap).
If I had to give it a rating on the fly, I'd say 3/5. Not worth the decade of work or deserving of the hype, but much better than I had expected.

Now that I've got that done, I can get to the meat of this post: discussing the setting. Bear with me, this will be awkward.
When you look at sci fi worlds you can often hazard a guess as to whether they are built around established rules and their consequences, or whether it just follows the rule of cool. Avatar is an interesting film as I think it was conceived as just a bunch of awesome ideas (floating mountains, world trees, pterodactyl mounts) that then had reasons made to hold them all together. It's contrived but it's better than no reason at all.

So the planet Pandora is rich with Unobtainium, which is a multi-purpose material that is incredibly valuable and a tradition trope of sci fi universe. The presence of this substance (I assume, it better be fucking canon or else they've got one hell of a contrived coincidence) allows the development of basically a tree-based network that connects living creatures, acts as a pseudo-afterlife, and contains an alien god-mind. It's the cross between the internet and the Farplane.

What's the problem then? Remember the end battle, with the military about to win only for the forces of nature to arrive and wreck their shit up. Sure it's a deus ex machina but at least there's some foreshadowing; it's not completely out of nowhere.

No what bothers me is this: how does Eywa communicate with all the predators? Does the wildlife just plug into trees in their spare time? One could argue that there was some sort of wireless communication but that completely undermines the whole premise of the bio-USB's and is not hinted at what so ever. It happens purely because the plot needs it to.

This same level of reasoning occurs in two other situations. The first is the mind transfer bit at the Tree of Souls. Apparently Pandora's plants can connect to the human mind via our skin, kind of like how when your put a book next to a TV, the story is shown on the screen. Fine I'll ignore this one, it only happens twice so it's not in your face all the time mocking logic. The next point is though: the freaking avatars.

The drivers get in their tanning beds, see some stock swirling vortexes, and then bam! they are controlling an alien body. How is this possible? Are their brainwaves being broadcast between bodies? If so wouldn't the floating mountains interfere? A side effect of this slopping planning/design is that it trivialises the whole Pandora USB thing. Who cares about wired stuff when there's wireless.
Something I don't understand is how this problem even came up. They could have made it that the drivers have to get body modifications done on them, namely a one of the neural links. The drivers could be hooked up to their avatar and transfer bodies. We'd lose the possibility of a driver being disconnected whilst in their avatar, but we'd gain the threat of their human body being killed when their are out playing space elves.

I came up with this in idea in like ten minutes; Avatar was being designed years ago. Go figure.

Choice

My mother and I were looking over our Foxtel plan to see if there were any packages we could cut. It is a dilemma we have faced before. The few channels we watch are scattered over the various deals Telstra offers so we end up paying for several dozen channels we don't want.

Confused by some of the more esoteric titles for the packages I sought out the official website to see what they contained, only to find that all the deals had changed recently. Perhaps the new arrangement would prove beneficial and result in more bang for our buck?

Short answer: NO!

Long answer: The new packages manage to be even worse than the previous ones. After some brief number crunching I worked out that to keep all of our current channels would cost even more. Thankfully our plan will remain on the old deal as long as we don't modify it at all.

What I can't figure out is why we the consumer have to bugger around with these packages to begin with. Wouldn't a system were people just individually bought the channels they want be better for everyone? The viewers would get want they want and I'm sure that Telstra could come up with a pricing system where they don't lose money (hell they'd probably be able to squeeze more cash out of people than they already do).

Further more this system would clearly show which channels are the popular ones which I'm sure would be desirably news for those in charge of advertising.

Though I shouldn't be surprised by this current situation. I've always believed that the basis of all business is the rule that you should make it as easy as possible for consumers to give you money, and time and time again I've seen companies ignore this. The really infuriating thing is that somehow they are frequently successful.

Satire. Subtly not included.

Strikebreaker Arc Finale

I've been putting off this post for several days now as I've come to realise that what's left to say about the Strikebreaker isn't particularly interesting to anyone but me (because this blog is all about pleasing everyone else). My obsessive completionist nature however makes me want to prattle on about minor technicalities regardless of the entertainment value said technicalities would have (hint: fairly little). Plus I said I was going to do this anyway. So now that I've wasted an entire paragraph on what is essentially filler let's begin.

Last post I talked about awkwardly elaborate ranged attack on my special infected. This time I shall discuss that melee attack and the infected's aesthetics. That's right, I spent time thinking about the aesthetics of non-existent videogame enemies.

