Book: The Future was Here

I finally managed to read Jimmy Maher's The Future was Here from 2012.

Before the Amiga 500 models hit shelves, Amiga really had a rather vague existence somewhere at the horizon of my experience. One of those computers that might be cool but would never ever be relevant to me, perhaps even a bit boring. The comparatively high-brow images of Botticelli's Venus and even the King Tut image were not very alluring to a 10-year old.

Probably my first impression of an Amiga, MikroBITTI magazine 9/1986. Bleurgh boring adult computer.

It's fascinating to read about the birth of the Amiga and the early handling of the platform by Commodore. When I finally saw an Amiga at the end of 1980s, things like the boing! demo were already ancient history and not that well known to a casual newbie like me in Europe.

I was also surprised to learn that the Commodore-bashing from Amiga owners did not start in the 1990s, but was almost inherent to the platform from the very beginning, including the logo debacle and poor marketing.

As the book points out, the North American Amiga experience was quite different to the European game- and demo-oriented culture, and the two overlapped very little. In the US, computer industry stalwarts, Unix alumni, scientists, professional artists, Fred Fish, adult people, flocked around the platform in the mid-1980s, eager for a revolution that seemed just around the corner, but also abandoning the platform at a point when it looked the promises failed to materialize.

Sorry it's a bit flat.

I hadn't figured the boing! and Juggler demos had such a large impact on the audiences at the time. The bouncing ball was even more "fake" than I had presumed, not a single pixel is drawn during the animation.

Maher suspects part of the reputation here was that people thought it did something it really didn't. He further points out the value of the demo is in the ingenuity of making the computer do what it was good at doing.

Today it might make a quirky, endearing GIF.

Juggler demo was more transparent in what it did, because obviously the Amiga could not do real-time ray-tracing. But that the animation frames were produced on an Amiga at all, was already a huge achievement and paved way for a kind of cottage industry of 3D and ray-tracing applications. The use of the 4096-color HAM mode and animation itself proved inspiring, regardless of the raytracing.

The portion opening up the Juggler and boing! was an insightful read and I hadn't really understood their appeal in these terms.

Although the author doesn't say it directly, one possible reason why early Amiga demoscene demos had lot of spheres and checkerboard patterns, could be because of these two "industry" demos.

Vectorballs from Dual Crew, 1990.

They might also be quite obvious choices. You need a very generic small, simple object that can move anywhere? It's a ball. What's a non-expensive yet somewhat complex background that works well to bitmap graphics? A checkerboard.

In any case, the Juggler was sometimes explicitly referred in early scene demos, such as in the Vectorballs demo from Dual Crew (and the Red Sector Megademo and the Cebit'90 demo and others.)


The Heyday

The paint program Deluxe Paint enjoyed a kind of "killer app" status, and the Amiga was long bundled with a version of DP. The author makes a neat analogy that Macpaint was a drawing program whereas Deluxe Paint was a painting program, demonstrating that a line can be drawn (cough) from the platform characteristics and the respective company cultures to the final product.

Yes, as a "platform study" book the author shows routes from Amiga's hardware design decisions to the software and use cases. The object under study is best understood as "emergent". Software such as Deluxe Paint or Sculpt-3D is not a determinist result of the platform's technical features, but part of a kind of sub-cultural wave that grows layer upon layer on that initial technical seed.

Deluxe Paint III

The platform's journey has early software milestones such as the boing! and Juggler Demo, but the culture of Commodore and essentially its "fanboys" will carry it onwards. Deluxe Paint and Protracker were in turn hugely important for the game- and demoscene culture that came after.

Amiga's important niche as a video authoring tool is also examined. This was also something very much in the far periphery for me back in the day. NewTek's Video Toaster was more of a new computer on top of Amiga than just an add-on. Its achievements barely fall into Amiga's basket, unless taking into account the aforementioned view of a 'cultural wave' emerging from and surrounding the Amiga.

Looking the Amiga's role in semi-professional and even professional video editing circles, Amiga's significance in this area is very much tied to the analog video era, very different from 2020s internet digital video ubiquity. The flickering interlaced high resolution output was a bane for traditional computer users but a boon within the video circles. The value of genloc, the logical mixing of computer image with input video, could also be puzzling unless factoring in the reigning analog video format.

Protracker 2.3D. Ok, this is a clone version.

