PAX is a problematic thing – there’s so much wrong with so many parts of the computer gaming industry and with gaming fandom, and with PA in particular. As I’m writing this, I’m seeing anger on Twitter again over something that apparently happened at the QA on Monday.

And yet, the crowd has made PAX Prime so very awesome every year. It’s one of those events where I just get more and more energy as I’m there. It’s 12-14 hour days spent spiralling up in energy. So many people I know get worn out by all the stimulus and the crowds, and after day three I’m ready to do it again.

I have an assortment of photos on Flickr, and, while I’m mentioning it, is anyone else as confused as I am to be saying “Yahoo! has really done good things with Flickr lately”? Because after ignoring it for years and letting it rot, they’ve gone at it, and I’m genuinely liking the changes so far. But have a few highlights:

That Worked Out Well

Paul Has Pikminions!

The view from Contestants’ Row
(I played Match Game on Gameshow Night)

First thing I wanted to do was play Elder Scrolls Online – a.k.a Skyrim Online 😀 – at the Bethesda booth. That had a two hour queue right out the gate, and it held that most if not all of the expo. It was easy to find:

Oh, That Must Be it

I snuck on to the queue just before they cut it off, and I got A Look from one of the Bethesda people who clearly thought I was cheating, but I was inside the tape, so lol no I’m not leaving. They had 30 instances running on desktops, along with command references sheets, so I photographed one and studied it on my phone.

Cheaty McCheetersdotter gets a sneak preview

Toggled over to first-person view, it plays a lot like Skyrim, which is exactly what I want. In the 20 minutes of playtime, I was mostly seeing Skyrim 2.0 Only Multiplayer, which is also exactly what I want, so I’m happy. A few UI changes were distracting – auras around current targets and interaction characters – but they said they had a lot of feedback from the minority of players who really dislike that, so there is an option to disable it.

I didn’t have enough time playing to evaluate the new skills system, but while the mechanics of it are different, the Bethesda reps present said it boiled down to the same sorts of customisations, and I’ll hold them to that.

Some of the hardware out now… hoo, I want it. Cooler Master’s modular stackable case system (HAF Stacker)? Yes please. I wouldn’t mind Intel’s little AppleTV-sized NUC complete systems either, tho’ I’m in a little less of a hurry for that. Sadly, other people won the raffles and stole my prizes, including the 600GB SSD.

Bastards.

I finally got my hands on Logitech’s G-13 gameboard. It’s a mixed bag. The wrist support is too low, but that’s easy to fix with a pad. The key programming functionality is excellent… but. There has to be a but, doesn’t there? And in this case, it’s that it’s all done in the drivers, not the hardware, and the drivers are OSX and Windows only, so no Linux support. I has a sad.

Some of the hardware shown didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Nvidia’s handheld remote gaming system, the Shield… it’s a nice system, and if you’re into Android platform games, okay, the hardware is very nice. But the stream-your-PC-games functionality, which is what they were mostly selling – I’m just not seeing the usage case. It performed flawlessly, but it works only on your LAN, and it’s a tiny screen compared to a desktop; playing Skyrim on it was just kind of weird. And your PC has to be on and running the game, doing most of the work, so it’s not actually portable.

I’m just not seeing the usage scenario here.

Friday night’s Bit Blasters concert turned out to be one of those things I’m glad to have done once. Essentially, they do a live playthrough of Megaman 2, playing the game music live on rock instruments, mixed in with the game’s actual music, all as loudly as possible. It’s very high concept, and the crowd was into it – but it’s not something I’d be likely to do again.

I didn’t get to see Saturday night’s Doubleclicks show! Since they weren’t the opening act, and I didn’t want to rely on the very last bus home – it’s really safe to do so but I’m paranoid about some damn thing happening and not having a backup plan – I had to leave before they got on stage. Ah, well, next time.

