Those are the two projects I am spending my time on right now.
Oh, and I am doing fine, just incredibly busy. Dealing with a lot of things, but its improving, if you are worried about me. And if you are, well... thanks. I appreciate it.
Sunday, March 29, 2020
Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 6.0
When:
Saturday April 21, 2018, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday April 22 2018, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Where:
A new location this year: 5000 Commerce Parkway, Roswell, GA 30076.
It's in the Roswell Town Center mall, around the back off Commerce Parkway.
Please check the Google Map linked from the address, it's a little tricky to find the first time.
This Map Link shows the entrance.
What:
Speakers — Come hear first-hand accounts of events in computer history and informative technical presentations. We have again attracted some very interesting speakers this year!
Check the Speakers link above more details.
Exhibits (and exhibit registration) — Exhibits are presented Saturday and Sunday. You'll find computers from the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's. From PDPs to Commodores to Apples… Some exhibits contain pristine original machines, others painstakingly restored machines and others focus on unique modern hacks. You'll find all this and everything in between.
We will also be having a sneak preview screening and feedback session for an upcoming documentary Love Notes to Newton (click link for a trailer) This will occur at 3 pm on Saturday.
Hands On Activities — We offer a chance to let your inner engineer out. A very popular feature of our Festival is the chance to create your own electronic device. We have kits available for purchase (for everyone from complete beginner to those already handy with a soldering iron).
We also expect to again have a demonstration area put on by the FIRST Robot team T\ They will be there to talk about their experiences at the FIRST competition as well.
Consignment — We offer a consignment area as part of our show. We'll try our best to sell your vintage computer related items. Details are on the Consignment link. Please remember this isn't a flea market.
Vendors — We invite folks who might have items that would be of interest to our audience to exhibit at our show as well. Register using the exhibits link.
Concessions — We offer a concession area where you can get soft drinks, water, popcorn, etc. We also have Festival T-Shirts (and a few from previous years) along with some other computer related items. Click the link for a more detailed list.
For whom:
Everyone! Computer geeks, families/children, STEM students, students, collectors, IT professionals, curious onlookers…
Admission: Free
http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/otherevents/vintage-computer-festival-southeast/
https://mailchi.mp/computermuseumofamerica.com/vcfse60updates?e=fd35a5dce2
Saturday April 21, 2018, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday April 22 2018, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Where:
A new location this year: 5000 Commerce Parkway, Roswell, GA 30076.
It's in the Roswell Town Center mall, around the back off Commerce Parkway.
Please check the Google Map linked from the address, it's a little tricky to find the first time.
This Map Link shows the entrance.
What:
Speakers — Come hear first-hand accounts of events in computer history and informative technical presentations. We have again attracted some very interesting speakers this year!
Check the Speakers link above more details.
Exhibits (and exhibit registration) — Exhibits are presented Saturday and Sunday. You'll find computers from the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's. From PDPs to Commodores to Apples… Some exhibits contain pristine original machines, others painstakingly restored machines and others focus on unique modern hacks. You'll find all this and everything in between.
We will also be having a sneak preview screening and feedback session for an upcoming documentary Love Notes to Newton (click link for a trailer) This will occur at 3 pm on Saturday.
Hands On Activities — We offer a chance to let your inner engineer out. A very popular feature of our Festival is the chance to create your own electronic device. We have kits available for purchase (for everyone from complete beginner to those already handy with a soldering iron).
We also expect to again have a demonstration area put on by the FIRST Robot team T\ They will be there to talk about their experiences at the FIRST competition as well.
Consignment — We offer a consignment area as part of our show. We'll try our best to sell your vintage computer related items. Details are on the Consignment link. Please remember this isn't a flea market.
Vendors — We invite folks who might have items that would be of interest to our audience to exhibit at our show as well. Register using the exhibits link.
Concessions — We offer a concession area where you can get soft drinks, water, popcorn, etc. We also have Festival T-Shirts (and a few from previous years) along with some other computer related items. Click the link for a more detailed list.
For whom:
Everyone! Computer geeks, families/children, STEM students, students, collectors, IT professionals, curious onlookers…
Admission: Free
http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/otherevents/vintage-computer-festival-southeast/
https://mailchi.mp/computermuseumofamerica.com/vcfse60updates?e=fd35a5dce2
Warlord Germans...I Had No Idea....
Warlord infantry section
After years of slagging off 28mm WWII figures a combination of circumstances have led me to dip my toe in the water. To put it simply, I was pleasantly surprised, a lot of the figures I'd seen have been the late war, overly "heroic" (read: Fugly) style, which remain pretty horrible. Then I discovered these early war Warlord plastics, much different, presumably a different designer, nicely proportioned, and as with so many plastics these days, really cleverly designed in terms of pose compatibility within the sprues. I enjoyed putting together the plastics, took me back to the old Airfix multi-pose kits (remember them?) they fit together well, and have some cracking pose combinations.
Then the painting, great fun...a lot more to work with obviously than 20mm, and the overall design lends it to gaining a decent result with only moderate skill with modern paints and techniques.
These I did with Vallejo block painting, then slopping GW Nuln oil all over, then a 2 layer highlight, before doing the flesh last (Vallejo sunny skin with a Lavado skin wash), my usual old lazy basing of PVA and sand +Army Painter Autumn tufts.
I'll talk about the Stugs a bit later.
All this is for Chain of Command, I've found a group in London who play these terrific rules, so this lot will get their first outing next week. However, I have far grander plans for this lot in the future.
More to come!
