zircon

A few points... 1. The writeup is not the only effort involved in posting a remix. There's getting it tagged, uploading it to multiple servers, and getting the associated YouTube video uploaded, not to mention Facebook/Twitter promotion of the mix. 2. We have, on numerous occasions, discussed an automated submission form of some kind, plus a backend for people working on the inbox. There's no question that it would be helpful, however, every time someone volunteers they never pull through. We just don't have the manpower to oversee the development of this project. If you REALLY want to help, and are serious about investing dozens of hours of work on it for $0 in compensation, shoot me an email... I have a requirements doc 90% complete. 3. We are always looking for more volunteer staff (workshop mods, judges, etc.) but the rate of turnover is pretty high. People join and then get busy and fall off the map. We're constantly adding and evaluating new folks but while we're doing that, existing staff are decreasing in activity level. It's not their/our fault of course, we all have responsibilities and careers, and volunteering for no money or glory doesn't really help one's motivation. Turnover is simply inevitable. So, even when things ARE delegated, they sometimes need to be re-delegated. Honestly, djp is the one CONSTANT in OCR's staff history from beginning to end. Even the mighty Liontamer has had brief periods of inactivity, but Dave has been handling everything like a boss for 12 years. 4. The rest of the stuff Dave does for the site is primarily work that simply cannot be delegated without a massive time investment. In some cases, it can't be delegated at all, such as with the Kickstarter/Square Enix issues recently. I was involved in that, but ultimately the responsibility falls on Dave as the owner of the site. We always appreciate feedback and suggestions, just keep these things in mind. It's VERY EASY to say "why not just make an app?" "why not just get more staff?" "why not delegate?" but we've been doing this for a LONG time. We've tried delegating, we've tried bringing on more staff, we've had volunteers for apps/backend things, etc., but at the end of the day they're not permanent solutions and they don't always work out. Edit: Regarding the importance of the frontpage, even if you (Rozo) don't discover mixes that way it's still far and away the part of the site that gets the most visits and views. People tend to spend a good amount of time there.

Haha, enjoy it. It's easy to learn technical skills. You can't "learn" inspiration or melodies in your head.

Alright y'all, sorry to shut you down. It's not a triangle, it's not osc sync, it's not multiple oscs, it's not a filter sweep. It's one saw going through a slightly resonant LPF. That's it. It has a bit of portamento and vibrato on the modwheel of course. But there's no other filter motion. Getting that EXACT tone may be tricky since it is highly dependent on the filter, and every synth (ESPECIALLY analog Moog synths) has a different filter. But I would go with a standard 24db/oct LP, a LITTLE resonance and drive, and then put the cutoff at around 1-2 o'clock. You'll have to tweak it to taste, however that will get you in the ballpark. If your filters don't have a drive option you might want a tiny bit of post-saturation to help emulate the raw sound of an analog synth. Your oscillator should just be a simple saw wave. Quick mockup: http://zirconstudios.com/music/wips/ThingOfGold.mp3 Omnisphere preset: Remember, try tweaking resonance, gain, cutoff and filter type to get REALLY close. A little post EQ might not hurt either.

I just don't think conceptually it's a bad idea. As I said if they just did bind-on-pickup or bind-on-trade items, that would basically solve the problem. Alternatively, make it so you can't buy/use AH items beyond your current progression level. It's sort of stupid to go from 2k dps at level 59 to like 15k at level 60 because you have a godly weapon bought for 20k gold. There should be a requirement for ilvl 62-63 items that you clear content.. unless you find the items yourself. Anyway, yeah, Blizzard obviously has an interest in getting players back because a healthy playerbase is important for any game. It's not BECAUSE of the auction house. I mean they were patching Diablo 2 for years and that had no auction house of any kind. Why would they do that unless they actually cared about the playerbase and the good of the game? Some of those patches were as recent as 2010 iirc.

Direct trading is fine when there isn't a massive underground economy like there was in D2. When you have a big black market you should try to deal with that by making legit ways of acquiring items, even with real money.

That's a cynical view. I actually have a huge problem with everyone wailing about how Diablo III is "balanced around the AH" or that all of Blizzard's decisions are to make more money from the RMAH. It's a logical fallacy. Anyone who played Diablo II saw the prevalence of people buying items from shady 3rd party sites. The same thing happened (and is happening in WoW). It would have been absolutely stupid for Blizzard to just plug their ears and pretend people weren't doing that, so they did the best possible thing - offer a legitimate, safe option that wouldn't encourage the black market. More to the point, if Blizzard only cared about RMAH revenue (which I can't imagine is at all significant relative to the 10m+ sales of the game itself) they wouldn't have made multiple changes that reduce the need to use the AH/RMAH: * 1.0.3 Inferno nerf * Act 1/2 ilvl 63 buff * Acts 3/4 ilvl 63 droprate buff * Upcoming 4x drop rate on trash buff * Upcoming Inferno nerfs All of these things reduce the need to use the auction house. Blizzard is not retarded. They're also not being controlled by Activision (something that has been debunked repeatedly.) They're doing their own thing just as they've always done. Diablo III is an interesting property because the Diablo series has always had a massive unedground economy. It was simply the right call to offer a first-party, legitimate and safe way of exchanging money/goods.