Sunday evening I could stay as late as I wanted, so didn’t go home until after everything shut down. The last few hours, I spent at Rock Band Freeplay, and won like 1100 XBOX points for downloadable content, just being Bassist And Vocalist For Everybody Who Needs One. Then I got together a band to do “Less Talk More Rokk,” which people who haven’t tried to play or sing it tend to think is easy, but oh my god it is not. My drummer (who had just pounded his way through some speed deathmetal)? He knew. “Less Talk More Rokk? Jesus, that one’s hard.” And vocally the opposite of what I’ve done historically, which is, of course, why I wanted to do it.

We nailed it, tho’. The Freeplay crowd went kind of nuts. It was awesome…

…but not as awesome as this:

When Tom Servo Rocks the Mic He Rocks the Mic Right

Then I got into a Cards Against Humanity game with a unicorn to close out the evening. No, really, I wasn’t hallucinating this.

Unicorns Against Humanity

THE OTHER GAMES!

I crawled the expo floor for serious this year. Here’s what made an impression (other than Elder Scrolls Online, above):

• Guns of Icarus is airship warfare from the indie booth. It’s multiplayer crew play, so you can be a pilot, an engineer, or one of two gunners, and you’re in a fleet combatting airships from another fleet. Good stylistic shooty fun.
• Dwarven Delve held my interest longest in the dungeon crawler category. It’s a lightweight game, runs on iOS and Android and eventually Steam. Unlike most of its sort, it’s partly a puzzle game, in that each dungeon is made of large hexes which you can rotate. Sometimes these are direct puzzles, sometimes it’s just configuring exits to your advantage. Combat is automated, so really, it’s mostly about the puzzle side.
• Super Space Blank is a free download for Windows from DigiPen students. It’s in the Asteroid family, but an exciting and initially confusing but entertaining – and distant – relative. 1-4 ships, all tied together via a platform, no thrusters – you manoeuvre using recoil from your weapons. It really wants controllers and three to four people, but if you have those, it is the kind of game that makes parties and destroys friendships. Highly recommended.
• I really want to like Wildstar. I really do. I think it’s pretty, I think it’s silly, I like the fight mechanics, and the fact that the female characters literally prance like a bad parody of drag around when walking – no, seriously, bouncy-ass-up arms akimber wrist-flappy prancing is unbelievably awful. I told the rep – after he gave me a T-shirt for my play – that I thought the game was great but this was so unbelievably annoying and horrible that I’d never play it. I even did an apparently-too-accurate rendition of the prance; he didn’t seem to like that, but, well, sucks to be him.
• I didn’t get to play inFAMOUS: Second Son, because nobody did; they just had a theatre trailer and sample (pre-shot) gameplay. However, their recreation of Pacific Science Centre for their demonstration level is creepy, freaky accurate. Honestly, it was kind of disturbing.
• Wolfinstein: The New Order looks surprisingly interesting and does well in atmospherics; I guess shooting Nazis never gets old. I’ll give that another look when it comes out.
• World of Tanks has an XBOX 360 version in closed beta; it played solidly, and I got a Beta code – actually, due to a flurry of confusion and hilarity, I got three Beta codes – and now that it’s a console game I’m thinking of actually playing it.
• Finally, Zombie! Zombie! Zombie! is a Shit Keeps Falling game with a reasonably clever mechanic: match three zombies to form a triangle, all the zombies within that triangle get annihilated, but there are Always More Zombies. So if you like Shit Keeps Falling or casual zombie games, look that up.

So now that I’m seeing more of Gabe Being A Total Shithead On Stage Again, and some clear crowd support for it at the Monday Q&A, we’re back to where we were: trying to figure out this mess. Because honestly: yeah. It’s a mess. In particular, I expected better of Robert Khoo. Mike, I expect to be a jackass. Khoo? Well, too bad.

But I keep looking at everything else and thinking, ‘okay, gaming fandom has a big chunk of horrible here… but where do I go that doesn’t?‘ And yeah, I mean this kind of rape-culture horrible in particular. I feel like there’s kind of this idea out there that because gaming culture isn’t better, that it’s therefore worse, and must be shunned, when I see judges giving 30 days and apologies to convicted child rapists and entire communities rallying together – over and over again, these aren’t one-offs – to protect gang rapists, and hounding their victims to suicide.