Before I had come up with a ranged attack that left me satisfied, I had the idea of having a special melee attack in addition to a ranged one, because as everyone should know: overly complex concept A + thematically similar but mechanically different, over complex concept B = elegantly simple solution.
So having clearly succeeded in both maths and logic I decided to once more think about sticking it to the corner-camping, melee-spamming survivors. The initial idea was that the melee attack would have a lunge if you were running forward that would knock any survivors it hit on their ass. This idea died the second I realised that a slightly clever player could just lunge a survivor (or group of overlapping survivors), take a few steps back, and repeat till death/rage quit.
Next came the idea that the melee attack would be a generic claw swipe unless the target was meleeing, in which case they would be knocked over (the idea being that the survivors need to brace themselves against the Strikebreaker's unbalancing attack and if they are swinging their gun they are unable to do so). This concept lasted until I became satisfied with the ranged attack at which point I realised this goofy attack was completely unnecessary.
Also, who else is sick of the word 'attack'. Even after trying to limit its usage I'm still annoyed with it frequency.

I initially started thinking of what the Strikebreaker would stylistically be like when I came up with the barb preparation, decided that the infected would make distinct gagging noises as it brought a barb up from its stomach to its throat. Since a projectile-based attacker is still rather threatening and potentially overpowered in Left 4 Dead the infected needed to make a distinctive warning noise constantly. Noises already taken: coughing, crying, feral screams, 'throaty' grunts, belching. It had to be clearly different from the other special infected and preferably unnerving. The answer: laughter, or rather insane giggling.
Leading off this feature, and the fact there's a lot more male than female characters, I figured the infected should be female. To add to its disturbing nature and be visually different pigtails and a (tasteful) dress seemed like a good idea for its appearance. To (hopefully) avoid making something that fits into people's sexual fetishes, the infected nature of the Strikebreaker would obviously have to visibly apparent: a emaciated but lanky form, spines emerging from the arms and back, black bubbling spit oozing out of the mouth etc. Sadly, this would only make it become more of a fetish for some, sigh.

Having now spent time typing up these ideas of mine I've come to realise that at the time I first came up with the Strikebreaker I had probably been playing too much of this:

Which unfortunately just reinforces my fear of creepy fetishes.

Open Beta Ultimate

Previously: "...from past experience I know that creating another special infected without overlapping or obsoleting existing ones is hard..."

That's right, less than ten posts in and we've started getting flashbacks! Soon there's going to alternate continuities and retcons (if there aren't already; after all I can just go and edit previous posts like some sort of small scale blogging George Lucas, only without all the money, fans etc).

Back on topic I'll be explaining that thought process of my failed attempt to create a clever, useful, and fundamentally different special infected for Left 4 Dead.

The 'Strikebreaker' (as I came to think of it) was birthed from two grievances in Left 4 Dead coming together:

-when the winning team would hide in a corner, overlapping and meleeing, which made it virtually impossible for the losing team, which naturally I was apart of, to harm them;

-general boredom at playing the same three classes of infected and a desire for a new playstyle.

The combined conclusion I came to was an idea that no doubt other Left 4 Dead players have had cross their minds: a ranged infected.

"But Lysander-you-brilliant-and-handsome-individual in your infinite wisdom you forgot about the smoker's tongue and the boomer's vomit," points out sycophantic reader number one.
"And the tank's rock throw," adds adequate reader number two.
"Yeah," chimes in redundant reader number three.

While it is true that all of the playable infected bar one do have some form of ranged attack there is a catch in all of them. The boomer's vomit is more of an AoE spray, which is rather buggy (or I'm just really bad at it (or both)) and the tank's rock throw is a secondary ability that is there for when the primary means of attack (punching people till they disconnect) is ineffective. This still leaves the the smoker's tongue which (while it is a primary ranged attack) functions more along the lines as a hunter on a string as opposed to direct projectile.

And so direct projectiles were the Strikebreaker's primary attack. Balancing this was where everything turned overly elaborate. Since a good team can theoretically defend against special infected without getting harmed there had to be something that prevented undefendable projectile spamming. Apart from an obvious cooldown of a few seconds, the spit attack (by the way the projectile is poisonous spit) did temporary damage which the survivor's will slowly recover from (essentially the complete opposite of temporary health from pain pills). To further combat spamming and to find the happy medium between 'too weak to be useful' and 'gamebreakingly powerful' I decided that the spit would build up in time, so the higher the charge the more (temporary) damage and the greater range (it's a parabola projectile). So essentially , the less frequently you fired, the more potent the attack.

Awkward to explain, less awkward in practice. Too bad that's not it. You could also hold down the fire button to prepare a barb. While the barb is being charged up the Strikebreaker makes a distinctive sound, moves at a decreased rate and can't jump. If you fire prematurely the barb is lost and the attack is just a (relatively) regular spit shot. If you do however finish preparing the barb you would get a damaging, almost linear projectile, plus all the spit that has managed to build up as well.
While the barb would do some actual permanent damage, its main feature would be the capability to pin a survivor to either the wall behind them or possibly the ground beneath. This would immobilise the victim until the the barb was removed by another teammate or by the survivor them self at the cost of some more health.

Here's roughly what the ranged attack interface would have to look like:


Bear in mind that all other infected are simple enough to have a single circle.

Since this post has already become a daunting mass of text, I'll leave the rest (yes there's more) for a later date.