SteveStreeting.com

For some reason I was suddenly curious as to how much money I’d spent since last December on digital content for the 360, such as XBox Live Arcade titles and more recently Rock Band DLC. Of course you buy things in Microsoft Points on the 360, which like Wii Points and Disney Dollars are designed precisely to disguise how much money you’re actually spending. The PSN has my respect in this regard for taking the brave step of actually pricing things in units of real money. Quite why Microsoft and Nintendo chose to go against the precendent set by every other marketplace in the developed world (except Disneyland, but that’s intentionally ‘wacky’) I’m not sure - I doubt we’d take most high street retailers very seriously if they required us to buy things in ‘Starbucks Bucks’ or ‘HMV Quatloos’.

Anyway, when I totalled it all up, I’ve chugged my way through 13,000 Microsoft Points in 9 months so far, which in the real world is £110.50, and judging by the dates, about half of that has been on Rock Band DLC, the rest being XBLA titles. I’ve spent more on digitally delivered content on my 360 than I have on boxed games (just software, excluding plastic peripherals) - some of that is because I received most of my boxed games as presents, and I picked up a back catalogue from eBay, but even so, I do think my own habits are a sign of how quickly digitally delivered content is becoming accepted.

Small purchases (micropayments is an often used term, although that usually refers to even smaller amounts) are just easy to mentally justify, even if you end up making enough of them to exceed a larger pruchase that you would perhaps think about more carefully. It’s really easy to slap down £1.36 for a new Rock Band track (that’s less than 2 tubes of Pringles), or £6.80 for an XBLA title (Geometry Wars 2 is particularly a no-brainer); it really doesn’t take much to convince you, particularly when you know exactly what you’re getting - after all you can check out the Rock Band tracks on RockBandContent.com and play demos of every XBLA game before you buy.

Taking out the overhead of the retailer and physical distribution makes products cheaper - that’s obvious. Games are, in general, very overpriced - we pay £40 for a boxed game which required the same budget to make as a Hollywood blockbuster I can pick up across the aisle for a tenner. One obvious reason is that market is smaller, another reason is the silly situation we have where a console platform holder takes a huge slice of the pie just for letting developers deploy on their platform.  All these things are interlinked - the audience is smaller partly because the content is so expensive, which leads to content marketed more at the core audience which spends that money, and larger margins required to make back console hardware development costs, etc etc. Nintendo has broken out of that to some degree, but they’ve mostly appealed just to the mass market, leaving most of the core audience on 360 and PS3. Ideally we’d have a situation where the whole spectrum of game players (’core’ and ‘mass market’ are the most talked about but there are lots of graduations) existed in one place, just like you have with movies, and obviously this is the holy grail that certainly MS and Sony are trying to chase, even though I have serious doubts that we’ll ever get there until the industry rids itself of the counterproductive market segmentation that multiple proprietary consoles creates. I do think that digital distribution helps though, because it disrupts the status quo, creates a more fluid situation that just can’t exist very easily elsewhere, and makes a space for people to experiment more - both as producers and consumers - and to see what works.

I’d love to know the bigger picture of how much money is spent on the likes of XBLA, Steam, PSN etc. I’m sure it’s generally smaller than retail sales, but I’d be interested in knowing the trajectory of those numbers, and in particular which kinds of players they are. Anecdotally I get the impression that digital distribution tends to be good for those ‘ex hardcore’ gamers like me - we don’t buy a ton of games anymore, but like quality bite-sized content and are willing to pay for it. We’re not casual, but we’re not hardcore anymore either.

Anyone else got interesting comparisons of their physical / digital purchase numbers?

Finally! I’d already had She Bangs the Drums in GH3, but it’s not one of the Roses’ best tracks and the GH3 implementation was, typically, not that much fun.

There’s a small handful of tracks on Guitar Hero : World Tour that I would like to see in Rock Band, and one was Love Spreads by The Stone Roses. Luckily next week’s Rock Band DLC includes this track, so that’s one crossed off my list. It’s still not one of my favourite tracks, but it’s still quintessentially Stone Roses and more interesting than She Bangs the Drums - I’m certainly looking forward to the Harmonix take on John Squire’s riffs and Reni’s drums.

