Raph Koster

Metaplace – Transition Tile Maker
July 8, 2008 Gamemaking
2 Comments

Another day, another little tool release over at the Metaplace site. This one is a little helper that assists in making transition textures between different terrain tiles. Sure, some engines do blending for you, but some don’t. And some effects really require handmade transitions. Well, the Transition Tile Maker lets you make your own blend masks and share them, or use the premade ones for making transitions. We figure there’s art tasks for UGC that are kind of tedious, so why not help the process along?

You can grab it for Windows or for Intel Mac…

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Google’s Lively
July 8, 2008July 8, 2008 Game talk
38 Comments

So at this point, I imagine everyone has seen the news about Google finally decloaking off the virtual bow with Lively.

The coverage showed up in both the gaming press, where Google shared a bunch of tidbits that seemed to indicate a PR outreach to the gaming community, and also of course in the tech press, where commenters seemed overall less than impressed, questioning how Lively relates to Google’s avowed purpose of “organizing the world’s information.”

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The Reiser Story Ends
July 8, 2008 Misc
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For those who have been reading the blog for a year and remember The Reiser Story post (which I did after reading a Wired article), the end of the story has finally come, as Reiser led police to the grave of his murdered wife.

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Some misc links
July 7, 2008 Game talk
11 Comments
- Oh look, another 3d engine in Flash.
- EA and Hasbro have gotten around to launching a legit Scrabble on Facebook. But Scrabulous appears undaunted.
- Once in a long ago, I half-heartedly suggested to Gordon Walton that the way to fix the SWG Correspondents program was to have them be player-elected. We never pursued it; the concern was always that they would feel that they would have the right to dictate policy and development priorities, thus taking away control from the dev team. Today, we see that EVE’s council gets covered in the New York Times. As a curiosity, for now — can the day when equivalent deliberations generate mainstream news be far behind?
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The Sunday Song: Midsummer
July 6, 2008 Music
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I finally got my recording setup sorted out. It was the stupid webcam. The control panels all said that my soundcard was selected as the input, but guess what — when I unplugged it, the issues went away.

Anyway, I wrote a weird little instrumental thing this morning, which didn’t really go anywhere. But I kept noodling with it first on the acoustic, then on the electric when my fingers got sore. Then I went back to the acoustic and started to build this up in layers. I called it “Midsummer” because I didn’t have any clever ideas for a title.

This is played in standard tuning with a partial capo at strings 3-4-5 on the second fret. There’s two acoustics and two electrics on there.

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