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
Tech Book Face Off: Game Engine Black Book [Wolfenstein 3D Vs. Doom]
After all of the heavier reading I've been doing lately—machine learning, CUDA programming, fundamental Lisp programming, etc.—I wanted to kick back and read something a bit more relaxing and entertaining. Luckily, at just the right time a friend lent me a couple of books that promised to fit the bill perfectly: the Game Engine Black Books for Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, both by Fabien Sanglard. I grew up with these games, with them being my first and second PC FPS games. I played countless hours of these and other id Software games and other games that used id Software engines like Rise of the Triad, Heretic, and Hexen. I couldn't wait to dig into these books and see what was underneath the games that pleasantly wasted away the night hours of my youth.
This Black Book starts out with forwards by John Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Romero, and then there's a short introduction that gives an overview of the game market, the PC market, and the state of video games in that era. This was the time of Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, and the i386 processors had been out for a few years by the time Wolfenstein 3D was released. The i386DX-33 was over four times more powerful than the Super Nintendo processor, and even more powerful i486 processors were coming to the market from mid-1989 to 1992. The video game consoles were primarily sprite-based hardware designs, so they weren't set up for running a 3-D game like Wolfenstein well at all. The PC was definitely the hardware of choice for this game, power-wise, but as Sanglard goes on to explain, it had its own downsides for game development.
The next chapter went into the state of the hardware that was targeted for Wolfenstein 3D in detail. The game was designed to run okay even on an i286 CPU, but even on the i386 processors, the compromises that were made in the design were astonishing. I had forgotten how bad things were back then with no hardware floating point units, only a handful of registers, and an utter mess of a memory hierarchy with real mode and segmented addressing. The state of video cards was not much better with no direct double-buffering in hardware, an essential feature for running smooth animation in a 3-D game. These VGA video cards were not set up to run games in the least, so double-buffering needed to be hacked and kludged together. Thankfully, that was possible to do. Sound was just reaching a tolerable level of performance at the time with AdLib and Sound Blaster cards, if you sprang for the add-in card and were able to get it working. Sound cards were rarely included in PC builds at the time, and I remember many a night fiddling with vaguely understandable IRQ and DMA settings before plug-n-play. Funny, now I actually know what those things mean, and what they're used for, but it's all handled automatically by the chipset and the OS.
That chapter was definitely a fun trip down memory lane. The next chapter switched gears and was all about the decidedly small team that made the game, especially by today's standards, and they completed the game in four months! There were four full-time people that founded id Software a year before starting Wolfenstein 3D. John Carmack and John Romero were the programmers, Adrian Carmack was the artist, and Tom Hall was the creative director. Another four people contributed, but did not work on the game full-time from start to finish. These were Jay Wilbur in business, Kevin Cloud as a computer artist, Robert Prince as the composer, and Jason Blochowiak as another programmer. The development studio was none other than the first floor of John Carmack's two floor apartment. Wild. The rest of the chapter went through the development tools they used and built to make the code, level maps, artwork, and sound assets of the game.
Chapter 4 gets into the real meat of the game architecture, and it's the longest chapter of the book. It was fascinating to learn about the ingenious performance hacks and algorithms they (mostly John Carmack) implemented to achieve playable frame rates with the hardware they had to work with. The game is restricted in numerous ways so that the code doesn't have to spend much time calculating things like clipping or player perspective. The floor and ceiling were solid colors, and all walls were orthogonal. The player couldn't look up or down, jump, or crouch, so walls were always perfectly vertical and the (obscured) horizon was always dead-center on the screen. The only polygons in the game were the walls, which were rectangles. Everything else was a sprite. The maximum view port was smaller than full-screen at 304x152 pixels, and it could be adjusted down from there if needed for a faster frame rate on slower hardware. These along with plenty of other restrictions made the game playable on the i286, although the best experience was still on an i386DX or better CPU.
The other common optimization was to code critical loops and code sequences in x86 assembly. Quite a few code listings in the book are just lines of assembly code, mostly of moving values around in various registers. Dropping down to assembly was necessary because compilers at the time weren't the best at outputting even remotely optimized code, and a smart developer could arrange assembly code much better than any compiler could. This deficiency in the compiler shouldn't all be blamed on it, for x86 assembly was truly horrendous. I am at the same time in awe of John Carmack for doing what he did with the code and eternally thankful that I never had to do x86 assembly programming like that myself. Even today it's something to be avoided because the complexity is now nearly unmanageable and compilers have made huge strides besides, but oh my gawd, that assembly programming must have been the most awful, tedious exercise in memorizing and recalling useless instruction set trivia.
This whole chapter was pure gold, covering everything from the renderer in detail to the enemy AI to the audio programming and sound effects. The writing wasn't always the greatest, but explanations were at least insightful, and I could always parse out what Sanglard meant, even with numerous typos and grammatical errors. Normally these kinds of mistakes would be obnoxious, but the book was so full of great pictures, diagrams, and information that was completely engrossing to me that I was willing to overlook that shortcoming.