The Amiga demoscene gets a looksie, using TRSI's Megademo and Spaceballs' State of the Art as opposing poles to represent the scene's technical achievement on one hand and dedicated audiovisual tinkering on the other. The standard story of the scene emerging from crack intros is told. The outcome (echoing one Viznut!) is that the scene should be examined in its own rather than shoehorning it into pre-existing categories of 'free software hackerism', 'art' or 'youth subculture', despite having some characteristics of all these.

Discussing games, the author takes an interesting standpoint that Amiga could be seen as a forerunner of today's casual games, citing Defender of the Crown and Lemmings as prime examples. Amiga is also a platform where a visually story-heavy game started to come into its own, in contrast to earlier video games that were more reaction- and rule-oriented.

The End

The author generally balances praise with critical tones. But perhaps the one area where Amiga's myth is more openly torn apart, is the multitasking operating system. Although Amiga's OS and the Workbench were landmark systems, there was also a crucial lack of memory management and the experience was hardly as friendly as the surface made it appear to be.

Workbench often needed the kind of tinkering that user of a simpler Mac or ST might never need to see. Also, some of the Amiga's innovative features would not survive a second in our security-obsessed world.

Maher argues that at least part of Amiga's downfall was hard-coded into its, despite all, somewhat shortsighted and complex design. The inventive approach that combined cheap parts for vastly more than the sum of those parts in 1985, was not as conducive to upgrading as were the more straightforward IBM PC clone components.

I'd still like to think that none of the 1980s home computers really got proper upgrades, and in this race Amiga fared a bit better than most.

Overall, Maher's Future Was Here gives a convincing case that Amiga was the first true multimedia computer, a forerunner for many desktop computer use trends that are now incredibly commonplace: creation and distribution of music, images, animations, demos, photographs, videos and much more.

To point out Amiga was not a harbinger of the mobile internet cultures of today is to miss the point. Sharing and consuming of Amiga-originated creations might have happened in the loosely-knit network of Bulletin Board Systems or the even slower network of mailed physical floppy disks. But shared they would be. Criticism and response could likewise be found in the diskmags and scrolltexts of the era.

The "I'll show mine" attitude prevalent in today's internet is already very much in evidence in the Amiga subcultures. These days, one's exploration of a musician- or visual artistship may just as well begin on a computer as on a so-called traditional medium. Amiga was the first computer to make that genuinely possible.

It's a Moose, Moose, Moose Life with proton/linux

Jeff Minter's Moose Life has arrived. I passed Polybius because it seemed so decidedly 'VR', this felt something like I could play.

It's a Windows game, but as Proton works so well, I thought I'd buy this game from Steam even if there were no positive (or negative) reports at that moment in the proton database.

Happy to say it works on my Linux Mint/Steam.

Trying to 'configure keyboard' did throw me out, though. Also, if I launched it in a windowed mode it would not sync to the vertical refresh and was over-fast. (Ticking vsync on in Nvidia settings did not help.)

I'm also doubtful if the VR/3DTV options can be made to work in Linux.

But apart from these choices, there was no tweaking.

Off we go!

You control this voxellated moose that can move left, right, forward and backward in a flat 3D plane.  And shoot everything.

In addition you can jump back and forth between the upside down plane at the top of the screen. In the beginning this has no immediate value, but later you'll find uses for it and eventually it becomes a necessity.

Instead of mining Tempest or Robotron for inspiration, the game somewhat brings into mind a less known Eugene Jarvis game Blaster from 1983. But it's far from a remake of that game.

Although some ideas from all the above games might be found here, it's more clearly a Llamasoft creation.

At least in this Linux workaround setup, some of the game keys (control, alt) pressed together will tend to loose the window focus. Possibly I could just change my system settings, if I can't get to the keyboard configuration. Fortunately this does not result in a crash, in fact the game gets paused and can be continued.

Apparently you can't play the non-arcade mode without a gamepad. Didn't have one at hand just now.

Like with many Jeff Minter games, it's a bit tricky to make a screenshot that would somehow do justice to the moving graphics. No doubt it looks really fascinating in VR.

The wide variety of power-ups brings about hilarious effects, such as creating a vertical mirror double of your moose. Various beasts appear, rotate and whirl around in different formations. Pixels, voxels and particles form clusters of explosions.

