Street Fighter HD Remix Patch

The patch was released today for SF HD Remix. No, I was not involved with it (though I have said several times that I am available to help with patches.) Several bugs were fixed (great!), but none with Akuma for some reason. His inescapable Raging Demon bug (from blockstun) remains, as does his invulnerable startup on red fireballs, instant startup of dragon punches, too high priority of jab dragon punch and several normals, and the unfortunate balancing decision by me to make his ground fireballs have such good recovery. And what's up with that air fireball hitbox being so big that it can hit things completely behind it?

Anyway, I didn't experience the lifebar glitch today or the music dropping out, so that's great. Also, the bug that sets your rank to 0 was fixed and the leaderboards reset (also great!). I made it back to #4 today, and for the record I used *only* Fei Long the entire time. I've heard from people who have no idea how to play Fei Long that he isn't good. Or that he's worse than ST (ha!). Or that he's worse than SF4 Fei Long (also: ha.) He seems pretty good to me.

Oh, and I played Vega a bit in unranked matches and I did experience a desync one time. Not sure if that was a fluke or what, because I think that opponent had a really sketchy connection anyway. Pre-patch I experienced desync with Vega quite a bit. All in all, looks like a lot of good fixes. It sure feels great to have ranked matches back, no lifebar glitches, and music that actually plays when it's supposed to. Yay.

UC Berkeley StarCraft Class, Week 7

UC Berkeley's StarCraft team defeated MIT's team by a score of 3-2 this week. I think I was supposed to feel happy about that because there I was attending the Berkeley class. But then I was supposed to feel sad because I went to MIT. In truth, I never bought into the us-vs-them concept of school rivalries in the first place but congratulations to the winners.

This week's class was about scouting. Somehow, this involves a bunch of equations and graphs that I don't have time to reproduce for you (nor do I even know how on the web, really) so you will suffer, just like last week. Or maybe you're actually happy about that because it means I'll explain the equations in regular English, so the non-math people will be able to understand more easily?

Choices

Before we get to scouting, let's lay some groundwork. Consider the difference between choices that are discrete and choices that are continuous. If you want to get really technical, just about every choice in StarCraft is discrete because it eventually comes down to the pixel and the clock cycle, but let's not be quite that picky. The categories wouldn't be so useful if we put everything into one of them.

In a discrete choice, we get only the extremes and nothing inbetween. For example, you choose between building a robotics facility or a templar archives. These are different tech trees so this one decision has a lot of implications and you can only have one or the other (early on when you can't afford both). You can't decide to go halfway on that and build half a robotics facility and half of a templar archives.

Continuous choices have much more leeway though. When to make an expansion?

Click to read more ...

Sirlin at Game Developer's Conference 2009

The Game Developer's Conference is the week after next. I'm giving a lecture on Balancing Multiplayer Competitive Games, so stop by if you're going to the conference. The content will be similar to the four articles I wrote on my site about balancing competitive games, but the lecture is sort of a version 2. And delivered with feeling.

I also wrote an article about subtractive design that appears in the March 2009 issue of Game Developer Magazine. That's the issue that's given out at the conference, so I'm a bit of a double threat at GDC this year.

If you're not a game developer (or not going to the conference and/or don't subscribe to the magazine), you're probably wondering how to get to this content. I don't think I'll be able to release video or audio from my talk because the conference likes to sell that stuff. I will make available my 4 page handout though. As for the subtractive design article, I'll be allowed to post it here in 3 or 4 weeks.

Gamer's Corner Interview

If you have yet another 2 hours to spare, here's an interview with me at Gamer's Corner. We cover many topics such as the design of online modes, of tutorial modes, of SF4, randomness in competitive games, Jonathan Blow, and more.

Gamespot Podcast

I was on this week's HotSpot podcast at Gamespot. If you have over two hours to spare, check it out. They had a lot of topics ranging from the Watchmen movie to emotions in games to the awesomeness of Quiz and Dragons, and more. I don't even know how to summarize it all.