The last few short chapters were also quite interesting, and a nice way to wrap up the book. Chapter 5 described the sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny. Chapter 6 covered a number of ports to other systems, including Super Nintendo (heavily compromised), Jaguar, iPhone, and VR ports. Chapter 7 concluded with a little information about the successors to Wolfenstein 3D and where each of the designers and developers are now. The whole book was an excellent tour of a classic game that changed the video game industry forever, and if you're at all interested in the details of one of the games that started the FPS genre, you have to read this book.
 | VS. |  |
Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D
I quickly realized what a beautiful book this was going to be with nearly full-page, glossy color pictures of the game and die photos of the Intel 80386-DX processor that ran the game when it first came out on May 5th, 1992. It was incredibly fun to just page through the book and look at the different pictures, and peruse the various explanations surrounding the pictures about the game engine's design. It took a little while to settle down and actually start reading through the book.This Black Book starts out with forwards by John Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Romero, and then there's a short introduction that gives an overview of the game market, the PC market, and the state of video games in that era. This was the time of Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, and the i386 processors had been out for a few years by the time Wolfenstein 3D was released. The i386DX-33 was over four times more powerful than the Super Nintendo processor, and even more powerful i486 processors were coming to the market from mid-1989 to 1992. The video game consoles were primarily sprite-based hardware designs, so they weren't set up for running a 3-D game like Wolfenstein well at all. The PC was definitely the hardware of choice for this game, power-wise, but as Sanglard goes on to explain, it had its own downsides for game development.
The next chapter went into the state of the hardware that was targeted for Wolfenstein 3D in detail. The game was designed to run okay even on an i286 CPU, but even on the i386 processors, the compromises that were made in the design were astonishing. I had forgotten how bad things were back then with no hardware floating point units, only a handful of registers, and an utter mess of a memory hierarchy with real mode and segmented addressing. The state of video cards was not much better with no direct double-buffering in hardware, an essential feature for running smooth animation in a 3-D game. These VGA video cards were not set up to run games in the least, so double-buffering needed to be hacked and kludged together. Thankfully, that was possible to do. Sound was just reaching a tolerable level of performance at the time with AdLib and Sound Blaster cards, if you sprang for the add-in card and were able to get it working. Sound cards were rarely included in PC builds at the time, and I remember many a night fiddling with vaguely understandable IRQ and DMA settings before plug-n-play. Funny, now I actually know what those things mean, and what they're used for, but it's all handled automatically by the chipset and the OS.
That chapter was definitely a fun trip down memory lane. The next chapter switched gears and was all about the decidedly small team that made the game, especially by today's standards, and they completed the game in four months! There were four full-time people that founded id Software a year before starting Wolfenstein 3D. John Carmack and John Romero were the programmers, Adrian Carmack was the artist, and Tom Hall was the creative director. Another four people contributed, but did not work on the game full-time from start to finish. These were Jay Wilbur in business, Kevin Cloud as a computer artist, Robert Prince as the composer, and Jason Blochowiak as another programmer. The development studio was none other than the first floor of John Carmack's two floor apartment. Wild. The rest of the chapter went through the development tools they used and built to make the code, level maps, artwork, and sound assets of the game.
Chapter 4 gets into the real meat of the game architecture, and it's the longest chapter of the book. It was fascinating to learn about the ingenious performance hacks and algorithms they (mostly John Carmack) implemented to achieve playable frame rates with the hardware they had to work with. The game is restricted in numerous ways so that the code doesn't have to spend much time calculating things like clipping or player perspective. The floor and ceiling were solid colors, and all walls were orthogonal. The player couldn't look up or down, jump, or crouch, so walls were always perfectly vertical and the (obscured) horizon was always dead-center on the screen. The only polygons in the game were the walls, which were rectangles. Everything else was a sprite. The maximum view port was smaller than full-screen at 304x152 pixels, and it could be adjusted down from there if needed for a faster frame rate on slower hardware. These along with plenty of other restrictions made the game playable on the i286, although the best experience was still on an i386DX or better CPU.
The other common optimization was to code critical loops and code sequences in x86 assembly. Quite a few code listings in the book are just lines of assembly code, mostly of moving values around in various registers. Dropping down to assembly was necessary because compilers at the time weren't the best at outputting even remotely optimized code, and a smart developer could arrange assembly code much better than any compiler could. This deficiency in the compiler shouldn't all be blamed on it, for x86 assembly was truly horrendous. I am at the same time in awe of John Carmack for doing what he did with the code and eternally thankful that I never had to do x86 assembly programming like that myself. Even today it's something to be avoided because the complexity is now nearly unmanageable and compilers have made huge strides besides, but oh my gawd, that assembly programming must have been the most awful, tedious exercise in memorizing and recalling useless instruction set trivia.
This whole chapter was pure gold, covering everything from the renderer in detail to the enemy AI to the audio programming and sound effects. The writing wasn't always the greatest, but explanations were at least insightful, and I could always parse out what Sanglard meant, even with numerous typos and grammatical errors. Normally these kinds of mistakes would be obnoxious, but the book was so full of great pictures, diagrams, and information that was completely engrossing to me that I was willing to overlook that shortcoming.
The last few short chapters were also quite interesting, and a nice way to wrap up the book. Chapter 5 described the sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny. Chapter 6 covered a number of ports to other systems, including Super Nintendo (heavily compromised), Jaguar, iPhone, and VR ports. Chapter 7 concluded with a little information about the successors to Wolfenstein 3D and where each of the designers and developers are now. The whole book was an excellent tour of a classic game that changed the video game industry forever, and if you're at all interested in the details of one of the games that started the FPS genre, you have to read this book.
Game Engine Black Book: Doom
This Black Book followed a very similar format to the Wolfenstein 3D book with the same result of an incredible experience digging through the game engine of one of the most influential PC games ever made. I went through waves of nostalgia as I paged through pictures of the Doom game world and explanations of how it calculated and rendered the intense game that consumed hours upon hours of my free time growing up. It was fascinating to see how all of it was implemented, and on such meager hardware, too! id Software achieved an incredible amount of performance and features with their idTech 1 engine that they created for Doom.