Even if the cumulative amount of effects can get very high, they are never too 'violent', which I guess is a result of considering the VR environment. In any case it gives a particular tone to these effects - there might be a second or two where you can even appreciate the expanding particle clouds.

A very nice game altogether. I'm somewhat afraid to get too deeply into it, as I might get addicted. Soo... a thumbs up I guess!

Book: Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany

Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany, by Uwe Schütte, 2020, is another 'introductory' book to Kraftwerk. I recall when Pascal Bussy's Man, Machine and Music from 1993 was pretty much the only book on the topic. Now it seems there's nearly an industry making stories out of Kraftwerk and the krautrock phenomenom.

Not that I complain. It does make an interesting read and is still a little known story. Kraftwerk are known for a certain elusiveness, which further separated them from the usually rather pushy pop-acts. Therefore the fans are even more hungry for any potential new snippet or insightful interpretation.

The book traces the evolution of Kraftwerk from a local art-scene band to an internationally known electro-act. The book structure is firmly mapped over the album releases, and it's not a long nor a very detailed book. If you read the ANTENNA mailing list actively in the early 2000s, there's probably not much new in this book, despite the 2020 perspective. In some of the details, the book does read like a compendium of the collective insight in that group.

Perhaps following these times, there's more need to re-examine the band's strategy of flirting with fascism, and to discuss racial themes in relation to the band. Despite some early bad international publicity and poorly calculated attempts at playing a game of stereotypes with journalists, it's long established Kraftwerk do not condone nazism. But, despite that, now the somewhat flippant notions of 'ethnic music from Ruhr area', 'industrial folk music' and the band's apparent celebration of western technological values (irony and all) need some re-evaluation too.

However, the way I read the book, the widespread appeal of Kraftwerk's music in different localities seems to testify in favour of a fundamentally anti-nationalist standpoint. Whereas rock/blues was appropriated to be the standard western white (male) music, Kraftwerk could help invent pop music that was a sufficiently blank slate, music for people who 'came from nowhere'.

Between the lines, I'm thinking the author says that Kraftwerk's asexual, 'anti-male' approach kind of rescues Kraftwerk from the sins of rock artists' maledom, despite being something of a boys' club music. The book does not do much to open the sexism of The Model, though. Is it somehow saved by a layer of irony or not, I'm wondering?

Instead the author offhandedly says the Sex Object is an oddity, and, in my opinion, misinterprets the song. It is perhaps time to say The Model is the odd one out in Kraftwerk canon, and the author is already giving tools to decipher the song this way. At least I've felt that Sex Object is now a more a song for our times than The Model.

Interestingly, the author points out the cultural stream of 1970s afro-futurism, which means that in likelihood the electro-influences in hip-hop would have emerged even without Kraftwerk, or the very least it was already a fertile ground for Kraftwerk's 'mothership' to land on.

This is a nice touch in a book that otherwise tends to follow the hype and elevate Kraftwerk as the single most important band of the 20th century. Yet, when enthusing about who Kraftwerk influenced, authors rarely discuss who influenced them. Sadly the book stops short of doing that, giving an impression that Kraftwerk transposed high art ideas of Warhol, Beuys, Gilbert&George and Stockhausen directly into pop music. To balance this out somehow the author points out Kraftwerk were not past 'copy-pasting' sound and melodic elements themselves, but this is more of a detail rather than a major reveal about the origins of Kraftwerk's sound.

It seems to me there is a route from early synthesizer music, such as Wendy Carlos' work made famous through Kubrick's Clockwork Orange. Especially the march, with overlaid vocoder singing works almost as a blueprint for Kraftwerk's Trans Europe Express -era music. I recall Pascal Bussy had this in mind with his earlier book, rightly tracing the emergence of Kraftwerk as a result of the evolution of the synthesizer, making notes of the moog music era and novelty songs en route to Kraftwerk.

I recall fans have sometimes suggested that Kraftwerk brought the funk-like elements for their music from, well, funk. I've not yet found the famous Numbers beat from funk music, but that may be because I'm not an aficionado. Captain Sky might be a starting point here. I believe Kraftwerk were actively mining any new music styles behind the Atlantic ocean, especially after visiting US themselves. Was Kraftwerk simply one more band to take elements from world music, but just being more clever and more tactful about it? Even if the beats might owe something to funk I guess the insistently monotonic and minimalized beat in Numbers is really their invention.

