Mirror's Edge postmortem article

I bumped into an article on Mirror's Edge postmortem interview from Reddit today. I think it's worth reading if only for an example of good replies for an interview. I'm sure a lot of details are omitted, but a little dose of honesty in the replies makes me respect Tom Farrer, the interviewee.

Of a special note is Mr Farrer's mentioning Singapore as one of the cities that influence Mirror's Edge cityscape design.

Liking what you do

There are times when I feel as if whatever I am doing, it all does not matter to the world. Last few weeks have been such times. This week is perhaps the start of my healing process. It started off with me going out with my good, old friends and somehow everything looked much better after that.

Today, I found something that reminds me that it does not matter how difficult and painful the process is, it is my attitude while throughout the process that matters most in life. That thing is David Sirlin's (very long) article on the process to balance Street Fighter II HD Remix. If you are a Street Fighter fan, I recommend going through some parts of the articles.

What I would like to highlight is the overview and the feature list.

Let's start with the overview. Quoting the opening paragraph:

"Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix was originally going to be a graphical update of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, but along the way some magic happened. HD Remix is now a completely new Street Fighter game—the 6th installment in the SF2 series."

I originally thought that HD Remix is nothing more than a masochistic project to update the sprites to Street Fighter II. Only after reading Sirlin's articles that I appreciate its magic. It is the product of hard work done by people who love what they do. (Also note the magic that a company actually allows such magic possible. It's much easier and less risky for them to do the masochist project.)
Balancing a game is very difficult. It is very easy for a player, who experience only a portion of the whole game to criticize, "Hey, this part is not balanced!" It's much, much more difficult to look at the whole game and balance every part (or at least most parts).

I guess the point it reminds me of is this. When I like doing something, I usually want to get better at it. And as I get better, the thought of doing the thing makes me mentally recall a long list of difficult things I need to go through to do well.
This is where I usually lose patience. This week I learnt that patience is not that difficult for the benefits it brings.

You might say that the introduction, like so many other introductions, is more interesting because it promises to give us things. Well, the summary of things the article gives is in the feature list. My highlights are:

• #7 double-blind character selection online. A simple point perhaps, but it happens every single time we play, so the cumulative effect is great.
  
• #13 hitbox display. It's obvious that the purpose for this feature is for players to refine their skills. If this does not show "love-what-I-do"-ness, I don't know what does.
  
• #15 dipswitches. I thinks this is the most hardcore feature of all: enabling known bugs on purpose because they affect gameplay. I personally probably won't use this feature, but I can appreciate that there are people who (like the game so much that they) do.

You can watch one of David Sirlin's matches: EvoWest 2007 Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo Finals.

Three Panel Soul

From the misty realm of teh Interweb, I found Three Panel Soul webcomic. It has a style that I like and quite a number of strips are funny. But this is not the reason for this post.

The reason for this post is that I find this particular strip on companionship cute, heart-warming, and yet painful.

Now go on, browse through that archive :)

Firefox Woes

I intended to write about this in April 2009 but I soon forgot about it. Well, today the problem showed up once more so let's get this one out of the way.

A plugin for web browser is a program that can communicate with a web browser and make the browser do additional things that a browser usually cannot do. For example, browsers cannot play videos on its own. That's why we need to install Flash plugin to play a Youtube video.

A scriptable plugin for a web browser is a special kind of plugin: we can write JavaScript codes to program how the plugin should behave. Internet Explorer browser and Firefox browser provides different mechanism for us to crate a scriptable plugin. In this post, I will consider only the Firefox mechanism because this post has the title "Firefox Woes".

Mozilla provides a number of ways to write scriptable plugins. One of them is the NPAPI. Ignoring that the documentation provided is confusing, there is one particular NPAPI bug that is annoying enough for me to want to write this post: the unsigned integer bug in NPAPI.

What could they have been thinking?