Seconding this. I have browsed forums where important users threw temper tantrums and deleted all of their posts, making it downright impossible to follow years worth of valuable dialogs.
I am a staunch proponent of anonymity and privacy (hence why I post here under a pseudonym), but you need to make the decision about the level of privacy you want before you post. Changing your mind 1. screws over the community and 2. won't save you from the determined taking a trip through the wayback machine anyway.
I am pseudonymous, though. I don't really care if you can e-stalk ANTSANTS to find that they posted in X forum or played Y game, as long as it stays separate from my real identity.
However, if you're gonna be creepy about it, maybe I should be more proactive.
I agree, I love FM and will always think good FM or "real chiptunes" are more impressive than good sample-based synthesis, because you can't just lean on your sample library. There are a few Genesis trackers out there, including Deflemask[1], vgmmaker (which sadly, the author took down because he got tired of dealing with unappreciative jerks, so you'll have to Google a bit to find a copy), and YMDj [2] (a "native tracker" that runs on the Genesis itself)
And I'm unimpressed by the technology but dig the music! It takes all kinds.
I like dubstep when people put some thought into it and aren't just lazily fiddling with an LFO, but to be fair, getting into breakcore as a teenager might have permanently ruined my taste.
I do like these demos for their music and their visual aesthetics, but I'm sorry to say, they aren't in any way technically impressive. The first one [1] is literally an FMV, it's all pre-rendered video. The second has one neat effect, the rotating scanline-aligned box that you've seen on other platforms, but all the hard part for other platforms, rasterizing it in realtime, is trivialized by the "mode 7" affine transformation video mode. Just need to calculate one 2D affine matrix per scanline, or load it from a lookup table, and the graphics hardware handles the rest. Plenty of commercial games had similar effects; it's just barely more impressive than seeing a rotating cube on a PlayStation. And even the (admittedly awesome) music isn't doing anything new, it's just using higher quality samples than most devs could afford to use in their games back in the day, synthesized on a PC with more powerful synthesizers.
I'm sorry, I know I sound like a total dick writing that. Again, I do enjoy the music and the visual aesthetics of this group's demos a lot more than a lot of other unarguably more technically impressive demos. Hell, I've watched Smash It about a dozen times now! I'm sure that we can expect really awesome stuff from them in the future as they get more experience. Just had to point out that "THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING OF WHAT WE CAN DO ON FUCKING SUPER NINTENDO" is an apt description of the tech on display, which is important, because the demoscene is about the intersection of style and technical achievement, not one or the other.
A symbol is a symbol. A flat monochrome floppy disk icon represents the concept of saving a file just the same as a lovingly rendered 3D floppy disk or even a photograph would.
Text glyphs are very flat, abstract symbols that represent sounds or ideas (indeed, I'm pretty sure the whole "flat design" trend was inspired by typography in the first place). Sure, we've been hunting beasts for much longer than we've been reading and writing, but written language is still a very old invention in the human timescale. And art predates even that. Humanity has had plenty of experience with symbolic visuals over the ages, I think we're equipped well enough to use basic smartphone apps.
Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.
Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.
Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.
Modern minimalism only became fashionable a century or so ago, which was - coincidentally - around the time artists started experimenting with extreme abstraction.
Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.
Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.
It's a difference of metaphorical and literal depth. Ignoring scale-dependence robs content of weight.
So minimalism is literally shallow. It's aesthetic lossy compression - abstraction into illegibility, for the sake of abstraction.
You can get away with that in art if you have something interesting to say. But it's really not the best of all possible solutions for UI/UX.
>Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.
>Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.
>Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.
But you don't see the depth of the stroke or the texture of the paper when you're reading. You see abstract lines. You don't see the imperfect squiggles our meat-appendages create unless you really focus; at a glance, your brain autocorrects them into the intended strokes.
>Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.
>Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.
Sure, we're well equipped to handle symbols, but we're better equipped to handle pictures. How much training does a toddler require to recognize the word "duck" versus a picture of an actual duck? I argue that you'd be comparing a time span of seconds to a time span of years.
But again, with training the efficiency in processing a symbol versus a picture becomes negligible. What matters is whether or not it looks good. Right now everyone likes flat design.
The only technical advantage flat design has over a more traditional approach is that it releaves a huge amount of burden from the designer. An icon of a floppy disc is way easier to draw then a 3d picture of a floppy. I would argue that flat design has allowed people with zero skill in traditional art to become "designers"
I also used ME for about a year but I don't remember it crashing once. Never understood why everyone had such problems with it, I thought it was just Windows 98 with USB drivers.
John Romero was making shareware games for years before he met John Carmack. He wrote the level editors, much gameplay code, created many levels for, and significantly contributed to the game design of all the id games from Commander Keen to Quake. His absence is arguably a big part of why most of the later id games just aren't as fun as Doom. Daikatana bombed for a lot of reasons (zero experience as a manager, dotcom-era ridiculousness in hype and project scope, infamously horrible marketing campaign that he had no part in, etc), but not because John Romero was an incompetent programmer or game designer.
If you have the time, watch this series in which John Romero and (Bioshock level designer and apparent Doom fanboy) Jean-Paul LeBreton play through the first episode of Doom and analyze its level design in depth:
Thanks for linking to that video, it was fun to watch. I've looked at the 90s' id games differently ever since I read Masters of Doom 10 years ago (due for a re-read soon) - learning their history made me appreciate those games on a whole new level. Their story was a very big inspiration and motivation boost for my own modest projects.
Yeah, the possibility of a "gatekeeper effect" is what's worrisome here. There's no way you can anticipate everything a user might want to do with their computer, so while opt-in sandboxing can only help, mandatory sandboxing could stifle the creativity of developers who must go through a gatekeeper (even a benevolent one) any time they want to ship a program that uses hardware or software abstractions in some unforeseen way.
Or alternatively, Joe User goes "[grumble grumble] guess I gotta delete that dang PulsePolicyD that's keepin' me from runnin' muh binaries [copies and pastes the first command found when googling "how i run X" into shell]" and it's all for naught.
Media players are rather large programs that users feed lots of untrusted data (gigabytes of pirated movies/tv shows/porn from suspect sources etc) into. All it takes is one exploitable bug in your media player of choice (or more likely, in a hardware-accelerated codec it uses) and one maliciously malformed video for your home directory to be nuked, keylogger to be installed, or worse.
I am a staunch proponent of anonymity and privacy (hence why I post here under a pseudonym), but you need to make the decision about the level of privacy you want before you post. Changing your mind 1. screws over the community and 2. won't save you from the determined taking a trip through the wayback machine anyway.