Zero Punctuation Reviews: Minecraft

Ok, and I absolutely had to throw this one in there...

Duke Nukem Forever Release Date Set:

May 3rd, 2011, we all become teenagers again.

Zero Punctuation: Top (and Bottom) 5 of 2010

I haven't posted too many ZPs lately because I found they only serve to accentuate when I'm slacking off (and I've slacked off a LOT lately, I know :P ), but this is definitely one to see.

On Wargame UIs

Found via brokentoys - how hard-core wargames actively alienate potential customers through having painful UI.

Here’s another example: this is the control panel that you use to control units in Norm Kroger’s Operational Art of War III:

So in the world of TOAW, “Next unit” is as important as “resolve battle” which is as important as “show/hide hex grid” which is as important as the twenty-five other miscellaneous options, some of which you will never use. It is to weep.

Great Moments in Customer Support: DC Online

From the blog of Scott - formerly known as Lum the Mad -

SOE’s kind of busy with launching DC Online and all, so could you just uninstall the beta manually yourself? And come in on Saturday? Yeah, that’d be great. (GoogleCache due to DCO beta forums being taken down.)

I’m sure you all realize that the focus of the development staff is currently going to be bmaking the game as awesome as possible for the retail release. The broken uninstaller is a forgivable and understandable over-sight.

Response from the Internet?

If a user has to hand-delete every file associated with your product, including digging through their registry, that is bad and your programmers should feel bad.

Accurate Math in Processors may not be important

At least not for certain tasks, such as rendering video, even of 3D environments.

An interesting bit over at Kotaku.

"The difference between the low-precision and the standard arithmetic was trivial," Shaw says. "It was about 14 pixels out of a million, averaged over many, many frames of video." "No human could see any of that," Bates adds.

Why is this a big thing? Because apparently, you can fit 1000 low precision cores in the space where 12 normal cores would go.


Nice.