Arcana

Happy Birthday belatedly, good to know you're doing well.

I made it back home today, I think my girlfriend and I were the last holdouts in Las Vegas! I am pretty much beyond tired. And I'm feeling really poor, being in that city for eight days in a row really takes a toll on you.

I'm not actually there yet

Well I guess this thing has officially started, a few people would have arrived into Vegas last night and a number are going to be arriving later today.

Most people do, so don't worry. When I run experiments looking at people for user interface testing I encourage them to speak aloud and then prompt them if they happen to fall silent. This is also what editing is for. I found, for example, watching Flik work on a one-hour Flik Omp really interesting even though he didn't do any think-aloud on that. Just watching him jam out on the keyboard and write down ideas and choose instruments (despite not being able to see his screen clearly) was educational. Since as you said you probably can't complete a (good high-quality) remix in an hour you'll have to be creative in how you can get the major ideas across without actually removing too much of the meat. Another consideration of course is to actually try a one-hour compo style approach and get the "main ideas" of a song done in an hour, and then skip a bit and do a separate video when you get down to a "polishing" phase that most people are interested in.

If you simply vocalise all of the "major decisions" that you make while remixing, then I think that in itself would be extremely valuable. Follow the "speak-aloud" protocol. So if you're doing something like choosing synths, rather than twiddling the knob say, "That sound has too much body in it so I'm going to reduce the cutoff... bit more... bit more. OK, I like that, it's going to sound good with the arps I've got going in the back. Hmm, now that I listen to this again there's a bit of mud, probably in the 800-1K range so I'm going to cut those frequencies in the arps like so." ... "Okay, so now that I got this sound I'm going to put down the chords. I listened to the source and got these four: A, E, G, and F. I'm going to repeat those in the first part here but I think the chorus needs some more spice. Let's see... so for that part I'm going to use these chords instead." .... And so on. I'm sure this is what you have in mind but I think that a "stream of consciousness" video might have some value for people who are curious about how remixing works and how musicians make decisions.

I'm more concerned at how they're limiting map sizes to 25MB uploads than of their censorship. The "Because we can" basically is an exchange that went like this: Player: "Why do you police maps now for Starcraft 2, but not for Starcraft 1?" Response: "Because we can. Now, we have the resources for it..." Basically the "because we can" is not a statement of arrogance, but rather one of capacity. They can now afford to ensure their maps are clean and appropriate, whereas before they really couldn't. I think if enough people complain about the strict limitations on modding, they'll budge on the upload storage space issue and give everyone much more than 25MB to play with. Man, if you're borrowing another friend's account and playing when he's not, just say it. If you pirated the game, just say it.

Yeah, they did. Old RPGs like FFIV took 40 hours for me when I was a kid. FF7 took like 60 hours. Secret of Mana was about 15 hours I think, possibly longer. But of course as I grew older the old NES and SNES games became much faster to clear and as you got good at them they became easy (I beat Chrono Trigger for the first time with all of the sidequests in under 25 hours). Often they took longer than 40 hours, but the game simply didn't tell you because if you died and it made you reset from your last save point, it (obviously) didn't record the time spent since you last died. NES games of course didn't take that long especially since most of them didn't have batteries, and the longer games used a password system (ahhh Faxanadu's 60+ character long strings).

Oh man, I finished mine early specifically because I knew this week I would be doing other stuff for Vegas. I guess this makes the listening party easier to schedule but you'd think that if someone's in Vegas they're not going to have time to work on it

Good luck getting a collector's edition for Starcraft 2. I might buy Blazblue next month, I spent too much money on games right now (and I think I'm in the same situation as many posters here in that it's basically not available in the city I live in yet). Are any of you people going to the OCR Las Vegas thing? My GF plans to bring her copy.

For me I'd like to see something about how you decide on song structure and layouts, especially if you're doing a remix. So it's things like how you would decide to turn a song that has a part A and a part B into something that's expansive with varied dynamics that tells a comprehensive story.

http://www.rtcsouthernnevada.com/

I'm a bronze player too. From what I've read, there are about five general tips in Starcraft. 1) Learn units and learn what counters units. Don't stick with the same strategy if it doesn't work. 2) Scout early and scout often. 3) Spend your money. If you're ending up with over 1000 minerals then build more buildings or do research. 4) Watch your supply. Try not to get supply capped. 5) Use hotkeys. Learn how to manage armies and units with hotkeys, that's what allows you to micro your army while building units at your base. That is in my head but it still takes time to actually get executing these things.