I'm really looking forward to 1.0.4. I think D3 is a great game overall. I've played 200 hours or so, and for $60 that's a hell of a deal. Knowing Bliz they will continue to refine and polish things, add content, etc. I never had a problem with Inferno's difficulty either, having beaten it before even the first nerf. It was a fantastic feeling. I also remember when Zero and I beat Belial on Inferno for the first time, and how psyched we were to have done so. The auction house is an interesting conundrum. In D2, the dupe economy and spamming in trade chat was not exactly ideal. On the other hand, the AH trivializes the early difficulties, and does take away a bit from the item hunt. The best solution would probably be items that bind on pickup and cannot be traded. That, or items you find/craft yourself have some kind of special bonus(es) that are removed when you trade them or sell on the AH. Anything to make your OWN finds more special. I'm not really playing my Monk anymore since I already cleared Inferno with her and built up my DPS to something like 41k, which is pretty hard to do as a Monk. I got a little bored of farming and not finding anything good to sell, whereas upgrades cost insane amounts. Co-op was, as Bliz noted, clearly a worse option than solo play due to the huge monster scaling. I'm glad they're fixing that. I've been leveling a Barb to 60 in the meantime and playing a bit of Hardcore on a Demon Hunter. As for pure runs in D2... yeah, I played through the game maybe once or twice total, everything else was just getting rushed. There was little motivation to actually play everything through. I'm glad the NV system encourages you to farm big swaths of acts in D3.

Hey, he just said "anticipate". Which we did. Unfortunately, we don't have anything yet.

Keep in mind the original print run is smaller than the print run that would be required now, not to mention we're also doing FF7. Assuming this goes back up.

I think the game looks great, but the art needs some work. The issue is that the background, foreground and enemies are not distinct enough from each other. If I pause this video with a lot of stuff happening on the screen, it is difficult to tell what's an enemy, what's an interactable object, what's an obstacle, and what's just decoration in the background. There needs to be more delineation somehow.

Well, that's basically what the project seeks to address - the bugginess and unplayability. I think this is really exciting for people who are retro game collectors, and that's something that has really exploded lately. I find it especially interesting because with many Kickstarters and ports/remakes, it's all about taking an old game and freshening it up for a new platform. But this is literally producing a physical cartridge (and JUST a physical cartridge) for a very old platform. It's neat.

Oh yeah, this doesn't affect the music at all. Definitely keep it up.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/343248998/cheetahmen-ii-the-lost-levels Possibly the most amazing project I've seen. Here we have a guy that now owns the rights to Cheetahmen and wants to work with the original programmer to create new, fully-functional NES cartridges of Cheetahmen II. Say that out loud. It's awesome. The video trailer alone is worth visiting the KS page, featuring cameos from various internet celebrities like the Angry Video Game Nerd and Pat the NES Punk. If this Kickstarter gets funded, people will be able to get a fresh printing of the game ("Cheetahman II: The Lost Levels") featuring all of the content from the original, but without the game breaking bug(s) that made it impossible to beat. I just still can't wrap my mind around the fact that this exists. Also, like the Giana fundraiser, considerable funds have already been put toward making this happen, which is a vote of confidence for the final result. Check it out!

I actually thought the original PC port, which I owned, was pretty darn good. The graphics + fonts actually looked better than on the PS1 version. Plus, years later, you could download mods to replace the MIDI music and improve the graphics (model swaps, etc)

Something can be considered competition (or a substitute good) without having the exact same or even similar tech specs. For example, while The Sims and Rage obviously cater to different segments of the general game buying market, they still share the same product category. They're both video games. If aggregate demand for video games fluctuates, it will affect both those things. An example of two products/goods that are NOT substitutes/competitors would be something like movies and video games, or books and movies. You could broadly say they're both entertainment, but since they each have independent demand, that classification would be way too broad. In other words, the Ouya isn't in its own category. It's functionally similar to an Xbox, PS3 or Wii, a statement further reinforced by the fact that it will share some of the same games. This fact also doesn't doom it to failure, since competing/substitute products can coexist successfully (see: Pepsi vs. Coke) I don't buy Newt's argument about developer support since, as we've been noting repeatedly, this isn't a completely new platform with its own complex devkit and code base. It's running the same software (Android) as existing platforms, and so developers will have no reason NOT to port their games over unless the entry fees are extremely high (which I doubt). A good analog would be how there are many stores in which artists can sell their music. iTunes, in my experience, is by far the most lucrative. But if I can sell music on other stores at virtually no additional time/money cost to me, there's no risk, and potential reward. Even if, say, Rhapsody generates 1/100 the revenue of iTunes that's still an extra 1% income for me.