So I look at all that, and all I can think is that if the right thing to do is GTFO – and, not incidentally, cede the territory to those people, which means even in their eyes that they win – then ‘where do I go’ ends up being a lesbian separatist commune out in the middle of nowhere, hoping we don’t face armed invasion from off-property. Because that’s pretty much the option.

And there are reasons I don’t live on a farm. I have lived on farms. I’ve worked on farms. I respect and in the non-factory case actively admire it and think it deserves support. But fuck if I’m doing it again myself.

As a solution, it doesn’t strike me as better.

So there you are. Everything has to kind of suck, even the awesome things, because people are horrible. It’s Cards, Unicorns, Elves, Supervillains, and Anybody Else We Can Find Against Humanity.

Or, I can be there, and go, ‘No, fuck you‘ when that shit comes up. Maybe guys can be there and actually do something, like, oh, withhold approval, and frown, if nothing else. Because women leaving, and boycotting? That isn’t going to do a goddamn thing. The misogynist sector is for that; it thinks we shouldn’t be there to start.

It’s a bit like not wanting to live on this planet anymore, I guess. That’s all well and good until you realise there isn’t somewhere better to go.

there’s no place like home
there’s no place like home
there’s no place like home to return to

eta: Shoshanna Kessock has a lot of the same feelings I do, and comes down to a different conclusion. You should read her post. I’ve also made a followup post here, on organised political boycotts, and here, on what people – and guys in particular – can do to help.

^{Our new single is a free download for Jaegercon:}  

Off to PAX! If there’s a proper Elder Scrolls Online demo, I’ll be queueing for that. I’m interested in Bit Brigade on Friday night, and The Doubleclicks on Saturday. Today is a big Expo Hall day for me in general, tho’.

Say hi if you see me!

Finally – finally – back to recording and doing some music; Sunnie’s in today for what should be a pretty short session. Also, I did some comping work last night, after the latest round of carpet cleaning. (I’m about to admit surrender and call professionals in early on the sealed-off areas of the Lair. And I thought supervillainy was evil!)

I’m going to PAX this weekend. I have unpleasantly mixed feelings about that, partly because of Gabe’s assholishness, and partly because of the whole long-term ramp-up in misogyny in gamers, which really pisses me off. But the way I look at it is this:

I was here first, you fuckers.

And I’m not yielding this ground. Not nearly that easily. So I’m going, because of All That, because Fuck You, No, I Was Here First, and I have the artefacts to prove it.

And hopefully I can forget all that and have a good time, because I’m sick of everything having to be a political act of defiance.

Well, that escalated quickly. I’m planning some shows, too, btw, but can’t talk about them yet. How’s your Wednesday?

We came under DDOS attack by a mostly-south-Asian botnet today; around 3,000 unique IPs, which is not that large on the scale of things. Probably an advanced hobbyist rather than a professional, given that we could sort it out and get back online as quickly as we did.

Furthest west IP was in Poland; furthest east, China. Southernmost probably Thailand.

Anyway, if you were trying to reach this morning’s blog post, that’s what happened; give it another go. We should be fine now. If you can’t anything on the website and are reading this via an echo, let me know; I probably blocked you accidentally too.

Who has the job of coming up with random fake brand names for generic batteries and similar cheap miscellany? Who has this job? Because somebody has this job. I want to know who.

Powermax Superdeer. Really? Superdeer?

On a similar note, please enjoy Valium lightbulbs. The best part is how they’re marked 110v on one side of the box, and 130v on the top. But the valium lets us not worry about that sort of thing.

Now, even sedated, I have no idea how you even make lightbulbs out of diazepam, but clearly, Uncle Fester has been ahead of the rest of us.

Maybe it was his idea. Maybe he’s the one who…

…oh god. What I have I discovered?!

Forget the light bulbs. The light bulbs are unknowable. The light bulbs have never been known. You cannot have known about the light bulbs because no one has ever known about the light bulbs. We do not need them. We have the lights above above the Arby’s, the ones that rush by as we pretend to sleep, and that is all that we need to know, because…

Yes. Yes, we do.