The book repeats the fan-historic and journalistic consensus that Electric Café was a misfire and does not belong to the canon of great Kraftwerk albums. I always disagree. Perhaps I should argue this in more detail some day!

Let's say I really suspect the criticism always came from older Kraftwerk fans, those who started with Autobahn and saw the band further themselves from that sound and conceptual point of origin. But I think for us, the Commodore 64 generation and 1990s techno musicians, it was a very important record, and working backwards towards Autobahn and the older records was always a bit of a challenge.

What I find most valuable in the book is the way it connects Kraftwerk's themes and concepts with locally german cultural and political events, such as the debate on nuclear power and the terrorist scare of 1970s-1980s. This nicely ties with the central idea that Kraftwerk was a project of building a new European and German identity into the void after World War II. But I think Pascal Bussy already suggested as much.

There could have been more discussion on musical connections, because as I already opined Kraftwerk did not simply filter high-art and political-societal concepts into music in an isolated bubble. Saying Trans Europe Express contradicted punk in late 1970s, does not say much because a whole futurist-disco theme existed in parallel to punk. Is Kraftwerk to thank for that too, or did Kraftwerk derive from it?

It is also sobering to point out that although the band was known early on in Germany, it was not particularly revered there during the time they were already internationally famous.

All in all, a very entertaining and inspiring read. Still I cannot help but point out some tiny mistakes and what I felt were omissions.

No, Afrika Bambaataa did not sample Numbers or Trans Europe Express for Planet Rock. Many journalists and writers tend to get the story somehow wrong. The beat was recreated on a drum machine, and a TEE-like melody was overlaid on it, creating a kind of a mash-up without actually doing a mash-up. I guess that because of the way music copyright worked at that time, only the melody from TEE became a point of contention and later pressings of Planet Rock credited the songwriters.

The computer on cover of Computer World has been identified and it is a terminal rather than a 'computer'. Interesting detail here is that supposedly the band had this particular item, and it was used for working on speech synthesis.

Schütte bluntly says that first home computers arrived after the album Computer World (1981), stating that the Commodore 64 from 1982 was the first 'true home computer'. No, Apple II was available from 1977. Commodore's PET (1977) models likewise predate the album. Atari 400/800 were also from 1979. Even in Europe, Sinclair ZX80 hit the shelves in 1980.

It is true the home computer 'fad' properly reached Europe only later and in a sense Kraftwerk had hit on a fashionable concept early on, possibly by having a whiff of what was already happening in the US.

Digressing a bit, I've never felt the rather excellent album was particularly 'prophetic' (an adjective often associated with it). I'd say it was observative about things that were already going on. Computers had permeated trade, banking and logistics already at that point. This would be especially true of highly industrialized centres in the USA, Japan and Germany. It's just that computers had not yet entered home life to the extent we now know.

So, to me it would be better to say that with Computer World, Kraftwerk managed to identify concepts that had real staying power.

Yes, Rebecca Allen (not 'Allan') set up the computer graphics for Electric Café album and the video Musique Non Stop. But it was not a new invention, it was basically re-use of the techniques that had been used for the film Futureworld (1976), and partly showcased in Allen's earlier contribution to the Adventures in Success music video project from 1983. The technique dates back to early 1970s and research into computer graphics at the University of Utah. Of course, stylistically and artistically the bold Kraftwerk rendition is the most impressive. But purely from a technical viewpoint it was hardly state-of-the-art anymore.

When it comes to The Mix, to me it seems an omission not to say that the album could be considered Kraftwerk's idea of a 'live' album, in that the songs now resembled what they sounded in concerts.

Despite mentioning the new concerts, the author does not mention Kraftwerk gave album-themed concerts, and generally being more flexible as to what songs to include in a concert. This meant a sudden influx of revamped songs that were never before played live. To me this is the most significant, last step in the Kraftwerk archival process, and perhaps not so much the 3-D visuals and sound.

I don't get what the author has against Daft Punk.

Fleamarket pedal

5 Euro foot pedals from a flea market. At first I thought it might be a sewing machine pedal, but seeing as it is pretty heavy and has two pedals so I don't know.

I had no fitting DIN connector and the cable smelled so strongly of old house, I got rid of the cable altogether.