This. Having to remember to save at every save point is dumb. Putting them far apart is even dumber. I don't want to play a game so I can play through the first 20 waves of boring, easy-to-kill enemies. I want to play so I can get past that super hard boss or to get that super hard secret item. Make a game hard, not tedious.

It's like, 41 degrees C (106 F) next week, you sure you want to go outside for extended periods of time?

I'm quite bad at the game still, my record is something like 4-21 or something like that. I've been playing Zerg but I think that I might switch to Terran since I've lost LOTS of games as Zerg but proportionally less as Terran. I don't quite know what I'm doing poorly, but I think I'm not managing my supply well and not microing my battles well. As Zerg I tend to fall behind my opponent in army value quickly because I don't have enough forces to penetrate defenses like bunkers and photon cannons. So I think I'm not doing a good job of estimating the strength of my army vs the opponent before I go off on attacks.

Yeah something I've noticed in this game is that unit upgrades are really, really strong and are definitely worth getting. I'm still a noob (bronze league lol) but there are a few key upgrades that really boost your units. I was playing practice league for a while but I think that it teaches bad habits, since the rocks basically block ground units from early scouting. I'm not a particularly aggressive player (I don't really have the APM for good multitasking) but I do like to have the option of sending in troops that aren't air-based. I've been ranked in the Bronze League so I'm still not particularly good. One thing to keep in mind is that even at the lower league I am losing, so if you are in fact quite new to Starcraft 2 then keep playing the practice league while you get used to the unit, build orders, and so forth. I've just started getting into the Starcraft 2 strategies and stuff. I had no idea what natural expansions, build orders, micro, macro, or economy were until this past weekend.

Did only a handful of people buy this game for the multiplayer? I don't see anyone from OCR on this game almost ever.

Gario is pretty much on the money here, you have a lot of lows and the highs don't really stand out as much as they could. There are a few tools that can help you look at the frequency spectrum in Logic. On your effects list look for the multimeter, and check out the "analyze" button on the Chan EQ. That gives you an idea of what your track might look like as far as covering the frequencies are and looking at which ones are strong relative to others. Personally the loudness sounds fine to me.

Do you have other constraints that prohibit you from using a digital piano (space for example)?

Do we have a schedule of events and a page containing contact information for key people yet? This means: a planned group dinner at some location, a birthday party at someone's specific room, an outing, whatever. There are a lot of people who are coming to this and the date is approximately one week away. I have a few people contacting me who are concerned about coordination and events since the date is coming up so close now. As I am going to be an international visitor I will not be able to keep up with Twitter SMS, so it would be good to see what the final plans are in advance of flying out. Obviously I don't expect an entire week of events but if we don't all know in advance when the "birthday thing" is for example then some people are going to get left out. All the best,

The only thing I miss about Unmod was the traffic - it was nice being able to come to the site and see something new every time you visited. Now it's not as populated but it's also not as noisy. Even PPR is more active nowadays and although it gets ugly sometimes most threads reach a critical point when people stop treating it seriously and it ends up imploding. It's nice to see a community where 90% of people post with proper spelling and grammar, and where most of the people will encourage people to think and do research for themselves.

I have an ATI 4850HD (mobile version) like that live blogger, on an iMac. The game seems to run fine for me even during the menus. I don't think I've heard the fans run up but maybe I'm too absorbed to really notice.

Awesome, my Starcraft ID is Arcana 456. I am still going through the campaign but I played a couple of vs maps against the AI and a practice round on multiplayer, since MP games are pretty different from campaign. It's very familiar but I was never good at Starcraft. It's still quite fun, I like the campaign a lot. I've played two practice games now and I beat the first guy I played but lost against the second. First guy didn't build a lot of defense and I managed to rush his base with zealots. The second guy sent a ton of the reapers after me and destroyed my SCVs, just after I moved my marines out of my base. Both games lasted under 10 minutes. I imagine that the "rush" is still going to be the standard style of gameplay, though I get the impression that there are more tools now to help you defend against early rushes.

My girlfriend absolutely loves this game. She plays for the story and characters. I haven't gotten around to buying it, as it wasn't out on Tuesday in Canada, so I ended up buying Starcraft 2 instead.