The Stone Roses did a massive amount to shake up the tired 80’s music scene and were in the vanguard of early Indie in the early 90’s, but are still ignored by a lot of people today. A combination of poor management, dodgy legal problems and their own incredible stupidity meant they didn’t realise their potential, but I remember the first time I heard Fool’s Gold - in 1989/1990 it was just so different. For anyone interested, the BBC did a documentary about the Roses which is fairly informative although I think they dismiss their second, admittedly 6-year late, album (Second Coming) a little too quickly; despite them being out of fashion by then and no longer fresh (since the sound had already been copied & furthered by others by then) I think it’s still good.

Now, Harminix/MTV please can we have Fool’s Gold, Waterfall, What the World is Waiting For, Mersey Paradise, Daybreak, Breaking Into Heaven.. hell, almost anything. Tell you what, I’ll just give you my wallet now, ok?

I don’t watch a huge number of films, but I do enjoy watching them occasionally and I’ve been using LoveFilm for the last couple of months after a friend recommended it. It’s especially good for catching up on films you didn’t have time to see when they came out. This week we had Super Size Me through the letter box, which another friend had recommended to me a while back.

I like documentaries generally, at least the informative ones anyway, and this one was simultaneously informative, funny and utterly disugusting in equal measure. I have to admire the guy for putting his health horribly at risk in the name of research, although I think everyone involved was surprised at just how much damage he could do in 30 days.

Some of the stats were interesting - I really didn’t realise that in the USA (allegedly) 40% of meals eaten by the average person are bought rather than made at home (that includes restaurants, take-out and fast food). To me that’s an incredible number - in comparison in our house I’d guess over 95% of the food is made at home.

But then, I’ve never really understood fast food. I can count the number of times I’ve eaten at McDonalds on one hand (in the 20ish years I’ve been an adult), and it’s always a very, very last resort - usually in airports at 3am when I’m jetlagged, but in recent years even that bastion has gone really thanks to decent airport restaurants being open 24/7. Our Island must be one of the last places in the world with no McDonalds - we did have a Burger King for a few years, but it shut down and is now a cafe / bistro. And don’t get me started on KFC - quite how you can take something as potentially delicious and healthy as chicken and turn it into a greasy, MSG-laden monstrosity I’ll never know (we don’t have any of those either, thank goodness). Probably the most decent food I’ve had from a fast-food joint is In-N-Out Burger (you were right Eric) - I actually saw them peeling real potatoes and mincing real beef, which is certainly a plus compared to the factory processed garbage most of these places use. Even so, I wouldn’t choose to eat it if I had an alternative.

As a bizarre coincidence, I read today that Activision is setting up a promotional partnership between Guitar Hero and KFC. Ugh.

Anyway, worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. Look out for the extras on the DVD, they’re very interesting - they did a decomposition test on ‘real’ food versus McDonalds, and it seems that even bacteria refuse to eat McDonalds french fries because they lasted for 10 weeks in a jar with little to no decomposition. That’s scary.

Now to await the UK follow-up - the health effects of eating nothing but take-out curry for 30 days Or maybe the fish & chip diet; although despite the unhealthy cooking mechanism, at least the ingredients in your local chippie are usually fresh & local, rather than being heavily factory processed like McD/KFC. The curry diet is almost certainly more entertaining though

I’ve been crazily busy lately trying to get OgreSpeedTree to a fit state for a 1.0 release alongside other projects (such as Ogre of course), so I can really start promoting it. Being the kind of person I am, I find it hard to stop tinkering and perfecting and I can’t let something go out the door without being totally happy with it. The screenshots and videos so far have been good I think, but I’ve been polishing away and making it all just that bit better, and one element of that has been some additional optimisation.

Thanks to some improved batching, OgreSpeedTree is now running even faster than before, and most importantly it scales to larger forests even better than before too. Here’s a short video where I tested adding over 8,000 trees (from 5 different models, and each with different rotations / scales) to the scene, together with over 2.5 million blades of grass, each of which can  be placed individually (I procedurally generated the distribution, but it could be done manually). Actually some of those tree models have multiple trees in them (the very close ‘clusters’ of 3/4 are actually one model), so in reality there are actually 12,000+ trees as far as the viewer is concerned.