The book starts off with forwards by John Carmack and Dave Taylor and a short introduction just to wet your appetite. Then it jumps into the hardware that Doom was designed for in chapter 2. Doom was able to run on an i386, but by 1993 when Doom was being developed, the i486 was becoming affordable and was over 2x faster than the equivalent frequency i386, so that was the new target system. Everything else was improving rapidly as well. Video cards took a big step up in performance with the VESA VL-Bus and tighter component integration on the cards. Sound cards became even more fragmented, unfortunately, but sound quality was improving by leaps and bounds. Networking was also becoming possible by this time with multiple ways to connect PCs for multiplayer co-op and deathmatch play. Finally, compilers had improved to the point where it wasn't necessary to do nearly everything in assembly. The Watcom compiler allowed id Software to code Doom almost entirely in C, freeing the developers to think at a higher level and implement more features more rapidly.
Chapter 3 is entirely new because id Software used an entirely different development environment for Doom. Instead of developing everything on unstable DOS PCs, they took the chance on using expensive NeXT workstations. Even a fairly basic NeXTstation cost $4,995 in 1991, and a NeXTcube ran $12,395! It turned out to be worth it, though, because these workstations were rock-solid and allowed John Carmack and the other developers to make incredible progress instead of constantly fighting with crashing machines and a poor development environment. This chapter did a great job going through the architecture and benefits of the NeXT systems, and how id Software used them to full effect.
The next chapter was about the team and tools, like chapter 3 in the Wolfenstein 3D book. Things had changed dramatically, with the team moving to Dallas, TX and growing to fourteen people by the end of development. The tools were evolving, too, with some of the character sprites and animation done using stop motion capture, and the map editor (DoomED) taking on new features to support the multitude of new capabilities in the game engine. Walls in the game no longer needed to be orthogonal, although they still had to be vertical for rendering to be fast enough. Floors and ceilings could change height to create steps, platforms, and other environmental features. Various kinds of traps and ambushes were also possible now. It's quite amazing how many features were added to idTech 1 when compared to the Wolf3D engine. These new features, especially the non-orthogonal walls and varying heights, required a more efficient data structure for the maps, and the BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) node tree was commandeered for the job.
Nearly half of the book is taken up by chapter 5 on the idTech 1 game engine. This chapter is just a monster of awesome information about the engine. It goes through every detail from the game tic design and use of fixed-point arithmetic to sound propagation and enemy AI. The section on the 3D renderer was especially interesting and detailed. There are great explanations on how the environment was drawn with its additional complexity, texture mapping with perspective correction, sprite clipping and animation, and diminished lighting to give the game its intense horror movie feel. This renderer section in particular was so interesting that it made me want to go implement a bunch of the algorithms myself just to be able to recreate them and see them in action. It looks like it would be immensely satisfying.
The last chapter described in fairly good detail how a number of ports of Doom were done on other game consoles. The console ports included the Atari Jaguar, Sega 32X, Super Nintendo, Sony PlayStation, 3DO, and Sega Saturn, and both the system architectures and Doom engine implementations are described. I was in high school during this era of the great console wars, although I never played Doom on any of them, just the excellent experience of the PC. I had forgotten how different these console architectures were, and some of the design decisions that went into those systems were truly remarkable...and strange. The sections on the Super Nintendo and PlayStation ports were my favorites. The Super Nintendo would have never been able to run Doom on its own, but with the extra power of the SuperFX chip that was used in Star Fox and a few other games, it was able to pull it off reasonably well. The PlayStation port was the most faithful of the ports, and even added some cool new features like colored ambient lighting. Of all of these systems, the PlayStation was exceptionally powerful for making great games. Even though other systems might have looked more powerful on paper, they all had disadvantages and unfortunate design decisions that handicapped them while the PlayStation was so easy to develop for that its potential could consistently be achieved in practice.
I enjoyed this book as much, if not more than the Wolf3D Black Book. From the beautiful full-color pictures to the detailed explanations of technical feature implementations to the well-chosen code listings sprinkled throughout the book, this was an incredibly fun guided tour of a legendary game engine. I devoured this book, and through it all, I wanted to do two things: go back and play through Doom again and re-implement some of those rendering algorithms for myself. I can't think of higher praise for a book, so if you've ever played Doom and want to know how it works, you need to go treat yourself to this book and the Wolfenstein 3D Black Book, too.
The book starts off with forwards by John Carmack and Dave Taylor and a short introduction just to wet your appetite. Then it jumps into the hardware that Doom was designed for in chapter 2. Doom was able to run on an i386, but by 1993 when Doom was being developed, the i486 was becoming affordable and was over 2x faster than the equivalent frequency i386, so that was the new target system. Everything else was improving rapidly as well. Video cards took a big step up in performance with the VESA VL-Bus and tighter component integration on the cards. Sound cards became even more fragmented, unfortunately, but sound quality was improving by leaps and bounds. Networking was also becoming possible by this time with multiple ways to connect PCs for multiplayer co-op and deathmatch play. Finally, compilers had improved to the point where it wasn't necessary to do nearly everything in assembly. The Watcom compiler allowed id Software to code Doom almost entirely in C, freeing the developers to think at a higher level and implement more features more rapidly.
