game connect

Tony Albrecht Explains “Tony” Unit Maths

9:30AM Logan Booker | Over at his blog Seven Degrees of Freedom, Pandemic programmer Tony Albrecht has posted an explanation of the mathematics behind the “Tony” unit. If you missed the post from two weeks ago, Tony came up with a new unit of measurement to quantify the power of the three major consoles. It was all in good fun, mind you, so don’t take this as Tony’s official stance on how the consoles rank. From the post: The numbers I gave were; • X360: 6 Tony units • PS3 : 14 Tony units • Wii : 0.2 Tony units Basically, I took my personal brain power (3.2GHz – which just happens to be the same as a single HW thread of the X360) as a base unit. So, the X360 with 3 cores, each with 2 HW threads gets 3*2 = 6 Tony units. More specifics on the PS3 and Wii can be found at the original post. I hope Tony doesn’t mind all the attention. This is the last of it man, I promise. Unless, of course, you make something else up that’s cool. Tony Units [Seven Degress of Freedom] Tony Albrecht Debuts “Tony” Units At Game Connect [Kotaku AU] More »

QA Is Not Taken Seriously, Seen As Career Stepping Stone

11:00AM Logan Booker | Martin Slater’s killer Bioshock post-mortem at the most recent Game Connect didn’t just highlight the less glamorous aspects of DirectX 10 – the 2K Australia lead programmer also discussed the issues facing quality assurance, and how important good QA is: There’s a nasty trend in the industry right now, QA is not taken seriously enough. It’s not a career for people, it’s a step up for people coming out of AIE [Academy of Interactive Entertainment], coming out of Qantm, coming out of wherever. Their first taste of the games industry is a stint in QA for six months on 15 bucks an hour, [where they] knock out some bugs until they’ve been known and hopefully chat it up with a few of the other people and get a job. According to Slater, QA needs to be taken seriously, not only as a crucial aspect of development, but a career as well. Currently, it’s perceived as a rung on the ladder to a “better” position – one that has nothing to do with QA. More from Slater after the jump. More »

Know Your Japanese Music Men, With Prize Goodness

3:25PM Logan Booker | Continuing on (unofficially) from our brush with Blizzard’s esteemed developer trio, here’s the pair of famous Japanese music men that paid Melbourne’s Game Connect event a visit a few weeks ago. They do games and anime, and they much prefer the sound of live recordings over synthesisers, even if machines can do awesome set pieces that are impossible for humans to reproduce. Now, I’ve decided to tie a competition in with this photo. All you have to do is Photoshop a speech bubble above the head of the handsome man on the left, and the most comical will win themselves a copy of Mario Party DS. Send your entry to tips AT kotaku.com.au, and I’ll pick a winner on Friday. Crude entries will not be accepted, so keep it clean folks. And before you ask, yes, it’s the same copy of Mario Party DS from yesterday’s comp, as no one was able to correctly identify all of our cosplayers. It was a tricky one. The two men above are named after the jump, if for some reason you’re unable to hover over the image itself for a massive hint. More »

Tony Albrecht Debuts “Tony” Units At Game Connect

1:40PM Logan Booker | Pandemic’s Tony Albrecht decided to invent a new unit of measurement to compare the processing grunt of the major consoles, in an effort to simplify the concept during Game Connect’s “Great Debate”. It’s called the “Tony”. Yes, he made it up. Before the fanboys get themselves worked up, the debate was an exercise in humour. Well, mostly. Although many of the points brought up during the verbal sparring were legitimate, they were often exaggerated or stretched. Mind you, Tantalus’ David Hewitt did an excellent job of combing the real with the funny as he defended the Wii, and it came as no surprise when he won the debate. But back to Albrecht: The 360 has three cores and two hardware threads on each … so you have six units of Tony power. The PS3 [has SPUs] … you can port your code across onto the SPU and it’s around four times the speed – six of those for you to play around with, so you have around 14 Tony units. How about Nintendo’s effort, Tony? The Wii has about .2 Tony units. It should be noted that Albrecht doesn’t own a 360 or PS3. But he does have a Wii. Can we please have the Tony added to the metric system? It’d make writing all those technical articles on the consoles so much easier. More »

2K Australia’s Martin Slater: “DirectX 10 Offers Your Gameplay Nothing”

9:45AM Logan Booker | I was fortunate enough to sit in on Martin Slater’s BioShock post-mortem down at Game Connect last weekend. With hands firmly clenching his speaker podium, Slater held his ground against a steady bombardment of questions on BioShock. I found his experiences working with Microsoft’s DirectX 10 the most interesting, so I’ve replicated them here from data carefully extracted from my voice recorder: [DirectX 10] offers your gameplay nothing … DirectX 10, probably for the next three, four, five years is not important to you. Microsoft are going to tell you everything under the sun differently. Everybody under the sun is going to tell you differently. I’m not sure it offers your visuals anything either, judging from Crysis and its configuration file silliness. DirectX 10 isn’t all bad though – hey, Microsoft didn’t go to all that trouble for nothing: You’ve got the business side and you’ve got the games side. The games side, you want to minimise the technology because you want to maximise the amount of time you spend interacting with game design. DirectX 10, for all your game programmers, is a beautiful place. I can’t help but agree with Slater. I also think people need to start understanding that DirectX 10 and Direct3D 10 are two different things – one is a collection of APIs, while the other is one of those APIs. More »

Masaaki Kaneko Slide Funnies

11:00AM Logan Booker | There’s always risk involved when you run a chunk of text in a foreign language through an online convertor. Most tend to use services such as Babel Fish to get a general idea of what’s going on. It’s unlikely you’d use the pseudo-English output generated by one of these magical services for any formal presentation. Yet Basiscape’s (Final Fantasy XII, Romeo x Juliet) Masaaki Kaneko did. He’s a brave man, that’s for sure. I felt bad for getting a giggle out of Kaneko’s slides for his presentation “The Difficulty of Drawing” at Melbourne’s Game Connect over the weekend – slides that he’d hastily fed into an online Japanese-English lanugage convertor. But I comforted myself with the fact that it was probably meant to be humorous, and that the presentation itself was very informative. Essentially, Kaneko discussed the importance of respecting the capabilities of each console’s audio system, and that just because a console can do something nifty with sound, doesn’t mean a developer has to take advantage of it. In fact, Kaneko believes games today go overboard in the audio department, and that it is more difficult to recognise an excess of “sound”, compared to lack of it. More »

eGames & Game Connect: Will You Be Going?

4:35PM Logan Booker | Over the weekend, I’m going to attempt to cover two gaming events down Melbourne way – at the same time. I’ll be channelling Red Dwarf’s Arnold Rimmer from that sexy episode where he gets jiggy with another hologram. Ahem. The events in question are the eGames and Entertainment Expo and Game Connect (the event formerly known as the Australian Game Developers Conference). Both are transpiring at roughly the same time, from the 15th to the 18th – give or take a day. If you’d like to have a chat, feel free to flag me down, or throw random pieces of confectionary at my head. If you’re not sure who to look for, I’ll be the guy with a big camera round his neck, a notepad in his back pocket, and a look of pure terror plastered to his face. Imagine you’ve just been ambushed by a H.R. Giger painting with teeth and a taste for scrawny 23-year olds, and you’re halfway there. Drop a comment and let me know if you’ll be going to either event, so I don’t feel so alone. More »