Monthly Archives: September 2007

General

The Annoying Valley

OK, you probably know about ‘the uncanny valley’ (maybe start at the Wikipedia article if you don’t), but do you know about ‘the annoying valley’? If you’ve played a video game in the last bunch of years, I’m sure you do.

In an effort to make their AI players more human-like, a lot of game developers add little human touches, like a character saying something to you in a specific situation. But what’s a pain is that they often say the _exact_ same thing in the _exact_ same way (basically, the same sampled audio) in the same situations. Such that you hear it possibly dozens or hundreds of times in the course of normal gameplay. This is annoying, this is the annoying valley.

Some sounds in a game you expect to repeat exactly or nearly exactly, because they would in real life. But humans are so rarely that boring, so the fact that it’s supposed to be a human reaction just makes the annoyance level skyrocket. I suppose you could call that a personal problem, and I certainly understand the relative difficulty of making human speech/animation that sounds/looks good _and_ has lots of natural-seeming variability, but still…

General

TV firmware

I wonder when the day will come when the firmware in more consumer-electronics devices, like TVs, will go open-source. I would love to be able to modify the firmware in my TV. For one thing, there’s a very annoying video bug that I’m 98% sure is a firmware bug, but Sharp (ooops, I didn’t mean to say the name of the company, but it’s too late to backspace now) refuses to acknowledge that it’s a bug or fix it. I bet if I had a source tree/build tools/loader I could fix it in about a day, regardless of the fact that I don’t know anything about TV firmware.

But the real reason is this: some PS3 games do 720p and some do 1080p. When the mode switches, my TV has an indicator that comes on briefly that says “Video: 720p” or “Video: 1080p”. I want to change the former indicator to “Video: 720p (teh suck)” und express the anger than I am feeling about games that don’t do 1080p.

General

Muffled

Hmmm, interesting psycho-physiological phenomenon… If I have a song running in my head, and it has lyrics, I hear it being sung in the voice of the original singer (Jim Morrison singing “Maggie M’Gill” is the particular example today). If I then take a drink of water or something, the voice is muffled a little. I wouldn’t predict that if I hadn’t experienced it…