Chapter 3 is entirely new because id Software used an entirely different development environment for Doom. Instead of developing everything on unstable DOS PCs, they took the chance on using expensive NeXT workstations. Even a fairly basic NeXTstation cost $4,995 in 1991, and a NeXTcube ran $12,395! It turned out to be worth it, though, because these workstations were rock-solid and allowed John Carmack and the other developers to make incredible progress instead of constantly fighting with crashing machines and a poor development environment. This chapter did a great job going through the architecture and benefits of the NeXT systems, and how id Software used them to full effect.
The next chapter was about the team and tools, like chapter 3 in the Wolfenstein 3D book. Things had changed dramatically, with the team moving to Dallas, TX and growing to fourteen people by the end of development. The tools were evolving, too, with some of the character sprites and animation done using stop motion capture, and the map editor (DoomED) taking on new features to support the multitude of new capabilities in the game engine. Walls in the game no longer needed to be orthogonal, although they still had to be vertical for rendering to be fast enough. Floors and ceilings could change height to create steps, platforms, and other environmental features. Various kinds of traps and ambushes were also possible now. It's quite amazing how many features were added to idTech 1 when compared to the Wolf3D engine. These new features, especially the non-orthogonal walls and varying heights, required a more efficient data structure for the maps, and the BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) node tree was commandeered for the job.
Nearly half of the book is taken up by chapter 5 on the idTech 1 game engine. This chapter is just a monster of awesome information about the engine. It goes through every detail from the game tic design and use of fixed-point arithmetic to sound propagation and enemy AI. The section on the 3D renderer was especially interesting and detailed. There are great explanations on how the environment was drawn with its additional complexity, texture mapping with perspective correction, sprite clipping and animation, and diminished lighting to give the game its intense horror movie feel. This renderer section in particular was so interesting that it made me want to go implement a bunch of the algorithms myself just to be able to recreate them and see them in action. It looks like it would be immensely satisfying.
The last chapter described in fairly good detail how a number of ports of Doom were done on other game consoles. The console ports included the Atari Jaguar, Sega 32X, Super Nintendo, Sony PlayStation, 3DO, and Sega Saturn, and both the system architectures and Doom engine implementations are described. I was in high school during this era of the great console wars, although I never played Doom on any of them, just the excellent experience of the PC. I had forgotten how different these console architectures were, and some of the design decisions that went into those systems were truly remarkable...and strange. The sections on the Super Nintendo and PlayStation ports were my favorites. The Super Nintendo would have never been able to run Doom on its own, but with the extra power of the SuperFX chip that was used in Star Fox and a few other games, it was able to pull it off reasonably well. The PlayStation port was the most faithful of the ports, and even added some cool new features like colored ambient lighting. Of all of these systems, the PlayStation was exceptionally powerful for making great games. Even though other systems might have looked more powerful on paper, they all had disadvantages and unfortunate design decisions that handicapped them while the PlayStation was so easy to develop for that its potential could consistently be achieved in practice.
I enjoyed this book as much, if not more than the Wolf3D Black Book. From the beautiful full-color pictures to the detailed explanations of technical feature implementations to the well-chosen code listings sprinkled throughout the book, this was an incredibly fun guided tour of a legendary game engine. I devoured this book, and through it all, I wanted to do two things: go back and play through Doom again and re-implement some of those rendering algorithms for myself. I can't think of higher praise for a book, so if you've ever played Doom and want to know how it works, you need to go treat yourself to this book and the Wolfenstein 3D Black Book, too.
Saturday, March 21, 2020
VectorMan (Genesis/Mega Drive) - Guest Post
This week on Super Adventures, mecha-neko's back with another guest post for you! He's found a game all about robots, purple flags and twinkly stars, and some people reckon it's pretty good. You'll have to keep reading if you want to know what mecha-neko thinks of it though.
Hey everybody, guess what! It's time to play the Mega Drive exclusive VectorMan!
If you think this little fragment of the title screen is busy, believe me I'm letting you off easy. If you're really gutsy, take a look at the full animation. Be warned, it contains flashing images. (And boy howdy does it ever.) That warning goes for the rest of this post as well. Are you ready?
Read on »
Hey everybody, guess what! It's time to play the Mega Drive exclusive VectorMan!
| Developer: | BlueSky Software | | | Release Date: | October 24th, 1995 | | | Systems: | Mega Drive/Genesis |
If you think this little fragment of the title screen is busy, believe me I'm letting you off easy. If you're really gutsy, take a look at the full animation. Be warned, it contains flashing images. (And boy howdy does it ever.) That warning goes for the rest of this post as well. Are you ready?
Read on »
Friday, March 20, 2020
Black Friday Sale And So Much More....
Black Friday Sale! Up to 60% off select items!
We dug pretty deep on our discounts for this sale, so much so we offered a special discount to our retail and wholesale partners.
Speaking of retail and wholesale partners; If you have not heard, we are now warehousing and distributing our own products. WOOT!
But that's not all…. Wait for it…. We are also stocking and distributing some legacy Wargames Factory products. For now, just the WWII line, both 15mm and 28mm scales but more is on the way.
Soooo much going on around here I am looking forward to the Thanksgiving holiday but dreading stepping away. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday.
All the best!
Mark
D-E-D Dead!
What's going on everyone!?
Today for the #2019gameaday challenge I played a game of Colt Express on the mobile app. It was a great game but I'm a little biased about the game, lol!
I didn't end up winning but I felt a bit rusty with the game. I can't wait to play it again and trying to win!
As always, thank you for reading and don't forget to stop and smell the meeples! :)
-Tim
SIEGE 2019
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
Leap Day Cha'alt Sale!!!