Opening the box was not obvious. I had to tear off the soft rubber bottom to reach the screw that holds the pedal axle in place. (The tiny hole in the axle of the loose pedal at the top image).

These machine screws were mightily stuck and I may have contributed to bending them, when trying to "open" the axle from the end.

Inside there was a tiny surprise: There were more parts than I would have expected. What does the cog do?

First I thought there was some complex system for softening the punch for the microswitches. Which it probably kind of does too...

But the pedals are not both on-off switches. The left one has a mechanical flip-flop latch that keeps the switch "pressed". Were there no microswitches with this functionality?

The left pedal then controls whether the right pedal presses go through at all.


Using the pedal

I had some visions about using the pedal as a second fire button on C64, or controlling my own programs through Arduino serial. Or a weird chess clock.

But, first, the pedal could be used in something that actually needs a pedal.

Enter the Alesis Samplepad Pro, another recent cheap acquisition. It's an electric drum kit that can be played with drumsticks.

There's not much pro about it, as it has a widely known crosstalk problem between the pads. But fortunately by adjusting the individual pad sensitivy values the problem can be practically removed.

My approach so far has been to make Kick, Snare and Hi-Hat more sensitive (6) and concentrate on using them. The rest of the pads can have level 2 sensitivity.

Now if the kick drum could be delivered with pedal, I could remove that pad from the equation altogether.

The Samplepad Pro has a pedal option for kick drum and hihat, and I could connect the pedal microswitch easily to this connector. I soldered in some cables, of course missing the right connections at first, but finally it worked.

Here I've used the 'trigger' option. Possibly the 'switch' allows a velocity control through a resistor.

Well, honestly I can't play at all, but already could see it would make more sense to have a pedal together with the pads. It's a bit dificult to generate proper patterns by using drumsticks alone, even though the geniuses in Youtube can do that too. Then again using both feet and hands is another level of motoric articulation and it doesn't come too easily either.

Well, the ergonomics of the situation now weigh much more heavily than when just using drumsticks. It's also blindingly obvious the pedal is not really suitable for a musical instrument. Ok, so I had to remove the rubber footing that would have kept it better in position, but I doubt if it would help that much.

No wonder the add-on pedals easily cost as much as the second-hand Samplepad.

Trigging the kick was not as accurate as I would have expected. If I make a steady rhythm it will pick all microswitch clicks accurately. But if I click it in really rapidly, only the first goes through. I'm wondering if this is a problem (or intentional design) with the Samplepad input detection, or with the microswitch itself.

So, a nice junk find that at least motivated me to do something more material after a long while.

Some more Linux/Proton games

About a year ago, I had a look at Proton on Steam for running Windows games on Linux.

Here's a small bunch of games I have since then played on Linux using the Proton/wine setup in Steam.

The results show not everything is totally perfect, it seems the larger the game the larger potential there is for some glitchiness.

Mind you some games could be improved by adjusting settings, these are more like out-of-the-box experiences.

A larger problem for the Linux player these days is the increasing amount of different game stores and solutions for running these games. Not everything is available on Steam. For instance, to play Firewatch I had to use Lutris, so I'm not discussing it here.


(I have reduced the screenshot sizes for this blog)


Inside

For some reason I avoided this for a long time. The game's a real little treat, comparable to Limbo (if not better in some ways) and works quite perfectly.

Ok this is exactly the kind of screenshot that helped me avoid the game. It's much more interesting than this.

Arma 3

There's apparently some limitations to on-line features, but I could play the solo missions.

If I recall correctly it did work rather well.

Every vehicle is quite meticulously modelled from outside and inside.

Although I had some positive memories from Arma 2 back in Windows Vista days, I just couldn't really now become enthused about this somewhat militaristic and involved playfield.

There is interesting stuff like drone reconnaissance, but the missions are of the "perform exactly correctly, or fail" variety, rather than a dynamic simulation, which is not that satisfying.

Some of the cutscenes are almost hilarious in their military matter-of-factness

Dirt Rally

I'm not too enthusiastic about car games but rally games have tended to be more bearable.

Dirt Rally works well, the loading times were surprisingly long but this likely has nothing to do with Proton.

The famous Paskuri.

It's about playable with a keyboard but this kind of game might really need a controller.

It does look quite authentic.

Virginia

This is a heavily Twin Peaks-inspired story game. It's bit like the aforementioned Firewatch but with even less to do for the player. Just click on things and walk the character to correct position to find the things to click.