Note that all the trees here are dynamically lit including normal mapping, and dynamic shadows are being cast through 3 shadow textures (PSSM). The LOD transitions are extremely hard to spot IMO too.

On my 9800 GX2 with a 2.66 dual-core, it runs consistently over 60fps (actually about 75fps most of the time). This is with a quite dense  clustering of the trees too; If you spread the trees out a bit more you can easily double that. The LOD settings are quite high too; reign those in and your lower class cards should be able to easily handle this, and of course you have the option of dropping or scaling back the dynamic shadows if you’re pushed.

I’m happy Not that I’ve quite finished of course, I have a couple of things still to polish for 1.0, but it shouldn’t be long now.

I don’t know if they’re actually airing these adverts Stateside, or whether they’re a web-only phenomenon for the moment, but Penny Arcade drew my attention to them today. Colour me unimpressed. If the intention was to shake off Vista’s sales blues, or to generally ‘connect’ with the wider consumer in a way that Apple does so well but Microsoft almost never does, but I’d have to classify this effort as a failure of sizable proportions.

Maybe it’s me; maybe I just don’t ‘get’ Seinfeld-style humour, or maybe it’s that Bill Gates really doesn’t remotely inspire or entertain me (making skiploads of cash every nanosecond might inspire some people to revere him, but not me). From my perspective though this is a fairly poor attempt at deadpan humour which leaves me with an impression of Gates being even more of an arrogant but incredibly dull grey suit than I thought before. Worse - it seems his thinking is that acting like a dull grey suit in wacky surroundings will somehow make him endearing and amusing, which couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s equivalent to your Uncle Henry who, despite bearing an unnatural affinity with tweed, thinks he can transform into John Travolta when he hits the wedding reception dance floor. Deeply painful to watch.

Tip to Microsoft - if you want endearing consumer-friendly ads, write Gates out of the script next time, he’s a dead weight.

*edit: I know this is old news but I’m behind a little, very busy lately!

I like iTunes - like many Apple products it does exactly what I want in a pretty and easy to use package. Sure, I may have to customise a bunch of options to make it rip CDs the way I want but on the whole it works swimmingly.

I updated to iTunes 8 today, because I wanted to try out the new ‘Genius’ feature - the ability to generate playlists from both within your collection and also to suggest more that you don’t own yet. I’ve tried several products that have purported to do this kind of thing before, such as TheFilter and of course the Last.fm plugin, and generally I’ve come away underwhelmed. Pandora was the only service I really liked and used regularly, but they shut the UK out recently and sound like they’re going out of business pretty soon, out of my earshot.

Using Genius is simple, just select a song and hit the Genius button in the bottom right, and you’ve got a playlist built from similar songs in your collection. I did it for a few songs in my collection, edited out the duplicate artists and picked the top 10 from the playlist, here’s the results:

Song: You’re All I Have (Snow Patrol)
Genius Playlist: In The Morning (Razorlight), Other Side Of The World (KT Tunstall), Wisemen (James Blunt), Dirty Harry (Gorillaz), Have a Nice Day (Stereophonics), Why Does It Always Rain on Me? (Travis), The Zephyr Song  (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Zombie (The Cranberries), Sit Down (James), Bat Out Of Hell (Meat Loaf)

Pretty good, it seems to have mostly picked out the ‘Alternative Rock’ (’Indie’ to us Brits) elements, although unfortunately it discovered the presence of James Blunt in my collection. How embarrassing.

Song: Spybreak! (Propellerheads)
Genius Playlist: Eple (Röyksopp), Feels Just Like It Should (Jamiroquai), Stayin’ Alive (Bee Gees), The Trick (The Prodigy), Purple Haze (Groove Armada), Glory Box (Portishead), Groovejet (Spiller), Fool’s Gold (Stone Roses), Don’t Falter[Mint mix] (Mint Royale), Leave Home (The Chemical Brothers)

Damn good choices - if I’m feeling like a bit of upbeat Propellerheads, chances are I’m probably also in the mood for the others in that list, a mixture of funk/dance/electronic. Groove Armada and Portishead tend to be a little slower but they’re definitely in the same vibe.