Every 4 years, right? Lots of sales going on, so here's mine...
Get the premium, luxury hardcover book of Cha'alt for $40 (shipping inside the USA included, otherwise, it's an extra $30). Normally, Cha'alt retails for $60.
Not familiar with this eldritch, gonzo, science-fantasy, post-apocalyptic campaign setting + megadungeon? Here's a text review and this is a video review.
Each book is signed and numbered (limited to 2,000 and I'm almost out - no reprints!)... plus, since it's leap day and all, I'll "ultra-personalize" it with an amateur drawing of some tentacled monstrosity.
This offer is only good until midnight tonight, so don't delay!
You can paypal me the money using my email address: Venger.Satanis@yahoo.com
Enjoy,
VS
p.s. Of course, if you order the hardcover, you'll get the PDF for FREE
Monday, March 16, 2020
Friday, March 6, 2020
Download IGI 2 Covert Strike Highly Compressed For Pc
Download IGI 2 Covert Strike Highly Compressed For Pc
IGI 2 Covert Strike Full Review
Screenshot
IGI 2 Covert Strike System Requirements
Following are the minimum system requirements of IGI 2.
- Operating System: Windows XP/ Windows Vista/ Windows 7/ Windows 8 and 8.1
- CPU: Pentium 4 1.4GHz
- RAM: 512 MB
- Hard Disk Space: 2 GB
So Far Behind...
I haven't talked about so many gaming things happening in my life the last few weeks.
First, I went to DesotoCon, in Kansas, back at the end of July. I started a blog post about it and will finish it, I promise. It's even going to be back dated so it will appear before this one. Not many (any?) photos from it though. Well, a few, I think.
The next week I went to Indianapolis for GenCon. Met a lot of great people, hung out with some friends from Thread Raiders, Saving Throw Show, and Dragons and Things (best Pathfinder liveplay stream, Fridays at 6:00 Pacific on Twitch). Bought a bunch of stuff. Again, it deserves it's own post and I will work on that. A few more photos there.
I've also released the first product from Goblyn Head Press on DriveThruRPG. It's a supplement designed for D&D 5e called Sacred Sites. It was written by Eli Arndt, who you ugys have seen me mention before around here. Nine different places you can encounter the sacred or profane. It has sold a few copies already and it's only been up about a week. Very excited about that. Probably deserves it's own post, too.
And we've gotten a few more sessions of Starfinder in. Kicked one guy out of our group, got another new player. Still sitting at three players so if anyone wants to join us in Santa Fe, TX (in Galveston County, on the mainland)...
And I painted a few minis. Not much. I really need to get to work on the Pledge or I am screwed.
Oh, two new display cases came in and I got one put together. Detolf from IKEA.
And I have been drawing more maps on my Wacom tablet. So that's getting me closer to done with another Goblyn Head project.
All in all, I guess I have been busy. Just not very good at reporting. I'll try to get caught up on all of that the next few days.
First, I went to DesotoCon, in Kansas, back at the end of July. I started a blog post about it and will finish it, I promise. It's even going to be back dated so it will appear before this one. Not many (any?) photos from it though. Well, a few, I think.
The next week I went to Indianapolis for GenCon. Met a lot of great people, hung out with some friends from Thread Raiders, Saving Throw Show, and Dragons and Things (best Pathfinder liveplay stream, Fridays at 6:00 Pacific on Twitch). Bought a bunch of stuff. Again, it deserves it's own post and I will work on that. A few more photos there.
I've also released the first product from Goblyn Head Press on DriveThruRPG. It's a supplement designed for D&D 5e called Sacred Sites. It was written by Eli Arndt, who you ugys have seen me mention before around here. Nine different places you can encounter the sacred or profane. It has sold a few copies already and it's only been up about a week. Very excited about that. Probably deserves it's own post, too.
And we've gotten a few more sessions of Starfinder in. Kicked one guy out of our group, got another new player. Still sitting at three players so if anyone wants to join us in Santa Fe, TX (in Galveston County, on the mainland)...
And I painted a few minis. Not much. I really need to get to work on the Pledge or I am screwed.
Oh, two new display cases came in and I got one put together. Detolf from IKEA.
All in all, I guess I have been busy. Just not very good at reporting. I'll try to get caught up on all of that the next few days.
The End Of Familiarity (Tradecraft)
When you walk into my store and look to the right, the designated direction Americans gaze when entering a store, you'll find a plethora of familiar game titles. Monopoly, Yahtzee, Scrabble, all the usual suspects. This is what is known as a "merchandising expense," games I stock that I would rather not, that indicate to the uninitiated that I am a safe place with things they are familiar with. This is a game store with games, you know, game games, as one customer recently described it. This practice is now coming to an end.
Here's how that works. First, hobby games have penetrated the mass market and they've been there now for a good, long time. Unless you're living under a rock, if you've been to Target and WalMart in the last decade and care even an inkling about games, enough to roll your red or blue cart past them, you've seen Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne and other former hobby game store exclusive titles.
These titles have declined for us significantly since their introduction in mass market, with the promise they are gateways to good times for us later. Perhaps this is true, perhaps not, but board games are booming. These titles are now familiar to consumers. They've become evergreens on the shelf of mass market stores. This means hobby game stores don't need to work as hard with our garbage merchandising expenses to show familiarity. Chess sets and Hasborg products can be dropped, if you feel your community have these touchstones in their lives. And what community doesn't?
