Digital Beast Plus+

Corporations in May.

Waiting for games that look like this, but are realtime 3D. Voxels were the promise unfilled.

Living Worlds by Mark Ferrari

From the artist:

Deimos was the god of terror in ancient Greece, he was the son of Ares and Aphrodite, and the twin brother of Phobos, god of horror.

With this work I am exploring terror, rather than horror. The distinction was first characterized by the Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe. Terror is characterized by “obscurity” or indeterminacy in its treatment of potentially horrible events; it is this indeterminacy which leads to the sublime. She says in her essay that it “expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life”.

This is the example of my efforts to try to engage the spectator to inhabit the dark with his own fear and to react on the absence, i.e. suggested presence. One of the areas that interest me the most are the archetypal fears, the fears that we bear from the earliest days of the existence of our species. If our ancestors saw a frightened dog or any other animal looking at something, they would probably get frightened themselves too and look at the same direction expecting to see some kind of danger. That’s how the fear becomes contagious, and the fact that we don’t know what’s hiding behind the bush becomes scarier than every visible thing, because our evolution brought us to always expect the worse.

Artist Site

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I did my part for https://thefreemovie.buzz/ (crowd sourced frame by frame redraw of The Bee Movie).

Utterly charmed by how Shroud of the Avatar decided to make their overworld a little diorama map of the world, showing cities, towns, player towns and etc. You run around atop it just like a regular map, and can even cast certain spells. Other players will show up running around as well, and random events may pop up to distract.

This spiritual and semi-official attempt at another Ultima Online is actually far better than I had assumed. It's new stewards (it was sold to another company a year after launch) are doing a great job.

Why are so many games moving to the 'we're going to have UI elements jump around and orient randomly' style, ala the inventory management of Outer Worlds and Diablo 4? Whatever happened to pinning the info window out of the way of the cursor that's moving around selecting things?

Sometimes it feels like the pop-up boxes on inventory items are actively trying to move away from where I'm looking. I usually end up having to chase information as it shifts around the screen.

A thousand deaths to info boxes that literally cover up the inventory, so you can no longer see what's there.

Related: Right-stick inventory 'cursors' in console games trying to cater to both a mouse cursor and a gamepad, needs to stop.

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I don't know why I went and got screencaps of just these exact 4 frames.

it turns out that doomcad, a very early doom map editor, takes an incredibly long time to calculate bsp divisions, and it renders them on the fly

When you just had to loadhigh everything.