Ross Scott

New Game Dungeon! This took way, way longer than it was supposed to. The original plan was to have this be under 20 minutes released last month. Instead, the game hit me pretty hard so I just didn't want to leave so much out. Anyway, it's finally done and I'm pretty happy with it, though I'm really going to have to go back to shorter episodes for a while. I think I figured out the source of some of my problems in the game since I made it, but not all of them. On another note, I discovered a bug in Premiere hours ago, where it simply interpreted FRAPS footage improperly. It actually caused stalled frames and the timing to change. This came as a bit of a shock as I didn't notice it until very late in the process. Re-encoding into another lossless codec solved the problem, but I wasn't going to do that for 1.5TB of footage (the gameplay was recorded losslessly) without delaying the video another day at least. I solved the most egregious problems, but it's possible there are some small problems left in there that I missed. I can release one of the problematic clips for testing if people are interested, though I should see if I can chop it without re-encoding as it's about 30GB on its own. For anyone critical of fraps, feel free to recommend software for recording DirectX 5-8 content with hardware antialiasing enabled (it may not behave how you think). Freeman's Mind next! Should come much faster! This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

Not at all, Microsoft has declared a war on gradients. Everything is flat with no shading now, I hate it. It's true this one is much more conservative compared to some others, but I see a lot I would want copy for a general OS theme. As for your main pick, I found the readability relatively poor. As for your runner ups, I actually liked your "Invasion" one quite a bit. I love the idea of making the OS looking like it's a top down pixel art landscape, with ships used more occasionally.

Here are the winners for the contest! This was hard to judge, I had even more runner-ups, but unfortunately I have no prizes for them. I tried not to overthink things and just go with ones that I immediately liked the look of. Many looked cool, but I think their novelty would wear off rapidly. Others I thought had a GREAT look, but then had awful contrast on the text or just issues with the readability. Finally others I also liked, but I had to cull my list to just 10. Here they are: RaTcHeT302 with System Shock 2 theme. This was almost a cheat, since it was known I liked that in my GUI video, but I can't deny I still like how this looks: kachiat with unknown theme. It could use a tad more contrast, but this just looks pretty nice from the get-go: Interlinked with Blackamp. I think the site rescaled this improperly, but I admit I like the look of this for a dark theme, easy to read and I like the color choices. Give me an 80s tech + sci-fi stuff vibe to it: alfredzharoff with unknown theme (Moss?). Very clean looking theme, easy to make out everything, eyes directed to the right places, funny that it's imitating an actual stereo: randomprecision with unknown theme. This is very slick. I wouldn't have the dark bar at the top, but other than that, this a super clean looking theme. Four Bajeena with Bytecast. This is simple, but looks slick. It shows what a difference gradients can make to this damn flat mania going on now: augustvalek with Women Want Winamp. My bias is bleeding through here, since I like the neon 80s accents. I'm sure some think this is ugly, but I like the look. I can imagine an alternate history where this is the standard look of computing The above are ones I was pretty sure were going to win. The remainders I tried to get a little more out there with: Solus with Unison brainstorm. This isn't really my look, but it looks very polished and I respect someone going all out on a steampunk theme. capritsuno with baldur's gate 2. Not quite my look, but I respect making the whole OS feel like an old school RPG: Swamp with Pixel. To be honest, I actually hate this color scheme, but the rest of the theme looks very neat and crisp and has a look I just didn't want to sideline. I can almost imagine what this theme would sound like: Winners will be private messaged soon (give me half an hour or so) with the keys. Thanks for entering this, that Winamp site helped restore some of my faith that things can be better with the GUI. OTHER COMMENTS: @KingLich: I was over limit, I had to bump somebody, sorry, yours was #11. I was impressed how well the claymation look was executed here. @RocketDude: If it had a little bit brighter contrast, yours might have won. I was impressed how genuinely evil your pick looked. @Ronno72: Yours was close to winning, but it was a bit too much yellow for me. Cool ideas going on with the layout though. @allexandeur: This one was close, but the contrast and readability hurt it for me, even though they're imitating the LCD look. @GWFH: Another close one, though the contrast was a tad too high for me. @nfb: I agree that yours has a real personality to it going on. It gives me this feeling like there's a world beyond the UI, but it was a bit muddy for me to pick it. @p-s-t: Almost won, but all the extra stuff going on around the text made it harderto read. If it didn't have the layered transparency stuff, I might have picked it. @Tim: Yours looks really cool, but the readability wasn't the best, plus it might get a little old looking at before long. @Vertigo: Yours had cool stuff going on, but the contrast and readability sank it for me. @shinonome_nano: It's well done and I liked the color scheme, but for some reason I didn't like the indented look to everything. I should have a better reason for not picking it, but I just had to go with my instincts. I felt like the Moss theme had kind of a similar look that I liked better also. @Isaiah: Yours was super-close to winning, but it just felt a bit busy and didn't have the right contrast for me. @panzyr: I liked it, but I think I would get tired of it too. @666heidegger: Thanks for all the comments. Yours was actually really close to winning also, but it felt a tad too busy to me compared to the others. A lot of cool UI ideas going on there. @accursedfarmer: Yours was close to winning, but you said you didn't want the game, so that made things easier. Glad you like the videos! @danielpotatostove: Same as above. @Fenric: You were tied with capritsuno for the old school RPG look, but I liked the look of the baldur's gate one a little more. @centersolace: The readability on yours kind of disqualified it, but I actually enjoy that smooth rounded lit up ergonomic look for actual peripherals as opposed to digital layouts. Something in this vein could have won if it was made a little more practical.