The beginning is promising but then it starts to get wearisome, as the gameplay never really expands. Then it just ends.

The unhappy family.

Almnost needless to say, the technically quite simple game works perfectly in Proton.

Where's the coffee?

NieR: Automata

Not as huge as a Final Fantasy game, but it's still quite intense. Although at heart an RPG, the game fuses elements from shootemups, platform games, brawlers, often shifting the genre multiple times a minute when going gets hectic.

The technical strain is not massive, but the visuals are well thought out

I encountered spurious crashes at first, but apparently these were a result of undervolting I had done earlier to my computer. After removing undervolting it became one of the stablest games.

You can attach different chips for different features, bit like magic accessories in an RPG. What makes it different is that even the basic game functions, such as hp counters, map, damage counters are "chips" and could theoretically be removed in order to make space for something else.

You are wearing the masks wrong

Mirror's Edge

A rather influential game, as most later third person action games (Tomb Raider) employ similar movement logic as this parkour-fest. Played this only a little but it seemed to work ok.

I needed to change the in-game resolution settings as it did not correctly guess the screen resolution.

Here I had not yet changed the resolution...

Just Cause 3

I believe this was something that until recently would not have worked because of Digital Rights Management issues. (Funnily enough the antagonists in the game are called DRM for Di Ravello Militia)

The High Ground makes it all easier

A rather nice open world game in the GTA mould, but with more emphasis on super-heroics and destruction. Maybe a touch of Midwinter here, although without the strategy/recruit elements.

After launching, the window minimizes itself, after which I had to bring it into view again. Using shift+tab I brought the focus to Steam, after which the keyboard becomes responsive.

The rebels favor strangely uniform visuals for styling their cars

During game, there's also a danger of pressing a key combination that minimizes the window again, or brings something else to focus. After this happens the keys rarely work 100% again and I had to relaunch the game.

I encountered some graphic glitches, which might or might not be result of Proton, but nothing that would distract my gameplay.

It also did crash very occasionally, perhaps 2-3 times in 20 hours (edit:30 hours) of playtime.

Surviv.io

I've become slightly addicted to a browser game that's essentially something that "kids these days" play, the mighty surviv.io. Although I'm probably 1-2 years late to it.

It's a clever 2D take on the popular battle royale online multiplayer genre, but better still it really reminds me of old games like Rambo, Cannon Fodder and Airborne Ranger.

Squad mode.

My first experiences were just die, die, and die some more.

Then I watched a few videos, read about weapon and item qualities, spectated the other players and went back to the game. And died some more. But at least I kind of knew why.


Some notes

Many players rush for the underground bunkers and other major buildings, as these have guaranteed weapon caches. Better players are often there and without experience you'll get killed instantly and it may be difficult to enjoy.

When you are inserted to the map, the clock may show something between 30 seconds to about 1:15. This gives an indication how long some players may already have been on the map. In the worst case others may have had a minute of looting time before you!

If you have a lot of time, you can check the map ('g' key) for the nearest interesting building (clubhouse, bunkers etc) as you might reach there first.

Even knowing this, to get the feel of the game it may be better to lurk around at first, find out what the items (health, pills, weapons, grenades) do, what can be found from the crates and furniture and so on.

A typical 50v50 map. The battle often focuses on the central bridge. A bunch is looting the greenhouse southwest to the center, with two squadmates. The circle marks the approaching red zone.

It's important to understand soon that using pills/cola adds to your adrenaline. If it's more than 50% you get a speed boost. This explains why some enemies run circles around you, they have the aggro and you don't. Adrenaline is also a slow-healer.

It's possible to survive in the red area in the beginning, and if you have some adrenaline the healing effect is stronger than the damage! Later the effect gets more intense and the pills can't compensate for the burn.

So if I find enough adrenaline at the beginning, I can lurk at the red area and collect all the junk that's been abandoned. This is also a way to learn more about the environment without someone pestering you all the time. It's not totally empty, though.

Lurking's fine for learning the ropes, but it seems it's not possible to win without becoming a hardened battle master! There's no reason to shy away from battles and difficult locations. Fights are often about a complex exchange of timing lateral motion and shooting, weapon switches and special items.


Armor and items

You can get some kind of armor and weapons very quickly, but if you only have crap armor, crap helmet, crap weapon, crap visibility then you won't have a place at the end game.

