PlaysWithWolves

Or I might be trolling him by taking away one potential obstacle? I confess I'm a little curious if he can do it despite the odds being against it happening.

It's still Saturday on the East Coast. Why not cut him a little slack? You complain relentlessly that he doesn't show anything and then he starts working on a project you still complain?

Retroland made real: Man opens up retro video game bar & lounge. A couple things of note: Many of his games are downloaded ("3,000 games") and he formerly was a postman who was found hoarding others' undelivered mail.

No promises on quality, but all the art he should need for this proof-of-concept is in his hands.

Yep, he's right! 16-bit JagPEG, according to an interview in GamePro #59, pp.20-21 (full mag. can be downloaded here in CBR format):

They'll make it up with a special edition Retro Video Game System issue.

Vlad needs most of the artwork done, so I'm not sure I'll be able to sneak mipmaps in. So, that may be one big optimization that'd be missing.

Sure. IM me the specs of what you need and I'll see what I can do. I did upload a tree over here, FWIW.

I'm so glad you posted this, as my mind also went there but couldn't recall the name.

I suspect there was a wide variety of reasons why people liked RVGS; mostly because of the way it was marketed. At one point, could it play new games ported to carts, but also "hardware-emulated" games with the FPGA cores built into the cartridges themselves. I know Kennedy brought up making an RVGS core, too, which appealed to those looking for a new system. At the peak of marketing—mere weeks from the IGG campaign—it could do all that and play old cartridges via a simple adapter. It was pretty much whatever we wanted it to be—until it wasn't.

For anyone interested in the Skarp Laser Razor brouhaha, CNET actually demoed their prototype. The author tested it(see below) and concludes it "felt like a working prototype", but how he did is beyond me. Even if we are generous and forgive the filament breaking at the slightest touch skin (it's supposedly not the final), it still barely even does the most basic of hair cutting:

Another major Kickstarter project is in trouble: The Coolest Cooler Is Turning Into One of Kickstarter’s Biggest Disasters Surely it's IndieGoGo's fault, or something.

My apologies, bretthorror. I should have at least phrased it more generically. I react pretty strongly to the types of tactics employed at every stage of this story. I don't even care about this Herman guy; in fact I found it weird that they have a board of directors and brought in Mike 2.0 (a sales/idea guy but now fortified with connections!).

Which is what Herman did try to do, and exactly what ShopDrop&Retro intentionally left out of his quote to incite people like you. Just because you can attribute whatever inflection you wish to some dry words doesn't take away from the fact that he offered to handle it personally.

That didn't read "like a dick" to me. Peeved or exasperated, perhaps. We'll never know, as the original audio's link is bad. It sounds like Gilgamesh left one nasty note to begin with, but I guess we'll never know that either. Gossip website is gossipy. News at 11. I'll agree it's a good analogy to RVGS, though. Small team. A cart made it into the wild that was not bug-free. Probably no dedicated customer service staff (and it is a skill). But then, even in 2007 I'd have known to use Google or to just take back the stupid game and look for other entertainment. None for me, thanks.

You left out the part where he left his phone number and offered to help resolve the issue. Also, it's a conveniently one-sided story to begin with. After reading up on this, I'll actually side with Herman here. Could he have handled it a bit better? Probably. Was "Gilgamesh" fame-hunting by making it public? You betcha. That said, hopefully with Kennedy on the team Herman will be instructed to make bug-free games. (rimshot)

So now they have two sales-and-ideas guys? I wonder who they're hiring (or hired) to develop a prototype? For anyone who can't read from the above image (via RetroVGS.com):

Infinite coins or bad headache?

Bang head here? -^

The Zano drone -- Europe's largest Kickstarter ever at about £2.3 million (US$3.5 million) -- project shut down by the company behind it. The Torquing Group plans to pursue "creditors' voluntary liquidation". No backers received drones from the project which was already months behind its shipping schedule of June '15.

I don't think Bill was implying there was a smear campaign.

I keep forgetting this is programmed in a form of BASIC and not Assembly. It's amazing you're getting the FPS you do and seems a testament to the RAPTOR guys as well. I think Super Burnout layered the sprites for their bleachers, and the 32X "Monaco" level of Slip Stream (which I never played) used it to great effect. They made a whole city level based on the idea, including a tunnel. You're probably familiar with all of this, but I'm playing catch-up. Unfortunately, I don't know what "best practices" are for sprites. From what I can gather, it almost sounds like it's better to have multiple smaller ones than a single large.

I'm sure lots of details need to be worked out with workflow, look-and-feel, palette, sizes, perspective lines and other things but this is just a proof-of-concept. Feel free to try it out if you wish. Of course, that pesky z-sorting would need to be addressed. The idea is that this would be stackable horizontally at intersections or just to block the view behind it to hide that there's not a full city or town. It also should be stackable on the Z-axis to give it some depth (hopefully). building_brick.bmp

I concur. The problem with IndieGoGo was that if there was a prototype they'd be on Kickstarter instead. There were other complaints, but those were pretty minor. It's functionally equivalent to pay Kickstarter at the end of the campaign as it is to pay IndieGoGo at the end of the campaign; one may just miss out on some 'early bird' specials an early Kickstarter pledge may have.

Concepts and dreams are a lot of fun. OTOH, there's also a point when it's ... Or to put it another way: When someone talks big but doesn't back it up, some may say he's "all hat, no cattle". I'm not familiar enough with Vladr's (or others') posts to make that judgement myself, but I can understand why some may want to see some actual work done.