Isaiah: You're right, I made a mistake: so IND distributed the files, but didn't crack anything, crackwatch declared that as cracked. The end. As for the latter portion, I thought of the perfect analogy: a locked door. If a door has 3 locks, and only one of them has been picked, the door isn't considered unlocked. I guess your not being a true/false condition is valid though, in the case of a server emulator, it's often never fully emulated, but still playable. For traditional cracks, sometimes the game is made playable, but additional checks are still present that cause problems later, that would also be a partial crack. I think in cases where the game isn't playable in any form and all you get it a login screen, that still counts as uncracked. In any event, the bottom line here is crackwatch isn't a reliable source of information.

I've come to a similar conclusion actually, the skin I'm working with someone to make for Windowblinds will be borrowing heavily from the "Bluecurve" theme for Gnome on Linux back in the early 2000s. I disagree with pure white though, I think that come across as a bit eye-searing, but maybe my monitor's a bit bright. That said, some of the dark themes people have posted here look very compelling and I think could work also with enough support software to ensure you're very rarely blinded by bright content. I'll try to be pretty open minded for the competition however, and will be leaning towards the stuff that just strikes me as looking great within the first second or two of looking at it.

To maybe move this to its own thread.

You're giving them way too much credit and assuming evidence that isn't there. Here's the chain of progression: 2011: Game released, no crack exists. A group "IND" claims it's cracked. There is no evidence of this. They're lying. People sometimes lie on the internet. Whenever crackwatch added the entry: They repost the same false information. 2018: a proof of concept server emulator is released with no affiliation to IND You say the cracked status from crackwatch is accurate. No, it's not, for 2 reasons: 1. Crackwatch's claim is that Darkspore was cracked by IND, not by Resurrection Capsule. 2. Resurrection Capsule says on their very site they haven't cracked all DRM, nor do they intend to, from their site "this project will respect every layer of DRM that is above the Darkspore application." I have NEVER heard someone declare a game "cracked" that still leaves DRM checks in that prevent the game from functioning. The very definition of a crack is that it REMOVES or circumvents DRM. If a piece of software has multiple DRM components and only one of them is circumvented, but the rest of them prevent the program from functioning, no one would ever call that "cracked." That would be the same as declaring an unfinished alpha of a program "completed" The thing to remember is requiring the client to connect to a defunct server by EA is a form of DRM in itself. Now if all DRM involved with preventing a game from running was removed, but the game still didn't run due to some other reason, like an OS incompatibility or something, then sure, you could call the game "cracked, but unplayable" Darkspore isn't cracked by any known definition.