Only much later I learned the helmet has a different logic to the armor, which simply tends to sink damage. There are apparently such things as 'critical hits' and the helmet sort of protects from those.

It's a good idea to learn to quickly identify enemy armor. White-ish border is the t-shirt, grey is level-2 vest and black is the top-notch (nearly) bullet-proof vest. Some cloth colors make these difficult to see.

Visibility 1=beginning, then 2, 4 and 8. 15 does exist. The higher, the more rare obviously. You can manipulate the situation by hanging inside or underground, as the visibility tends to be low there.

8x view, 50v50 mode. The bridge is often the centerpiece of the battle.

Visibility range in itself is again not that useful, if your weapon has no stopping power from distance. You may just end up revealing your position from further away!

A "sniper" weapon coupled with 8-range can be a deadly combination, whereas those guns are rather difficult to handle at close quarters. Some sight problems may arise from the 8-view, maybe someone jumps out of the nearest bush and you can't see the threat!

It's safe to say that skilled players will have top tier everything at the end game, and if you don't, then there's little chance. They do the math and rush you with superior weapons, confident that you can't damage them enough in the altercation. With luck you can get to #2 through having avoided everything, but it won't help you win.

Note that there are also cheaters, hackers, aimbots and whatnot. (As of today something may have been done to this) It's unclear to me if mobile players and mouse-players are mixed in the same game. I guess touch screen versions must involve some kind of aim assist. Don't be too sad if you get killed by someone playing by different rules.


Weapons

One novelty of surviv.io is that although the game is very simplified and even abstract, the weapons are (comparatively) realistic. There's a bunch of weapons with different characteristics for damage, spread, range, magazine size, loading speed, post-firing slowdown etc.

I'm not going into detail about which gun does which damage, there are wikis and websites for that. In the beginning I tried to figure out which was the "best" weapon, but as I've learned more, most of them seem to have their place in some situation. This also adds some nuance to the game.

AK-47 sounds good but isn't really that amazing. I would prefer M416 over it. The shotguns are OK-ish too. I've begun to like a combination of M416 and the M220 shotgun that delivers 2 shots in quick succession. These are also quite often available.

As I already said, the end-game is not very forgiving. There you need better weapons, even if the M220 serves well as a 2nd weapon. What others have left lying around is often a good guide as to what's crap.

A MAC-10 or a double-wielded G81C can be useful at the very start. Although not powerful, these spraying weapons are attractive for the beginner as the aiming is not so difficult. Slow shotguns and sniper rifles are more potent but are also harder to use.

There have been tricks switching weapons to diminish the delays, slowdowns and loading speeds, but I'm not yet that intensely involved. Also sometimes the developers discourage these tricks by altering the rules. In any case it makes sense to be able to switch quickly between weapons in the heat of the battle.

Grenades can be a game-changer, but they are often easy to avoid too. Throw them at the last moment before they explode and you have yourselves a bazooka, but it's difficult to do in a chaotic situation (i.e. every real fight)

One of the underground bunkers.

More often grenades are used to create a suppression zone between you and the enemy so you can escape or get time to heal. In squad games this can be quite important. Smoke grenades have more subtle uses. You might follow up a smoke grenade with an explosive, but it's often a little too obvious.

Mines were recently added, and initially I felt the game doesn't need another semi-random way to die! But they do appear to add dynamics to situations.

As I said, fists might even deal more damage than some of the weaker guns. The melee fights are slightly random but sometimes a desperate fist assault can be better than fleeing under gunfire. Note that claws, knuckles and knives are simply cosmetic skins, even though the latter show as items.


Other game modes

After I found Squad games more enjoyable than the Solo mode, I rarely play anything else. This is partly because victory doesn't become so important.

50v50 games are sometimes available, and these can be a good learning experience as you don't meet the enemy too soon. It's more easy to get into the logic of looting and finding weapons and items. Also, the chaotic battle situations are amusing in themselves.

The Russian police never sleeps!

There's also the squad variant on a cobalt grey "spiky" landscape, with "character classes". This can also be useful for learning. Here the Cast Ironskin class generates its own ammunition, so you don't have to figure out which ammo fits which gun (something that caused trouble in the very beginning). Otherwise I'm not a big fan of that mode.