I found these on Tumblr and edited them up to print resolution. 😀

Shatterdome Maintenance Level

The studio is actually on one of the upper levels of the Lair. The last thing you want to do is lose satellite signal when you’re aiming energy bolts at your enemies. It’s just sloppy. Besides, if we’re going to be launching jaegers, who wants to wait in elevators?

Particularly when we drop the bass

Extreme crush hazard. Extreme.

Sorry for the intense lag bout there – after getting back from Vancouver, Friday got swallowed whole by more cat problems and a mountain of paperwork. The weekend… yeah, mostly more cat pee cleanup. I tried to put my studio back together on Saturday, but had to take it apart again.

But I think I’ve found the last hidden spot in my studio which has been driving me insane for a week^*, at last, tonight.

BUT. ENOUGH ABOUT CAT PEE. Vancouver and the Great Big Sea show at the PNE was awesome. Geri and Robert let us crash at their place again – thanks! The Fair, by the way, has this:

Oh Jesus

…which is something I’m sure nobody needed to know. I did not partake, but I almost did. Instead, I bought alcohol and Siegel’s, which are now safely stashed in our pantry.

Of course, the show:

Setting the Stage
(More photos on my Flickr stream.)

GBS was good, as always, but the experience – I hate to say this, but I knew it would be true – paled against seeing them last year on their home turf. The crowd was into it, don’t get me wrong, but not on the same order of magnitude.

The funniest moment in the show was when Alan realised one of the giant mobile sculpture-like metal towers behind the audience (Revelation) was actually a ride and there “are people up there,” at which point he was all, “…what did you do?!”

He looked genuinely freaked out. It was hilarious.

Thursday was the last day of Mt. Pleasant/East Van icon Rhizome, which is a sad and terrible thing – they’re moving to Toronto, partly for family reasons, and re-opening there. DAMN YOU, EASTERN STANDARD TRIBE!

I stopped by for a last lunch and to hang out a bit, and ended up putting them back in contact with another person who moved from Vancouver to Toronto, and took a few pictures; this one is fitting:

Accidental Sepiatone

Accidental sepiatone actually was accidental, a mis-exposure and happy accident. I have a regular-colour shot too, but I like this one better. Anna and I also helped Robert move his old rear-projection TV to the recycle centre; a relaxed and lazy day before catching the train south.

Once back, at King Street Station, we walked by this beautiful beast:

Private Car

I asked the station employee in the photo what the deal was, and she told me it was a private car. I know about these, but hadn’t yet seen one; essentially, you can buy an old rail car and pay rail companies to haul them around for you – with cargo trains too, this isn’t just CascadiaRail or Amtrak – with you and yours in them. It’s like an RV, but for the rails.

I want one so much. 😀

So, that’s a bit of catching up. Today we’ll have another go at putting the studio back together sans remaining stink, and try to get back on proper track.

*: Honestly, you have no idea how disruptive this has been. He started while we were gone, and it went from never to 2-4 times a day, and there’s not a day I’m not spending at least a couple of hours cleaning cat pee or aftereffects thereof, just trying to catch up. It’s all I did for a solid week; at least it’s not all my time anymore. On top of that, everything is stacked up in fenced-off areas he can’t reach; it’s like we’re in the middle of packing for a move, and that includes my studio. I’m having anxiety nightmares. We have an action plan now, but… yeah.

I have to admit, it’s a tad breathtaking, in a good way, to get home on the train and walk into this station, after so many years of the horrible 60s “modernisation” and a decade of restoration.

It’s one hell of a first impression, I have to tell you.

Back from Vancouver. Bed now. More later. ^_^

Courtesy Criacow, this… this is beautiful.

My contribution, were I to make one, would possibly be:

#define fork sleep(1);fork

For once, do read the comments.

UPDATED: See below.

Okay, so the latest: we’re pretty sure this is not actually xorg now. We’re back to session saves. Not I/O in general: specifically session saves, which is to say, saving the entire project.

See, the every two-minutes thing turned out to be a new feature in Ardour I hadn’t noticed: scheduled auto-saves, which turned out to be… every two minutes. Saves also happen whenever you enable master record, which is the other time I see it. So we’re pretty damn sure it’s Save Session.