Second, even if I don't have this market penetration that breeds familiarity, there are now enough regular folks who play hobby games to where I need the space taken up by oversized merchandising inventory. I may lose the completely out of touch customer, but my overall base is so much larger than a decade ago, I can afford it. What I can't afford to do is stock quaint product for muggles when I've got educated consumers flocking to my business and demanding games now. They will just as easily, and without a moment of regret, buy it online, so it better be there now.
In general, if you don't know or are frightened by products like Dungeons & Dragons, Ticket to Ride, Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering, you are simply not worth any of my time whatsoever. Through mass market stores and the Internet, the public has been converted from suspects to prospects. In fact, it has turned many from prospects to customers, bypassing hobby game stores completely. I am at the tail end of this equation, taking in what I can of a cultural shift, in which a hurricane of customers have been created and I'm trying to fill up a thimble, arm outstretched into the clouds, while dying of thirst. As with all revolutions, you never know exactly your place in it until shots are fired.
Here's how that works. First, hobby games have penetrated the mass market and they've been there now for a good, long time. Unless you're living under a rock, if you've been to Target and WalMart in the last decade and care even an inkling about games, enough to roll your red or blue cart past them, you've seen Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne and other former hobby game store exclusive titles.
These titles have declined for us significantly since their introduction in mass market, with the promise they are gateways to good times for us later. Perhaps this is true, perhaps not, but board games are booming. These titles are now familiar to consumers. They've become evergreens on the shelf of mass market stores. This means hobby game stores don't need to work as hard with our garbage merchandising expenses to show familiarity. Chess sets and Hasborg products can be dropped, if you feel your community have these touchstones in their lives. And what community doesn't?
Second, even if I don't have this market penetration that breeds familiarity, there are now enough regular folks who play hobby games to where I need the space taken up by oversized merchandising inventory. I may lose the completely out of touch customer, but my overall base is so much larger than a decade ago, I can afford it. What I can't afford to do is stock quaint product for muggles when I've got educated consumers flocking to my business and demanding games now. They will just as easily, and without a moment of regret, buy it online, so it better be there now.
In general, if you don't know or are frightened by products like Dungeons & Dragons, Ticket to Ride, Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering, you are simply not worth any of my time whatsoever. Through mass market stores and the Internet, the public has been converted from suspects to prospects. In fact, it has turned many from prospects to customers, bypassing hobby game stores completely. I am at the tail end of this equation, taking in what I can of a cultural shift, in which a hurricane of customers have been created and I'm trying to fill up a thimble, arm outstretched into the clouds, while dying of thirst. As with all revolutions, you never know exactly your place in it until shots are fired.
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| Games in my parents guest room. One of these things is not like the other. |
Thursday, March 5, 2020
Beat The Price Increase
The new pricing structure takes effect on February 15th. We are offering up to a 30% discount our current off MSRP until that date.
Most items will see a 5% to 8% increase and a few specific items will be higher.
If you have an item or two that has been on your bucket list, this might be a good time to blow the dust off the list.
(from prior post)
We started down the road to manufacturing plastic kits in 2012, a lot has happened since then. I have seen shipping prices nearly double, WGF has ceased to be our distributor and we have taken over that aspect of operations. We now purchase our kits from WGF China directly.
We recently place two restock orders to bring our stock levels back on par, the shipping costs have been an eye opener. In many cases shipping from China to the US was more than the actual cost to manufacture a kit. Some kits needed to be brought in line with their cost of production. This price increase was as minimal as we could make it most items will see an increase of 5% to 8% with some more drastic adjustments to kits that were selling into distribution at a lower than delivered cost to us.
To maintain the health of DreamForge-Games it has become clear that we will need to implement a price increase, effective February 15th2016 Mark Mondragon
DreamForge-Games
Stonne 1940 Big CoC Weekend Part 1
This has been in the pipeline for a few months now, the first public Big CoC public weekend at the WHC. In this first post I'll give some idea of the thought process (sic) behind the game and then I'll give you the scenarios and how the game played out...oh, and there will be a few pics.  |
| Warlord and Crusader French |
A small problem with running Big CoC games is that the scenarios are somewhat dependant on the number of players attending, and given the nature of the WHC the numbers can vary, Some players book months in advance, but often people will book relatively late so the scenario needed to be capable of being tweaked to fit this in. The nuts and bolts of the game don't alter that much, the idea being that each player will command an infantry (or armour) platoon, then the force as a whole has a degree of support which is then dished out. On the whole this is not a problem, but for quite a while we were looking at having six players (fine, 3 on 3) then suddenly the numbers went up to seven. My initial reaction was one of mild horror because it meant balancing the game for a three versus four. However, when I started looking at the way the Stonne game might play out, the imbalance of 3 platoons against 4 became more and more attractive.
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| A little Panhard 178. It bogged in the ditch...... |
They were encountering in these scenarios the 3e DIM (Division d'Infanterie Motorisée), supported by 3e DCr (Division Cuirassée)
Looking at the platoon lists for CoC the 1940 German infantry platoons are enormous. Each platoon contains 2 senior leaders and a 50mm mortar team plus 4 x 10 man sections, for a total of 44 men.
The French platoons are a similar size, with 2 platoon leaders (1 senior, 1 junior) a VB rifle grenade team of a junior leader with 4 men. plus 3 sections of 11 for a total of 40 men.