Random squads are not often very effective. Bickering members steal whatever items they can see. For some, snatching the item from a crate you looted is a game into itself. Most care little if some squad members still miss weapons, but more experienced players tend to be more helpful.

...and some wander off without much thought about team coherence. There are also those who find enjoyment in playing "solo" in the squad mode, or try to establish teams in the actual Solo game, or somehow disturb the 50v50. Well, whatever.

Chaos at the bridge in 50v50. The red zone is approaching...

Communication

I played a solid amount of games before even looking at how to produce emojis and to communicate with teammates. The emoji wheel is activated by holding and releasing the right mousebutton, whereas the latter comes up by holding key 'c' and doing the same. The set of emojis can be adjusted in the loadout.

At start I thought that a game with no chat or verbal communication would have no insults or much negativity in it. How naive I was! A barrage of 'poop' and 'crying with laughter' emojis after you've been brutally overcome, DOES have a kind of effect.

The little text there is, is in the player names. There are the occasional squadmates with a "hilarious" name in the vein of "nazis are ok" or "jewkiller", which I feel the need to discourage somehow. As squadmates can't damage each other it can only suffice not to help them. These may have been censored lately.

I've felt that shooting at squadmates can be used to indicate disapproval, even if no damage can be done. After shooting at one "nazi" he got confused and began emoting he's French or Russian or whatever. Yes, there are nationality emojis, which are sometimes brought up in 50v50 as a some kind of hopeful appeal to "true allegiance" when death is nearing.

I also felt the "?" emoji would be useful for play situations, but turns out many just interpret it to mean "what is your nationality?"

The nickname "girl killer" and variants, is a grey area, is that someone who kills girls or a girl who does the killing?

Choosing emoji set in the loadout.

I felt surprised that a lot of the crowd were progressive and conscious enough to declare the "rainbow" emoji. Soon it dawned on me that when correctly timed, the rainbow emoji simply equals the on-line gaming classic "you are gay".

Add to this that it can be invoked in an implied and plausibly deniable way. Should this be worrying? Did the devs think this through?

Or, did I, after reading too little into it, read too much into it? Someone gets killed: that's a rainbow moment. You die: one final rainbow towards your assailants. Some are seen to actually collaborate: a rainbow. Some are found in healing activities in the bushes: rainbow again. Oh look, there are some flowers, that's definitely rainbow time.

It's weird if players are assumed to be of particular gender (the visuals aren't particularly gendered) to make this effective as some kind of insult. So there might be a layer of irony here, too.


Ironies of Surviv.io

• Try a weapon and find yourself at the losing end of every fight. Then take note how anyone else is able to pulverize you easily with the same weapon, no matter how "crap" it seemed.
• Conversely, see how economically the enemies wipe you out with a "difficult" weapon like the SPAS-12, try it yourself and you never either hit anyone or deal enough damage.
• The more seemingly amazing weapon or equipment you find in the first 30 seconds, the more likely it's all going to go to hell in the first minute. Find the most sad weapons and equipment and you'll be bound to survive to the endgame, just to get killed (because of the crappy equipment).
• Good players always retreat at the right moment, they sneak out of range and view to heal themselves. You try it and get shot in the back.

recordmydesktop script

I've used recordmydesktop for grabbing the few desktop videos I need.

It's useful to record a specific window. This requires knowing the window ID beforehand, acquired by using xwininfo.

Remembering and executing this phase is sometimes a bit annoying, so I tried to shorten the process a bit by using the following script. I guess a front-end exists somewhere, though.

After running it, xwininfo is indeed launched but the info is directed through grep to a temporary file. I click on the window I want to record, the output is parsed so that the window ID is passed onto recordmydesktop.

It could be bit more elegant but what do I care.


#!/bin/bash
echo Click on Window
echo WILL RECORD INSTANTLY
echo using fps 30
xwininfo -display :0 | grep "id:" > temp.txt
more temp.txt | grep -Eo '0x[0-9]+' > temp2.txt
fname=$(<temp2.txt)
echo $fname
rm temp.txt
rm temp2.txt
recordmydesktop --windowid=$fname --fps 30

I noted that on occasions at least Chromium browser window refuses to work (unrelated to script I think). Recordmydesktop had trouble with the acquired window ID. First I thought it might have to do with detached tabs, but not really. Sooo... maybe just run another instance of it and try again or something.