Today marks what seems like a milestone in my life that I never thought of even attempting to reach: the first time, to my knowledge, that I am actually mentioned by name in the employment contract of someone not in any way affiliated with me or my employer.
I'm not really sure what to make of that!
Sadly for me, it seems like the offloading of work from me suggested by that contract extract isn't actually going to happen. Instead, DanC is apparently going to work on tutorials, which frankly is probably a far more useful thing to work on.
Meanwhile, work on HTML5 itself continues, and the spec should be on track for Last Call in October of this year, at which point the text will be stable enough for a final thorough review by anyone who is interested in reviewing the draft.
If you really care about GTAⅣ‬ spoilers, stop reading. I keep this pretty vague, though.
GTAⅣ‬, in the tradition of GTA games, is very non-linear. If you can find a better way to do a mission, then that's a-ok. Prefer to land on the target building's roof with a helicopter and then infiltrate from the top rather than entering from the basement? Go ahead. Prefer to escape from the cops through a more distant exit from the subway than the default suggestion, no problem. I love this about the game. GTAⅣ‬ even goes further than earlier incarnations by giving you specific choices sometimes, kill or don't kill, pick a side, etc.
So. In the mission "Out of Commission", I figure that instead of fighting my way through the hoards of minions, chasing the target with the bike, and so forth, I would instead sneak in through the back of the building, chase the target out of the building, sneak back out onto the road, and then fire at the target, who for some reason is waiting patiently in his boat, using a sniping rifle.
He didn't die. He barely flinched, though there was some blood. What is this? Our target, a major character in the plot, is actually an undead? Well then. Rocket launcher. That will sort him out. Rocket away, boat explodes... "You have abandoned your bike." Mission failure.
What?
The bike hadn't moved. The goal was to kill the now dismembered guy. I achieved the goal. What has the bike to do with anything? Why didn't it work?
Look, I love the GTA series, and GTAⅣ‬ has fantastic levels of detail. But please, keep the missions non-linear. Let me solve them them the way I want to solve them, don't make me jump through hoops to satisfy your desire for a particular set of mission points.
The gameplay is ultimately far more important than the rest of the game. The missions in GTAⅣ‬ aren't as flexible and as varied as in previous games, they almost all consist of either driving somewhere and shooting someone, or just going through a set of hoops that the mission designer came up with.
It's sad, but as detailed as GTAⅣ‬ is, it loses on poor mission design.
Here's an idea for GTAⅤ‬: instead of having specific missions, have characters with motivations, and make the missions be generated based on that just like the cars and pedestrians are driven by simulation. If I shoot a major character, don't fail the mission, just continue from there. If a particular building is some gang's stronghold, then it should always be that stronghold, whether I'm in a mission or not. If I kill them all, they should stay dead, and I should find their stash. If I call the cops while in the middle of a giant shootout, the cops, if they aren't being bribed by someone, should turn up and start arresting people (including me), just like they do if a shoot-out happens outside of a mission.
If I want to play a linear game, I'll play a game like Half Life.
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The W3C Technical Plenary was a few weeks ago. Other than my hotel room having three separate shower heads, and the restaurants in Mandelieu-La-Napoule being worse than I remembered, there's not much to report. I continue to feel that face-to-face meetings aren't worth the cost (in CO2, time, and money). There's a lot to be said for meeting people in person, certainly. But not enough.
During that week, while I was gone, Pillar came back. After three weeks, during which time we'd mourned her, she knocked on the door nonchalantly and came in, with a broken leg. She unfortunately had to have it amputated (after the veterinarian unsuccessfully tried to save her leg in surgery for hours — apparently it was just broken too low near the ankle, in too bad a way to be saved). Thanks Keth for looking after her while we were gone.
Then, two weeks on the East Coast. The East Coast doesn't do good food, especially far from cities. After a week or so I finally got good food in the West Village at a place called De Santos (no Web site, it appears). Very good food.
We saw a brief documentary film Cosmic Collisions at the Hayden Sphere, an "overhead projector" as McCain would call it, and I decided that our imaginary house would have one of these instead of a TV.
On our way back the TSA told me I couldn't keep my apple juice. I asked if I could drink it first. They said only if I went back outside. I asked if they meant that my apple juice was a danger in the security area but safe outside, and they confirmed that that was the case.