There are 11 responses to “Episode #73”.

• Nic says:

  Tue 9 March, 2010 at 2:23 pm

  Apologies for the random skype sounds every so often; They’re mostly me.

  Ironically, the spam of 6-7 sounds shortly before the interview is me telling William there are chat sounds on the stream and telling him to mute them. At one point I said “someone is really spamming you right now, you should definitely go mute the sounds”; Not realising they were from me.

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• deka says:

  Wed 10 March, 2010 at 2:35 am

  I thought Glenn’s critique of Orion was unjustified. The last things I’d want to see in Orion are gimmicky and superfluous objectives or multiplayer mechanics. Variety should always be a priority for developers, but this trend of judging a game solely by its novelty needs to die.

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• Hectic Glenn says:

  Wed 10 March, 2010 at 9:44 am

  Although I was speaking for myself only, I get to see the opinions of the community quite frequently and I was kind of reflecting upon that and my own thoughts. I’d agree with you that gimmicky approaches aren’t of any value, however team deathmatch & CTF in Orion doesn’t add any further spark or excitement. This is reflected in the playing numbers (which is also due to bugs and crashes too). Vital was a gamemode Praz highlighted before release which sounds really exciting. It was this mode I was alluding to with regard to making something which stood out.

  I’ve spoken with Praz since anyway, and Orion has undergone some momentous changes behind closed doors since the initial release, which will blow your mind. I’m sworn to secrecy I’m afraid but I think they are addressing the exact issues I took point with and I’m sure Praz is happy with that progress. Keep an eye on them.

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  • deka says:

    Wed 10 March, 2010 at 7:44 pm

    I believe you too. The slim majority of players I encountered, back when Orion was fairly popular, voiced a discontent over the lack of variety. Coincidentally, the same people were unable to fully realize Orion’s movement and battle mechanics; only a handful of individuals had uncovered bunnyhopping and gliding, cloaking and infiltration, or even the subtle differences among the weaponry — e.g. the scoping inaccuracy with the submachine gun. For the few that joined the fray, I’d say they’d found a decent game, in spite of its shortcomings. Moreover, I can see why the rest of the community would feel frustrated or ostracized, yet laying the blame on the game itself, for failing to provide a niche for the audience that failed to compete, isn’t justifiable. I’m convinced that Orion had originality, at a depth where most would fail to see it.

    I’m sure we could both agree that Orion still requires large amounts of refinement; our differences lie in what constitutes refinement. Aside from the server bug, I felt that Orion lacked the arsenal and map-size to emulate Tribes-esque deathmatch. While a new game mode sounds exciting, if it’s not properly implemented, then it’s as good as rubbish. I’d rather have one or two cliched yet carefully refined objectives — much like Fortress Forever — than a plethora of whimsical objectives — not unlike Team Fortress 2 (not to intentionally offend any TF2 fans).

    My comment on judging a game by its novelty has mostly to do with my perspective of the modding community; a pretentious, confident, university-bound art-crowd has hijacked the modding community much in the same way that indie gaming has evolved, with the aid of such wankers as Tim Rogers and Leigh Alexander, to its current height of complacency. One need only to look to the popularity of Canabalt and Radiator to find that people are growing far more concerned with a game’s style than its quality, and in regards to games that intentionally develop elements of literature and film over game mechanics, it’s becoming increasingly easy to fool the community into praising nonsense. The mark of any work of art is depth, and depth is inimitable.

    My only fear for Orion would be Praz’s decision to join this trend — if only for the masses it would attract. The last thing a solid multiplayer mod would need is an excess of superficialities — maps, weapons, objectives with no consistency in mind.

    /rant

    Reply
• azelito says:

  Thu 11 March, 2010 at 8:50 am

  The iTunes version of this cast is buggered, it’s only 42 minutes long.

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  • CubicVirtuoso says:

    Thu 11 March, 2010 at 1:24 pm

    We are looking into this right now.

    Reply
  • CubicVirtuoso says:

    Thu 11 March, 2010 at 1:34 pm

    I was able to listen to the podcast fine over iTunes. Your connection may have been interrupted half way through – try to re-download and keep us informed.

    Reply
    • azelito says:

      Thu 11 March, 2010 at 2:03 pm

      It’s very strange… I got one version when it first got released and when I refreshed it today it downloaded an extra version, plus listing an extra version for every episode since 66…
      http://azelito.net/temp/pc17.gif
      It’s probably an iTunes screw-up/local issue for me. Looks like I got the working version now, anyhow.

      Reply
      • Nic says:

        Thu 11 March, 2010 at 4:57 pm

        I think I know what caused the duplicates.

        Yesterday I added a redirect to aboutthatbeer.com (the site which serves the iTunes feed) so its pages would redirect to the actual P17 homepage. But I forgot to make an exception for the separate iTunes feed until about 20 minutes later.

        My guess — based on how they go back to #66 and the titles don’t include the interview — is that the iTunes directory scanned aboutthatbeer.com’s feed last night and updated the feed link to podcast17.com based on the redirect.

        The feed was going to be switched over soon anyway, but it sucks that there will be duplicates now because it happenned before the proper iTunes tags were in place.

        Reply
• Herr_Alien says:

  Mon 15 March, 2010 at 6:37 am

  Emanuel, you were not the only one … surprised, by the intro.
  Having Ryan on is definitely a nice surprise. This promises to be interesting.

  @Portal updates: I’m amazed on how people connect information to paint a bigger picture. The end result picture can be wrong, but the process itself is definitely entertaining.

  @Valve arriving on MACs: it was bound to happen, it’s another market that can be tapped.
  Mods on MACs, it will work as long as all platform dependencies are not exposed to the modders. Otherwise, the modders will need to code multi-platform aware. Which is not easy.

  @Desura: thanks for the insights, it does shed some light on what the market for Desura is. You are right, maybe installing the mod is something the mod developer should try to automate as much as possible. And for the games that don’t make that easy (you mentioned UT), Desura sure has the opportunity to get installed and used.
  There are things that somehow limit it though. For example, there are so many games out there that I fear they won’t be supported because of lack of manpower. ‘Cause it takes manpower to ‘teach’ Desura how to install mods for a given game.
  Maybe a system where the community can specify Desura how to install mods for a game? Some sort of XML-like structure/set of rules?

  Reply
• Major Banter says:

  Sun 28 March, 2010 at 5:49 pm

  An absolute pleasure to be given the Podcast 17 treatment!

  I just thought I’d drop you guys a line to say that I love the podcast, and to be featured literally scared the bejesus out of me. Thanks for being so mellow about my, let’s be honest, ambitious news post.

  Hoped you might be able to check my page out and see if you approve of the features we’re implementing; I just want to demonstrate that this isn’t another “hey guys, check out my streams of maps” akin to Raindrop’s usual updates.

  Anyway, thanks for the feature!

  Jack ‘Banter’ Skelhon

  Reply

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