We know it’s not I/O in general. Recording is actually far more I/O intensive, and once record is enabled and the save process is done, you can record all you want to without any problems. Bouncing existing material is also a complete nonissue.

It’s also not a filesystem issue: it happens even with RAMdisk, which is faster than anything else. And the behaviour reproduces itself perfectly on my non-USB on-motherboard Intel HD Audio card, so it’s not USB.

Now, to get into more details, I’ve gone digging deep into Ardour source code. BUT I HAVE AN IDEA, so bear with me.

In the source code, most of save happens in libs/ardour/session_state.cc

Save works fine when plugins are deactivated but triggers XRUNs – which means buffer overflows due to more than 100% digital signal processing capability (DSP) is available – when plugins are active.

That’s any kind of plugin, and it doesn’t seem to matter how few.

Save session calls a lot of things including get_state(), which in turn gets latency data from plugins via (eventually) latency_compute_run(), the code for which is the same! in both lv2 and ladspa plugin interfaces.

latency_compute_run() calculates the latency by actually running the plugin. Not a copy: it runs in place the actual plugin that’s in use.

This is all in here:
libs/ardour/lv2_plugin.cc
libs/ardour/ladspa_plugin.cc

latency_compute_run() activates the plugin even if it’s already activated (!) then deactivates it on exit (which I guess is stacked somehow because they don’t deactivate in Ardour itself) and runs a second thread on the same instance of the plugin. (Presumably, because how else I guess?)

This strikes me as a minefield.

And so, an hypothesis: this is causing the hyperthreading predictive Intel cpu I have to retrace because of bad prediction and/or bad hyperthreading.

Penalty for this in Intel land is large, and I have seen commentary to the effect that it is large in the Intel Core series I have. I suspect that the two versions of the active plugin may be continually invalidating each other(!) for the duration of the latency test. It may even be causing the on-chip cache to be thrown out.

This would explain why it stops being an issue when the plugin is not active.

Thoughts?

ETA: Brent over on Facebook pointed me at this 5-year-old bug, which led me to try fencing Ardour off to a single CPU. And when I do that… the problem goes away. Now, this sounds terrible, but I’m finding even with my semi-pathological test project (which I built to repro this problem) I can get down to 23-ish ms latency with a good degree of safety. So clearly, no matter what’s happening, it does. not. like. multicore.

That said, with hardware monitoring (which I have) that’s plenty good enough. I could live with 60ms if I knew it was safe. 23ms being safe (and 11.7 being mostly ok but a little iffy)? Awesome. Still: what is this?

ETA2: las, who wrote most of and manages the plugin code, popped on and said what I described would totally happen … except the latency recalculation doesn’t actually get called during save. I appear to have just misread the code, which is easy to do when all you have is grep and vi and an unfamiliar codebase.

ETA3: Well, hey! Turns out that setting Input Device and Output Device separately to the same device directly instead of setting Interface to the device (and leaving input and output devices to default assignment) means that Jack loads the device handler twice, as two instances – once for input, once for output. Thanks to rgareus on Ardour Chat for that pointer.

I can see how they get there, but there really ought to be a warning dialogue if you do that.

That means on a single-processor I can get down to 5.6ms latency and past my pathological repro tests cleanly. This is the kind of performance I’ve been expecting out of this box – at a minimum. Attained. I could in theory not even hardware monitor at these speeds – tho’ you really want to be down around 3ms for that ideally. (I can actually kinda run at 2.8ms – but it’s dodgy.) Since I have hardware monitoring I’m setting it all the way up to 11.6ms just to keep DSP numbers down. But any way you look at it – this is awesome.

I was really hoping to get this system back to usability before heading off, and – success! Thanks to everybody who threw out ideas, even if they didn’t work, because at least there are things we get to rule out when that happens.

Also, I’ve started putting together a dev envrironment (with help from Tom – thanks!) so I can explore this further when I get back into town. Saves shouldn’t be doing this. It’d be one thing were it just to HD and not to ramdisk, that’d be fine. But to ramdisk? No. Just… no. And the processor core thing, and the plugins-active-vs-not things are just odd. Maybe I can find it.