Yeah, but as others have pointed out, the Ouya has a touch controller. So, no matter how you slice it, it's not gonna be that hard to port over. It's not like a developer would be going from Objective C to Android, they're going from Android to Android. So it is very reasonable to assume (barring unforeseen licensing or approval costs) that many independent developers with Android games will make Ouya ports.

It's not as hard as you're making it out to be. Any controller input, touch or otherwise, just ends up calling on a bunch of functions (move here, attack this). So, you have the program check what platform it's on (IF PC, IF OUYA, IF PHONE...) and adjust accordingly. You don't have to change the underlying functions. We had to do two totally different control schemes for Return All Robots (PC vs. Xbox) and it really wasn't hard at all to adapt it. No competent developer would take more than a day to make such a change, I would think.

If the OUYA really does run Android, and you made your game for Android, then I'm pretty sure making a port would be fairly simple. Just a matter of swapping in higher-res sprites/textures (which would most likely already exist as sources) and changing the control scheme.

25/male/2 hrs

I think Phil is a dick, but you're off the mark with this. If fees for updating are really high, that DISCOURAGES developers from making bug fixes and patches that would improve the stability and playability of the game. It's the exact opposite effect that you're describing.

No one is able to give you specific settings because most tools are entirely dependent on the source material and the mix. That's just how it is. A compressor setting that works for MY acoustic guitar might not work for yours, due to different recordings, different mixes, different context. If you have specific questions about specific mixes that's another thing entirely.

Kickstarters are regularly done for projects that are still in-progress; some aren't even in production yet. FF6 was (and is) pretty far along. Not to mention we literally wouldn't have been able to do one (nor would it have made sense to do one) without a project associated. Given OCR's twelve-year history of earning no profit, being run by a staff of volunteers, and being endorsed (either implicitly or explicitly) by numerous game developers, publishers and professional composers, we didn't expect any problems.

You misunderstand me. We don't have all the music done for the project. We don't even have an exact track count. So, even if we did limit the # of albums printed (which we did, and are going to) it wouldn't help with nailing down licensing figures since you ALSO need to know how much music there is! I noticed on the Shizz people hating because we "didn't license" the music, but again, to be clear, we were actively considering licensing options and wouldn't have been able to execute on anything anyway without having a final track or album count. It depends on the license. When people talk about licensing music for distribution they're most usually referring to mechanical licensing via the compulsory mechanical licensing statute in the US code, section 115, which enables people to obtain (with or without the permission of the copyright holder) mechanical licenses at a rate of 9.1 cents per song, per album or download provided. However, people can (and do) make licenses with all sort of specialized terms. We don't know. As posted on the front page, it's not even a sure thing that it WILL be reinstated, though everyone involved is hoping that is the resolution we reach. We can't answer that question. We were considering and planning some kind of Kickstarter since before the Doublefine one. We do think pretty far ahead on things. Moving quickly on them is another matter, but that's to be expected with an all-volunteer staff Kickstarter prohibits funding for charities, causes, OR ongoing projects. We could not have done a Kickstarter solely for OCR itself, because OCR is not a one-time thing that can be completed. It's an ongoing project. We DID forego a normal donation drive this year because we didn't want to solicit money from people for anything OCR-related multiple times in a short period. Much like how we've done various promotional experiments in the past, such as the Facebook "Like" campaign for Maverick Rising (which was a huge success), we were interested in the viability of Kickstarter as a fundraising platform for a given project (with excess going to bonus content and the site itself, as we've mentioned). We were excited to see that it was substantially more effective than traditional fundraising. In any given year, OCR receives <$10k in donations (and even that number is pretty darn high!) and that's WITH a major push for our "April is OCR Month" donation campaign. To see us raise $15k in <24 hours completely blew away all expectations, and showed that Kickstarter is much more effective for this kind of thing. Keep in mind that at conventions like Otakon (just ended) and MAGfest, where OCR typically has a panel, we will offer physical albums as giveaway bonuses for people who pay ~$25 for OCR merchandise like t-shirts, hoodies, stickers. etc. We normally have a fairly small number of people take us up on that offer. Based on that, we did not think a great number of people would chip in TWICE that amount. But again, it goes to show that Kickstarter offers much more visibility for project fundraising, and more efficacy.

Thanks man! Glad you're enjoying it.

Could be memory, but why do you need 6-7 instances of Kontakt? Each one can load 64 instruments...