Song: Diamond Hoo Ha Man (Supergrass)
Genius Playlist: Horse To Water (R.E.M.), Shot Down (Nine Black Alps), Love Is The Law (Seahorses), Animal Nitrate (Suede), Charmless Man (Blur), Waterfall (Stone Roses), This Is Music (The Verve), Girl From Mars (Ash), Good Souls (Starsailor), Slight Return (The Bluetones)

Again, a really appropriate selection. A good selection with the same mix of Indie and Post-punk influences that I tend to like at pretty much any time of day, with a sprinkle of BritPop.

Song: Jumpin’ Jack Flash (The Rolling Stones)
Genius Playlist: My Generation (The Who), All Right Now (Free), I’m a Believer (The Monkees), Sweet Emotion (Aerosmith), Black Dog (Led Zeppelin), Suffragette City (David Bowie), After Midnight (Eric Clapton), Monkey Wrench (Foo Fighters), Orange Crush (R.E.M.), For What It’s Worth (Buffalo Springfield)

It clearly picked up the ‘Classic Rock’ pointers here, which is good - although the inclusion of The Monkees is really only period-accurate and not genre-accurate:)

Song: Wonderwall (Oasis)
Genius Playlist: One Week (Barenaked Ladies), I Believe In A Thing Called Love (The Darkness), Everybody Hurts    (R.E.M.), Smooth Criminal (Alien Ant Farm), Lady (Lenny Kravitz), Otherside (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Mysterious Ways (U2), A Little Less Conversation (Elvis Presley), Single (Natasha Bedingfield), Talk (Coldplay)

Mmkay, a little more random variation here - I would love to know the thinking behind associating Elvis with Oasis, apart from silly accents I also would have associated The Darkness with more glam rock, but there we go.

I had noticed that big names like Radiohead and Queen were going strangely unacknowledged by Genius so far, so I decided to see what it did think went with those:

Song: High and Dry (Radiohead)
Genius Playlist: Lucky Man (The Verve), Supernatural Superserious (R.E.M.), Everyday Is Like Sunday (Morrissey), Hands Open (Snow Patrol),  Babe I’m Gonna Leave You (Led Zeppelin), Stay (Faraway, So Close) (U2), Supersonic (Oasis), Have a Nice Day (Stereophonics), Sam’s Town (The Killers), Low (Cracker)

Hmm, yeah I can buy that list - definitely on the pensive end of the rock spectrum

Song: Fat Bottomed Girls (Queen)
Genius Playlist: The Hand That Feeds (Nine Inch Nails), Oye Como Va (Santana), Personal Jesus (Depeche Mode), After Midnight (Eric Clapton), Won’t Get Fooled Again (The Who), Kashmir (Led Zeppelin), Dude Looks Like a Lady (Aerosmith), Can’t Stop (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Fly Away (Lenny Kravitz), DOA (Foo Fighters)

A bit of a mixed bag that one, but then Queen are a fairly hard band to pigeon-hole, and at least Santana finally made it in to the list.

So, overall Genius seems to do a pretty good job. I’m way too lazy and disorganised to make manual playlists for groups of songs that I like at particular times - I’ve tried but I just can’t be arsed, I think I was born without the ‘filing gene’. I have so far relied entirely on the ‘Recently Added’ and ‘Party Shuffle’ lists, so I can envisage Genius being useful - I recommend checking it out.

You’ve no doubt heard about the first tests of CERN’s LHC today, but the folks at Reddit are clearly ahead of the game on this and are making sure that the scientists are adequately prepared for the discoveries that may be around the corner. They’ve taken the prudent step of sending CERN a crowbar, a copy of the Half Life Strategy Guide, and a ‘training headcrab’, together with a simple note:

“Get this to Gordon Freeman. He’ll know what to do.”