Their report showed it cracked as of day 1.

September videochat with fans, I tried to go more quickly through the questions this time, but it didn't seem to change anything! Lots of rambling again, also a GOG giveaway at the end. Details on the giveaway here. More Freeman's Mind and Game Dungeon coming! This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

WHAT IS THIS: GOG gave me 10 copies of Iron Harvest to give away to people, so I'll be giving them out here on September 12th. HOW TO ENTER: This has nothing to do with GOG or the game, but tying back to my GUI video, an online archive of Winamp skins was recently made public that shows an incredible variety with over 65k skins. 1. Go here: https://skins.webamp.org/ 2. Browse through the collection and pick out the skin you like the most. This should be something you would skin your whole OS with this theme if you could. 3. Right click on the image, click "copy image address" and post in this thread. If you could also list the name of the skin (it's shown at the bottom when you click on it on the site), that would be appreciated, but not mandatory. That's it! I'll pick the top 10 I think are the best sometime on Saturday, September 12th. I'll announce the winners here and private message them the keys for the game. ADDITIONAL TIPS: -Many of the skins just have a big picture of a celebrity or a scene from a movie, don't pick these, these will NOT win. I want to see stuff that looks like it's its own coherent look for a GUI. -I'll probably be biased towards stuff that looks slick and would make a great theme for an OS in general. If it's really cool looking, those might win also. -Only one entry per person. If you want to show off more you found, try to use the "spoiler" tag in the post (the eye icon) for those. If you post more than one, I'm automatically going to assume the first skin listed is your entry and not count the others. -Only one winner per skin. If multiple people pick the same skin, I'll select one of them at random, so you have better odds if you pick a skin nobody else has already.

This stuff is just meant as a proof of life that I'm still working on things. I agree it's not as interesting, that's why I make the old chats unlisted. More real videos coming!

Ask questions or topics to discuss here for the next videochat with fans on 5:00pm UTC on September 6th at twitch.tv/rossbroadcast. Running behind again, but FM + RGD are both partially done, don't know which will be completed first, but they're coming ASAP! This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

It was probably the high after having a video completed, it feels like a weight off my back when that happens. Actually only one person responded, then disappeared on me. I may end up having to do this myself. I absolutely can't afford to offer thousands for this unfortunately. That would be closer to the entire budget for the movie.