So if we had seven players, with 3 on the German side and 4 for the French it wouldn't be too bad. 1 player a side would be playing a tank platoon anyway, so it would be 2 German infantry platoons against 3 French, however that is actually 8 German sections opposed to 9 French, making it less unbalanced than first appears. A little extra tweaking by making the Germans "superior regulars" meaning they treat rolls on their command dice of a single six also as a 5, giving them more CoC dice pips during the game, plus increasing the size of their panzer II platoon to a whopping 5 vehicles would compensate for the additional French numbers. Additionally, each German platoon would start with a full Chain of Command Dice.
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| Poilus advance, CharB in support So I worked on that basis, and prepared everything with 7 players in mind, Then of course Mark called and said " I've got an 8th player"......So the superior regular, and the extra CoC dice went out of the window, and the Panzer platoon was cut from 5 down to 4, and the Germans went up to 3 infantry platoons to make it 4 a side. Also the Germans would not have a significant advantage in support points when they were attacking, while the french would. Even after this we had another couple of guys wanting to sign up, but at that late stage we sadly had to say no, and stick with 8, as I think a single game with 5 a side is really stretching it for this rule set - not saying its not possible, but I think the game might suffer. So that is the format we ended up going with, having said that I'm pretty sure the scenarios will work fine with seven (or 5 for that matter) players if the Germans are bumped up a bit to cater for uneven forces.  Panzerjeager I supports Black Tree and Warlord infantry The other aspect of the games that numbers have an impact on is the size of the table used for each scenario. The recommendation for Big CoC is that the table size should be the same as for normal CoC (6' x 4') with an additional foot width per additional infantry platoon added - you add nothing for the armour. Well, The main table at the WHC is 24' long by 6' deep, and so we already play on a depth of 6' which I prefer over 4'. The patrol phase gets forces into action quickly enough anyway, and having the extra depth gives players a bit more room without slowing things down. Just adding 2 feet per platoon gives us a width of 8' x 6 " which is fine, but the centres' terrain boards are 3' each so it is convenient to go for a slightly larger width of 9'. a bit more room both on the table and for player comfort. That meant that it wasn't too tricky to divide up the table into 3 sections - 9' at each end and then utilise the central 6' and 3' of one of the other sections to give us 3 x 6' x 9' areas. The point of all this meant I could set up the entire table beforehand, and players go from game to game with no great interruptions in order to maximise playing time. Also I think it looks good! |
Stonne from west to east: Game 1 at the far end, game 2 in the foreground, game 3 in the centre. The Germans are advancing from the north, the French, the south.
I also planned to have a 4th scenario, which would have meant re-setting the terrain at one end of the table- it would have been that which was fought over in game 2 so we could do it while game 3 was in progress giving plenty of time. As it turned out, we didn't get in 4 games over the weekend, a bit of a shame but, sometimes CoC games can be like that, some go faster than others.
The table was made up simply from having a look at Google Earth, backed up with some excellent maps in Prieser's "Blitzkrieg Legend"- to get the overall topography. Generally the village hasn't changed enormously since 1940, although it was rebuilt there has been no development sprawl, The critical points haven't changed, in terms of the woods, the road layout, and the extent of the village.Being able to get down at street view is an amazing resource, it shows just how winding and steep the only road the Germans had to approach the village from the north was, as it approaches the Butte De Stonne at the Eastern end of the village, and how despite it appearing very flat on the map, the countryside to the west and south actually has quite a lot of small undulations, the view south from the village is somewhat restricted. At the eastern end of the village the countryside is more wooded and broken, with the road becoming sunken before it winds down back on itself down the steep wooded slope to the north of the village (off- table)
Map showing the initial German attack on Stonne, May 15 at 0800. Influenced by Eric Denis' work. (wikipedia)
Given the nature of playing 3 or possibly 4 games over a weekend in a campaign format with 8 CoC novices I thought that the first scenario should probably be a bit gentle in order to ease them into it, and allow them to possibly make a few mistakes without getting horribly punished. I also wanted to keep it relatively simple.Given the nature of the fighting in Stonne (the village apparently changed hands 17 times in 3 days), it lent itself to a relatively straightforward narrative: i.e. Attack and counterattack- So I decided to make the first game an attack/defence scenario with the Germans on the offensive at the eastern end of the table, the second game was to be another attack/defence with the French on the offensive at the western end of the table. Game 3 was to be in the central area of the table with the Germans attacking in an "attack on an objective" scenario.
I planned a 4th scenario which was to be played out on new terrain to the east of Stonne and that would have been the French conducting a flank attack. However, time sadly ran out. I'm sure we will do it one day.
The View from east to west, the broken ground of the Butte De Stonne in the foreground
French section enters central Stonne
The scene was set:
8 players, hopefully 4 games, Germans versus French at Stonne, one of the iconic battles of the campaign.
What were the salient features of the battle? The Germans had crossed the Meuse a couple of days earlier and were trying to exploit that relatively fragile bridgehead, the French had rapidly managed to assemble a counter attack force. The massif of which Stonne is a small part doesn't readily show up on a map, but have a look at Google Earth and you can see just how important it was for both sides. The village itself is rather innocuous, just a farming village with two roads entering from the south, however, it is the terrain to the north which both sides were focused on. There is a single road which leads out of Stonne to the north, this snakes down the hillside along a steep wooded slope before reaching the more gentle plain. The entire northern side of Stonne is covered in thick fir trees which extend down the steep slope- there is nowhere in the village itself (other than the "Butte de Stonne") which has a view to the north. However, if you hold the town and can establish OP's in this wooded hillside you have a magnificent vista stretching out 4 or 5 kilometres and more to the north, the German bridgeheads, and the routes they will take as they expand. Subsequently this tiny Ardennes village became vitally important.
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