When pan-dimensional hell breaks loose, we’ll know who to thank for our ultimate salvation.

Next in the line of OgreSpeed* products, here’s a shot of OgreSpeedGrass.

It’s based on IDV’s SpeedGrass but I’ve rewritten a fair amount to make it work conveniently with Ogre, and also improved it somewhat - such as better wind effects and the completely dynamic lighting and shadowing you see there, which I think looks rather nice.

OgreSpeedGrass will be bundled with a yearly support agreement for OgreSpeedTree, in the same way that the original SpeedGrass is licensed. I’m not looking for any additional beta testers right now, but there will be an official 1.0 release of both these libraries by the end of the month; if you’d like to be notified when that happens, please email enquiries at torusknot dot com.

More shots are available in the Ogre gallery.

Edit: and here’s a video, for those who asked:

I just read that EA has decided to drop the RRP of Rock Band in Europe ahead of the PS3 / PS2 / Wii release this Friday, to £109 instead of £129 for the instruments edition (game is still extra).

This is good, but I’m not sure whether it will be reflected in the practical price you pay; Play.com were already selling the instruments bundle for less than this lower RRP (£99) right from release in May (on 360), and Amazon matched it fairly quickly. Whether they will also reflect this RRP price drop I’m not sure, I guess it depends if anyone goes first.

There was such a massive backlash against the Rock Band pricing in Europe, which is somewhat understandable but lessened somewhat when you take into account that a) the shockingly high £189.99 RRP isn’t actually what you end up paying (I paid £133), b) we always pay more in Europe anyway, thanks to languages and regulations, it’s why $59.99 games are £49.99 here when they should be more like £35 c) the US exchange rate has come off its highs now, denting the conversion calculations to some degree; but as yet I’ve heard pretty much no consternation about the GH:WT price, which - shock - is pretty much comparable. Play & Amazon have it listed at £159.99, which is £20 more expensive than they’re selling Rock Band for (before any potential reduction from today’s announcement) once you add in the game. They are however bundling a bass guitar which would normally cost an extra £30-60 (depending on which one you buy) so that does make it cheaper if you had needed to buy all 4 instruments. But, if you already own a guitar from GH3 I’m sure you’d rather have the £30-60 off rather than the bundled bass - but of course the reduction in price wouldn’t be anywhere near that large without the bundling, since they’re no doubt doing it at cost. My guess is that eBay will be awash with unwanted GH:WT wireless bass guitars come the November release date.

Whichever way you slice it, there’s not that much difference in the prices. These games are expensive, which sucks, but if you want this unique experience, you have to pay the ante; bitching about it and crying ‘boycott’ will in practice do very little except deny yourself that experience while all the people who do choose to save up for it have a great time. Supply & demand rules apply - despite the vocal boycott brigade, most people will make their own decisions on whether they think it’s worth it. I’m glad I had a load of PS2 Guitar Hero stuff to sell on eBay to help fund my Rock Band experience, but even if I didn’t I would still have bought it, and I haven’t regretted the outlay one iota. The disc hasn’t left my 360 since May and we’ve had hours and hours of collective fun with it. The way I look at it, it cost me the equivalent of about 3.5 normal full-price games, and I strongly believe it’s given me at least that multiple in enjoyment compared to any other single game I own - more so when you add in the collective enjoyment on social occasions. And I don’t see us stopping playing it any time soon - GH2 lasted us a year, and that was without the weekly DLC that makes Rock Band so rich with variety. It may just be a silly game with expensive plastic instruments, but my goodness it delivers a damn fine dollop of fun

David Heinemeier Hansson is famous for being the guy that invented Ruby on Rails and running 37Signals; I  have mixed feelings about Rails personally (great for some things, not so great for others, but then that applies to pretty much every technology), but this presentation he did on making money as a tech startup is very good indeed - insightful yet very amusing.

He presents in an online context for the most part but as he says himself, the principles apply to all kinds of product. It also dovetails in nicely with what I was saying a few days ago about open source and business, in that there are similar arguments about not believing the hype we’re often sold by high-profile business news stories.


Found via Matt Asay.