I get what you're saying, but I don't see how it matters outside of theory. Yes, there's a difference between not being able to produce enough food v. mismanaging the economy so that vast numbers of people don't have resources in order to purchase food. In either scenario, people go hungry. Housing is a good example of this. We're projected to evict 40 million people in the USA. Do we just not have homes for them? No, of course we do, but we're managing things so we don't. Unless there is a major intervention, that throws tens of millions of people out on the street. This raises instability for society all around and I honestly don't know how that plays out, but probably nothing good. I think you may not understand how peak oil works. We could have oil for thousands of years or even infinite in theory, that's actually irrelevant. Peak oil is when we hit maximum rate of production. Yes, there's tons of shale oil, but it's more energy intensive to get out of the ground. So, regardless of the cost, we get less oil back for the amount of oil we spend extracting it compared to traditional wells. Peak oil is all about the RATE of production. So say in order for us to be functioning as normal, we need X oil outputted each day. We could have infinite fields, but if we can only extract them at a rate of X - 1, then we start having problems and that contracts the economy. Since our economy is fragile and we're incredibly dependent on oil, this causes job losses, increased prices in essential goods and almost inevitably causes a depression. I think my analogy to a car engine overheating in the video is an apt one. We can go through a depression, which causes a drop in demand of oil. As soon as we try to recover because demand has dropped, if we're successful, we'll slam up against the limits of supply again, over and over. I don't see a way out of this with our current economic system. As for CO2 relationship, that almost is irrelevant also. I think you might be mistaken on that and the reason that projections have been off is the oceans absorb more heat than we anticipated, but again, it's almost besides the point. Increased CO2 in the atmosphere reacts with saltwater to make it more acidic, thus killing off large swaths of the ecosystem. Maybe fossil fuel burning is the main culprit, maybe it's a loss of biomass from human activity, maybe it's mass cultivation of cattle that's increasing the temperature. Again, in my eyes, we're still headed to the same destination. So even if increased CO2 isn't the main culprit for the warming itself, we ARE still warming and the CO2 IS raising hell with the health of ocean. You can call me closed-minded, but I'm not interested in a debate on whether man-made global warming is happening or not. Speaking purely anecdotally, I haven't seen snow for the past couple winters in Poland and summers are more intense than what used to happen. I tend to trust the bulk of evidence by the scientific community to be the closest thing we have to truth, it's not like this is all based on one fringe study. I'm a fan of Carl Sagan's quote of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." At this point, I think humans NOT warming the planet is the extraordinary claim. Think what you want, I'm convinced we have huge problems. Now the EXTENT of how bad this will all be and by when is a complete unknown to me, I'm definitely interested in theories along those lines.

The way our current economy is structured, I think it does. Publicly traded corporations earn most revenue in the economy. Their CEOs have fiduciary duties to maximize profit. If they're lax in that duty, they can be sued or fired. This means there's no "enough" revenue. They need to increase it year after year to satisfy shareholders. If growth STOPS or REVERSES for most companies, we have a recession or depression which can affect billions negatively, leading to more homelessness, hunger, inability to afford basic goods and services, etc. So in order for things to be "okay" under the economy, there has to be ongoing growth. Our economic system simply isn't designed for anything else. I'm not saying you can't design an economic system that doesn't rely on growth, I'm saying that's not what we currently have, at all. Regarding the homelessness comment, we've also had the greatest extraction of resources at any point in history also. This makes anything look better by comparison for the short term. As demand outstrips supply for essential resources, this could unleash poverty like we've never seen before. My point being is you say homelessness now isn't as bad as in the 18th century. That may not be the case by the end of the 21st if enough systems collapse. Demographic growth may be leveling off, but my understanding is it would settle at 11 billion. If that's still WAY past the carrying capacity of the Earth, that's still unsustainable. A figure I remember when I did Oil's Well is that without oil, the carrying capacity of the earth is about 1 billion. Now technology may have made that number better, but considering the ecological impact we're having on the planet right now, I think all signs point to us being overextended. We're collapsing ecosystems also and many biologists argue we're in the sixth mass extinction. I honestly don't know how that plays out for the survival of humanity other than "probably not great." Even without that though, much of the progress and breakthroughs and population explosion we've had for the past 150 years or so can largely be traced back to oil. It's what fueled the machines we used to develop better technology and even now, is absolutely essential for transportation. Alternatives do exist to oil. However, there's nothing even CLOSE as far as the SCALE we use it at without massive, massive infrastructure changes that are decades off in good times. I mean I think I get what you're saying. We have absolutely copious amounts of resources that if they were wisely managed, could probably last us millennia. That's not what we're doing though. An analogy I make is to imagine a pioneer colony like Jamestown. Imagine they hunted all the game in the area and harvest all edibles and had enough food to last the winter if they were careful about it. Now imagine instead of rationing, they decided to have massive feasts every day in celebration and ended up going through all their food stores in a month. Things would look GREAT and promising in that first month. They would probably all be dead by the third month. Even though the situation is more complex, I see that general kind of dynamic playing out on a much larger and longer scale.

August videochat with fans. More rambling, I don't remember any one topic dominating, but it's kind of a blur. This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

Don't worry, next stop is escapism land and we may not be coming back. The next Game Dungeon might be almost manic, I'll have to see how it goes.

I wasn't aware it was DX12 only, fair enough, so 5.5 years if we start getting some more DX12 ones I wasn't referring to anything actually, just that maybe in the future an indie dev could make something in a similar vein. As for Cyberpunk 2077, I've been intentionally staying in the dark on it, my guess is it's going to be sort of an outlook from another time looking at an alternative reality, but I really don't know. I'm not expecting it to be prophetic, just awesome. I KNEW somebody was going to draw that conclusion and was hesitant whether I should spell it out in the video. Answer: no. I'm saying it should be illegal for contracts to state that the developer can NOT release on another platform. If they don't want to port to another platform by their own volition, that's fine. I'm not saying they should be REQUIRED to release on something else. I realize this is a really radical stance to take, but it's literally what was in place for movies for a long time. This might literally be the last video I make where I get into heavy topics (aside from dead games, I'm not done with that). I just kind of wanted to get it out of the way. I'm not kidding about wanting to go back to the escapism side! I simplified it for sure, the article is a good read. Your take on it is apt, however it ALSO includes the massive defunding, so it's a combo-punch. True, it doesn't literally mean it's codified they are above the law, I just see this as a significant change historically. The IRS had them, but they fought back by essentially exerting power over the agency itself and it's going to leave a substantial impact on the agency. I've only seen evasion tactics in the past, not actual power plays like this. Oh it will decline with a major MAJOR collapse, but by then it almost doesn't matter. With all the talk of renewable energy, the #1 use of oil is in transportation. Demand can grow and fall, but demand for GOODS, like FOOD, can only drop so much! My understanding is we're decades behind where we need to be on that in order to have a smooth transition and that's assuming an otherwise normal infrastructure and economy. Some bad times coming! I can believe slightly less dire, I really am lost on the time table, I feel proud I thought of The Mist analogy for my perception on the matter. I think we're in agreement that it's all about trajectory. If I saw WWII-levels of change occurring on this, I wouldn't be making foregone conclusions, but we're really not on a good path. I didn't even get as pessimistic as I could have. Since global warming isn't the only threat on the table. There's just the plain footprint of humanity which is devastating the ecosystem in other way. Maybe we can engineer our way out of it, maybe we can't. I always think of the faith in technology solutions being the equivalent of pulling an all nighter to prepare for a test instead of studying ahead. Maybe it will be enough, maybe it won't! " (I disagree with the "infinite growth is not sustainable in a finite world" school of thought, but that's a different matter) " I could almost be willing to do a debate on that. At some point, you run into Newton's conversation of energy being issue. I guess if you got into real sci-fi territory, like the mass generators in Supreme Commander, you open up options, but I think ultimately there are limits. I think of Moore's Law. It held true a LONG time, but eventually stopped working due to physical limitations. Well you JUST SAID you don't hold out hope for political solutions, that's 100% a political solution. Anyway, If anyone was confused, my purpose wasn't to be doom and gloom, but more I feel like too many discussions on climate bury the lede, whereas I'm coming at this from a "let's assume we're going to continue not being smart collectively and figure out where that takes us" perspective. Hey, it's not like I KNOW, I'm in the fog of badness! To be honest I'm not even sure we have a complete disagreement on the conclusion, from what you were saying it sounds like I drift 10% one direction, you drift 10% the other.

The third Game Dungeon Follow-up! This ended up taking about as much time to make as I thought it would, though it's a little deceptive, since I did an overkill amount and had to shelf a lot of what I was going to say for a future follow-up episode. I tried to limit it to what I thought most needed a response instead. More videos planned for this month, "Coming soon!" This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »